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Atlassian, AU company raises US60M, unheard of for Australian company
- wallflower 16y agoTitle is incorrect. My large company has been using Atlassian software for years (Confluence, Jira). They are not a startup anymore.
- zzygan 16y agoTrue, they're not a startup anymore really, I've updated the title a bit. The story does talk about the founding of the company though
- obiefernandez 16y agoHas the usability of Confluence and Jira improved over the years? Those were key products in use at ThoughtWorks when I was there about 4-6 years ago. I can tell you that most people hated working with them.
- goodside 16y agoA few months ago, I wanted to insert a double backslash into a Confluence wiki page. This isn't as odd as it sounds; Windows network file paths begin with \\Foo\. Since backslashes are of course an escape char, you usually have to use \\\\ to get \\ to output. But, in Confluence, this outputs two newlines. Yes, double-backslash is the symbol for a newline. Counter-intuitive, yes, but no worse than that so long as there's another symbol you can use for when you do need a double-backslash. But, the thing is, there isn't. When Confluence was first designed, they used up their only escape char with their nonstandard newline symbol. This is, their support staff informed me, a deep-rooted and unchangeable aspect of how Confluence works. It's not a bug, because it will never be changed. This should give you the gist of what Atlassian is like.
- i386 16y agoSorry you had a problem with Confluence. I can tell you that there is a project running right now to make the editor a lot nicer to work with. Not sure on the delivery schedule (I work on Bamboo so its not my product) but I believe it is on its way.
- brown9-2 16y agoIt might not help now, but I think you could have wrapped \\Foo\ with {noformat}\\Foo\{noformat}
- goodside 16y agoThis does not work. Nothing obvious will. This is an acknowledged issue that they are opting never to resolve. Here's a relevant issue on their bug tracker that has been open for four years: http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-6405 http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-6405 It wouldn't be nearly as infuriating if it weren't caused by such a terrible design decision (using doubled backslashes for line breaks when the backslash is your only escape char) in the first place.
- daredevildave 16y agoThey must have fixed something, because in our Confluence wiki: \\ -> new line \\\\ -> \\\\ \\Foo -> Foo \\Foo\Bar -> \\Foo\Bar Somewhat errant result for \\Foo, but the other ones seem to work.
- goodside 16y agoThe \\Foo\ example I gave was poorly chosen, because they put in a kluge fix so that anything that resembles a Windows file path will pass through unparsed. You cannot use \\ in any other circumstance, which is why \\Foo failed.
- wallflower 16y agoFor the amount of money it costs, Confluence's search is atrocious. Finding a document on Confluence can be an exercise in patience.
- squidsoup 16y agoConfluence is actually very reasonably priced compared to competing software like Jive SBS, Socialtext etc.
- nl 16y agoEver tried Sharepoint search? I actually wrote a Sharepoint spider to find a single document because of the stupidity of the default Sharepoint search (old version, but the biggest problem was that it relied on MS Word document metadata instead of document text)
- modoc 16y agoPersonally I love Confluence and Jira. I've brought them in to multiple companies replacing things like Wiki products, Bugzilla, Mantis, Trac, SharePoint, etc... and it's always been a step up. Are they perfect? No. But so far they're the best apps in the space I've ever used.
- gojomo 16y agoThey have a significant SF office, as well, by my understanding.
- daveoflynn 16y agoYup. 60-odd folks there, though the majority of the engineering crew are still in Sydney.
- dmharrison 16y agoGood to see the Australian tech sector has some life. The thing I found most interesting was that they bootstrapped off their credit card.
- larrywright 16y agoThis seems odd to me. I've looked at their products in the past, and they certainly aren't giving them away for free. I can't imagine they're not profitable, so what would they need this kind of money for?
- tgdavies 16y agoAccel's business expertise is as important as (perhaps more important than) the money: "Accel has a long track record of helping companies break out" -- http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/2010/07/atlassian_adventure.html http://blogs.atlassian.com/news/2010/07/atlassian_adventure....
- pufuwozu 16y agoMainly expansion. It looks like Atlassian is planning to use the money on getting more into Europe and Asia; getting some more acquisitions and giving some liquidity to employees.
- i386 16y agoAs an employee its very exciting. Welcome to the team Accel!
- pufuwozu 16y agoI'll be starting as a Graduate Developer (in Sydney) next year. It should be fun be part of Atlassian and watch it expand.
- i386 16y agoWelcome aboard - looking forward to having you here. Any idea what team Talent have placed you in?
- pufuwozu 16y agoDon't know yet - there's still about 7 months to go so it's not a big rush. You'd know more than me - but judging from the direction of the Summit announcements I'm guessing it'll be a Dev Tools team.
