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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

#291

Post by vasco »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #281
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 mean…

Is your understanding of software companies that you add people and magically new good products appear right away?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#292

Post by janee »

jakub_g wrote: post #6

> While it is still used by many tech businesses (including the author’s), it has no real network effect — that is, users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle of switching to a new system). Lol. At some companies, Jira workflows literally run the whole company. At my prev job, prod deployments were tightly linked to Jira.

> users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost (other than the initial hassle of switching to a new system).

My experience tells me the complete opposite of this statement. Regardless of the the workflows, automation and whatnot there are tons and tons of IP hidden in tickets and over a long enough period references to them end up scattered all over your tools, commits, documents, wikis, IM, email, etc. etc.

When you move ticketing providers it's very likely you can't correctly migrate all of your existing data into the new system without breaking or losing some of it.

I detest trying to figure out why a certain code change was made, looking at the commit message only to find a reference to link to a dead ticket.

I'm not for or against Jira, but moving ticketing systems does not come at a "minimal cost" in my opinion and needs careful consideration and motivation.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#293

Post by ramraj07 »

yobbo wrote: post #117
ramraj07 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual lines of code in an OS has balooned exponentially. Of course we can’t discount the abilities of the average software engineer in the 90s vs now. I’d guess back then you had to be fairly driven and smart to be employed there, which is not necessarily true anymore. If you have a pulse and can barely pass fizz buzz you’re employed with 200k salary, so yeah.

> If you have a pulse and can barely pass fizz buzz you’re employed with 200k salary If this was true; it is not an "efficient market" we are observing, neither in SaaS or developer employment. These companies would be outcompeted. The underlying mechanism that enables this is probably SaaS/etc lock-in. Will be interesting to see what/how overturns whatever paradigm this is.

Efficient market hypothesis doesn’t work here, honestly not sure if it works anywhere. See https://danluu.com/nothing-works/

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#294

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

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?

It matters what portion of the cycle we are in. We used to be in the voting portion, now we are in the weighing machine portion and things are very different.

“In other words, the market is not a weighing machine, on which the value of each issue is recorded by an exact and impersonal mechanism, in accordance with its specific qualities. Rather should we say that the market is a voting machine, whereon countless individuals register choices which are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion.” -Security Analysis 1934

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#295

Post by ramraj07 »

zeusk wrote: post #116
ramraj07 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual lines of code in an OS has balooned exponentially. Of course we can’t discount the abilities of the average software engineer in the 90s vs now. I’d guess back then you had to be fairly driven and smart to be employed there, which is not necessarily true anymore. If you have a pulse and can barely pass fizz buzz you’re employed with 200k salary, so yeah.

> If you have a pulse and can barely pass fizz buzz you’re employed with 200k salary, so yeah. Tell us you don't have any experience with hiring, without telling us you don't.

I most definitely know more people than I would prefer who can only barely pass fizz buzz and make more than that. It is kinda interesting how dev compensation is in fact bimodal and the engineers (and the managers) in the second hump want to actively avoid any mention of the possibility that they’re under compensated.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#296

Post by altdataseller »

ronhav3 wrote: post #259
altdataseller wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats the only measure of real profitability - GAAP. Free cash flow includes stock based compensation. Thats a real expanse and turns negative cashflow to positive. But it dilutes existing shareholders, you would like to see positive cashflow EXCLUDING stock based compensation

If GAAP is the only measure, then Amazon and Salesforce have been utter failures for 20+ years, only returning 120,000% and 4000% returns to shareholders. In fact, if an investor went by GAAP, he would have missed the entire massive SaaS boom of the past decade.

Did i say these companies were failures? I simply said they were not profitable.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#298

Post by daniel_iversen »

threeseed wrote: post #43
zeusk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I helped a prior employer move to github and asana through JIRA's own APIs. It's actually not that hard and the entire engineering group was very cheerful of the change.

Be curious what the size of the engineering team and company was. Asana is great for SMBs but for larger developer teams it lacks a lot of features and integrations.

(Work at Asana so I might be biased)

While Jira may have some unique features for developers, one of Asana’s selling points is how it allows non-homogenous teams (incl whole companies) to work together (and by themselves within individual teams) on a variety of different kinds of work (projects, processes, loose day to day tasks etc). And as for scale we have many customers with thousands of users (one tech customer of ours has 100,000+ users on Asana - most of them I’m sure would be product teams).

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#299

Post by thr0wawayf00 »

vasco wrote: post #291
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mean…

Is your understanding of software companies that you add people and magically new good products appear right away?

They IPO'd 7 years ago, which looks even worse. They've had all this time and hired all of these people and largely kept the same product offering with no obvious improvements to performance or stability. Again, that's a market analyst's nightmare.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#300

Post by jkukul »

Majestic121 wrote: post #44
gaff33 wrote: post #12

Does anyone actually like using JIRA? Or Confluence? Or any of the Atlassian products?

I don't know anybody that likes using JIRA, but to be fair I don't know anybody that likes to use Asana either. I might be wrong, but I think those tools are dedicated to something people don't like to do by default (planning, going through bureaucratic processes), so they don't like the tool either. But for some reason, they convince themselves that they don't like to go through Bureaucratic Processes because of JIR…

Asana shows a flying unicorn when you complete a task. Makes my day every time.

A bit more seriously - it's not only about Bureaucratic Processes. UX matters. If you need to deal with "Bureaucratic Processes" using a terrible UI, it makes things worse.

Jira's UI is notoriously bad. Very slow. And the worst of all are the UX inconsistencies in Atlassian's products. Things behaving differently in Jira vs Confluence or even within Jira itself. For example, being able to use markdown when creating an issue but not when editing it (or vice versa, I don't remember).

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