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Canva becomes Australia’s only privately backed tech startup to be valued at $1B
- clusmore 9y agoSomebody please correct me, because it sounds like they're saying a $40m investment got them to a $1b valuation, which would mean the investors (Sequoia, Blackbird and Felicis) got 4% between them? Why would they take such little equity?
- adventured 9y agoIf that's all correct, it's because it was what they could get for now. It'd likely be just to wet their beak, get an inside track, form a relationship, and they're looking to get more in future rounds. Sometimes companies that aren't desperate for outside funding will do a slower walk-up on partnerships with VCs, which I think can make a lot of sense if you have the luxury to do it.
- bigiain 9y agoIn the article the cofounder says it was "an offer we couldn't refuse". I guess she meant in a "You'll give us _how_ much for less than 5%??? You're joking? No? DONE!" way, rather than a "Nice business you've got here, it'd be a pity if anything happened to it." or a "We know where your children go to school" kind of way...
- elvinyung 9y agoIs Atlassian not considered Australian? (Well, I guess it's public now.)
- lurr 9y agoMy first thought as well. Are they excluded for going public? Weren't they over a billion well before that? Or did they not take outside money?
- ProAm 9y agoPretty sure they moved years ago because of taxes. [1] [1] http://www.afr.com/leadership/entrepreneur/atlassian-leads-charge-of-startups-abandoning-australia-over-tax-20140107-jyc34 http://www.afr.com/leadership/entrepreneur/atlassian-leads-c...
- glangdale 9y agoThey are UK-headquartered and list on the NASDAQ. Not sure what proportion of employees are Australian and spiritually I would still claim them as Australian. They would also have comfortably been a unicorn-level company before the UK restructure and the listing, with substantial profits.
- chrisco255 9y agoNope, Atlassian's HQ is Sydney. Definitely Australian-based.
- adventured 9y agoAtlassian is legally domiciled in the UK, not Sydney. Their legal appears to mostly be HQ'd in San Francisco per all their legal documents. I understand that doesn't mean they aren't primarily operating out of Sydney, although I don't know how one would say that definitely given the distribution (unless eg that's where all their core management operates?). How many employees do they have in Sydney? Where does the top management primarily operate from?
- ajdlinux 9y agoI'd rely on the fact that the company contact page lists "Sydney (HQ)" as the first office, followed by "San Francisco (HQ)" and then the non-HQ offices, as an assertion that they consider themselves to be an Australian-based company. As for top management, I believe both their co-CEOs are Sydney-based, and Mike Cannon-Brookes is well known for his occasional forays into Australian politics and public affairs...
- bigiain 9y ago> How many employees do they have in Sydney? Based on sightings of dudebros wearing branded shwag in coffee shops and bars around here, I'd say quite a lot...
- siquick 9y ago
- glenngillen 9y agoI’m going to guess that the “privately backed” qualifier either disqualifies them because they’re now public, or because they reached the $1B valuation before they took VC money. Similar story with most other AU companies that have reached that level, local IPO early or reach the valuation without institutional money. The latter also meaning valuation is pure external speculation.
- chrisco255 9y agoAtlassian is certainly an Australian company. HQ is Sydney, both co-founders are Australian, and probably more employees in that office than any other.
- flgb 9y agoAtlassian is definitely Australian. But if we count them, there are a lot more Australian tech businesses worth more than US$1B: Acconex was just bought by Oracle for US$1.2B, and we have tech businesses from the last web boom like Seek.com (~US$5B), or going even further back, businesses like MYOB (~US$1.7B).
- freeelncer 9y agoI wish the day will come where we’ll stop callimg companies “Unicorns” that are “valued” at a billion dollar based on equity negotiations done by investors and founders and instead, call companies unicorns when they “profit” a billion dollars a year. That, my friend, is an achievement worth giving a mythical name.
- supertiger 9y agocraigslist is probably close to qualify in your definition
- lettergram 9y agoAbout $500 million profit, with ~$700 million revenue. Still kind of shy, but that profit is pretty astounding! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist
- maxxxxx 9y agoIf those numbers are correct and the number of employees is really only 50 as on Wikipedia it's time to be really impressed.
