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Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

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Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

#41

Post by TrackerFF »

matt3210 wrote: post #13

How do people pay the bills when they start a company? I'd go start a company right now if I could figure out how to pay my car payment while doing it.

- Have a family that can back / help you out financially.

- Have a working spouse that can float you.

- Have funding secured BEFORE launching your startup.

- Have a solid network of friends, acquaintances, co-workers, business partners, etc. that have enough money to support you.

And so on.

Not really the best kept secret, but a LOT of startup founders come from social classes where money isn't that difficult to get. And others work in lucrative industries before launching their entrepreneurial careers.

For ages there's been this debate on being able to afford (taking) risks, which tends to be strongly correlated with your socioeconomic background.

Taking out credit-card loans, mortgaging your house, etc. def isn't the norm.

Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

#42

Post by andsoitis »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #3

Atlassian, before Atlassian, asked me to open source my wiki engine, because they wanted to create a wiki. Did that, LGPLed it, and Confluence was born ;-) [Edit] "Engine" is ambigous, wiki render engine would be more precise [0]. To be transparent and because it is not and was not my intention to mislead people: the code was a library that rendered Wiki markup into HTML and had a plugin/extension system to e.G. rend…

> my wiki engine, because they wanted to create a wiki. Did that, LGPLed it, and Confluence was born ;-)

What is the name / URL to your wiki engine?

Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

#43

Post by remyp »

matt3210 wrote: post #13

How do people pay the bills when they start a company? I'd go start a company right now if I could figure out how to pay my car payment while doing it.

I spent the first 15 years of my career grinding and saving cash + equity as a SWE. It turns out that some of that "worthless" startup equity eventually CAN turn in to Real Money and now I'm using it to pay my bills while I build my own thing.

Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

#44

Post by pyrrhotech »

It's a great story, but at least in the software world, this sort of thing is exponentially more difficult to pull off today than it was 10 or 15 years ago. The internet was the most economically revolutionary invention of all time. Sell to anyone! Connect anyone in the world instantly! It created a lot of low hanging fruit. So much that it took 20 years or so to grab it all. However, in 2023, all that low hanging fruit is gone, and the market is largely saturated. A quick Google search of nearly any idea will pop up at least a handful (sometimes 30+) of established competitors fighting over scraps, none of which ever have a chance of achieving Atlassian-level success. Even B2B SAAS is reaching that saturation point. The golden age of the garage tech startup becoming a billion dollar business in a few years are probably behind us.

Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

#45

Post by KingOfCoders »

ryanackley wrote: post #37
KingOfCoders wrote: post #3

Atlassian, before Atlassian, asked me to open source my wiki engine, because they wanted to create a wiki. Did that, LGPLed it, and Confluence was born ;-) [Edit] "Engine" is ambigous, wiki render engine would be more precise [0]. To be transparent and because it is not and was not my intention to mislead people: the code was a library that rendered Wiki markup into HTML and had a plugin/extension system to e.G. rend…

[edit] This is a response to the original unedited comment that claimed he wrote the first version of Confluence I'm a former Confluence developer (2008-2013). I don't know anything about you or the detailed history of Confluence. - When I started there were 12 people on the team including me. I wasn't there at the very beginning but some people on that team were and they would discuss design decisions from the start…

[Edit] To make it clearer I annotated my initial comment because I don't want to mislead people.

[Deleted b/c it was inappropriate]

The wiki engine was called Radeox and rendered wiki markup into HTML. It was written in Java and open sourced from an existing Wiki application called SnipSnap [0]. If you have worked at Atlassian as a developer, you should have seen that name. It was also used as an example by Grails developers, e.G. in "The definitive guide to Grails"

References to it can be e.G. found here:

https://docs.atlassian.com/ConfluenceServer/javadoc/7.12.2/c...

The way macros are done and I have invented can e.G. be found here:

https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/insert-t...

I have discussed things with Mike Cannon-Brookes long before you've joined the company. Sadly the oldest mail I can still find from Mike to me is from 2006 and was not about this topic.

[0] https://github.com/thinkberg/snipsnap

Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

#46

Post by a_c »

sleepychu wrote: post #4

Yikes, I have to create an account and subscribe to read the second half of the article? Think the complaints about that are obvious. Leaving a comment in case anyone else wants to avoid that particular experience. Shame, it was an interesting and well written article.

I assume the article is a transcript of an episode of "How I Built This", if podcast is more your thing

https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/atlassian-mike-cannon-...

Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

#48

Post by KingOfCoders »

andsoitis wrote: post #42
KingOfCoders wrote: post #3

Atlassian, before Atlassian, asked me to open source my wiki engine, because they wanted to create a wiki. Did that, LGPLed it, and Confluence was born ;-) [Edit] "Engine" is ambigous, wiki render engine would be more precise [0]. To be transparent and because it is not and was not my intention to mislead people: the code was a library that rendered Wiki markup into HTML and had a plugin/extension system to e.G. rend…

> my wiki engine, because they wanted to create a wiki. Did that, LGPLed it, and Confluence was born ;-) What is the name / URL to your wiki engine?

This is 20 years ago, I don't think it exists (not on Github).

A reference can be found on the (back then) famous C2

https://wiki.c2.com/?RaDeox

It was cut out from a Wiki application called SnipSnap

https://github.com/thinkberg/snipsnap

Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

#49

Post by bunnyfoofoo »

sleepychu wrote: post #4

Yikes, I have to create an account and subscribe to read the second half of the article? Think the complaints about that are obvious. Leaving a comment in case anyone else wants to avoid that particular experience. Shame, it was an interesting and well written article.

I used the author's email and that was accepted. No confirmation necessary.

Re: Bootstrapping Atlassian: $10k In Credit Card Debt To $20M In Revenue In 5 years

#50

Post by andsoitis »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #48
andsoitis wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my wiki engine, because they wanted to create a wiki. Did that, LGPLed it, and Confluence was born ;-) What is the name / URL to your wiki engine?

This is 20 years ago, I don't think it exists (not on Github). A reference can be found on the (back then) famous C2 https://wiki.c2.com/?RaDeox It was cut out from a Wiki application called SnipSnap https://github.com/thinkberg/snipsnap

Found: https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/radeox/
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