Slack and Github investors will be watching this closely!
Will be interesting to see what the market thinks about a profitable company going public.
13 years from starting to going public, so those of you who join a startup going on its 4th year, something to keep in mind. You could have joined in year 5 and had your shares vest by year 9 and then be waiting for an additional 4 years for your liquidity event!
Kindof weird that their CFO resigned in October, just before they went public. That's probably something I'd want to know about in more depth if I was going to invest.
I wonder if they delayed the IPO so this could happen before they filled. Seeing as they brought him in to lead them through the IPO process, this seems a bit of a weird time to leave, this is probably the busiest time for a CFO.
> 13 years from starting to going public, so those of you who join a startup going on its 4th year, something to keep in mind
Atlassian started in Australia, a country where technology is generally considered a scam to separate idiots from their wallets. This significantly slowed down growth, and the founders have said they wished the company had left Australia sooner.
My own experience working in Australia (as an Australian) in innovative technology was extreme wariness of tech: it's an expense, not an investment. Local companies were cynical of technologies, even mainstream technologies in the US and UK, until there was at least one other Australian company using them.
The CEO's comments about 457 requirements reminded me of my recent experience working in Sydney on a 457. Not having access to the public health system was annoying (though luckily not too expensive because my family was generally healthy). What really annoyed me was having to pay the Medicare tax every fortnight, then claiming it back at the end of the year when I filed taxes. I don't like giving an interest-free loan to the government. Either give me access to the system, or don't tax me because you know I can't use Medicare!
The changes to LAFHA policy would have affected me very dramatically had my employer not given me a large raise to cover the difference. It completely boggles my mind that while I was paying the same tax as an Australian citizen, I had to pay out-of-pocket for my daughter's education (this was a NSW thing but is slowly spreading to other states). The mediocre local public school was $5k per child, so I spent $10k instead and sent her to a great private school.
It is clear to me that the Australian government is only interested in soaking foreign workers for as much as they could get away with. They clearly are not interested in anything other than digging stuff up out of the ground and selling it.
Er, to get you a 457 your employer has to prove private medical coverage, so...
The best schools in Sydney are the public schools... Went to one of the best public high schools in Sydney. My parents paid $400. At least you're not paying $20k USD/year in SF.
Your comments re tax can be applied to any country in the world (citizens vs residents/temporary residents). The US even has an exit tax on Green Card holders.
No, the visa holder is required to provide proof of private medical insurance (which costs more than your standard private insurance). My employer did not pay for this policy.
The local middle school in my suburb was mediocre (north of Hornsby). I'm sure there are others that are much better. (One of) the final straws was when her math teacher gave her a calculator when she continued to ask for help with math. The other was when the principal embarrassed her in front of the entire school assembly because of an technical issue with her uniform.
At the time, I couldn't find any information on withholding exceptions for Medicare tax. It worked out in the end though because we got a large refund for the un-refunded amount as we prepared to leave the country.
We loved our time in Australia, so please don't construe my comments as disparaging the country in general. It was a sad day as we flew away to the US.
Paperwork-wise, either you have never met France, either you didn't compare.
- Flat rental applications contain 2 years of tax return forms, 3 months of salary proof, for yourself and for a third person (or bank) who will guarantee you.
- As a self employed there are 18 different organizations to whom I must lodge contributions: VAT, retirement, retirement 2, training, universal income, disability, elderness 1, elderness 2, elderness 3, illness, health insurance, health insurance 2, workplace safety, help for housing, help for various institutions who went bankrupt, Commerce chamber, CSG, corporate tax, land tax. Employed people pay the same, plus unemployment, the employer handles half the paperwork but employees who don't cross-check are penalized.
- Each of them have an application form and half of them are monthly. Most of them apply on weird rules ("7.23% on 98.5% of revenue within limit of 1200 PASS if the revenue is ... and 1400 PASS if ..."). Some of them are taken, but don't give you benefits because you don't fit the rules (as you talked about pumping money from workers). Some are taken and refunded later.
- There are lunch tickets and holiday grants, for about 200€ per month, your employer must fund the employee bureau for this, but you need to apply to get them granted. Most usually you'll have to lodge an application for that, with your tax return and salary sheet, and you'll have fewer benefits if you don't have children. For example you'll be offered a rebate on a house rental for 5 people, which exactly fits the family of the employee managing the appcations.
