
Atlassian Sets Its I.P.O. at $21 - kungfudoi
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/business/dealbook/atlassian-sets-its-ipo-at-21.html
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swingbridge
JIRA is far from perfect, but in an "enterprise" environment it's far better
than most of the piece of $&@? "enterprise" software tools floating around.
i.e. "Hey guys check out the new Sharepoint site for this project!" (banging
head against wall)

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guiomie
Agree, it could be worst. We have Jira bug tracking, Confluence and Jira
Agile. Confluence is great, no more sharepoint, we just put all our
documentation there. Jira Agile is simply awful, the UI/UX is non-intuive and
super hard to understand. That product is definitely there for the enterprise
world who is drinking the Agile kool-aid.

We started using gitlab at work, sadly we dont track issues in there, but
still rely on Jira Agile. GitLab would be a great acquisition for Atlasian.

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willthames
I'm not sure why Atlassian would acquire Gitlab when they already have Stash
(which might be called Bitbucket Server now - but either way is a fully
fledged Git{la,hu}b competitor)

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guiomie
Wasn`t aware about that. I'm surprised my team didnt go with that...

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lhc-
We use Stash (and Jira and Confluence and a bunch of Agile stuff). Its... ok.
Its a lot better than some of the other self-hosted repositories we tried, but
there are some rough spots. Pull requests are a lot worse than Github, for
example. The integration with Jira can be pretty cool though.

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hbhakhra
I hope to see them succeed with their IPO, they seem like just a good company.
They got solid revenues that they have been reinvesting while staying
profitable, so this IPO could let them grow much faster. With $319.5 million
revenue, the IPO valuation is only 13x revenue, which is a solid company in
this tech market.

~~~
sqldba
You said $319.5 million revenue, and the other poster said $6.8 million
profit. Which is right?

Edit: Ok I get it. Revenue vs Profit. Of course.

Speaking as a non-stockmarkety person: comparing the valuation with profit it
looks like a much worse deal and who would run a company for 2% profit let
alone buy a part in one?

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Bjartr
>who would run a company for 2% profit let alone buy a part in one?

People who think putting that revenue back into the business today will result
in even more revenue tomorrow. Money they take in and spend on making the
company better isn't counted as profit, just like how paying the costs of
accruing that revenue lowers the profit.

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pkorzeniewski
I can't believe Jira is so popular, I've had to use it for 3 years and it's -
to put it mildly - bad. Ok, actually it's a pile of shit. It's hard to count
how many times we had problems with it on meetings, the UX is absolutely
horrendous - I felt like Jira was always in the state of war with you, trying
to make your day worse. Common tasks that should be easy to do were overly
complicated and required too many actions, trying to find an issue was a
chore, on every page a lot of shit you don't need - generally one big mess. I
don't know about their other software, maybe it's better, but Jira being the
most popular, their success baffles me.

~~~
Rexxar
I'm not sure if Jira is inherently bad or if Jira is destroyed by project
managers that force developers to use it as a reporting/management tool and
not as a bug-tracking tool.

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oneJob
My experience also suggests that this is the real issue. Someone has to make a
decision on which solution to use for their "agile" development workflow, but
this someone doesn't understand that they are actually purchasing a product
with a constrained, predefined version of agile. Even though it is somewhat
flexible it doesn't perfectly map onto this person's version of agile and so,
since they've already paid the licensing fees and gone through the office
politics of getting buy in or stuffing it down the users throats, they don't
want to admit that either their version of agile could be tweaked or that they
should have licensed different software. So then, the mess begins. At every
turn square pegs are forced into round holes and workflows are misused with
consequences that are not immediately evident. A year down the road and
everyone is frustrated. You'd be better off using an excel workbook. Now you
have to explain to everyone you onboard why your version of agile is so much
better than other versions and warranted creating this monstrosity which they
must figure out how to use without documentation (which is useless at this
point) and without frustrating their new coworkers with too many questions
about the arbitrary nature of their system, which they hate and had shoved
down their throats.

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nstj
As a former user of Atlassian products in a number of "enterprisey places",
and having always myself said something along the lines of "this
[Jira/Confluence/HipChat] is a big ball of enterprisey s!&t" I just now
realised after reading these comments that we're all really just upset at
Atlassian making great products for their. target. markets.

Besides a select few (e.g. Apple with Swift OSS Jira), how many companies
which you _really admire_ do you think would buy and use Jira? The reason
Atlassian have made, and will continue to make a lot of money (think of all
the businesses in this world who haven't even heard of the term "agile" who
will buy Jira down the track) is that they make products which serve their
target market - big, bumbling, _less than nimble_ enterprises.

And you have to respect them for that.

Every time you look at an Atlassian product and complain about it being crappy
and having a bad UI (I've certainly done this in the past), just realise that
what you're really upset about is the company in which you work where someone
is willing (and able) to purchase such a product.

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forgottenpass
_that we 're all really just upset at Atlassian making great products for
their. target. markets._

No. "We're" not. You. You are. People tend to extrapolate from themselves and
assume the same is true for others, but that's an impulse we have to control
and use stronger reasoning.

Atlassin has good products and none of the silliness that comes from accepting
VC cash. That they're not hip in the startup echo chamber doesn't bother me. I
don't need to (inaccurately) characterize and throw shade at their customer
base to not have a hangup about that company.

I think there is more going on here than you disliking their UI and therefore
dismissing them as too "enterprise." Have you considered pulling your head
outside the startup bubble, and having a bit of a think for a while about what
you're actually frustrated with ('cause it sure as shit ain't Atlassin)?

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nstj
No need to make it personal! I was only referring to the people who always
complain about their products. I have a huge amount of respect for Atlassian
(IMO they're the standout Au tech story as a company), have a number of
friends who work for them, and have enjoyed countless free beers and pizzas as
a result of their selfless sponsorship of the software development community.