- jms 16y agoApologies for the threadjack, but I'm moving to Sydney soon and am looking for work. I saw Atlassian and was very tempted as it looks like an awesome culture, but the there aren't any jobs that are really a great fit for me. The tech and entrepreneurial scene looks pretty good in Sydney with barcamps and hacker spaces, and what seems like plenty of tech jobs. Would anyone be kind enough to get in touch (email in my profile) to help me identify the other good companies and resources?
- thesethings 16y agoI'm pretty ignorant about financing. I have a question for finance folks: This company is about 8 years old, profitable since day one, and made 58 million last year in revenue. I never hear about companies getting such a cash injection at this stage in their lifespan. Perhaps I'm just primed for "things are different now" stories after reading Fred Wilson's recent post on the topic ( http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/07/some-thoughts-on-the-seed-fund-phenomenon.html http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/07/some-thoughts-on-the-seed-fu... tl;dr : "While many businesses require a lot less capital to start, they don't require less capital to grow."). But even by a new We Need to Grow yardstick, it seems Atlassian is mature. What do you folks think?
- ant5 16y agoThis reminds me of Jive Software. They were in a very similar position when they took money, in the same market, at a very similar level of maturity, and one of the prime competitors to Atlassian. I can't speak to the financial implications for their company, but as a customer, the move was terrible. Their prices got jacked way up, they dropped all their offerings in favor of what they saw as the product likely to provide the highest return, invested a ton of that money in sales and marketing, and their service and quality plummeted. They switched to a subscription software licensing model, stopped listing prices on their website, added a "Solutions" tab next to "Products", etc. I never understood why they took the money, but I understood why those changes came with the money. As a customer, I hope Atlassian doesn't go down the same road, but given the amount of money and the actual scope of the products they work on, I can't help think that it's an inescapable path.
- scottfarkas 16y agoAs the founder of the company, I'd like to say that we don't plan on any changes to the business model or pricing. We've grown Atlassian 3x over the last 3 years, all by following our current model of reasonable, transparent pricing, and selling in volume to thousands of customers around the globe. There are things we want to improve of course (around our products - we're never done with improving them), but we don't plan to change our model. We spoke at great length with Accel Partner about this. They like us for what we are, not what we could be if we changed.
- mkramlich 16y agowell, they have a real product and real paying customers. that goes a long way I hear.
- pchristensen 16y agoThis is what Joel Spolsky was worried about a while back. http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-slow-death.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-...
- niels 16y agoGood catch.
- wolfhumble 16y agoIn the comment section to the inc article I found this blog post which I thought was interesting: http://blog.global-roam.com/index.php/2009/11/joel-spolskys-focus-is-not-on-the-customer/ http://blog.global-roam.com/index.php/2009/11/joel-spolskys-... Some points I reflect on after reading both articles are: - Should the real needs of my customers be met, or the needs I think they have? That is, where is my focus: On the customer or on the product? (ref. blog post) - Can I allow myself to think that my competitor is selling junk, as mentioned in: "So that's the development team's mission for 2010: to eliminate any possible reason that customers might buy our competitors' junk, . . . ." (ref. inc post) - Should I build the perfect product and use a salesforce to push it on customers that does not happen to know that we have the best product (ref. inc article), OR should I make sure that we all the time make sure that we build what the customer needs and wants (ref. blog post)? PS: I know nothing or very little about the products mentioned in these posts, some my reflection was more based on the chosen strategies rather then the given people, companies and products mentioned.
- bl4k 16y agoI had to wonder. We do have a large competitor in our market that appears to be growing a lot faster than we are. The company is closing big deals with big, enterprise customers. And the wheels are falling off the donkey cart over there as the company stretches to fulfill its obligations. Meanwhile, our product is miles better, and we're a well-run company, but it doesn't seem to matter. Why? For those of you who might have missed the reference, Spolsky is referring to Atlassian here, even though he doesn't mention them directly by name (not sure why he didn't - perhaps he was still in the denial phase)
- Smerity 16y agoI'm glad to hear they're continuing to do so well. Atlassian is one of the great Australian IT success stories - I really hope the government and people see them as a shining example of IT in Australia and why the industry should be further encouraged. They're also quite generous to a number of causes. They sponsor the Sydney University IT Society and NCSS (which is a summer program in computing for talented high school students) and commonly come and give talks to the local universities on a wide range of topics (technical and entrepreneurial). They also provide free software for open source projects and host the local Java User Groups. Overall I really do have a fond spot for them, even if they work in Java ;)