- If you were a foreigner, you would also have to file for a visa and work permit, which means in average 0,5 day per trimester queuing in person at the Prefecture for various reasons.
A counterpoint: I moved to France with my family this year, and work as a self-employed developer while bootstrapping my own company.
- our landlord wanted to see a tax return from the previous year and three months' bank statements. No guarantee required. Our tenancy is for three years, before which the landlord cannot terminate it, but we can with 3 months' notice at any time. Renting was easy and cheap, and comes with a great deal of security.
- our new bank wanted a LOT of information about us, and some 70 pages of documentation. But now it's set up I can email or phone them and get an instant response from someone that knows me and my family (and speaks fluent English to boot). Their online systems are considerably better than my previous UK bank's.
- Registering for self-employment was entirely online and took 20 minutes.
- I fill out a social security return quarterly, which takes ~45 seconds, and all of the calculations are handled for me.
- We pay more tax than in the UK. But the state also pays for 85% of our childcare costs, and credits half of the remainder against our income tax bill.
- When I needed to check on our residence tax status, I rolled up at our local tax office where I was seen within 2 minutes by a friendly official who had immediately called all our details up on his computer, showed me what I needed to know and told me everything was in hand. (It was.)
It's not perfect. Being an employer is seriously not fun. Self-employment has its issues too. But it seems to be getting better, and by and large the systems work. (Probably because there are huge numbers of people running them.)
yeah, but France is a broken country when it comes to bureaucracy. Some aspects, like education seem to be in very good shape, but the system overall is repulsive.
One example out of blue - when you have a property (probably not your primary residence) and somebody breaks in and starts squatting in it, you cannot just drive them out without providing another accommodation for them. You go to courts, fight for months, and then maybe you're lucky and get your property back.
It's a system that looks social & fair from outside, but as everywhere else, rich gets richer, poor stay poor and are just thrown some bread crumbs to not complain too much.
By virtue of the fact that Atlassian chose not to list in Australia they have sent a message to government. Turnbull appears to be the kind of prime minister who could make Australia more tech-friendly, so fingers crossed.
The best option for a rising tech company in Australia remains, unfortunately, to purchase outright a flailing listed mining company and invert, a la 1999. This is where the "scammy" feel of listed tech companies comes from.
Malcom Turnbull is the guy who, for purely political purposes, messed up the planned upgrade of our absolutely terrible internet infrastructure. Now instead of having fibre, we have a bunch of crappy technologies that supposedly will also cost more and take longer to roll out.
Been in NZ for just over 4 years. The AU/NZ banking system is way out ahead of the US in my experience. Instant acct-acct transfers even on weekends. Hourly posting for bank to bank transfers. Better online experiences. Most of the big banks, and kiwibank, offer good free expense tracking and budgeting software ala mint.. I really hate having to deal with my US accounts :|
Even here in the banana republic called Thailand I can do instant transfers from my account in one bank to my own or someone else's account in another bank. I can do it by phone, at an ATM or online. I too loathe interacting with my US bankings.
BTW, any issues or threats by your US bank to close your account because your are living abroad? It's going around.
My account keeps getting deactivated because I don't make purchases from it with a debit card or check; I have to call online services and have it reactivated every few months :(
OzForex? CurrenciesDirect? There are many similar exchange agents: You transfer to their bank account of country 1, they transfer from their local bank account in country 2, avoiding international transfer fees. Few days, less than 1% away from the Google rate, unbeatable.
Australia and NZ have different currencies so there is no way you can avoid dealing with the money changers. There was a bit of debate a few years back about if Australia and NZ should form a single currency, but it did not seem to get far.
I live in Canada but visit the US at least once a year. Nearly every grocery store and restaurant has NFC terminals now.
We're constantly blocked from access to great online content and we can't order products from the US without great expense. But the moment I step foot on US soil and try to buy something, I feel like I'm in the credit card dark ages.
It's funny, we have all these NFC credit card terminals, but Apple Pay still hasn't launched here.
> It's funny, we have all these NFC credit card terminals, but Apple Pay still hasn't launched here.
I mean, "it can do the same thing your free debit card could two years ago" is kind of a weak marketing pitch, so maybe that's why they're not prioritizing it...
