9 ms·

Atlassian Planning U.S. IPO

75 points by sqs 11y ago

ghiculescu 11y ago
Atlassian' founders are constantly in the press talking about the australian startup ecosystem and its flounderings, asking that government do more to help, and so on. I've always wondered why, given their patriotism, they aren't going public on the ASX first. Obviously they'll make a lot more money this way, but going by what they've said in the past, it doesn't seem like that's the biggest priority anymore. (I haven't met the guys and would love to have this problem so take this armchair analysis as it is, but I'm curious if anyone knows more about the why here.)
- trentmb 11y ago
  Maybe to make a point- an Australian company can 'make it' in the US. Something to point to when pressuring the Ausi gov't?
- jpau 11y ago
  You're right - they will probably make more by listing in the USA. Tech valuations on US exchanges are higher than on the ASX - even with recent falls, the NASDAQ is sitting at an average price-to-earnings of 22 vs the ASX200 IT index sitting at about half that. The Atlassian founders are known to be good at putting their money where their mouth is. Perhaps they feel they can make a greater impact with the extra funds than with a single statement.
- corkill 11y ago
  I think you answered your own question that they will make more money this way, which I'm sure all of their investors and employees holding stock will appreciate. I believe they are quoted somewhere as saying the ASX doesn't understand tech stories like Atlassian though can't dig up the quote right now.
- hyperpallium 11y ago
  Most of their customers are in the US.
mrmondo 11y ago
Every time I come across one of their products I am underwhelmed. Jira and Bamboo both feel half a decade behind the game and are each clearly large, fumbling beasts that seem to get in your way more than they do assist you. Their ecosystem is very closed and you can feel the pain of this when you visit an organisation that's drunk their cool aid and is now locked in. I'm making it all sound a bit fire here - which it's not but I really just don't think that they're good, modern products.
- anko 11y ago
  I'd be interested in what products you use? There are so many bug tracking products - even researching them can be hard work.
- Bahamut 11y ago
  I can assure you, worse tools than Jira populate the project management space - Jira is definitely one of the better options in the space sadly.
  - gkop 11y ago
    It's true. It's safe to say people that disparage Jira have never tried Pivotal Tracker, for example.
    - blackaspen 11y ago
      Funny -- I find Pivotal to be hands down the best tracking tool I've ever used. You have to conform to it a little more than Jira can conform to you though, but it's not bloated.
      - walterbell 11y ago
        The challenge for enterprises is that each one has slightly different needs, and enterprises are rarely able to conform to their tools.
Randgalt 11y ago
Maybe they'll finally fix Jira's email spamming: https://rule1.quora.com/Does-Atlassian-Give-an-F https://rule1.quora.com/Does-Atlassian-Give-an-F
- yeukhon 11y ago
  You can disable some of the email spams in JIRA. For example you can disable notify anybody when a ticket is created in your Kibana board. But I find those spams really useful regardless. I read all of JIRA mentions, tickets just created in my queue, and everything coming from JIRA so I know what's going on. Well, I am in a DevOps role so maybe that's a whole different experience.
aaronbrethorst 11y ago
Saying that 'Jira is better than lots of other tools out there' is sort of like saying that breaking your finger is better than breaking your femur. Although technically true, that's not to say that breaking your finger or using Jira is enjoyable.[1] [1] n.b. I have never broken either my finger or my femur, but I have used Jira[2] quite a bit over a period of 8 years. [2] I am also amused by the origin of the name: "Although normally styled JIRA, the product name is not an acronym, but a truncation of Gojira, the Japanese name for Godzilla,[6] itself a reference to JIRA's main competitor, Bugzilla." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIRA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIRA
cpayne 11y ago
I'd love to see a postmortem on Atlassian's rise to fame where other tools haven't succeeded. I remember reading a brief comment by Joel Spolsky saying he wasn't too worried about "those blokes from Australia". At lot more people I work with know more about Jira than Fogbugz. IMO Atlassian do OK tools. But nothing to justify the hype they are always receiving. What am I missing - Price? Features? Implementation pain (or lack thereof)?
- walterbell 11y ago
