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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

#371

Post by theturtletalks »

dalbasal wrote: post #284
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 fro…

Fundamentally, why would someone buy a stock of a company that doesn’t eventually make a profit or offer some sort of dividend? Seems like Atlassian traded profit for staying power, but can they leverage that staying power to bring value to their investors?

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#372

Post by jschumacher »

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…

The product suite differs significantly from 2015. Put aside new and acquired products like Trello and OpsGenie, the existing products have significantly expanded their capabilities and added Premium and Enterprise tiers.

Revenue in 2015 was $320M, In 2021 it was $2B. That kind of growth requires growth in Supporting functions and infrastructure teams, not just in product.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#373

Post by logicchains »

throwamon wrote: post #333
zac23or wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never write anything in any web interface. I write in notepad and copy and paste. I had many bad surprises ... I can't trust web interfaces. And I use the Windows clipboard manager too.

You mean literally Windows' Notepad? Because that's about the worst app to write on. Not even going to go into how it's almost devoid of useful commands. Make one mistake, you're good. Make two, tough luck, you can only undo once. Accidentally select some (or all) text and type over it then somewhere else? Today's really not your day. It's actually worse than textboxes in this respect. This happened to me more times…

>You mean literally Windows' Notepad? Because that's about the worst app to write on.

It's actually one of the best on Windows, because if you leave your computer for a moment and it randomly decides to restart to install a Windows Update, often a notepad with unsaved changes will block it from restarting, whilst unsaved work elsewhere won't.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#374

Post by geodel »

londons_explore wrote: post #239
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…

> Switching would come with a lot of effort. I think you misunderstand the way some companies work... Some companies, a VP will send an email saying "As of next week, we will use Asana instead of Jira. Jira will be deleted, so copy anything important off it now. NO EXCEPTIONS!" Sure, there will be mayhem for a couple of weeks, but the migration will be successful. The VP will have one more thing to put on his 'done'…

Agreed. To think Jira has reached to the level of Mainframes, effectively irreplaceable, would be hilarious.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#375

Post by bombcar »

theturtletalks wrote: post #371
dalbasal wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fro…

Fundamentally, why would someone buy a stock of a company that doesn’t eventually make a profit or offer some sort of dividend? Seems like Atlassian traded profit for staying power, but can they leverage that staying power to bring value to their investors?

People buy growth stocks because they can sell them for more tomorrow, it's often a bit of greater-fool theory in play.

For the successful companies that do grow into a dividend company, they often have valuations that far outstrip their eventual settling location at some point in the trajectory.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#376

Post by swilliamsio »

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.

Recently found out about ClickUp. It's not quite as feature-rich as JIRA, but nowhere near as simplistic as Trello, and its fairly jank-free so I'm a fan.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#377

Post by bombcar »

milesskorpen wrote: post #367
upupandup wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sudden…

There's also a bit of "path not taken" - perhaps whatever choice wasn't made wouldn't have worked out great anyway, for various other reasons.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#378

Post by skeeter2020 »

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…

>> Are any of them any better?

Not in my experience, at least not enough of an impact to make me really care. Azure DevOps was far worse in my experience, and many of the ones SW Devs promote can't roll up to the portfolio level which is where the strategic and purchasing decisions are made.

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#379

Post by eafkuor »

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…

> Anyway, they have 8000 employees... they can always drastically downsize and refocus, the company will be around for a while.

They want to hire 17000 more people: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-07/atlassian...

Re: Atlassian is 20 years old and unprofitable

#380

Post by colinmhayes »

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…

Wouldn’t companies switch to a one time purchase or open source model if mongo stopped developing new features? Why would they continue paying a subscription for a product that doesn’t improve when money is tight? Especially when there are plenty of mongo competitors.
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