Yes, in Canada virtually every major bank issued debit or credit card for the last several years has supported NFC. There's different branding depending on the card - Interac Flash (debit), visa paywave, etc. But all use the same terminals.
No PIN, tap and go, no batteries.
With little user benefit, I'm assuming banks are reluctant to sign on to give apple a cut.
I'm in the opposite situation - recently moved back to the US after many years living abroad. Not having Chip & Pin or those neat wireless card terminals is weird. Signing for everything just feels so archaic!
I paid for something at Walgreens with my iPhone today via ApplePay, and a middle aged woman stopped me and asked why the cashier just let me go. The idea of paying for something with a cell phone was not within her ability to comprehend. That it was safer than using a swiped credit card was so far beyond the pale that I think it gave her vapors.
With [the absolutely fantastic] Paywave / Paypass now just about completely ubiquitous here in Australia, and supported by a good few smart phones to boot, why on earth would we want Apple Pay? They've truly missed the boat here.
The main advantages are security (you can't use a card without a TouchID fingerprint scan to unlock) and being able to easily use multiple cards on the one device.
The second user advantage is a drawback to most banks (they'd rather you carry just their card, rather than be able to switch easily), so that might also be a contributing reason for not signing up for Apple Pay.
The thing is in Australia, we have near ubiquitous support for contactless payments so when Apple Pay launchs here it'll be supported _everywhere_ on day one[1]
[1] Well, the tech will be supported. Whether the business will accept amex or not is another story...
We (Aus) and especially NZ (due to population size / spread I assume) are often the testing ground for tech advancements like this. Once proven and stable, they are rolled out to the rest of the world.
In this case I think it's more that there are only 4 banks in Aus so making a change like chip cards is much less like herding cats than it is in the US.
It's not that simple, and Australians love to paint the country as a backwater when it's not. It's hard for a lot of B2B businesses all over the place to get that first customer. And Australians go for tech as much as anyone else - as someone else mentions, NFC is way ahead of the US (as was chip and pin). Similarly polymer money was adopted very early here. Tired of being treated like a backwater given media release cycles, the general public adopted torrenting like a duck to water.
And then there are regressive forces like the last PM, who gutted science funding in permanently damaging ways.
It's a complex picture, but I think it's unfair to say Australians shy away from tech. Tech startups are harder here because of both government red tape and small market size, but that doesn't mean there's no real appetite for tech here. And frankly, given how much people here on HN say employee options are worthless, it's not the Australian regulations on options that would be holding anything back.
Australian are rapid adopters of tech, except for those who happen to be CTO’s or CEO. There is a real cultural cringe towards anything Australian when it comes to technology. I just wish we could get to the point where we think of Australian tech in the same way as we think of Australian sport.
My one positive is things today are nowhere near as bad as they were 15 years ago when I started. We have a great base of talent and with a little government support I could see Australian’s getting over their cringe.
The biggest problem is the very small market. Tech needs a big market to support it due to the sheer expense of it. Aus + NZ is only 25 million people - the nearest masses of humanity are a full workday's flight away. Compare to the US, Europe, or south / east Asia itself.
Small markets can be good while you are starting out as it allows you to make sure you are able to achieve high penetrance at relatively low cost. In a large market you don’t really know how broad an appeal your product has until quite late in the process.
With no industry other than "digging things up", extremely expensive and slow internet, and large family homes all over the middle of the city, it is pretty indisputable. All you have mentioned is that, yes, our banks and government can adopt technologies quicker than other countries that are much larger.
Those people you deride as 'digging things up' also really push the envelope when it comes to tech. Both the mining and agricultural sectors are lapping it up. I used to work for an agricultural telemetry startup and there's a ton of interest in the sector - depictions of farmers as backwood yokels who are fearful of technological change are bad stereotypes.
Yes, the internet here is expensive and slow. You can thank the current government for it's intentional blocking of better infrastructure there. But just because the internet is comparatively slow here doesn't mean that the country is a backwater overall. The internet in the US is amazingly fast... if you're in the right spot. It's fucking awful if you're in a bad spot. Yet we don't paint the US as a technological backwater.
> Atlassian started in Australia, a country where technology is generally considered a scam to separate idiots from their wallets
sorry, can you explain this further? i don't know much about australia but this seems strange for a 'western' country, especially one in the british commonwealth.
Working in the UK for the last 7 years, for both US-based and British companies, and Oz before that for the previous 9.
