Atlassian files for IPO
sec.gov
sec.gov
Slack and Github investors will be watching this closely! Will be interesting to see what the market thinks about a profitable company going public.
13 years from starting to going public, so those of you who join a startup going on its 4th year, something to keep in mind. You could have joined in year 5 and had your shares vest by year 9 and then be waiting for an additional 4 years for your liquidity event!
> https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000104746915...
Kindof weird that their CFO resigned in October, just before they went public. That's probably something I'd want to know about in more depth if I was going to invest.
I wonder if they delayed the IPO so this could happen before they filled. Seeing as they brought him in to lead them through the IPO process, this seems a bit of a weird time to leave, this is probably the busiest time for a CFO.
> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-11/atlassian-...
"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..'"
" In October 2015, our former Chief Financial Officer, Erik Bardman, resigned from the company to focus on matters related to a past employer, including an investigation of certain accounting practices entirely with respect to such past employment."
https://management-change.com/atlassian-cfo-erik-bardman-ous...
Atlassian started in Australia, a country where technology is generally considered a scam to separate idiots from their wallets. This significantly slowed down growth, and the founders have said they wished the company had left Australia sooner.
Edit: this went from +2 to -2 very quickly. For anyone unfamiliar with Australian technology industry, here's a reference for Atlassian CEO comments: http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/557248/atlassian-ceo...
The Australian government also taxes employee options in such a way to make them non-viable: http://www.techworld.com.au/article/535906/what_atlassian_mo...
My own experience working in Australia (as an Australian) in innovative technology was extreme wariness of tech: it's an expense, not an investment. Local companies were cynical of technologies, even mainstream technologies in the US and UK, until there was at least one other Australian company using them.
The best option for a rising tech company in Australia remains, unfortunately, to purchase outright a flailing listed mining company and invert, a la 1999. This is where the "scammy" feel of listed tech companies comes from.
sorry, can you explain this further? i don't know much about australia but this seems strange for a 'western' country, especially one in the british commonwealth.
Australia's wealth is from its natural resources. Originally farming, then gold, coal, oil, and uranium. Britain has some natural resources in the North sea, but London has been a centre of intellectual wealth for hundreds of years: before there were startups, there were the Rothschild's, banks, and every other kind of trader. Man Group started the first hedge fund in the world in London 200 years ago based on storms affecting the sugercane crop for their Royal Navy rum contract. Australia is still at the selling sugarcane stage.
So while the UK is a little more cynical than the US, it still appreciates the value can be created intellectually because it has that history. Australia doesn't, because money is made by digging things up and selling them. I met and worked with some incredibly talented technical people in Oz - Damien from BSD/ipfw, Skud from Perl, lots of SA folk from Usenix - but the general business community is very wary of tech.
There are key difference b/w the US, UK and Aus (native speaker here) with respect to business. I perceive the US as risk-takers with access to deregulated finance. The UK is risk-adverse with sophisticated finance. In Aus we have a combination of risk aversion and what I'll term, "dumb-money".
Perhaps ironically, when I was in Australia a few weeks back, every merchant assumed my credit card supported NFC.
They got a kick out of my explanation that American credit cards just finally caught up with Smart Chips, and now Australia has moved on.
We're constantly blocked from access to great online content and we can't order products from the US without great expense. But the moment I step foot on US soil and try to buy something, I feel like I'm in the credit card dark ages.
It's funny, we have all these NFC credit card terminals, but Apple Pay still hasn't launched here.
I mean, "it can do the same thing your free debit card could two years ago" is kind of a weak marketing pitch, so maybe that's why they're not prioritizing it...
No PIN, tap and go, no batteries.
With little user benefit, I'm assuming banks are reluctant to sign on to give apple a cut.
My old Amex Blue supported NFC 4-5 years ago, which was super rad. None of my current cards, however do.
I want to buy from www.lastseason.co.nz without getting stung.
Edit: BankWest in Australia has a no-conversion-fee Mastercard.
I used Tranferz a few times when I moved from Aus to the US. Free for over $5000 last time I checked.
BTW, any issues or threats by your US bank to close your account because your are living abroad? It's going around.
