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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

#311

Post by papito »

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…

It's like that scene from Silicon Valley (which is almost always accurate).

Seriously, when did it become normal in capitalism that you should not prove that your business can make money? That there a customers willing to pay for your product? That the promise of future maybe profit sells better than actual profit now? This is insane.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#312

Post by Aeolun »

acdha wrote: post #278
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…

GitLab issues are better for all but very large projects. Jira will win on features, of course, but unless you have 50+ people working on the same thing, multiple dedicated PMs, etc. you’re almost certainly not seeing enough value to be worth the frictional cost and temptation to divert time away from the product to build Potemkin project plans in Jira. (This is the same failure mode as many Agile-as-practiced projec…

Oddly enough, if your team is small enough that it doesn’t need a dedicated PM, you generally have no issues with Jira either.

It’s almost as if the PM is the problem instead of the solution.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#313

Post by serial_dev »

tarsinge wrote: post #285
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 distr…

In the space Atlassian is in, choosing to be unprofitable while quickly growing could make sense.

It is not necessarily true for other sectors (e-scooters, different delivery services, maybe even Uber), as there is no stickiness in those areas. Whenever a cheaper Uber would come to my city, I'd drop them within a second. They are usually cheap while they can burn VC money.

If Atlassian can keep their system for a couple of years in a big, slow legacy company, the company will end up with tens of thousands of tickets and pages.

Then, no matter how everyone thinks that all the products of Atlassian is terrible (there is a thread about it every second month here), the company will never leave Atlassian because nobody wants to spend the time on migrating all that stuff and everybody is afraid to say that "we will probably not going to need poorly written user stories from three years ago", and they don't want to risk that the new system doesn't cover everything that e.g Jira does.

Once a company is locked in, it will keep paying because paying any amount is easier for them then migrating, training the employees to use the new system, broken links, missing features, etc.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#314

Post by zeroonetwothree »

carlsborg wrote: post #303

I suspect the following is built into valuations of many software companies with subscription revenue models: they can reduce headcount dramatically and keep a relatively tiny headcount of staff around to sustain the existing recurring revenue and be highly profitable even in a slowing economy. For example how many people would MongoDB, with close to a billion dollars of annual revenue, need to keep the lights on, as…

I think this is not as straightforward as you make it sound.

1. Often the way companies are structured requires specific teams and processes to exist and unwinding that is not easy.

2. It can be very hard to identify which people are actually critical. If you get it wrong it’s a big problem.

3. Additionally, firing a large percentage of employees will create a very negative feeling in the remainder so they might leave as well or their work quality will suffer.

4. Customers may lose faith in the business as a result and switch. Something like Atlassian has many competitors.

Are there any specific examples of this being done successfully?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#315

Post by papito »

ihaveajob wrote: post #283
nemo44x wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like Adam Nuemann. You have to be tall and loud. Doesn't matter if you are making sense or not. Sometimes VCs act like gullible women on a date who are enamored by a douchebag, I swear.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#316

Post by asimpletune »

Just a random, semi-related thought, but maybe if there is a recession, then software as an industry will become more connected to business/engineering fundamentals? I see a few people mentioned Jira busy-work here... maybe the market will actually correct for all of that?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#317

Post by notjustanymike »

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…

While I miss the ability to create epics, I would say is an Asana otherwise wonderful replacement for Jira.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#318

Post by tablet »

the_duke wrote: post #54

> users can switch to a competitor product like Asana, Basecamp or Monday.com with minimal cost That's just plain nonsense. I dislike using Jira as much as anyone, mainly because it's so excruciatingly slow. But there is no competing product (suite) that offers comparable functionality and provides the same long-term flexibilty. Many companies have built entire workflows (not just development related) around Jira, an…

> I dislike using Jira as much as anyone, mainly because it's so excruciatingly slow.

But there is no competing product (suite) that offers comparable functionality and provides the same long-term flexibilty.

This is maybe true, but the future belongs to more flexible software. Eventually Notion [1] or Fibery [2] will replace Jira. They may do it now for smaller team already (10-500 ppl), it just takes time to enter large companies.

[1] https://notion.so [2] https://fibery.io

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#319

Post by njsubedi »

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…

Featurewise, Taiga is the closest competitor. The only missing bit is mobile apps and real-time notification. Other than that, there's almost nothing that Taiga doesn't do.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#320

Post by ced »

serial_dev wrote: post #313
tarsinge wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 distr…

In the space Atlassian is in, choosing to be unprofitable while quickly growing could make sense. It is not necessarily true for other sectors (e-scooters, different delivery services, maybe even Uber), as there is no stickiness in those areas. Whenever a cheaper Uber would come to my city, I'd drop them within a second. They are usually cheap while they can burn VC money. If Atlassian can keep their system for a cou…

Whenever a cheaper Uber would come to my city, I'd drop them within a second.

Isn't the stickiness that drivers will only switch if customers use it, and customers will only switch if drivers use it?

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