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

Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

smartcompany.com.au

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 515 posts

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#361

Post by jschumacher »

prmoustache wrote: post #260
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…

>What are the equivalents for Jira ? One equivalent that does everything and is as flexible as jira, I don't know. There are however a multitude of software that provide some of the functionnalites or can do many things jira does but in a more opinionated way. It depends if one's company want a tool flexible enough to suit gazillons of different workflows with integration with many other tools or not. If the goal is…

> Funny thing is jira is such a mess Atlassian introduced jira service desk more focused on tickets while the former can also do that.

Not quite. Service Desk (aka Service Management today) has a number of capabilities that differ quite significantly from Jira Software. The most obvious is the end-user facing help portal. But how users are managed is quite different, it has SLAs, different reporting, a knowledge base, etc. Just like Jira Software is flexible but tailored to software teams with boards, backlogs and sprints, Jira Service Management is tailored to IT teams and requirements specific to that market.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#362

Post by ryanackley »

upupandup wrote: post #345
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 actually bad to be profitable when you're growing. I've seen this happen so many times: - profitable, down to earth founders generating net profits - VC approaches said outfit and tries to gather as much info - VC realizes said outfit is difficult to emulate and break into market - VC invests and starts demanding they run at a loss to grow quickly This works well when interest rates are low, and VC is not unde…

Few counterpoints:

- Your entire theory relies on VCs having some power over decisions being made at Atlassian. That isn't the case. The founders of Atlassian have always been in control. After taking VC money and going public, they still have over 80% of the voting shares [0].

- A downturn of 5+ years would be the longest downturn in the USA in the last 100 years [1]. Anything is possible but it's unlikely to be that bad.

[0] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220527005335/en/Atl...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#363

Post by marcosdumay »

ratww wrote: post #342
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 leav…

I've worked (as in actively worked) in a couple restructuring efforts, and it went fine, but it wasn't on tech, it was on education. It went massively well. The universities were financially healthier afterwards, and all the remaining employees had safer (union!) jobs. The trick for this being successful is most of the time by challenging the processes themselves, rather than the employees. Employees aren't useless,…

> because it requires introspection, egolessness and actual work, the sorta stuff that is rare in upper management

It also may reduce the need for middle and upper management.

In fact, if you give people some confidence that they won't be fire and instead you will use their work on some more valuable action, ICs will line up on your door with ideas on how to cut their processes. But management won't.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#364

Post by ab_testing »

The high growth without generating a profit has worked fine for them for the last decade. But it seems that their stock price is in risky territory. They were valued at 113B at their peak and are now close to 48B. But their annual revenue is just around 2B. So that is still 24x revenue with no profits. It looks like they would fall a lot more if that revenue growth slows down due to a recession or companies just cutting back a litte bit.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#365

Post by PheonixPharts »

papito wrote: post #311
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.

We've been in a bubble so long that there were people who have worked only in the current tech bubble. People run companies now that think a stock market crashes ultimately means more money flows in from VCs. I once worked for a c-level that seriously thought he had discovered something amazing when he realized that a company that made more than it cost to run the business had unlimited runway... the very idea that a company could run without constantly running to investors begging for more cash was completely foreign to him.

This has been the consequence of increasingly cheap money and investor money having nowhere to go after the real estate crash in 2008. To be fair, if money is basically free then it does make sense to grow without worrying about a profit. If you've had an entire career without every having to worry about more investor money coming it, it would start to seem wasteful to not spend it all.

But that's why these current economic conditions have me very worried: money can't be cheap anymore. If interest rates continue to rise we'll see a massive contraction in tech. First it will be the smaller, direct to consumer startups, then it will be all of the companies that have those startups as a non-trivial portion of their revenue.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#366

Post by goodpoint »

square_usual wrote: post #160
goodpoint wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thought of running a 10,000+ development team using Jira is horrific.

Think of how much human effort is being wasted on Jira !

People really underestimate the loss of productivity and morale of using slow web-based tools. Now multiply it for 10k.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#367

Post by milesskorpen »

upupandup wrote: post #345
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 actually bad to be profitable when you're growing. I've seen this happen so many times: - profitable, down to earth founders generating net profits - VC approaches said outfit and tries to gather as much info - VC realizes said outfit is difficult to emulate and break into market - VC invests and starts demanding they run at a loss to grow quickly This works well when interest rates are low, and VC is not unde…

You don't say it explicitly, but there's a bit of a garden-of-eden in this story: Founders were running this great wonderful profitable business and then those darn VCs come in and ruin everything.

A founder isn't forced to take on investors. The same founders who were so "down to earth" and profitable are the ones making the decision to take on investors. The founders can't be responsible for profits and then suddenly get taken advantage of by investors. Everyone involved is eyes-wide-open.

Lots of great businesses have been built, in partnership with investors, during higher interest rate periods and downturns.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#368

Post by PheonixPharts »

fencepost wrote: post #343
papito wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I have a company with good cash flow, all employees (including me) are compensated well, and I'm spending a chunk of that cash flow on R&D and growth but have only marginal profits if any am I doing something wrong? Should I cut R&D to pay dividends? How about if the company is privately held? There's a difference between 'not profitable' and 'losing money.'

If "profitable" is a switch you can flip, then what you're describing makes sense.

The issue is that many of these companies have never demonstrated that if they want to they can be profitable. The big assumption in these growth models is that there is a point where you can just magically flip that profit switch.

For example if I run a lemonade stand where I spend $3 to make a $1 glass of lemonade, even if I am able to use investor capital to keep growing my lemonade stand to be the only lemonade stand in town, or even the world, it's not clear that I can survive if I'm forced to make a profit.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#369

Post by geodel »

dalbasal wrote: post #183

This article's finger is on the right place, but IMO the analysis is off. Netflix, has recently excited the fundamental/rationalist investor camp. The huge valuations hot tech companies enjoy must eventually be justified by a "Thiel Monopoly." That's the only way to earn the 20%-50% margins that Google/Apple/Meta can achieve. Netflix sells a cheap consumer product. One product among several similar options. Consumers…

> The companies who pay them aren't price sensitive, and they are locked in enough.

I doubt this is true lately. I have seen even more critical ticketing system like ServiceNow/Cherwell/Remedy getting replaced. We replaced Slack with other chat software because of licensing cost. Big companies are not price sensitive seems like old theory. Because I am seeing in so many large companies increasing license fee is causing replacement of existing products.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#370

Post by geodel »

guhidalg wrote: post #310
alxlaz wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was (a very small, and only part-time) part of a team that did a migration from a Perforce-era VCS to git. It was about 6 weeks of 100% background work -- as in, we prepared cheat sheets, changed or rewrote relevant parts of the CI and deployment chain, while everyone in the company kept using the old VCS. Then it took about 36 hours to move the relevant code bases (a few dozen repositories, some of them 20+ years…

Thank you for sharing your experience. Migrating from software A to B is part of life, Jira does not hold a special technical place. Politically, that's a different conversation...

You are right. I'd say politically it is equally likely to have Jira replaced some places as it is not replaced in other places.
Post reply on HN