  JIRA offered a good compromise between closed and open source: full source code was available, which enabled local custom modifications to prove out the viability of enhancement requests. Atlassian also provides free JIRA to open-source projects, e.g. keep code on Github, move issue tracking to cloud-hosted JIRA for workflow not supported by Github issues. It is encouraging to see a bootstrapped company reach IPO, even if it took them a decade to reach their $3B valuation compared to Github's attainment of a $2B valuation in a much shorter time. Atlassian's forward-thinking private investors provided liquidity to employees, which supported their long road to the public market. From a 2014 interview, http://fortune.com/2014/04/10/atlassian-the-3-3-billion-software-company-youve-never-heard-of/ http://fortune.com/2014/04/10/atlassian-the-3-3-billion-soft... "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..'" From a 2011 review of Atlassian culture and self-service sales, http://www.managementexchange.com/story/its-culture-stupid-how-permeating-information-culture-leads-corporate-success http://www.managementexchange.com/story/its-culture-stupid-h..., with a talk about internal systems: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mALn4nyi7Qs https://youtube.com/watch?v=mALn4nyi7Qs "Atlassian CEOs have instilled an information culture throughout the company with the core value of "Open Company, No Bullshit". The result is a bottom-up democracy of information where information sharing is the norm and information hoarding is a foreign concept ... Product pricing is public, including discount policies. Prospective customers can download software and try it free for 30 days. All documentation is public and available for anyone to access. Bug reports and feature requests are public, allowing people to 'vote' on their preferred features."
dmourati 11y ago
Jira is okay. Confluence is okay. I find the installation and management of each okay. We don't use Hip Chat but I imagine with all the focus on Slack lately, chat is not a big portion of Atlassian's growth story. What is strange to me is how on-premise focused their business is. This is a market at or beyond its peak. Perhaps that is the reason for the IPO at this point?
- walterbell 11y ago
  Atlassian started on-premise and later moved to cloud. Github started with cloud and later moved to on-premise. It would be interesting to compare the current revenue split/growth at the two companies.
wluu 11y ago
One of the co-founders (Mike Cannon-Brookes) did an AMA on reddit a few days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3lrvpv/iama_mike_cannonbrookes_cofounder_of_atlassian_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3lrvpv/iama_mike_cann... Some quotes: Q: "What was the scariest, most panic-inducing thing to happen to/at Atlassian?" A: "The most topical fear we have at the moment (and one of the reasons you see us spending so much time on it right now) is that Atlassian is growing faster than the Sydney (and Australian) technology industry. That cannot be good for our long term domicile here - we must continue to diversify product + engineering overseas, or risk running aground." Q: "...before Atlassian for saving bookmarks which you sold pretty early. What did you learn from that business that helped the most with Atlassian?" A: "Overall? It was a fantastic lesson. Failure (or forced sale type success in a smart decision before we hit the wall) taught us many things. How to get customers. How to build software. How to prioritise our day. How to get a business name. A domain name. How to run books. Get investors on board. How hard it is to make $1. Harder to make $10 still etc." And the other co-founder (Scott Farquhar) did an interview on ABC's lateline show earlier in the week: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2015/s4317805.htm http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2015/s4317805.htm
semerda 11y ago
Awesome news! When I 1st arrived in USA (from Australia back in 2009) I never knew of Atlassian when their tools were brought on-premise at Coupons.com. Boy was I proud to hear it's an Aussie product. Yap, it was expensive. As time went on and I moved on to do my own gig. I wanted to go cheap so I explored many alternative products to replace Jira/Agile, Bitbucket, Confluence, Bamboo etc.. what I ended up with is different tools with different interfaces sticky taped together working just OK. This got frustrating and I decided to dump them all and move to Atlassian OnDemand. The overhead of managing & educating staff on all these tools was just not worth the pennies saved. This is the power in Atlassian products, their tight integration and consistency. Yeah there are quirks here and there but those always get resolved and features added over time. Anyways I love Atlassian products and I hope their IPO is a success! Long journey to get this far but well worth it. Solid company!