Starting a company which actually has sales and sustainably operates - all
with capital from your credit card? I think that is f$&)ing awesome. I was
just trying to place some commentary around the not-infrequent complaints
given to some of their products which I hear - I wasn't trying to justify
them. :) peace

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planetjones
$6.8 million profit last year and an initial valuation for the company of
$4.38 billion. It truly is a crazy world we are living in. I was tempted to
take a long position in Atlassian, but frankly I think the chosen price
grossly overvalues them.

~~~
thoman23
Not to mention they are no longer "cool". I hear younger developers talk about
Jira like I might talk about Internet Explorer. Without Jira, the Confluence
Wiki loses some luster. HipChat of course has been overrun by Slack...etc.

For the record, I'm still a big fan of the Atlassian suite, and also had
thought about taking a long position once they were public, but I can't do it
given the above conditions and this seemingly inflated price.

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semerda
So who are these younger developers talking about now?

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girvo
Nothing, honestly. JIRA has been painful to use as a developer in the trenches
for the 7 years and 3 companies I've used it at, but there still isn't a
proper competitor to it that seems to have traction. For what it's worth, we
moved to breeze.pm, but the CTO decided to build his own "complete" business
management service; project management, CRM, HR, etc. all in one system and
integrated with Xero. We'll see how it goes. I'm keeping an eye on Tagia.io,
but I'm waiting for the "Slack" to appear.

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ansgri
How Redmine is not a competition?

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stephen_g
Redmine is pretty good for what it is, but I don't think it's in the same
league as Jira... It does a lot of things, but having used it for a while at
work I didn't feel that it did anything amazingly well. We just kept hitting
annoyances in the UI, various limitations in all sorts of things in the
ticketing and wiki, the lack of good reports, etc.

I actually joined the company just as they were about to move to Redmine, and
recommended Jira instead after playing around with the Redmine test instance
for a while. They were worried about the cost though, and I didn't have much
say yet, but in the end switching to Redmine was the best argument for getting
Jira. I didn't even have to push for it - after a few months my manager came
to me and said he'd already got the funds approved!

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leonardinius
Hi. Old time Jira user here. Used to use it heavily ... 5-3 years ago.

Last few years we use Redmine mostly. In the beginning I had mixed feelings
about it. Now I'm OK with it.

We sometimes need to switch to Jira in our projects. It's always a pain
nowadays. I used to love Jira time reports, now I just don't get them.

My perspective: Redmine covers the basics we need, don't have the feature
creep problem and does reporting (time reporting) really really well.

Rant mode continued: In several projects we use YouTrack [0]. Initially I was
very excited: e.g. great UX etc .. But! It's time reporting capabilities are
just rudimentary.

In the end we do the following: created internal tool too fetch time reports
from different systems and to push to our Redmine system (via REST API).
Redmine serves our reporting needs well. Still, in some extreme cases also use
excel via ODBC..

[0]:
[https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/](https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/)

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caseysoftware
According to the S-1, the founders still own ~75% and the other
directors/officers own another 10%.

Wow.

~~~
pbreit
Seems like employees should own a lot more. Too bad for them.

~~~
tajen
During the previous round (see CrunchBase), Scott Farquhar said some employees
will be able to buy a little home with the shares they have. I'm not sure
employees who joined in the last years (when it became bigger than 500 people)
should get equity at all, but I don't know how this opinion compares with the
rest of the industry.

~~~
randycupertino
A home where? Probably not in SF or the Bay Area with those #s. Maybe in
Seattle.

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icebraining
Well, their HQ is in Sydney, Australia, so I don't see why they would be
referring to the Bay Area.

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randycupertino
I live in SF and a bunch of my friends work for Atlassian. They have a SF
office with a lot of people in it:

[https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers/all-
jobs?location=...](https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers/all-
jobs?location=San%20Francisco)

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tajen
With another point of view, I'm asking:

What will the proceeds of the IPO be used for?

Do current shareholders sell part of their shares, or is it newly emitted
shares? If newly emitted, will they dilute the founder's shares? Thus, at the
end, will this money be used for investment and sudden, huge growth, or will
Atlassian stay on their "bootstrapper" growth rate?

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coryl
Aren't all IPOs principally the same in that a company raises money by selling
new shares to the public, and those companies shares can then be traded
publicly? (With the exception of lockups, etc.)

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tajen
It probably depends on the company: Founders and employees may seek liquidity,
for example. According to [http://seekingalpha.com/article/3746196-ipo-
preview-atlassia...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/3746196-ipo-preview-
atlassian-corporation-plc), it looks like Atlassian offers 10% in the IPO. But
I'm not a financial analyst.

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maxxxxx
I really admire a company like Atlassian that has real products, a real
business and didn't take 100s of million dollars of investment without having
any kind of plan to make money.

There is way too much focus on "unicorns" that aren't real businesses but just
an investment vehicle.

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mcintyre1994
Ah they're IPOing now? I hadn't really kept up with this news but I guess it
explains them converting bitbucket account to Atlassian ones. Great service
though :)

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voltagex_
Pity they're not on the ASX - last time I looked it was a lot of paperwork.
Although, last time I was lazy about paperwork I missed investing in ARMH...

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tedmiston
Maybe they can invest some of that spare change into making the Jira Agile
backlog automatically refresh when it is changed by other clients.

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dharma1
how do stock options work for people who join companies around 1 year or less
before they go public?

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nuand
The options, RSU, and NSO packages remain as-is. The only thing that changes
is the tax situation. Excercising options after a stock is publicly traded is
viewed and taxed exactly as income.