[1] Well, the tech will be supported. Whether the business will accept amex or not is another story...
If you are an iPhone user, and many folks happen to own iphones, that would be the reason.
The changes to LAFHA policy would have affected me very dramatically had my employer not given me a large raise to cover the difference. It completely boggles my mind that while I was paying the same tax as an Australian citizen, I had to pay out-of-pocket for my daughter's education (this was a NSW thing but is slowly spreading to other states). The mediocre local public school was $5k per child, so I spent $10k instead and sent her to a great private school.
It is clear to me that the Australian government is only interested in soaking foreign workers for as much as they could get away with. They clearly are not interested in anything other than digging stuff up out of the ground and selling it.
- Flat rental applications contain 2 years of tax return forms, 3 months of salary proof, for yourself and for a third person (or bank) who will guarantee you.
- As a self employed there are 18 different organizations to whom I must lodge contributions: VAT, retirement, retirement 2, training, universal income, disability, elderness 1, elderness 2, elderness 3, illness, health insurance, health insurance 2, workplace safety, help for housing, help for various institutions who went bankrupt, Commerce chamber, CSG, corporate tax, land tax. Employed people pay the same, plus unemployment, the employer handles half the paperwork but employees who don't cross-check are penalized.
- Each of them have an application form and half of them are monthly. Most of them apply on weird rules ("7.23% on 98.5% of revenue within limit of 1200 PASS if the revenue is ... and 1400 PASS if ..."). Some of them are taken, but don't give you benefits because you don't fit the rules (as you talked about pumping money from workers). Some are taken and refunded later.
- There are lunch tickets and holiday grants, for about 200€ per month, your employer must fund the employee bureau for this, but you need to apply to get them granted. Most usually you'll have to lodge an application for that, with your tax return and salary sheet, and you'll have fewer benefits if you don't have children. For example you'll be offered a rebate on a house rental for 5 people, which exactly fits the family of the employee managing the appcations.
- If you were a foreigner, you would also have to file for a visa and work permit, which means in average 0,5 day per trimester queuing in person at the Prefecture for various reasons.
- our landlord wanted to see a tax return from the previous year and three months' bank statements. No guarantee required. Our tenancy is for three years, before which the landlord cannot terminate it, but we can with 3 months' notice at any time. Renting was easy and cheap, and comes with a great deal of security.
- our new bank wanted a LOT of information about us, and some 70 pages of documentation. But now it's set up I can email or phone them and get an instant response from someone that knows me and my family (and speaks fluent English to boot). Their online systems are considerably better than my previous UK bank's.
- Registering for self-employment was entirely online and took 20 minutes.
- I fill out a social security return quarterly, which takes ~45 seconds, and all of the calculations are handled for me.
- We pay more tax than in the UK. But the state also pays for 85% of our childcare costs, and credits half of the remainder against our income tax bill.
- When I needed to check on our residence tax status, I rolled up at our local tax office where I was seen within 2 minutes by a friendly official who had immediately called all our details up on his computer, showed me what I needed to know and told me everything was in hand. (It was.)
It's not perfect. Being an employer is seriously not fun. Self-employment has its issues too. But it seems to be getting better, and by and large the systems work. (Probably because there are huge numbers of people running them.)
One example out of blue - when you have a property (probably not your primary residence) and somebody breaks in and starts squatting in it, you cannot just drive them out without providing another accommodation for them. You go to courts, fight for months, and then maybe you're lucky and get your property back.
It's a system that looks social & fair from outside, but as everywhere else, rich gets richer, poor stay poor and are just thrown some bread crumbs to not complain too much.
The best schools in Sydney are the public schools... Went to one of the best public high schools in Sydney. My parents paid $400. At least you're not paying $20k USD/year in SF.
Your comments re tax can be applied to any country in the world (citizens vs residents/temporary residents). The US even has an exit tax on Green Card holders.
You can apply for a withholding exemption.
The local middle school in my suburb was mediocre (north of Hornsby). I'm sure there are others that are much better. (One of) the final straws was when her math teacher gave her a calculator when she continued to ask for help with math. The other was when the principal embarrassed her in front of the entire school assembly because of an technical issue with her uniform.