nevi-me 11y ago
If I hadn't decided to move to JIRA I'd still be saying Atlassian sucks because of the lackluster Bitbucket issue system. It was my biggest complaint because I was being cheap and not wanting to spend the amount of money I spend on a day's lunch to get a better tool. JIRA does feel clunky, but after spending the time configuring it, I find it helps me more than getting in the way. I've tried a number of other tools, especially for Agile development, and I ended up feeling like our team would need multiple told to get things done. By trying JIRA out on work projects and personal ones, I'm now a bit more productive, and my team is getting there too. The price felt a bit 'steep' after the 10 users, but I've convinced my company that the price per user is nothing as it's how much we bill our clients for a few minutes if our time. The listing makes sense, they've been profitable for a long time, and should have a possibly sustainable share considering EPS and other requirements of shareholders.
- mapunk 11y ago
  > If I hadn't decided to move to JIRA I'd still be saying Atlassian sucks because of the lackluster Bitbucket issue system. You'd say an entire company sucks because one feature of one of their products is underwhelming to you?
siliconc0w 11y ago
Honestly I like trello the best for day to day issue tracking. It gets clunky if you try to do too much at once but that is intentional. JIRA can be okay but there are a lot of caveats: * well customized to fit the business (i.e don't let those 'non-practicing-entities' with nothing else to do go crazy creating and reworking convoluted workflows) * small number of users (or performance sucks) * well organized (you tend to get 'dumping grounds' of bugs and tech debt that just accumulates). I like trello's concept of card 'decay'. * deep pockets (you gotta 'buy in' to the ecosystem and not get stingy about who gets access) * ignore features - don't try to shoehorn, use what you need and forget the rest
snurk 11y ago
How does this company trudge on despite their products sucking so badly?
condescendence 11y ago
For those looking to get past the paywall very quickly and easily, quick gif tutorial. http://gfycat.com/FarflungUnderstatedIcelandgull http://gfycat.com/FarflungUnderstatedIcelandgull Sorry about url, gfycat so weird with their url generation
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
mbubb 11y ago
I recently migrated jira/ Confluence / Stash / Hipchat from the cloud versions to self hosted for a company going through the IPO process. So we went from the Crowd based setup to LDAP / postgresql backed versions of the products. The big surprise for me is how divergent the products are. User setup and the cross application links are so different. The underlying postgres schemas are different. So the migrations were fundimentally different. (In hipchat's case it is understandable as the self hosted version of the softwre was new and somewhat beta) It reminded me of how back in the 90s I heard that Microsoft kept the developers of different products in the Office suite apart. Thus when you go to link the applications together you get weird redundancies and it all doesnt work as it should. Partly that is because the licensing is so separate. Atlassian support was pretty good in that they worked with us on it and also they provided unofficial scripts to help withthe process. They also recommended using Crowd to manage users which to my mind only added a layer of complexity - you should be able to add users directly from LDAP. I ended up enjoying the migration project because I got to work with postgres which is great software. Atlassian is bloated and in my opinion they havent worked on cross application connectivity enough. It should be seamless. My company (at the time) ended up hiring a fulltime person to manage the complexity (ie an Atlassian admin) plus a few consultants to get the workflow stuff down. It is good when you have jira and confluence running well - but it takes a lot of time and money to get to that point.
- johnhkg 11y ago
  > My company (at the time) ended up hiring a fulltime person to manage the complexity (ie an Atlassian admin) plus a few consultants to get the workflow stuff down Offtopic - I have recently been trying to break into full-time consulting / contracting. May I know how you went about hiring the consultants for the migration ?
AnthonBerg 11y ago
They should fix their incredibly slow OnDemand hosting - unusable! - painfully un-automatable upgrades and operations, and add realtime multiuser editing.

