I’m not sure whether I find it more worrisome or fascinating that we live in a world where a company that, as far as I know, has never generated a single dollar in revenue has managed to exist for over five years, employ more than 100 people, and still get acquired for this amount. This isn’t criticism or sarcasm — I’m genuinely impressed, but also very curious about the rationale behind it.
Atlassian has always baffled me. In that JBoss sort of way. Explaining why they're successful and I'm not.
Of course, you need to have other ingredients too, but hundreds of millions, if not even billions of people have those skills too. Who win more among them is pure luck.
And in that, of course a ton of predetermined parameters, like where you born, who your parents are, what your skin color is, etc.
I have a friend who is worse in almost every skills which matter in our work. Not much worse, he is still awesome in his job. But I’m better. Every single person who saw us work in comparable environments would tell you the same thing. His career is still better than mine. And the single reason is that he born in wealth. He had the opportunity to live without income for years, and kick off a startup, and try to start some others, and simply try out, and risk things which I couldn’t do. Nothing else. Pure luck.