I still remember their CEO building his original audience on TheServerSide.com, back when Enterprise Java was the thing.
They took 13 years to get to this point, a solid 8-9 years longer than most enterprise SaaS companies are expected to take (by VCs). And yet, not a single VC I've asked if they wish they were in Atlassian has said no.
You can build huge companies on your own terms and you don't have to swallow the story that everybody tries to feed you. You do need to do one thing though (and only one thing): get traction and keep it growing.
Don't want to be that guy but 4-5 years for enterprise startups "to get to this point" which I'm assuming is either that market cap size or IPO is ambitious - Enterprise startups tend to take a while to get that flywheel spinning. The fact that Salesforce did it in 5 years (Founded: 1999, IPO: 2004) means that they are more the anomalie than the others. For example here's a list of Enterprise companies which have taken 7-13 years to get to IPO:
Eloqua - Founded: 1999, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 13
Qualys - Founded: 1999, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 13
Rally Software - Founded: 2001, IPO: 2013. Years to IPO: 12
E2open - Founded: 2000, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 12
Exact Target - Founded: 2000, IPO 2012. Years to IPO: 12
Box (Summer IPO) - Founded: 2005, IPO: 2014. Years to IPO: 9
Demandware - Founded: 2004, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 8
Fleetmatics - Founded: 2004, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 8
ServiceNow - Founded: 2004, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 8
Bazaarvoice - Founded: 2005, IPO: 2013. Years to IPO - 7
Workday - Founded: 2005, IPO: 2012. Years to IPO: 7
Marin Software - Founded: 2006, IPO: 2013. Years to IPO: 7
Marketo - Founded: 2006, IPO: 2013. Years to IPO: 7
Yes, this was my point. The story you're sold when speaking with VCs is that if you're not at some astronomical valuation within a few years, you're not growing fast enough. A look at how things actually play out reveals a different story altogether.
I have a start up I have been working on for almost 2 years. I am bringing in money, but not enough yet to be life sustaining. So I have a full time job and working every day on this startup. It can get rather tiring...
I was questioning its worth the other day, to keep going or to wait. But I must keep going. It doesn't take a year, but rather its a long drawn out process.
I wish I had your kind of attitude a year ago - me and a former cofounder gave up on a promising enterprise startup idea within a few months because we were generating way less money than we had expected. If you're bringing in money you're definitely doing something right, and you're doing better than 50% of enterprise startups out there. I'm glad you're sticking with it because it is indeed a very long and drawn-out process, but can be quite rewarding in the end.
Atlassian is an anomaly amongst anomalies, but the timing is pretty normal. I find it strange that there is some kind of apparent value judgement being made on one company vs another.
The average time to an enterprise exit is 9.5 years according to http://pando.com/2013/05/21/memo-to-this-years-yc-class-its-.... So Atlassian is generally in line with the average. Talk to any person or VC that has built a large SAAS company and they will likely say the same thing.
Would every company love to grow >40% annually with spending 0% on sales and 15% on marketing...of course! The reality is that most companies can't do that. You can't look at it and say "I want to be Atlassian not Box." Box has a growth rate of over 100%, so commands a gigantic valuation. If I were starting a business I'd take either unicorn.
They don't really spend 0% on sales. They just don't have a traditional salesforce. They put a huge amount of resources and effort into pre-sales support (which is arguably sales with customer aligned incentives) and customer funnel progression.
It is a small but important distinction, what they don't do is scale sales by throwing salaries + commissions at a highly paid sales force.
"And yet, not a single VC I've asked if they wish they were in Atlassian has said no."
Well sure, a hit is a hit. A hit that took 3x time is still worth being a part of if your hit ratio is less than one in three. With hindsight, of course they "wish they were in Atlassian."
Indeed. Those fundamentals and lack thereof are worrying. It seems everyone just goes for their own wallet content, not for building value over time. In the end bad fundamentals result in some kind of damage; not for the founders, but for the employees and others directly and indirectly involved when the axe falls. I don't really respect that if it is intentional. Billions or not. Hoped to see some different cases.
Veeva Systems (VEEV) took just a touch longer at 6 years and did it with remarkable capital efficiency. Founded 2007. Raised $4m from VCs. IPO in 2013. Opened at $2.4b mkt cap, closed day at $4.5b, $5.6b today.