75 points by sqs 11y ago

Atlassian' founders are constantly in the press talking about the australian startup ecosystem and its flounderings, asking that government do more to help, and so on. I've always wondered why, given their patriotism, they aren't going public on the ASX first. Obviously they'll make a lot more money this way, but going by what they've said in the past, it doesn't seem like that's the biggest priority anymore. (I haven't met the guys and would love to have this problem so take this armchair analysis as it is, but I'm curious if anyone knows more about the why here.)

trentmb 11y ago
Maybe to make a point- an Australian company can 'make it' in the US. Something to point to when pressuring the Ausi gov't?
jpau 11y ago
You're right - they will probably make more by listing in the USA. Tech valuations on US exchanges are higher than on the ASX - even with recent falls, the NASDAQ is sitting at an average price-to-earnings of 22 vs the ASX200 IT index sitting at about half that. The Atlassian founders are known to be good at putting their money where their mouth is. Perhaps they feel they can make a greater impact with the extra funds than with a single statement.
corkill 11y ago
I think you answered your own question that they will make more money this way, which I'm sure all of their investors and employees holding stock will appreciate. I believe they are quoted somewhere as saying the ASX doesn't understand tech stories like Atlassian though can't dig up the quote right now.
hyperpallium 11y ago
Most of their customers are in the US.

mrmondo 11y ago

Every time I come across one of their products I am underwhelmed. Jira and Bamboo both feel half a decade behind the game and are each clearly large, fumbling beasts that seem to get in your way more than they do assist you. Their ecosystem is very closed and you can feel the pain of this when you visit an organisation that's drunk their cool aid and is now locked in. I'm making it all sound a bit fire here - which it's not but I really just don't think that they're good, modern products.

anko 11y ago
I'd be interested in what products you use? There are so many bug tracking products - even researching them can be hard work.
Bahamut 11y ago
I can assure you, worse tools than Jira populate the project management space - Jira is definitely one of the better options in the space sadly.
- gkop 11y ago
  It's true. It's safe to say people that disparage Jira have never tried Pivotal Tracker, for example.
  - blackaspen 11y ago
    Funny -- I find Pivotal to be hands down the best tracking tool I've ever used. You have to conform to it a little more than Jira can conform to you though, but it's not bloated.
    - walterbell 11y ago
      The challenge for enterprises is that each one has slightly different needs, and enterprises are rarely able to conform to their tools.

Randgalt 11y ago

Maybe they'll finally fix Jira's email spamming: https://rule1.quora.com/Does-Atlassian-Give-an-F https://rule1.quora.com/Does-Atlassian-Give-an-F

yeukhon 11y ago
You can disable some of the email spams in JIRA. For example you can disable notify anybody when a ticket is created in your Kibana board. But I find those spams really useful regardless. I read all of JIRA mentions, tickets just created in my queue, and everything coming from JIRA so I know what's going on. Well, I am in a DevOps role so maybe that's a whole different experience.

aaronbrethorst 11y ago

Saying that 'Jira is better than lots of other tools out there' is sort of like saying that breaking your finger is better than breaking your femur. Although technically true, that's not to say that breaking your finger or using Jira is enjoyable.[1] [1] n.b. I have never broken either my finger or my femur, but I have used Jira[2] quite a bit over a period of 8 years. [2] I am also amused by the origin of the name: "Although normally styled JIRA, the product name is not an acronym, but a truncation of Gojira, the Japanese name for Godzilla,[6] itself a reference to JIRA's main competitor, Bugzilla." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIRA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIRA

cpayne 11y ago

I'd love to see a postmortem on Atlassian's rise to fame where other tools haven't succeeded. I remember reading a brief comment by Joel Spolsky saying he wasn't too worried about "those blokes from Australia". At lot more people I work with know more about Jira than Fogbugz. IMO Atlassian do OK tools. But nothing to justify the hype they are always receiving. What am I missing - Price? Features? Implementation pain (or lack thereof)?

