Atlassian is an anomaly amongst anomalies, but the timing is pretty normal. I find it strange that there is some kind of apparent value judgement being made on one company vs another.
The average time to an enterprise exit is 9.5 years according to http://pando.com/2013/05/21/memo-to-this-years-yc-class-its-.... So Atlassian is generally in line with the average. Talk to any person or VC that has built a large SAAS company and they will likely say the same thing.
Would every company love to grow >40% annually with spending 0% on sales and 15% on marketing...of course! The reality is that most companies can't do that. You can't look at it and say "I want to be Atlassian not Box." Box has a growth rate of over 100%, so commands a gigantic valuation. If I were starting a business I'd take either unicorn.
They don't really spend 0% on sales. They just don't have a traditional salesforce. They put a huge amount of resources and effort into pre-sales support (which is arguably sales with customer aligned incentives) and customer funnel progression.
It is a small but important distinction, what they don't do is scale sales by throwing salaries + commissions at a highly paid sales force.
The average time to an enterprise exit is 9.5 years according to http://pando.com/2013/05/21/memo-to-this-years-yc-class-its-.... So Atlassian is generally in line with the average. Talk to any person or VC that has built a large SAAS company and they will likely say the same thing.
Would every company love to grow >40% annually with spending 0% on sales and 15% on marketing...of course! The reality is that most companies can't do that. You can't look at it and say "I want to be Atlassian not Box." Box has a growth rate of over 100%, so commands a gigantic valuation. If I were starting a business I'd take either unicorn.