Australia's wealth is from its natural resources. Originally farming, then gold, coal, oil, and uranium. Britain has some natural resources in the North sea, but London has been a centre of intellectual wealth for hundreds of years: before there were startups, there were the Rothschild's, banks, and every other kind of trader. Man Group started the first hedge fund in the world in London 200 years ago based on storms affecting the sugercane crop for their Royal Navy rum contract. Australia is still at the selling sugarcane stage.
So while the UK is a little more cynical than the US, it still appreciates the value can be created intellectually because it has that history. Australia doesn't, because money is made by digging things up and selling them. I met and worked with some incredibly talented technical people in Oz - Damien from BSD/ipfw, Skud from Perl, lots of SA folk from Usenix - but the general business community is very wary of tech.
"i don't know much about australia but this seems strange for a 'western' country, especially one in the british commonwealth."
There are key difference b/w the US, UK and Aus (native speaker here) with respect to business. I perceive the US as risk-takers with access to deregulated finance. The UK is risk-adverse with sophisticated finance. In Aus we have a combination of risk aversion and what I'll term, "dumb-money".
A story on innovation in Australia by ABC's "The Science Show" made a comparison between the attitude to entrepreneurs in Israel & US vs Australia. In Israel & US it was viewed as a positive thing for an entrepreneur to have had 3 failed ventures as the 4th is more likely to succeed due to the experience gained in the previous ventures. In Australia it is viewed as a negative because past failures are predictive of the future.
Well there was that article recently by Matt Barrie (Freelancer CEO) that took a jab at Sydney's lockout laws as one reason that (young, enterprising, tech-focused) people don't want to stay here. He claimed that the inability to find fun and exciting places at all hours of the night was driving some people away from living here (in Sydney) as compared to places like London or New York (with a more bustling night scene).
Well I am bit too old to be worried about lockout laws, but it is my understanding that they just apply to a fairly limited area and there are heaps of places that are not affected.
I think a bigger issue is the ludicrous rents. We are paying SF/NYC/London rents, but wages for developers are not anywhere near the level they are in these cities. We do have very nice beaches and fantastic weather - today is just perfect in Sydney.
Yeah, I guess it affects someone like me (or younger) more. It does only affect a small area of the city, but that part now becomes dead after midnight, and the problems that used to be encountered have just shifted to other neighbourhoods.
I actually think we are paying more in rent than the cities mentioned. The only place where I can think of higher rent is in SF.
"The $150 million it recently raised isn’t going into its bank account — instead, its new investors are buying shares from past and present employees in an effort to offer workers some liquidity and retain talent ... 'the Accel Partners round was mostly about founders, and this [T. Rowe Price] one is about employees. Now neither of the founders are selling anything. So this is a little different. We’ve been profitable for 10 years, so we don’t need the cash, we have a lot of cash in the bank. It’s more a case of wanting to get a partner [that knows about public markets] on board..'"
" In October 2015, our former Chief Financial Officer, Erik Bardman, resigned from the company to focus on matters related to a past employer, including an investigation of certain accounting practices entirely with respect to such past employment."
Interesting. "Accel bought a $60 million stake in Atlassian from the co-founders in 2010. Last year, Atlassian sold $135 million worth of employees’ shares to T. Rowe Price Group Inc. and Dragoneer Investment Group." So the founders have had a liquidity event and the employees too? They're profitable and have access to private capital. I'm trying to understand why they would IPO. Currency for M&A?
HN works in the reverse. If you're going to assert your opinion, you back it up. People don't have any particular obligation to prove you wrong. Also, no one wants a conversation about votes.
Two similar companies that I can think of that went public recently is Splunk (SPLK) and Hortonworks (HDP) - their stock is trading mostly sideways, nothing exciting.
Not sure what to attribute this to - having reliable business clients pay for your software seems like very solid business to me, after all isn't that how IBM's and Oracle's of this world came about.
I suspect it comes down to how competitive this space is. Campfire used to be the thing not long ago, and then everyone went to Slack - who's to say that another competitor will not emerge and everyone will ditch their Jira's for something better?