walterbell 11y ago
JIRA offered a good compromise between closed and open source: full source code was available, which enabled local custom modifications to prove out the viability of enhancement requests. Atlassian also provides free JIRA to open-source projects, e.g. keep code on Github, move issue tracking to cloud-hosted JIRA for workflow not supported by Github issues. It is encouraging to see a bootstrapped company reach IPO, even if it took them a decade to reach their $3B valuation compared to Github's attainment of a $2B valuation in a much shorter time. Atlassian's forward-thinking private investors provided liquidity to employees, which supported their long road to the public market. From a 2014 interview, http://fortune.com/2014/04/10/atlassian-the-3-3-billion-software-company-youve-never-heard-of/ http://fortune.com/2014/04/10/atlassian-the-3-3-billion-soft... "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..'" From a 2011 review of Atlassian culture and self-service sales, http://www.managementexchange.com/story/its-culture-stupid-how-permeating-information-culture-leads-corporate-success http://www.managementexchange.com/story/its-culture-stupid-h..., with a talk about internal systems: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mALn4nyi7Qs https://youtube.com/watch?v=mALn4nyi7Qs "Atlassian CEOs have instilled an information culture throughout the company with the core value of "Open Company, No Bullshit". The result is a bottom-up democracy of information where information sharing is the norm and information hoarding is a foreign concept ... Product pricing is public, including discount policies. Prospective customers can download software and try it free for 30 days. All documentation is public and available for anyone to access. Bug reports and feature requests are public, allowing people to 'vote' on their preferred features."

dmourati 11y ago

Jira is okay. Confluence is okay. I find the installation and management of each okay. We don't use Hip Chat but I imagine with all the focus on Slack lately, chat is not a big portion of Atlassian's growth story. What is strange to me is how on-premise focused their business is. This is a market at or beyond its peak. Perhaps that is the reason for the IPO at this point?

walterbell 11y ago
Atlassian started on-premise and later moved to cloud. Github started with cloud and later moved to on-premise. It would be interesting to compare the current revenue split/growth at the two companies.

wluu 11y ago

One of the co-founders (Mike Cannon-Brookes) did an AMA on reddit a few days ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3lrvpv/iama_mike_cannonbrookes_cofounder_of_atlassian_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3lrvpv/iama_mike_cann... Some quotes: Q: "What was the scariest, most panic-inducing thing to happen to/at Atlassian?" A: "The most topical fear we have at the moment (and one of the reasons you see us spending so much time on it right now) is that Atlassian is growing faster than the Sydney (and Australian) technology industry. That cannot be good for our long term domicile here - we must continue to diversify product + engineering overseas, or risk running aground." Q: "...before Atlassian for saving bookmarks which you sold pretty early. What did you learn from that business that helped the most with Atlassian?" A: "Overall? It was a fantastic lesson. Failure (or forced sale type success in a smart decision before we hit the wall) taught us many things. How to get customers. How to build software. How to prioritise our day. How to get a business name. A domain name. How to run books. Get investors on board. How hard it is to make $1. Harder to make $10 still etc." And the other co-founder (Scott Farquhar) did an interview on ABC's lateline show earlier in the week: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2015/s4317805.htm http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2015/s4317805.htm

semerda 11y ago

Awesome news! When I 1st arrived in USA (from Australia back in 2009) I never knew of Atlassian when their tools were brought on-premise at Coupons.com. Boy was I proud to hear it's an Aussie product. Yap, it was expensive. As time went on and I moved on to do my own gig. I wanted to go cheap so I explored many alternative products to replace Jira/Agile, Bitbucket, Confluence, Bamboo etc.. what I ended up with is different tools with different interfaces sticky taped together working just OK. This got frustrating and I decided to dump them all and move to Atlassian OnDemand. The overhead of managing & educating staff on all these tools was just not worth the pennies saved. This is the power in Atlassian products, their tight integration and consistency. Yeah there are quirks here and there but those always get resolved and features added over time. Anyways I love Atlassian products and I hope their IPO is a success! Long journey to get this far but well worth it. Solid company!

