Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

blogs.wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 169 posts

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#131

Post by zevyoura »

notatoad wrote: post #121
zevyoura wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>doesn't make useless dodads or chat apps or whatever To be fair, Atlassian makes HipChat, and though it's not exactly the foundation of their valuation it is a pretty significant product.

HipChat isn't like SnapChat though. If you go to their homepage, right up in the header they've got a link to their pricing page. You don't have to wonder who they're selling you to or what convoluted monetization schemes they have, Atlassian makes money because people pay them for a service that they think is valuable. Which is refreshing.

I thought the implicit comparison was more to WhatsApp, which also directly charges users (SnapChat is, despite the name, not really a "chat" app).

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#132

Post by josegonzalez »

e1g wrote: post #124
tluyben2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Workday (NYSE:WDAY) was founded in 2005 and floated in 2012 with the valuation of $4.5B (currently $15B). However the Workday story is different because it was started by grownups and well geared towards enterprise from the start (business model, marketing, connection, financing, etc).

As opposed to all other companies that are started by toddlers?

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#133

Post by mrkurt »

mchusma wrote: post #58
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…

They don't really spend 0% on sales. They just don't have a traditional salesforce. They put a huge amount of resources and effort into pre-sales support (which is arguably sales with customer aligned incentives) and customer funnel progression.

It is a small but important distinction, what they don't do is scale sales by throwing salaries + commissions at a highly paid sales force.

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#134

Post by Karunamon »

madeofpalk wrote: post #96
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)

> They really make awesome products Oh dear god. As an employee at a medium sized company that uses Jira and Confluence, I have to disagree. I'm sure people out there have managed to wrangle and configure Jira into something usable, but it's implementation where I work has been just horrible. And confluence... Apart from being just slow and unreliable, it's text editor gives me nightmares. I mean, all due respect for…

I'll be the first to admit that both of those applications are the source of much misery if mishandled. JIRA especially, considering how many layers deep you can go sometimes. This issue type belongs to this scheme which uses this screen in some issue types but not others, that's designed in another scheme... aiya. It gets complicated.

Unfortunately, that's enterprise for you. Basic human logic is often insufficient to handle the demands...

Those applications are absolutely only as good as the time taken to adapt them to the needs at hand and to the team using it.

And +1 for markdown support. There are plugins out there that add that, but... don't get me started on their plugin ecosystem.

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#135

Post by stephengillie »

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…

Apparently I'm extremely oversensitive. I'll focus more on not caring about potentially racist, sexist, ageist, Marxist, time-ist, technologist, social, political, extremist, terrorist, traveler's, vice-user, or otherwise self-destructive motives I see expressed by other humans.

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#136

Post by e1g »

josegonzalez wrote: post #132
e1g wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Workday (NYSE:WDAY) was founded in 2005 and floated in 2012 with the valuation of $4.5B (currently $15B). However the Workday story is different because it was started by grownups and well geared towards enterprise from the start (business model, marketing, connection, financing, etc).

As opposed to all other companies that are started by toddlers?

The "grownups" reference was snide and dismissive of the great work done by young founders - I should not have used it.

For context, I was comparing the origin of Atlassian and Workday. Atlassian was started by two 22 year olds through a sizeable credit card debt. Workday was started by a 65 year old ex-PeopleSoft CEO with his funds and an additional $15M in VC finance.

"Mature" would have been a better suited word. Thank you for calling me out on it.

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#137

Post by hox »

fjaved wrote: post #75
tluyben2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Veeva Systems (VEEV) took just a touch longer at 6 years and did it with remarkable capital efficiency. Founded 2007. Raised $4m from VCs. IPO in 2013. Opened at $2.4b mkt cap, closed day at $4.5b, $5.6b today.

Great to see both workday and veeva mentioned here, both tri-valley software companies proving that success can come in the Bay Area outside of Silicon Valley and San Fran.

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#138

Post by tomjadams »

daveoflynn wrote: post #29
daigoba66 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BitBucket and HipChat are fairly recently acquisitions, but fit perfectly in their portfolio. Some of their lesser-used products are also acquisitions.

Many of the products were acquisitions, though often at a very early stage in the product's lifecycle. Off the top of my head, acquisitions: HipChat, Bitbucket, GreenHopper (now JIRA Agile), SourceTree, FishEye, Crucible, Clover, Crowd, Bamboo.

Cenqua is the company that had fishey, crucible & clover. About 5 people when they bought it, and probably their first acquisition.

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#139

Post by Retric »

thefreeman wrote: post #122
bane wrote: post #73

I don't know why, but this makes me feel good. Like a world that makes sense. A regular old business, that makes money and continues to grow and make more money, gets valued on a nice speculative curve, doesn't make useless dodads or chat apps or whatever and went from $0 to $xx billion valuation in a couple years because it has some possible tangential business tie in with somebody else, but instead makes something…

Sort of. But it drives me crazy that WhatsApp was bought for like 5x as much.

Soft of. It was bought with highly volatile and overvalued stock.

Re: Atlassian Valued at $3.3 Billion

#140

Post by imthatguyama »

i386 wrote: post #118
dkarapetyan wrote: post #101

I don't understand any of this. Every atlassian product I have ever used has been terrible. All their software is full of performance issues, uncountable UI bugs, and every time we upgrade it's impossible to tell whether we lost any data in the process and several times we have lost data. Their continuous integration server, Bamboo, is pretty to look at but unusable except for the lightest of use cases. The message b…

Sorry to hear that you are having trouble with Bamboo. I'm Product Manager for Bamboo at Atlassian, so I'd be interested in looking into the problems and use cases you are having issues with. Feel free to drop me a line at james@atlassian.com and ill setup a time to give you a call.

You and your co-workers, please stop down-voting criticism of your employer.
Post reply on HN