"Reliable business" is a double edged sword in this case because reliable also means predictable. A lot of blue chip companies get their high valuation because the public can see the potential but not completely so. Whereas companies like Splunk or Hortonworks it's pretty much predictable how they will keep making money (at least for the next couple of years assuming that nothing surprising will happen)
I guess i should have been clear. I meant "making money" as in having a business model. Being profitable and having a business model are two different things. We can ask Amazon
Ok, so let's ask Amazon: they are both profitable and have a business model (further, for years running now, they've been able to demonstrate profitability whenever they feel like it to satisfy Wall Street worries). Their retail business has always had low margins, no different than Walmart by comparison.
SPLK is up about 60% since their debut in 2012 after gaining more than 150% and then coming back to reality where it is today - up 60%. Wouldn't call it sideways.
HDP on the other hand is pretty much where it started.
That was my reaction too. Over 80% of the company is still in the hands of the executives, directors, etc. That is amazing and even a relatively modest (by current standards) IPO will mean a huge windfall for many of them.
I'd short it technically because Confluence is Satan's wiki, but corps eat it up because WYSIWYG and because it costs money. (FOSS is bad, doncha know).
I actually really like Confluence specifically because it's WYSIWYG -- not for myself, but because by being accessible, other (non-developer/technical) people actually use it. I hate having to deal with the mess that is every shared network drive at every company ever, or even worse, email attachments.
Personally, I'd be happy with just Markdown if it was just a group of devs, but that is a rarity. At my company now, we have tech support, IT, (non-technical) account reps and even to some extent HR and finance using it, and to get that to happen, it was essential to be very easy. There's still a handful of users that attach Word or PDF documents to a page, but at least it's accepted that the wiki is still the canonical location to get any type of documentation, company policy/forms, etc. Baby steps.
So well Confluence does have its warts, getting buy-in into non-technical departments trumps those.
Conversely, I've never seen a non-WYSIWYG wiki actually successfully deployed and used by non-technical users (as contributors) -- anyone else?
Well, the wiki my team needs is one that is used by tech-people only. IT security team. We had Dokuwiki, which worked alright (except inline images were a bit tedious).
Confluence is just tacky, too much whitespace, whizzywig editor is slow and buggy (less so than 2yr ago).
And the old fogeys on the team that hate documentation still write their notes in a notes.txt file on our team share. Having a "beginner friendly" wiki didn't help anything.
Oh, and our dokuwiki was HA on day one, with backup scripts zipping and SCPing a backup to an offsite server. Confluence took MONTHS to get HA as an enterprise solution.
Maybe too much whitespace isn't right; it's too much clutter. I don't know how to describe it; I'll attribute my indecision on being under the weather. Let's stick with "clean": I like Dokuwiki's layout, categorical hierarchy and linking system better than Confluence.
I agree that team members not adhering to doc standards is a human problem.
Went through the exact opposite of this while at ${CAR_COMPANY.jp} last year (CF->SP). Even a poorly-run Confluence is Shangri-La compared to the abomination that is Sharepoint.
Sharepoint cannot even be referred to as a wiki (at least what I've seen, it's an MSOffice document store with some clumsy shared-edting kludged on).
Confluence used to have regular wiki syntax plus WYSIWYG for non-geeks, but the non-WYSIWYG appears to have been killed off completly. It's till a wiki, but barely.
You can use either Atlassian markup or Markdown to edit Confluence pages, it just takes a few extra keystrokes and I can't remember how to do it right at the moment. Not a piece of cake like Github/Stackoverflow, but at least it's possible.
The thing with Atlassian's whole stack, I've found after nearly 5 years administering them, is that how the users perceive it depends entirely on how it's run.
That applies to nearly everything they make, Jira, Confluence, the whole lot.
It's possible, and very very easy, to set up a shitty Confluence wiki, and some of the details of its performance are not exactly obvious. It takes a bit more work to set up one that's both well liked and easy to use.
If I had it to do over again, I'd still pick Confluence over MediaWiki every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Life's too short to deal with wiki markup by hand.
In my experience, Confluence sucks a lot less than SharePoint.
The unfortunate thing with any Wiki or document sharing tool is they tend to become cesspools of outdated or contradictory information. It has to be someone's job responsibility to keep it updated and curated.
1) Something isn't a wiki because it's called such. Sharepoint is not a Wiki. It's a server of some kind that can sometimes hold data that users put on it. I didn't even classify it as a wiki in my "what's crappy" list.