I just came across their story the other day - really inspiring. I'd love to hear the full story of how they did it. They are in a super specialized market, so I'm guessing that helped.
yes, we are tackling a single vertical, life sciences - with multiple SaaS products. the core vision is the industry cloud.
by being super specialized, the cost of sale is massively lower. no need for an army of sales people. focus is on product and delivery/implementation - once it is proven that your stuff actually works, others take notice in a tightly knit industry.
Great to see both workday and veeva mentioned here, both tri-valley software companies proving that success can come in the Bay Area outside of Silicon Valley and San Fran.
Workday (NYSE:WDAY) was founded in 2005 and floated in 2012 with the valuation of $4.5B (currently $15B). However the Workday story is different because it was started by grownups and well geared towards enterprise from the start (business model, marketing, connection, financing, etc).
The "grownups" reference was snide and dismissive of the great work done by young founders - I should not have used it.
For context, I was comparing the origin of Atlassian and Workday. Atlassian was started by two 22 year olds through a sizeable credit card debt. Workday was started by a 65 year old ex-PeopleSoft CEO with his funds and an additional $15M in VC finance.
"Mature" would have been a better suited word. Thank you for calling me out on it.
Atlassian didn't get caught in the established wisdom trap of enterprise software: worrying more about generating sales leads than about the product.
Upfront non-discriminatory pricing, direct purchase via credit card, immediate access to trial downloads, both installable AND cloud offerings, and source access to give customers piece of mind when it comes to solving their own problems and ensuring business continuity.
Atlassian does it right in a field where so many don't.
I don't know why, but this makes me feel good. Like a world that makes sense. A regular old business, that makes money and continues to grow and make more money, gets valued on a nice speculative curve, doesn't make useless dodads or chat apps or whatever and went from $0 to $xx billion valuation in a couple years because it has some possible tangential business tie in with somebody else, but instead makes something useful.
HipChat isn't like SnapChat though. If you go to their homepage, right up in the header they've got a link to their pricing page. You don't have to wonder who they're selling you to or what convoluted monetization schemes they have, Atlassian makes money because people pay them for a service that they think is valuable. Which is refreshing.
I didn't even realise BitBucket wasn't originally an Atlassian product. What do you think makes it seem so seamless, or what makes Atlassian so good at integrating new products?
TBH I would say they are "ok" at integrating products. Until last year I worked at a company that used Atlassian products, and while they worked well together there were definitely a lot of points of integration that were missing which we felt should have been there. It's been getting better over time, but it's definitely not seamless.
BitBucket/JIRA/Confluence integration could be much tighter. BitBucket definitely feels like an island IME.
That said, it's most of what you want from Github at much more reasonable rates. So I'm very happy with it outside of the positive network effects of forking on Github (I rarely see a lib I want to fork on BitBucket).
First sentence in the article: "Atlassian, an Australian maker of online collaboration tools for businesses, is gunning for the same market as fast-growing startup Box Inc."
Saying that they're gunning for the same market seems a stretch to me. No one's going to say "I was thinking of buying Jira, but I just went with Box instead."
Leading off with drawing parallels between Atlassian and Box just strikes me as not helpful.
Perhaps they meant the stock market? I also thought "man, I guess I missed where Atlassian went into the cloud storage market" when I read the first paragraph.
I would assume that the write assumed that "online collaboration tools for businesses" is a single market, and ostensibly both companies can be said to sell products in that space, but yes, I agree that it's less than apt.
That might have been a slight misunderstanding on the writer's part, but I'm sure the atlassian guys are considering box's market as well. If a company is already spending money on Jira and stash for developer collaboration, wouldn't offering content management as a product be compelling? If the engineering department at a company is heavily invested in atlassian products, maybe marketing or sales would give their cloud content sharing product a shot too.
I think you're giving the reporter too much credit :)
Also, Atlassian is a good deal bigger than GitHub (if measured by revenue, profit, people or valuation), which would seem to put them on the Dropbox side of the analogy
I think the Bitbucket piece is smaller than Github. But Atlassian also have a whole bunch of enterprise-oriented products, more in the same kind of market as Thoughtworks or one of the big enterprisey lots.
Really cool that you can reach that kind of valuation with a basket of products, rather than a single run-away network effect fueled win. I find it very inspirational that they do that well by building great software that people love.
also: They really make awesome products (we use BitBucket, HipChat and Confluence)
As someone who has to use and administer JIRA I'll have to respectfully disagree. The nicest thing I can say about the product is that it was built "by engineers, for engineers". People who want empowering software that gets out of the way appear to have been an afterthought.
