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Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

smartcompany.com.au

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Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#281

Post by thr0wawayf00 »

BFLpL0QNek wrote: post #195

> Atlassian has somehow become the Benjamin Button of the tech sector — profitable as a startup and loss making as it has matured. They where profitable, they didn’t need funding the only funding they took was for staff to sell some of the equity. Them now making a loss I think is more a deliberate choice, not a business failure. They could of continued as they where making $$$ but instead choose to go from 700 peopl…

> Them now making a loss I think is more a deliberate choice, not a business failure. They could of continued as they where making $$$ but instead choose to go from 700 people at ipo to near 7k today for pretty much the same product suite.

But this is exactly the kind of thing that makes a market analyst yell "FIRE!" during a bear market. Nobody trading stocks is going to look at a 10x headcount increase without meaningful additions to the product offering as a good thing.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#282

Post by robbiep »

nemo44x wrote: post #215
ryanackley wrote: post #107

Worked there from 2008-2013. So early-ish employee here. I still have a chunk of shares from the original ESOP program. Saying that for full disclosure because I'm biased and this feels like a hit piece to me. When I worked there, they disclosed all financials in our internal Confluence site. There was a policy of full transparency with the employees. The owners (Mike and Scott) had impressive business discipline. Th…

The character Russ Hanneman on the TV show “Silicon Valley” took it a step further stating that having no revenue to speak of makes a company more valuable. It’s satire…but is it?

A company with no revenue can potentially raise at a higher valuation with a company of $1 of revenue - because now it’s real and investors will start making their mind up about the actual possiblities of the investment

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#283

Post by ihaveajob »

nemo44x wrote: post #215
ryanackley wrote: post #107

Worked there from 2008-2013. So early-ish employee here. I still have a chunk of shares from the original ESOP program. Saying that for full disclosure because I'm biased and this feels like a hit piece to me. When I worked there, they disclosed all financials in our internal Confluence site. There was a policy of full transparency with the employees. The owners (Mike and Scott) had impressive business discipline. Th…

The character Russ Hanneman on the TV show “Silicon Valley” took it a step further stating that having no revenue to speak of makes a company more valuable. It’s satire…but is it?

I've heard this time and time again in SV circles. It probably is for the right founder who is able to paint a rosy picture and a nice story. I'm not that kind of person, so it's bonkers to me.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#284

Post by dalbasal »

ryanackley wrote: post #107

Worked there from 2008-2013. So early-ish employee here. I still have a chunk of shares from the original ESOP program. Saying that for full disclosure because I'm biased and this feels like a hit piece to me. When I worked there, they disclosed all financials in our internal Confluence site. There was a policy of full transparency with the employees. The owners (Mike and Scott) had impressive business discipline. Th…

The idea that growth is better than profits was in-built into Atlassian's proposition to shareholders, ultimately.

The slow and steady mentality is fine, but we see over and over that it isn't what the market wants. A private company or a high risk growth company, those are the two options for a software company.

Either that or they'll be taken over. They're revenue now is just a $2bn, so that "grow grow" mindset from 10 years ago did not work out. In theory, a steady CEO could try to steady at that size with a nice margin. But, actually declaring and pursuing that would mean halving the companies market cap to a "normal" P/E of 20-30X.

At that price (say $20bn) one of the big software companies would just buy them... for their own growth targets.

Moderation has no place in the public markets as a software company. It's remarkable how unstable a stable condition is.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#285

Post by tarsinge »

ryanackley wrote: post #107

Worked there from 2008-2013. So early-ish employee here. I still have a chunk of shares from the original ESOP program. Saying that for full disclosure because I'm biased and this feels like a hit piece to me. When I worked there, they disclosed all financials in our internal Confluence site. There was a policy of full transparency with the employees. The owners (Mike and Scott) had impressive business discipline. Th…

The problem is that choosing to be unprofitable is a strategy that maybe worked (or just was fashionable) the past decade under very specific circumstances (lot of free money chasing higher returns in a context of very low rates), but otherwise obviously makes no sense, it's antithetic to the very idea of a business. It's not to be confused with the sane version that is reinvesting profits for growth instead of distributing them as dividends.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#286