2) Agreed on the maintenance part. There needs to be a yearly audit/testing of procedures to make sure the docs hold up to new versions of software, new releases, etc.
Thought I'd hop in here for everyone who isn't satisfied with Confluence (or think it's the preferred publishing method of the devil).
My startup's building wiki software that's targeted at small groups to start who want a team wiki (instead of having to post everything to the entire corporation). The idea is to really focus on making the publishing and discussion experiences delightful.
I'd love to chat with anyone who is thinking about setting up a wiki for their startup or team My email is andy@tettra.co and the site is http://tettra.co.
Like what? As someone maintaining a Confluence wiki among other tasks I can say the only thing I has provided is reasonably fine-grained access control and a huge ton of headaches, pure WTF moments of XML hell, and java crash stack traces to debug.
Confluence is the Wordpress of wikis, but without Wordpress's code quality</s>
You want this alphabetically for why most corps won't deploy OSS wikis that are stamped for approval by the HN crowd?
1. LDAP support
2. SAML / SSO support
3. RBACLs
4. Auditability that integrates with some Big Corp compliance system (I'm thinking SOX primarily here and why some companies can't use Git for systems that require full auditability just because Git rebase and wipe of the reflog can happen)
5. The fact it's Java-based rather than oh... Erlang or Python is a pro to most enterprises that have hordes of people that have known only Java tooling and languages. Training a bunch of people that are not motivated to learn anything new is insanely hard. PHP could substitute in here as well I suppose.
6. Other software suites that integrate tightly with it. JIRA sucks for a lot of people, too, but it sure beats all the other crap I've had to use at work. I think less than 20% of the people on HN have actually had to use HP Quality Center or Rational ClearQuest on a daily basis for a long time.
7. Vendor is software maintainer. Big Corps would rather work with a single vendor if possible rather than some small consulting companies that install and integrate the software tailored for their environment and then leave pretty much. So unless one of the primary maintainers of I dunno, Redmine, started offering support contracts with a team of professional services folks, there's hardly any actual competitors to the Atlassian suite in the enterprise "more money and not much technical know-how to spend it effectively" software market.
8. A sales team that you can choke to bend to your will with money. Most OSS projects will not take terrible, horrible, ugly feature requests for large sums of money from a single user that are technically bad and tough to support without massive costs - this is how a lot of enterprise software vendors do business and part of how they decline over time (too many one-off feature requests for big ticket customers that create conflicting design requirements to engineer around combined with a shift to sales culture over engineering / innovation culture leading to massive loss of technical talent).
Only time I've ever run into XML hell on Confluence is when dealing with imported pages. Their automated import tool is neat, but it leaves you with some cleanup to do since not all of the markup from $wikiPackage transfers cleanly to Confluence macros.
Combine this with the fact that there's no error handler for broken pages - if the XML that makes a page work is invalid on the back end, the page just straight up won't render and has to be fixed another way. (Which sucks, but as I said, this is not a thing most people will ever encounter). It's not possible to generate invalid XML using the WYSIWYG editor, but plenty possible if you're using either the code editor, or plugins that do strange things.
The logs are chatty as hell and you'll generally get stack traces for even completely benign problems/notices. That's one thing I wish they'd deal with, but it's pretty minor.
If you're getting error-level stack traces and XML nonsense on a daily basis, something is terribly wrong in your instance. That is simply not standard behavior, and I'm kind of curious what their support people are telling you.
(Shoot me an email if you're comfortable doing so - I may be able to help you out)
Yeah I'm also considering shorting this as well. Having worked at a company that ate Atlassian software day and night, every single piece of software they have in their portfolio is a complete ugly mess. For every piece of software they have there's a better alternative that is cheap or free.
I think it's pretty subjective. JIRA can turn into a nightmare once overzealous project managers get their hands on the workflow designer. But I really miss Bamboo, having since moved to a company using Jenkins now. And Stash's web UI is pretty nice for doing pull requests/code reviews.
Well, for wikis it's obviously MediaWiki, and Bugzilla for JIRA.
Only thing that I don't know of free software replacement is the Agile Development tooling that JIRA provides. But tbh, "agile development" is a hellhole of buzzwords, expensive consultants and ridiculous bullshit rules anyway.
Or, you know, something a fortune 200 company uses to set its release dates for its flagship software. And is able to communicate how scope creep would affect sales to their internal team. And hits that release date.