- hoodoof 9y agoA thing is worth what someone else will give you for it. You're asking for the core mechanism of wealth creation in technology to be dispelled. If enough people, over a credible amount of time, say that a company is increasing in value, and if they back each such assertion with a small percentage of that stated value, then eventually said company can be taken to the public who hopefully will agree and put up their money to validate the game.
- cornholio 9y ago> A thing is worth what someone else will give you for it. You are correct, however, selling 0.00001% of my company to some schmuck for 100$ does not mean people are willing to give me 1 billion dollars for te rest of it. Many so called "unicorns" seem to be closer to that scenario than to actually having a market valuation of 1 billion dollars.
- i386 9y agoWorked at Canva two years ago - what an incredibly bright team! CEO Melanie Perkins is an inspiring visionary. Congratulations on the new valuation!
- senatorobama 9y agoFOMO for those RSUs? ;)
- dannyw 9y agoSame here! Worked at Canva during 2016. One of the most amazing experiences in my life so far.
- somtum 9y agoAmazing product. Curious on what their stack is like?
- Torn 9y agoDepends on the role; check out the job profiles here https://about.canva.com/careers/sydney/ https://about.canva.com/careers/sydney/
- hit8run 9y agoAfter tax loss of 3.3 million while having a revenue of 23.5 million Australian Dollars and this company gets this crazy high valuation... Puh it worked for Facebook but they were attracting users like crazy. I don’t know much about canva so maybe someone that knows better can explain to me what makes their product so special?
- hoodoof 9y agoThe question is, what would a high quality online design program be worth to a company with a large user base to feed products into? i.e. what is this company worth as an acquisition to Microsoft/Goog etc
- nkkollaw 9y agoIt's basically the most promising competitor to Photoshop for creating graphics. Very cool product.
- pavanlimo 9y agoI just gave it a go and it didn't really look like a Photoshop replacement, more like a really trimmed version of Photoshop. But for the usecases it serves, it's probably enough. Not an expert in this domain but I'm struggling to see its value at $1B. May be the community is high quality and large?
- adventured 9y agoSome of it surely has to do with the hype around Adobe and their switch to recurring revenue, SaaS style products. It has thrown their stock through the roof. Their stock was essentially dead in the water from 2000 to 2012. $30 to $185 since then. Pull back on their chart to the max time frame, and it's hilarious looking in the spike versus the past. They've been given a ~60 PE ratio, for 15%-20% growth and a rather old-fashion boring product. But it's cloud! Recurring revenue! Throw enough of that together with a stock market bubble and you get a 80% jump in the stock in one year. That's the most plausible argument in favor of Canva getting their crazy valuation, it matches the insanity of Adobe's valuation. It's obvious what happens on the back side of that insanity too.
- Jyaif 9y agoSo all it takes for a unicorn to exist is somebody buying a billionth of a company for $1.
- faitswulff 9y agoI use Canva a ton for simple graphic designs. It's great that you can access it wherever there's a browser, use it for (mostly) free, and it's extremely user-friendly. Great product, good to see them doing well!
- nitin_flanker 9y agoThis is what I like most about Canva too. They are always improving their tool with new UI and features without ever forcing me to buy the "Canva for work". They are also great at accepting feedbacks.
- mmjaa 9y agoHow does it compare with h5mag.com, which is what I currently use to do all this .. ?
- quickthrower2 9y ago"Only Tech Unicorn" is questionable. In addition to this and Atlassian, there is also WisetechGlobal https://www.marketindex.com.au/asx/wtc https://www.marketindex.com.au/asx/wtc - market cap $4Bn.
- ajdlinux 9y agoTechnologyOne (ASX:TNE), an enterprise software company focused on government/public sector, has a market cap of AU$1.56bn.
- gexla 9y agoUnicorn is a startup term. Atlassian is TEAM on the NASDAQ.
- esseeayen 9y agoWell technically if it's listed on the ASX then it's gone public, i.e. Exited, so typically not called a unicorn.
- quickthrower2 9y agoFair enough but relatively recently listed. I guess Australia is probably a serial unicorn maker.