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Atlassian Sets Its I.P.O. at $21
- planetjones 11y ago$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.
- whoInvited 11y agoonly 644x earnings...
- hoodoof 11y agoGet all the cash off the table that you can.
- thoman23 11y agoNot 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.
- __derek__ 11y agoThey don't have to be cool: they're enterprise. Jira is established as the de facto standard in Agile development/project management. Managers and above make the decision to purchase, and those with opinions on "cool" tools begrudgingly use the tools handed down all the while complaining about how uncool they are.
- sqldba 11y agoThe tie-in between their products is also their undoing in the Enterprise market. I'm just an onlooker but I've seen Jira (the proper tool for a problem) was universally shunned by management because they specifically didn't want to be tied into the rest of the Atlasssian ecosystem. I realise that it makes no sense, but it's partly because they want diversity rather than being strung over a barrel by one vendor, and partly because they are ordered to use some different components by the higher-up conglomerate managers; which is what Enterprise is all about. I don't know what the integration options were with other systems but management struck it off the list from the get-go regardless. We were already using it internally successfully; but hey no let's try to shoehorn ServiceNow to do the same thing. I'll leave the rest for your imagination. Yes though, it sucks for us on the ground floor. We really don't give a crap WHAT gets used as long as it works, and all the different crappy products with zero integration absolutely doesn't work. Tell that to management though; they don't have to use it.
- chx 11y agoTied? How so? I consult for a large department of a certain Fortune 100 company (think 30k users) and their JIRA is tied to an Enterprise Github instance for example, not Bitbucket. Developers are on a self hosted IRC network (yes, really) as IRC is still unbeatable when you work in a heterogeneous, massively distributed environment.
- sqldba 11y agoBecause Atlasssian offers other products and so the impetus is to get them as well. It's not worth it to pay for Jira because why do that when you can just turn ServiceNow into... a development CMDB time tracking thing with a mere few tens of millions of effort. Look, I didn't say management was smart. That's just the dumb way they look at it.
- mstade 11y agoI know at least three top tier banks that have pretty much this exact setup. Small world, huh?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- semerda 11y agoSo who are these younger developers talking about now?
- saool 11y agoThose will be VC fueled and privately held till they need a sucker to hold the bag.
- girvo 11y agoNothing, 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.
- stephen_g 11y agoWho set up those instances? The only Jira instances I have ever used were set up by developers and were really great, but I hear that it's a fatal mistake to ever let a project manager know there's such thing as the workflow editor.
- amatix 11y agoJIRA without spending the time to correctly set it up to match your workflow/approach/business is a complete waste -- for companies who do invest that effort upfront (and evolve it over time) then it usually works great.
- UK-AL 11y agoI have the opposite experience. The default JIRA Agile experience is great. It become a problem when a PM gets his hands on it, included about 50 steps with manual approvals etc.
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- Stratoscope 11y ago> I hear younger developers talk about Jira like I might talk about Internet Explorer. Gosh, I'm 63, and I talk about JIRA like that!
- seren 11y agoIt is a matter of perspective. My company just deployed Jira & Confluence. Before that we had a poor mediawiki install, and for task management basically nothing (or rather, awkward internal tool compatible with IE6...). It is a blessing. I guess if you have been using (and abusing) Atlassian tools for years, you will experience some tool fatigue, which is natural.
- vecter 11y agoProfit isn't necessarily the most meaningful way to evaluate a company (n.b. Amazon). Usually for growth stage companies, YoY revenue growth is more important. I don't know what Atlassian's revenue numbers actually are, but I'd have to imagine they've been growing significantly in order for them to try to command such a valuation.
- semerda 11y agoProfit is opinion but cash is a fact. They are pushing cash back into the business to create more opportunity.
- yo-code-sucks 11y agoAgreed, also their underlying platforms are shit.
- jonknee 11y agoA lot of IPOs don't have any profits, that's why they are out raising money.
- hbhakhra 11y agoI 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.
- ericd 11y ago13x revenue, not earnings? That's pretty high for a fairly mature company... I guess we'll see what their growth numbers have been.
- seanlinehan 11y agoYou can check out their F1: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000155837015001685/filename1.htm#SELECTEDCONSOLIDATEDFINANCIALDATA_788272 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000155837015... 2013: $148.4M 2014: $215.1M (44% growth) 2015: $319.5M (48% growth)
- ericd 11y agoAh thanks! That is quite strong...
- themartorana 11y agoWe're part of that growth. As much as I tried to avoid JIRA, it's just that good (and, that integrated) and once you're on JIRA, you realize just how well their other products are aligned. It's pretty amazing, and I think one of the few times a tech IPO feels quite worth its valuation.