Post by jethro_tell »

ratww wrote: post #268
steveBK123 wrote: post #255

Jira is an interesting product everyone loves to hate. It has the do-whatever-you-want configurability to fit anyones SDLC. Really its a software product that allows you to mirror your organizational structure. That said, 99% of software projects I have been on could be managed with a simple Kanban board like Trello (which they now own). Unless your firm has staff who are full time Jira jockeys in the form of project…

It's kind of amusing: I've seen a few times developers rebelling and moving to whatever other random tool (Atlassian's own Trello, Pivotal Tracker, Github's thing, stickers on the wall) as soon as a hardline PO/PM left the job. Only for JIRA to return when another PO/PM that "really really needs the reporting features" (but didn't really use them) was hired.

heh, I was once on a dev team that some how got moved into the project management section of a company. The thought was we'd help out and fix the little stuff that the PMs needed done that they couldn't get other teams to prioritize.

Obviously a bonkers idea, but they went for it. It was just jira all the way down. They wanted us to create separate tracking jiras for pages, before we worked the issue in the middle of the night. Nobody was actually doing anything, especially the devs I lasted a couple months before I moved. At the end of the year, everyone that stayed got promoted a level as a dev. I went back though git and couldn't find a single commit from any of them. Just bananas, they all got promoted to a higher level as devs for busy work, but jiras don't lie, right?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#287

Post by zac23or »

arcturus17 wrote: post #211
zac23or wrote: post #145

> That is, CTOs and CPOs loved Atlassian’s revolutionary Jira product so much, it was able to grow virally and organically without the business having to spend millions of dollars on an enterprise sales team. Here people talk a lot about creating a good product, code quality, etc. It doesn't matter. You don't need to build a great product: you need to find the market and exploit it faster than you can. The quality of…

> That is, CTOs and CPOs loved Atlassian’s revolutionary Jira product so much, it was able to grow virally and organically > Here people talk a lot about creating a good product, code quality, etc. It doesn't matter. You don't need to build a great product You really haven't disproven that CTOs and CPOS loved the product initially, which I believe to be true. So yes, you do need to build a great product at the beginn…

I have no idea what Jira was like in the beginning. But today Jira is a very bad product (in the opinion of developers), but managers still love Jira because Jira has found a market (managers, CTOS, CPOS, etc). Jira being a very slow and buggy application is not important.

As an example of a tool that found a market in the area of developers is Docker. I used docker in some companies and my God, Docker is buggy as hell, sometimes I pull new code in git and Docker doesn't see it, I have a lot of network problems, etc. And have no idea what Docker was like in the beginning, but when I used it, it was horrible experience, and developers continue to use it. I'm very happy that my current employee does not use Docker.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#288

Post by brycewray »

Other than the points raised here by others and in TFA’s comments section which point out TFA’s flaws, I would add only that there are worse things than Jira --- as I found out When my final employer converted from Jira to ServiceNow. If you think Jira is bad... jeez.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#289

Post by bluGill »

parkingrift wrote: post #273
sien wrote: post #28

So with Slack there is Mattermost and Zulip. What are the equivalents for Jira ? Is there an openish source piece of similar software ? Jira cops a lot of hate on HN, but really to paraphrase Churchill on Democracy - "Jira is the worst issue tracking software, except for all the others". The comparison on Wikipedia has so many of them : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue-tracking_s... Are any of them a…

Why does a competitor need to be open source? ClickUp, Asana, and Shortcut/Clubhouse are all competing in this space. I consider Jira to be far and away the worst one of that bunch, but beauty is always in the eye of the beholder. My personal preference is ClickUp or Asana as they offer flexibility to bolt on routine task management in a much more flexible way.

A competitor probably shouldn't be. The only people who need a competitor to Jira are large companies who have a budget. There are lots of small companies and open source companies, but they have no need for the complexities of Jira and should avoid it.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#290

Post by century19 »

lodovic wrote: post #158
rjgonza wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intered to know more about "MS Teams Scrum", got a link or something?

My client uses Azure DevOps for ticketing and scrum processes, and that integrates nicely with Teams (pipelines, bugs, user stories, etc). It works pretty well and can be customized.

Indeed, it was Azure DevOps. I had linked it with Teams as it was accessed through that, or so I remember.
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