At the time, I couldn't find any information on withholding exceptions for Medicare tax. It worked out in the end though because we got a large refund for the un-refunded amount as we prepared to leave the country.
We loved our time in Australia, so please don't construe my comments as disparaging the country in general. It was a sad day as we flew away to the US.
Here is the fee schedule: http://www.detinternational.nsw.edu.au/media-assets/trp/fees...
If you choose to then apply for a PR, you're eligible for a partial refund based on your PR grant date.
1. http://www.tillett.info/2015/06/24/why-i-kept-my-startup-in-...
I think a bigger issue is the ludicrous rents. We are paying SF/NYC/London rents, but wages for developers are not anywhere near the level they are in these cities. We do have very nice beaches and fantastic weather - today is just perfect in Sydney.
I actually think we are paying more in rent than the cities mentioned. The only place where I can think of higher rent is in SF.
And then there are regressive forces like the last PM, who gutted science funding in permanently damaging ways.
It's a complex picture, but I think it's unfair to say Australians shy away from tech. Tech startups are harder here because of both government red tape and small market size, but that doesn't mean there's no real appetite for tech here. And frankly, given how much people here on HN say employee options are worthless, it's not the Australian regulations on options that would be holding anything back.
My one positive is things today are nowhere near as bad as they were 15 years ago when I started. We have a great base of talent and with a little government support I could see Australian’s getting over their cringe.
Yes, the internet here is expensive and slow. You can thank the current government for it's intentional blocking of better infrastructure there. But just because the internet is comparatively slow here doesn't mean that the country is a backwater overall. The internet in the US is amazingly fast... if you're in the right spot. It's fucking awful if you're in a bad spot. Yet we don't paint the US as a technological backwater.
Imagine working in Security. 'Yes, this costs money and will bring in zero revenue for your company...'
Not sure what to attribute this to - having reliable business clients pay for your software seems like very solid business to me, after all isn't that how IBM's and Oracle's of this world came about.
I suspect it comes down to how competitive this space is. Campfire used to be the thing not long ago, and then everyone went to Slack - who's to say that another competitor will not emerge and everyone will ditch their Jira's for something better?
Huh? Neither Splunk nor Hortonworks are profitable.
HDP on the other hand is pretty much where it started.
It is almost NEVER brought in by management.
The only exception is if Jira is used for project management type stuff - those projects can and should be isolated from dev projects.
Sounds like all the developers you know hate how their bosses use tools. I happen to love how my team uses Jira.
Much happier with Trello and a zero bug policy.
Oh, why hadn't I thought of that...
Unlike Github's mostly developer centric issue mechanism, Jira is more suited for organizations the would have a QA department, a security review, a more complicated release process (multiple phases of validation and testing) or that that just need a custom issue state machine.
It just so happens that those companies also have money to buy Jira licenses and Atlassian is brilliant for letting OSS project use it as well. So they get a foot in the door at multiple places in the industry.
If startup developers don't like it, oh well, there is enough money for them to be made in the Enterprise market.
(Also, I noticed that there is an interesting plugin market for it as well, once you have audience that paid so much to use it, they'll be willing to shell out a a few hundred more for say Slack integration or other such plugins).
Up to you if that's a bug or a feature.
The interesting thing is that it is very often used for Agile project management. It's massive overkill for that. It has the feel of something that evolved from an issue-tracking system, because it existed before Agile and morphed into an Agile tool.
Corps just run into roadblocks with OSS wikis.
Confluence is the Wordpress of wikis, but without Wordpress's code quality</s>
Combine this with the fact that there's no error handler for broken pages - if the XML that makes a page work is invalid on the back end, the page just straight up won't render and has to be fixed another way. (Which sucks, but as I said, this is not a thing most people will ever encounter). It's not possible to generate invalid XML using the WYSIWYG editor, but plenty possible if you're using either the code editor, or plugins that do strange things.
The logs are chatty as hell and you'll generally get stack traces for even completely benign problems/notices. That's one thing I wish they'd deal with, but it's pretty minor.