- jschwartzi 11y agoWe went with JIRA because every other system I've used was super-clunky, Windows-only, or both. We do embedded systems but the last time I needed Windows for anything was about 5 months ago when I needed to email myself a pdf from the QA team's tracker. Everything of consequence we do in Linux.
- tedmiston 11y agoMaybe they can invest some of that spare change into making the Jira Agile backlog automatically refresh when it is changed by other clients.
- caseysoftware 11y agoAccording to the S-1, the founders still own ~75% and the other directors/officers own another 10%. Wow.
- pbreit 11y agoSeems like employees should own a lot more. Too bad for them.
- jlangenauer 11y agoPerhaps, but I know some Atlasssian employees who were there reasonably early, and - let me put it this way - they're not exactly unhappy at the moment.
- modarts 11y agohttp://reactiongifs.me/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/crying-money-woody-harrelson-zombieland.gif http://reactiongifs.me/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/crying-mon...
- illumen 11y agoSeems like Australia should own a lot more. They founded the company there, took advantage of the country, and then made an exit elsewhere.
- morgante 11y agoWhy do you think the Australian government should be entitled to ownership of all startups founded there? By most counts, they just make it difficult and annoying for tech companies. Atlassian has paid millions in taxes, why should they owe more?
- illumen 11y agoThey should pay tax at the rate set by law. Do they have a moral or ethical obligation to support the society that gave them life? Should the Australian government have supported them more than say the coal or car industry? Hell yes. This is a massive blunder on the part of the Australian government. One that has been repeated for decades. Could Australia be in the position to provide as much capital as Atlassian is raising now? Yes! There is a LOT of money flowing around Australia. Just a small percentage of Super (compulsory pension funds) could have been invested. Even R&D tax breaks could have given more. However, VC invested by Australian funds is tiny (less than 1 billion/year). The fact is Atlassian left Australia to avoid paying tax. They have even admitted it many times. The Australian government should have done more to keep them there. Maybe Atlassian leaving will actually do more good in the long term, because more people will see the missed opportunities. (not holding my breath on that one).
- mcintyre1994 11y agoAh 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 :)
- dharma1 11y agohow do stock options work for people who join companies around 1 year or less before they go public?
- nuand 11y agoThe 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.
- voltagex_ 11y agoPity 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...
- tajen 11y agoWith 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?
- coryl 11y agoAren'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.)
- tajen 11y agoIt probably depends on the company: Founders and employees may seek liquidity, for example. According to http://seekingalpha.com/article/3746196-ipo-preview-atlassian-corporation-plc http://seekingalpha.com/article/3746196-ipo-preview-atlassia..., it looks like Atlassian offers 10% in the IPO. But I'm not a financial analyst.
- pkorzeniewski 11y agoI 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.
- adrianN 11y agoHave you tried the competition? They all seem to be pretty bad.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- daveguy 11y agoWhat would make for a good one?
- Rexxar 11y agoI'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.
- mgkimsal 11y agoI'm diving in to a new project right now - third one with Jira/Confluence, and working with a freelance PM on it. The one issue she's got with it is trying to generate "good reports" with it for the 'biz folks' on the project. :) That said, we're still going with it, partially because the other tools we've tried all... don't work together very well. Documenting things in Confluence and tying tickets to those documents directly does wonders for bridging the gap between tech/dev and the other parts of a project that think in English. There are no doubt better 'bug trackers' out there, and there are no doubt better 'document collaboration' tools, and better 'planning' tools, but I've not found any that play nice together. Open to suggestions...
- swingbridge 11y agoJIRA 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)
- codegeek 11y ago"Sharepoint site" I just had a flash of old nightmares that I used to get when working with sharepoint sites. Thx for that :)
- guiomie 11y agoAgree, 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.
- willthames 11y agoI'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)
- nstj 11y agoAs 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.
- ryanackley 11y agoUsers of Atlassian products: Netflix, Facebook, Apple, LinkedIn, etc. Obviously the dregs of corporate society. Source: Atlassian front page http://www.atlassian.com http://www.atlassian.com
- nstj 11y agoApologies - I acknowledged Apple (via Swift OSS) in my original post, will update to reflect the ones you have posted. (Actually I don't think I can as PG's algorithm seems to time lock edits - would happily add those names if I could).
- astral303 11y agoI think you have to consider just how much better Atlassian's products are than the typical large enterprise software. (HP Quality Center anyone?) These large enterprises are waking up to the reality of SaaS and better software. Mature SaaS software with a well-oiled enterprise support machine (Atlassian) is much more comfortable step for a large organization to take than switching to a newer/better, but a lesser known player.
- maxxxxx 11y agoI 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.