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Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

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Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#51

Post by FollowSteph3 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #14
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #10

This is a company that was founded in 2001. I still remember their CEO building his original audience on TheServerSide.com, back when Enterprise Java was the thing. They took 13 years to get to this point, a solid 8-9 years longer than most enterprise SaaS companies are expected to take (by VCs). And yet, not a single VC I've asked if they wish they were in Atlassian has said no. You can build huge companies on your…

Can you give examples of SaaS companies which did that in 4-5 years; I know you said 'by VCs', but i'm curious.

I would add with similar fundamentals. Or even just the similar revenues...

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#52

Post by dangoor »

dorkrawk wrote: post #37
dangoor wrote: post #13

First sentence in the article: "Atlassian, an Australian maker of online collaboration tools for businesses, is gunning for the same market as fast-growing startup Box Inc." Saying that they're gunning for the same market seems a stretch to me. No one's going to say "I was thinking of buying Jira, but I just went with Box instead." Leading off with drawing parallels between Atlassian and Box just strikes me as not he…

I saw that as perhaps a way to compare Atlassian (mainly BitBucket) to Github Atlassian is to Github as Box is to Dropbox ?

I think you're giving the reporter too much credit :)

Also, Atlassian is a good deal bigger than GitHub (if measured by revenue, profit, people or valuation), which would seem to put them on the Dropbox side of the analogy

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#53

Post by jeffsinclair »

sledmonkey wrote: post #42
stephengillie wrote: post #32

We've had a rough, shaky time using Jira, but it's almost entirely due to internal politics and constantly-shifting business priorities. (aka CEOs and owners who are just megaphones for their corporate customers) We intended to replace our invented-here ticketing system (which has Zendesk integration) with Jira, but instead we integrated Jira into that invented-here ticket system. On the other side, my team has been…

We had a similar bug that we worked around by adding a transition view of "Resolved Issue Screen" to all steps leading to done in the Add Workflow Transition page.

If you also want to fix existing issues, I'd suggest creating a "loopback" workflow transition on the resolved state, and adding a post-function that sets the resolution to "Fixed" or something similar.

You can then bulk transition all your existing issues and the resolution will get populated correctly.

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#54

Post by thathonkey »

polskibus wrote: post #3

They do seem to be the best in a very competitive market. There are loads of either commercial or open source issue trackers, wikis, combinations of both, etc. etc. How will they grow past that ? Acqusitions? Writing custom JIRA plugins that will make it more like an ERP ? Ideas?

One of the biggest value-adds with Atlassian is the synergy between products. Bamboo, JIRA, BitBucket, and HipChat all integrate nicely together.

Eg. I put a JIRA ticket number in a commit message to a BitBucket repo. Bamboo is watching that repo and runs a build with the ticket # in message. The ticket number has also already been interpreted and links straight back to JIRA where you can mark the issue as deployed.

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#55

Post by tluyben2 »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #44
tluyben2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's both a lot less than $3.3B though. You meant 'this point' being an IPO only?

Yes, but that is also worth noting. Some of the more recent SaaS IPOs were built on lots of funding and, as a result, don't have great fundamentals.

Indeed. Those fundamentals and lack thereof are worrying. It seems everyone just goes for their own wallet content, not for building value over time. In the end bad fundamentals result in some kind of damage; not for the founders, but for the employees and others directly and indirectly involved when the axe falls. I don't really respect that if it is intentional. Billions or not. Hoped to see some different cases.

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#56

Post by thathonkey »

rqebmm wrote: post #45
malanj wrote: post #8

Really cool that you can reach that kind of valuation with a basket of products, rather than a single run-away network effect fueled win. I find it very inspirational that they do that well by building great software that people love. also: They really make awesome products (we use BitBucket, HipChat and Confluence)

ironically the product of theirs I like the most (Sourcetree) is free. I've heard mixed reviews on JIRA, and Confluence is useful but we certainly have gripes about it (seriously, no symbolic links?!)

Sourcetree is by far the best Git GUI I've ever seen.

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#58

Post by mchusma »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #10

This is a company that was founded in 2001. I still remember their CEO building his original audience on TheServerSide.com, back when Enterprise Java was the thing. They took 13 years to get to this point, a solid 8-9 years longer than most enterprise SaaS companies are expected to take (by VCs). And yet, not a single VC I've asked if they wish they were in Atlassian has said no. You can build huge companies on your…

Atlassian is an anomaly amongst anomalies, but the timing is pretty normal. I find it strange that there is some kind of apparent value judgement being made on one company vs another.

The average time to an enterprise exit is 9.5 years according to http://pando.com/2013/05/21/memo-to-this-years-yc-class-its-.... So Atlassian is generally in line with the average. Talk to any person or VC that has built a large SAAS company and they will likely say the same thing.

Would every company love to grow >40% annually with spending 0% on sales and 15% on marketing...of course! The reality is that most companies can't do that. You can't look at it and say "I want to be Atlassian not Box." Box has a growth rate of over 100%, so commands a gigantic valuation. If I were starting a business I'd take either unicorn.

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#59

Post by itsprofitbaron »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #10

This is a company that was founded in 2001. I still remember their CEO building his original audience on TheServerSide.com, back when Enterprise Java was the thing. They took 13 years to get to this point, a solid 8-9 years longer than most enterprise SaaS companies are expected to take (by VCs). And yet, not a single VC I've asked if they wish they were in Atlassian has said no. You can build huge companies on your…

Don't want to be that guy but 4-5 years for enterprise startups "to get to this point" which I'm assuming is either that market cap size or IPO is ambitious - Enterprise startups tend to take a while to get that flywheel spinning. The fact that Salesforce did it in 5 years (Founded: 1999, IPO: 2004) means that they are more the anomalie than the others. For example here's a list of Enterprise companies which have taken 7-13 years to get to IPO:

Eloqua - Founded: 1999, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 13

Qualys - Founded: 1999, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 13

Rally Software - Founded: 2001, IPO: 2013. Years to IPO: 12

E2open - Founded: 2000, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 12

Exact Target - Founded: 2000, IPO 2012. Years to IPO: 12

Box (Summer IPO) - Founded: 2005, IPO: 2014. Years to IPO: 9

Demandware - Founded: 2004, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 8

Fleetmatics - Founded: 2004, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 8

ServiceNow - Founded: 2004, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 8

Bazaarvoice - Founded: 2005, IPO: 2013. Years to IPO - 7

Workday - Founded: 2005, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 7

Marin Software - Founded: 2006, IPO: 2013. Years to IPO: 7

Marketo - Founded: 2006, IPO: 2013. Years to IPO: 7

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#60

Post by rgrieselhuber »

itsprofitbaron wrote: post #59
rgrieselhuber wrote: post #10

This is a company that was founded in 2001. I still remember their CEO building his original audience on TheServerSide.com, back when Enterprise Java was the thing. They took 13 years to get to this point, a solid 8-9 years longer than most enterprise SaaS companies are expected to take (by VCs). And yet, not a single VC I've asked if they wish they were in Atlassian has said no. You can build huge companies on your…

Don't want to be that guy but 4-5 years for enterprise startups "to get to this point" which I'm assuming is either that market cap size or IPO is ambitious - Enterprise startups tend to take a while to get that flywheel spinning. The fact that Salesforce did it in 5 years (Founded: 1999, IPO: 2004) means that they are more the anomalie than the others. For example here's a list of Enterprise companies which have tak…

Yes, this was my point. The story you're sold when speaking with VCs is that if you're not at some astronomical valuation within a few years, you're not growing fast enough. A look at how things actually play out reveals a different story altogether.
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