Unlike Github's mostly developer centric issue mechanism, Jira is more suited for organizations the would have a QA department, a security review, a more complicated release process (multiple phases of validation and testing) or that that just need a custom issue state machine.
It just so happens that those companies also have money to buy Jira licenses and Atlassian is brilliant for letting OSS project use it as well. So they get a foot in the door at multiple places in the industry.
If startup developers don't like it, oh well, there is enough money for them to be made in the Enterprise market.
(Also, I noticed that there is an interesting plugin market for it as well, once you have audience that paid so much to use it, they'll be willing to shell out a a few hundred more for say Slack integration or other such plugins).
Yup, JIRA is a power-manager's wet dream. Whatever way one can think of for adding "things" to a task (and how to classify them, and how to keep track of them...), Atlassian has probably thought of it. For a developer who just wants to keep the tool at a distance and only log into it to move their shit across the scrum board and promptly log back out, they better hope their scrum overlords have looked upon them kindly.
Almost every time my company gets called in to do JIRA consulting the situation is this: Devs bring JIRA in.. JIRA gets popular.. things get out of control.
I used to be a dev who brought in JIRA because I like it out-of-the-box and it can grow with a team. But I always tell my manager to NOT TOUCH THE WORKFLOWS and to just let things grow organically as the needs of the team grow (or don't). And every time the moment they click around and see the workflow editor we ended up with some big, bloated, convoluted mess. I've been burned too many times, I no longer recommend JIRA to anyone.
In my opinion it's a range of management requests that give rise to the workflow, and devs hate managing workflows with email, notes ("When you are done implementing move the issue to the X column and send a message to the testers group that..."). So then devs bring in JIRA to do some automation. Now the tester person gets an email when the issue is moved to the testing phase. But once everything is in place, management will see the benefits, and the workflow will "evolve", especially if the teams grow. It's pretty natural.
I used to be a Pivotal guy before looking into JIRA again recently. They've made a lot of changes to their platform that really make it a pleasure to use, at least for my needs (development work with small teams). There is a bit of setup work but once you do that, it's smooth sailing.
I started using FOSS Phabricator on a medium-sized team (~20) for private central git hosting, code review, issue tracking, project management, etc. We absolutely love it and I wonder how it compares to Confluence/JIRA.
The interesting thing is that it is very often used for Agile project management. It's massive overkill for that. It has the feel of something that evolved from an issue-tracking system, because it existed before Agile and morphed into an Agile tool.
I hope it works well for them. I've seen many companies go down the tubes after deciding to go public. Which makes me wonder why one would even want to go public in the first place? The allure of perhaps making more money?
You know all those employees that you gave equity to in order to lure them onboard? Well, you've got a few options at that point. You can go public so they can cash out. Or you can do some kind of revenue-sharing scheme so they can get cash. Or something. Point is, you have to make good on your promise to them (their equity) at some point or they're all going to quit.
You don't think most employees are smart enough to realize options in most startups are like lottery tickets? Yeah, you might win, but the probable value is zero or close to it.
I wanted to ask this same question. I know the public market is very important to our economy, but I feel like for so many companies, going public optimizes them for the wrong things.
Presumably this is why they completely repackaged JIRA a few weeks ago. http://www.cio.com/article/2989783/atlassian-takes-jira-beyo.... Now they have the broad corporate-focused packages that will play well on Wall Street. They also have upside growth from the repackaging that can drive speculative pricing beyond what their current financial statements would justify.
These are very healthy for a software company. They nearly doubled their spend on sales and marketing between FY13 and FY14, which explains the temporary dip in gross margin in FY14.
This will be a great litmus test for relatively new and growing technology companies to determine when it's right to IPO in this market.
There have been a number of recent IPO's from companies with great growth but no profits to show for it. The market has mainly rejected these companies and the companies are trading near IPO levels or below. Some of them after taking a down round to go public even, such as HDP.
Atlasssian is showing very good growth and profits, however modest (which they should be for them - reinvesting in the company is the best action right now), which I assume would end up with a pretty decent multiple.
My midline would be a 4 billion market cap based on current growth trajectory, current and potential earnings (and their reinvestment in the business) and cash on hand which should limit and sort of second round any time in the foreseeable future.
