
A missing letter helped create a tech billionaire - rmason
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47301446
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jcims
I’m sure if you got some serious alone time and trust with other billionaires
you could fill a book with these stories.

Around 1983 my mom was dating a chef at the restaurant she worked at. One
night he was out carousing and got himself killed. Fast forward a year and my
mom meets the manager’s brother, thinks he’s an asshole and blows him off.
He’s visiting from out of town and gets wasted, mom helps him to the brothers
place and the guy turns out to be hilarious and a great story teller. They
agree to a date, it escalates to marriage and we move. A year later now step-
dad’s employer offers him relocation to either Chicago or a sleepy suburb in
another state. Mom convinces him to take the latter on our behalf. Fast
forward ten years I ask a cute coworker out to see Earnest Scared Stupid. That
escalated to marriage four years later and on to two beautiful kids that are
now almost out on their own.

I sometimes wonder if I should tell them that if some guy didn’t die in a
crash they would never have been born. When they become billionaires that can
be their story.

~~~
Pristina
You can literally tell everybody that they might not exist in a different
timeline. This thought is neither novel nor meaningful.

~~~
agumonkey
It's still very weird to think about how many tiny details will deflect your
life 0 or 180.. who decides which class you'll be in as a kid for instance

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misiti3780
Happy for him in his success, JIRA is still the product i hate using the most
on a day to day basis.

~~~
cocochanel
Same here. Happy for the guy and his billion, but I can't understand why the
product is so successful, despite being painfully slow –at every single page
load it makes me want to cry. Does anyone here actually choose to use it, or
like me, you happen to work in a company that settled on it. Can anyone offer
perspective, am I missing something?

~~~
sien
Have you used HP Quality Center or Rational ClearQuest or some other
'enterprise' bug tracker.

JIRA is much better than they are.

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GuillaumeBrdet
Regardless of our own personal opinions towards Atlassian, it should be more
talked about in the startup ecosystem. Not only for there stock doing well (Up
over 340% since January 2017), for the ownership the founders still have and
much more.

~~~
avinium
This is an intriguing lesson for us all.

Whenever Atlassian is mentioned on HN, at least 75% of the comments are
complaints about the product - it’s crap, it’s slow, buggy, whatever.

But the company behind it has turned into a juggernaut.

Lesson being that \- product isn’t nearly as important as distribution and
sales strategy \- be wary of asking HN for business advice (flashbacks of “No
wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

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voltagex_
>To help do this he is working with the Australian government on how to best
bring in more talent from overseas. He also wants to build a new technology
precinct in Sydney, a hub he hopes will act as "the lighthouse" to attract
people to Australia

There's probably enough talented workers in Australia, just not enough who
want to live and work in Sydney.

~~~
thundergolfer
I've lived in Melbourne and Sydney, and Sydney is a pretty excellent place to
work and live on an Atlassian salary, I'm not sure it's the city where I'd be
focusing improvements.

Sydney compensation could use a bump in compensation to justify moving from
places like Melbourne and Brisbane. In my limited experience they sometimes
don't pay enough to cover the increased cost of living, particularly rent.

Otherwise I'd agree with Scott that Australia needs overseas talent. At Canva,
where I work, the strong majority hired are overseas talent. Australia's
software industry is too small for these companies' appetites, and its
universities aren't producing a large enough supply of talented grads.

~~~
BFLpL0QNek
I’d describe Atlassian’s Sydney pay as fair if you enjoy working there but on
the lower to mid end of the market so you wouldn’t join on a purely financial
decision. They have also stated they’ll never attempt to be one of the big
payers.

Australia’s problem, in general the Australian born devs are very good,
Computer Science must be done right here (i’m not Australian). However the
quantity of good interesting software jobs isn’t great compared to other
countries, when you have easy migration to the US as an AU citizen, and jobs
offering more money and more work opportunities it’s hard to overlook. Maybe
catch 22, for good devs to stay you need good interesting jobs, for jobs you
need devs.

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sys_64738
As I started to read the article I was picturing permutations of the company
name with an additional letter :)

~~~
minikomi
Catlassian was originally planned as a pet goods lifestyle business. A fat
finger when registering the domain name sent them down a different path.

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byoung2
Ah...a missing postal letter, not a missing letter of the alphabet

~~~
cylinder
I read the whole article and until I read your comment, still thought it was a
missing letter of the alphabet in the address of the postal letter that never
got to him. Lol

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adventured
It's impressive that 17 years after the founding of Atlassian and post IPO,
Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar still control a combined 56% of the
company (28% each).

~~~
taneq
That's what happens when you let a company grow organically instead of trying
to bootstrap yourself all the way to global dominance with VC funding.

~~~
quickthrower2
That’s the Australia way.

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megy
It really seems to be a thing to have a story these days, no matter how true
it is.

~~~
bitexploder
We all have stories. I can tell you a dramatic story about micro decisions and
events that led to me founding an infosec consulting firm. We just magnify
these stories in really successful people. That’s the thing. Most billionaires
don’t have stories that are much more interesting than the average persons.
There are a lot of people that risked everything and lost, many of them lost
despite making better decisions than many billionaires. That is just how luck
works.

Most of the interesting stuff about how companies grow come down to a relative
small period where some key decisions get made (in the tech world at least).
Anyhow, this is normal and people love to try and parse the lives of the
wealthy to see if any of it can be applied to their life to capture some of
that success. There are a lot of things to increase your luck potential, but
it still takes grit+luck.

~~~
jlawson
>Most of the interesting stuff about how companies grow come down to a
relative small period where some key decisions get made (in the tech world at
least).

I really don't think so. Case in point - The article describes a 17-year
growth path for Atlassian, including many reversals along the way.

What you're describing is the exception. E.g. Minecraft. Most successful tech
businesses (like all businesses) are built on a combination of luck and
sustained good decision-making and hard work.

~~~
bitexploder
It’s probably a little of column A and a little of column B. A lot of good
small decisions and probably 4-6 major ones, even in a 17year journey. If I
had to guess. Who your business partners are. Major strategy shifts (cloud).
Etc.

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mmjaa
The only way I've been able to stomach having to use an Atlassian product is
through 3rd-party tools that expose it all to a command line interface (jira-
cli, for example).

I think there is $45bn worth of unexploited value to be had in fixing the
problems with Atlassians' UI designs - the productivity to be gained by _not_
using Jira, and instead training ones staff to be better at standard thing -
like, you know, sending emails - seems to me to be a huge opportunity.

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CharlesW
TLDR: His acceptance letter to the Australian Defence Force Academy got lost,
so he went to university instead.

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Invictus0
Seems strange to lionize a guy that blew off his honeymoon to go fix a bug.
Why must we worship at the altar of billionaires?

~~~
netsharc
How do you know it's a bug? The article says "problem". Presumably it was
something huge, I would presume company-threatening.