nevi-me 11y ago

If I hadn't decided to move to JIRA I'd still be saying Atlassian sucks because of the lackluster Bitbucket issue system. It was my biggest complaint because I was being cheap and not wanting to spend the amount of money I spend on a day's lunch to get a better tool. JIRA does feel clunky, but after spending the time configuring it, I find it helps me more than getting in the way. I've tried a number of other tools, especially for Agile development, and I ended up feeling like our team would need multiple told to get things done. By trying JIRA out on work projects and personal ones, I'm now a bit more productive, and my team is getting there too. The price felt a bit 'steep' after the 10 users, but I've convinced my company that the price per user is nothing as it's how much we bill our clients for a few minutes if our time. The listing makes sense, they've been profitable for a long time, and should have a possibly sustainable share considering EPS and other requirements of shareholders.

mapunk 11y ago
> If I hadn't decided to move to JIRA I'd still be saying Atlassian sucks because of the lackluster Bitbucket issue system. You'd say an entire company sucks because one feature of one of their products is underwhelming to you?

siliconc0w 11y ago

Honestly I like trello the best for day to day issue tracking. It gets clunky if you try to do too much at once but that is intentional. JIRA can be okay but there are a lot of caveats: * well customized to fit the business (i.e don't let those 'non-practicing-entities' with nothing else to do go crazy creating and reworking convoluted workflows) * small number of users (or performance sucks) * well organized (you tend to get 'dumping grounds' of bugs and tech debt that just accumulates). I like trello's concept of card 'decay'. * deep pockets (you gotta 'buy in' to the ecosystem and not get stingy about who gets access) * ignore features - don't try to shoehorn, use what you need and forget the rest

snurk 11y ago

How does this company trudge on despite their products sucking so badly?

condescendence 11y ago

For those looking to get past the paywall very quickly and easily, quick gif tutorial. http://gfycat.com/FarflungUnderstatedIcelandgull http://gfycat.com/FarflungUnderstatedIcelandgull Sorry about url, gfycat so weird with their url generation

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

mbubb 11y ago

I recently migrated jira/ Confluence / Stash / Hipchat from the cloud versions to self hosted for a company going through the IPO process. So we went from the Crowd based setup to LDAP / postgresql backed versions of the products. The big surprise for me is how divergent the products are. User setup and the cross application links are so different. The underlying postgres schemas are different. So the migrations were fundimentally different. (In hipchat's case it is understandable as the self hosted version of the softwre was new and somewhat beta) It reminded me of how back in the 90s I heard that Microsoft kept the developers of different products in the Office suite apart. Thus when you go to link the applications together you get weird redundancies and it all doesnt work as it should. Partly that is because the licensing is so separate. Atlassian support was pretty good in that they worked with us on it and also they provided unofficial scripts to help withthe process. They also recommended using Crowd to manage users which to my mind only added a layer of complexity - you should be able to add users directly from LDAP. I ended up enjoying the migration project because I got to work with postgres which is great software. Atlassian is bloated and in my opinion they havent worked on cross application connectivity enough. It should be seamless. My company (at the time) ended up hiring a fulltime person to manage the complexity (ie an Atlassian admin) plus a few consultants to get the workflow stuff down. It is good when you have jira and confluence running well - but it takes a lot of time and money to get to that point.

johnhkg 11y ago
> My company (at the time) ended up hiring a fulltime person to manage the complexity (ie an Atlassian admin) plus a few consultants to get the workflow stuff down Offtopic - I have recently been trying to break into full-time consulting / contracting. May I know how you went about hiring the consultants for the migration ?

AnthonBerg 11y ago

They should fix their incredibly slow OnDemand hosting - unusable! - painfully un-automatable upgrades and operations, and add realtime multiuser editing.