If you're getting error-level stack traces and XML nonsense on a daily basis, something is terribly wrong in your instance. That is simply not standard behavior, and I'm kind of curious what their support people are telling you.
(Shoot me an email if you're comfortable doing so - I may be able to help you out)
1. LDAP support
2. SAML / SSO support
3. RBACLs
4. Auditability that integrates with some Big Corp compliance system (I'm thinking SOX primarily here and why some companies can't use Git for systems that require full auditability just because Git rebase and wipe of the reflog can happen)
5. The fact it's Java-based rather than oh... Erlang or Python is a pro to most enterprises that have hordes of people that have known only Java tooling and languages. Training a bunch of people that are not motivated to learn anything new is insanely hard. PHP could substitute in here as well I suppose.
6. Other software suites that integrate tightly with it. JIRA sucks for a lot of people, too, but it sure beats all the other crap I've had to use at work. I think less than 20% of the people on HN have actually had to use HP Quality Center or Rational ClearQuest on a daily basis for a long time.
7. Vendor is software maintainer. Big Corps would rather work with a single vendor if possible rather than some small consulting companies that install and integrate the software tailored for their environment and then leave pretty much. So unless one of the primary maintainers of I dunno, Redmine, started offering support contracts with a team of professional services folks, there's hardly any actual competitors to the Atlassian suite in the enterprise "more money and not much technical know-how to spend it effectively" software market.
8. A sales team that you can choke to bend to your will with money. Most OSS projects will not take terrible, horrible, ugly feature requests for large sums of money from a single user that are technically bad and tough to support without massive costs - this is how a lot of enterprise software vendors do business and part of how they decline over time (too many one-off feature requests for big ticket customers that create conflicting design requirements to engineer around combined with a shift to sales culture over engineering / innovation culture leading to massive loss of technical talent).
Edit for newlines
Personally, I'd be happy with just Markdown if it was just a group of devs, but that is a rarity. At my company now, we have tech support, IT, (non-technical) account reps and even to some extent HR and finance using it, and to get that to happen, it was essential to be very easy. There's still a handful of users that attach Word or PDF documents to a page, but at least it's accepted that the wiki is still the canonical location to get any type of documentation, company policy/forms, etc. Baby steps.
So well Confluence does have its warts, getting buy-in into non-technical departments trumps those.
Conversely, I've never seen a non-WYSIWYG wiki actually successfully deployed and used by non-technical users (as contributors) -- anyone else?
Confluence is just tacky, too much whitespace, whizzywig editor is slow and buggy (less so than 2yr ago).
And the old fogeys on the team that hate documentation still write their notes in a notes.txt file on our team share. Having a "beginner friendly" wiki didn't help anything.
Oh, and our dokuwiki was HA on day one, with backup scripts zipping and SCPing a backup to an offsite server. Confluence took MONTHS to get HA as an enterprise solution.
I mean you're already doing documentation, adding tedious tasks to it just makes it worse. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, done.
Your "old fogeys" thing is a managerial/personnel problem, it has nothing to do with the software.
And this is the first time that I've heard "too much whitespace" be a complaint. You want to be distracted from the content?
I agree that team members not adhering to doc standards is a human problem.
The unfortunate thing with any Wiki or document sharing tool is they tend to become cesspools of outdated or contradictory information. It has to be someone's job responsibility to keep it updated and curated.
2) Agreed on the maintenance part. There needs to be a yearly audit/testing of procedures to make sure the docs hold up to new versions of software, new releases, etc.
Confluence used to have regular wiki syntax plus WYSIWYG for non-geeks, but the non-WYSIWYG appears to have been killed off completly. It's till a wiki, but barely.
My startup's building wiki software that's targeted at small groups to start who want a team wiki (instead of having to post everything to the entire corporation). The idea is to really focus on making the publishing and discussion experiences delightful.
I'd love to chat with anyone who is thinking about setting up a wiki for their startup or team My email is andy@tettra.co and the site is http://tettra.co.
That applies to nearly everything they make, Jira, Confluence, the whole lot.