This isn't based on PE (it would be extremely high right now) but rather the revenue growth and cash stability to allow sustainable reinvestment in the companies marketing, R&D and sales departments. It's a bit over 10x forward revenue.
I think very highly of JIRA and would use it again, but at a previous workplace ( over 1000 users) we required to have a JIRA/confluence admin who was spending over 50% of his time either keeping it running, adding connectors, or making modifications to suite various interest groups.
Interesting that this has happened so soon after relocating to the UK (2014) from Australia. I wonder if they plan to stay there or move the US as well?
I didn't realize that they weren't based in SF, since they have a large presence here. In fact, the Chief Legal Officer cited in that filing is based in SF.
According to statements made by the founder[1], the move to London was designed to make them more integrated into the global economy ahead of their IPO. That tells me that they aren't moving again any time soon.
According to the "foreign private issuer" paragraph, "more than 50% of our assets cannot be located in the United States", and ditto for the board members.
They are primarily based in Sydney, they might be the biggest importers of developers in Australia actually ;) but the SF office is large too, they hold a few usergroups in it, as well as the Atlassian Summit which just ended (3-5 Nov). https://summit.atlassian.com . No wonder you believed they were SF based.
Their products are well designed but often sluggish which ruins the experience. I stopped using them because of that, unfortunately. It created a barrier in my head and made me hesitant every time I wanted to interact with their software.
Check if your brokerage is offering them. Usually there will be a way you can sign up for "new issues".
In this arrangement, you would enter into an "expression of interest" to purchase shares at the IPO price, if your broker was allotted any shares by the underwriters. Once you have entered into this, you must be ready to buy the number of shares you indicated at the IPO price, but if there is a lot of interest, you may not get fully filled and may not even get filled at all.
The most awesome of the awesomest companies: " An application has been made to list our Class A ordinary shares on the NASDAQ Global Market under the symbol "TEAM"."
Only Atlassian could ask to be listen as "TEAM".
Is there a "quiet period"? I can't find the date of IPO on the document either.
Does an IPO introductory price usually match the last round of funding? It seems on page 10, they mention $2.23 for Class A shares and $0.51 for Class B shares, which makes a total valuation of $148m. Last round valuation was $3.15bn [1]. It means those shares have been bought 21 times higher at the last round than the price mentioned in this document. Did I read it correctly?
Page 62, chart: For $1 initial purchase, customers end up spending $8 in additional users, renewals and other products.
It's my first time reading an F-1/S-1, it's awesome, there's plenty of information! Sales per continent, page 71! Marketing expenses page 80! That's awesome!
The prices on Page 10 (I actually see similar but slightly different numbers, the document may have been updated) are weighted-average exercise prices for all outstanding options. Since many of those options would have been issued years ago (presumably with low strike prices) the average option price bears little relationship to the IPO price (which we won't know until the IPO is priced by the underwriters--note the blanks throughout).
Example: They recently did a massive reshuffle on their Jira product lines. Now instead of Jira + a set of software dev plugins, it's two separate products. Jira Core, and Jira Software, which bundles all the software dev stuff that you used to have to buy separately.
If you were a Jira license holder before this change, you basically got bumped to Jira Software (i.e. you got access to the dev stuff) for the same price you were paying before.
I would not see this happening with a public company.
Going public exposes you to the toxic "growth at all costs" mindset of short-term, quarter to quarter thinking investors, which pressures the company to screw their customers to make the balance sheet look a bit better.
This isn't going to happen immediately, but they're on a clock now. It will happen sooner or later, mark my words.
This seems overly broad. Red Hat has done a lot of very good things since going public and I'm sure if you sat down and looked at a lot of public companies shoes software you use it's likely they have done good things.
Slack and Github investors will be watching this closely! Will be interesting to see what the market thinks about a profitable company going public.
13 years from starting to going public, so those of you who join a startup going on its 4th year, something to keep in mind. You could have joined in year 5 and had your shares vest by year 9 and then be waiting for an additional 4 years for your liquidity event!
> https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000104746915...
Kindof weird that their CFO resigned in October, just before they went public. That's probably something I'd want to know about in more depth if I was going to invest.
I wonder if they delayed the IPO so this could happen before they filled. Seeing as they brought him in to lead them through the IPO process, this seems a bit of a weird time to leave, this is probably the busiest time for a CFO.
> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-11/atlassian-...