It's possible, and very very easy, to set up a shitty Confluence wiki, and some of the details of its performance are not exactly obvious. It takes a bit more work to set up one that's both well liked and easy to use.
If I had it to do over again, I'd still pick Confluence over MediaWiki every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Life's too short to deal with wiki markup by hand.
Only thing that I don't know of free software replacement is the Agile Development tooling that JIRA provides. But tbh, "agile development" is a hellhole of buzzwords, expensive consultants and ridiculous bullshit rules anyway.
It becomes less about the money rather quickly.
$148.5m (FY2013)
$215.1m (FY2014)
$319.5m (FY2015)
Net income:
$10.8m (FY2013)
$19.0m (FY2014)
$6.8m (FY2015)
R&D as % of Revenue by year:
2013 39%
2014 37%
2015 44%
The marketing and sales expense goes from 13% to 21% of revenue in 2015
The growth in these line items really compress their margins in 2015.
Their gross margins are probably what you want to look at instead, since their cost of revenue won't include R&D ($ in 1,000s):
FY13 FY14 FY15
Gross revenue 148,512 215,109 319,521
Gross profit 115,481 117,123 266,589
Gross margin 77.7% 54.4% 83.4%
I wonder if they stay with that model or do more of the "enterprise sells" now.
There have been a number of recent IPO's from companies with great growth but no profits to show for it. The market has mainly rejected these companies and the companies are trading near IPO levels or below. Some of them after taking a down round to go public even, such as HDP.
Atlasssian is showing very good growth and profits, however modest (which they should be for them - reinvesting in the company is the best action right now), which I assume would end up with a pretty decent multiple.
My midline would be a 4 billion market cap based on current growth trajectory, current and potential earnings (and their reinvestment in the business) and cash on hand which should limit and sort of second round any time in the foreseeable future.
This isn't based on PE (it would be extremely high right now) but rather the revenue growth and cash stability to allow sustainable reinvestment in the companies marketing, R&D and sales departments. It's a bit over 10x forward revenue.
According to statements made by the founder[1], the move to London was designed to make them more integrated into the global economy ahead of their IPO. That tells me that they aren't moving again any time soon.
[1] http://www.afr.com/technology/atlassians-farquhar-justifies-...
They are primarily based in Sydney, they might be the biggest importers of developers in Australia actually ;) but the SF office is large too, they hold a few usergroups in it, as well as the Atlassian Summit which just ended (3-5 Nov). https://summit.atlassian.com . No wonder you believed they were SF based.
In this arrangement, you would enter into an "expression of interest" to purchase shares at the IPO price, if your broker was allotted any shares by the underwriters. Once you have entered into this, you must be ready to buy the number of shares you indicated at the IPO price, but if there is a lot of interest, you may not get fully filled and may not even get filled at all.
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Only Atlassian could ask to be listen as "TEAM".
Is there a "quiet period"? I can't find the date of IPO on the document either.
Does an IPO introductory price usually match the last round of funding? It seems on page 10, they mention $2.23 for Class A shares and $0.51 for Class B shares, which makes a total valuation of $148m. Last round valuation was $3.15bn [1]. It means those shares have been bought 21 times higher at the last round than the price mentioned in this document. Did I read it correctly?
Page 62, chart: For $1 initial purchase, customers end up spending $8 in additional users, renewals and other products.
It's my first time reading an F-1/S-1, it's awesome, there's plenty of information! Sales per continent, page 71! Marketing expenses page 80! That's awesome!
Example: They recently did a massive reshuffle on their Jira product lines. Now instead of Jira + a set of software dev plugins, it's two separate products. Jira Core, and Jira Software, which bundles all the software dev stuff that you used to have to buy separately.
If you were a Jira license holder before this change, you basically got bumped to Jira Software (i.e. you got access to the dev stuff) for the same price you were paying before.
I would not see this happening with a public company.
Going public exposes you to the toxic "growth at all costs" mindset of short-term, quarter to quarter thinking investors, which pressures the company to screw their customers to make the balance sheet look a bit better.
This isn't going to happen immediately, but they're on a clock now. It will happen sooner or later, mark my words.
I even love saying the word "TEAM".