As someone who also uses and administers JIRA i'll have to respectfully disagree with that disagreement ;)
The backend application may very well be engineer-focused, but that speaks more to its flexibility than anything, IMO - as far as user experience, it's as empowering and minimalistic as you make it.
Fortunately, engineers are a significant target market.
In the real world, simplistic ticketing systems fail to meet enterprise needs, which are complex and peculiar, arising from weird contract clauses, irrational political outcomes, legacy processes etc etc. JIRA's multi-layered customisability is a huge boon in these environments.
Also, people aren't actually stupid. Yes, even non-engineers can use a complex piece of computer software! A little training goes a long way. Who knew?!
I second that. I sometimes wonder why FogBugz+Kiln combination has not 'caught on' as much as other offerings like github, atlassian products, etc.
My only (but major) gripe I have with FogBugz is that it is stupidly hard to insert inline images in cases (compared to how easy it is in a github issue)..and while at it, the entire editor could use a makeover for ease of use/markdown capability
I think it comes down to pricing for a lot of people. $300 a year per user basically and you don't own anything at the end of that term. $7200 a year for 25-150 doesn't seem so bad once you get up to 100+ users. $300 a year might not be bad for a developer who is in it every day, or a PM who keeps track of these things every day, but for that person who gets called in to fix one thing it can be expensive.
The price is steep for the most price sensitive users who probably already have experience in another tracking system. It's hard to get that user to try it the first time. Even the free version is very limited compared to other trials, allowing a total of 2 users, which probably isn't representative of the number of people involved when issue tracking is brought up.
JIRA has got an extremely "nervous" interface where clicking around in innocuous places (like blocks of text) causes strange things to happen, editing modes to be entered, and things to move around unexpectedly. So in this sense it "gets out of the way" nicely.
As an employee at a medium sized company that uses Jira and Confluence, I have to disagree.
I'm sure people out there have managed to wrangle and configure Jira into something usable, but it's implementation where I work has been just horrible.
And confluence... Apart from being just slow and unreliable, it's text editor gives me nightmares. I mean, all due respect for building that (it does some pretty powerful and complicated things), but 95% of the time I just want to write an article in Markdown and post it.
I'll be the first to admit that both of those applications are the source of much misery if mishandled. JIRA especially, considering how many layers deep you can go sometimes. This issue type belongs to this scheme which uses this screen in some issue types but not others, that's designed in another scheme... aiya. It gets complicated.
Unfortunately, that's enterprise for you. Basic human logic is often insufficient to handle the demands...
Those applications are absolutely only as good as the time taken to adapt them to the needs at hand and to the team using it.
And +1 for markdown support. There are plugins out there that add that, but... don't get me started on their plugin ecosystem.
Try out the new versions of Jira and Confluence which seem much better. The user experience depends on how both these are managed.
I do wish Jira had much more powerful query, and support for deeper dashboard customization. Compared to ClearQuest, Jira is very user friendly, but CQ felt much more powerful.
I agree, I've also been at a company which merged with another company; and both were each using their own Jira and Confluence instances along with plugins. Horrible products.
So I think the 'problem' with Jira is that it's the SAP of todo lists. We used to use it for non-tech teams in our org to manage their tasks, tech team or organise sprints (and somehow coordinate that with designers), and as well as for issue and bug tracking.
In the end we just scrapped it all and went with Trello. Yes, it's 'less powerful', but we've found that you don't really need much more. For all the features that Trello 'lacks', it makes up for in speed, simplicity and ease of use.
Exactly, JIRA's UX was clunky when I last used it in '09, but after using Trac, Redmine, QC, Bugzilla and (God help me) CA USD, JIRA is far superior. Haven't tried FogBugz but I'm a Joel fan, how does the UI compare?
ironically the product of theirs I like the most (Sourcetree) is free. I've heard mixed reviews on JIRA, and Confluence is useful but we certainly have gripes about it (seriously, no symbolic links?!)
I personally use the command line but a lot of my team members aren't comfortable with CLIs so that's why I was exploring Sourcetree and found it to be quite full-featured compared to others I've tried. I've found that Git has so many options, most GUIs barely scratch the surface of what is available.
Thanks for the suggestion though. I'll give Tower a whirl.
BitBucket and HipChat are fairly recently acquisitions, but fit perfectly in their portfolio. Some of their lesser-used products are also acquisitions.
Many of the products were acquisitions, though often at a very early stage in the product's lifecycle. Off the top of my head, acquisitions: HipChat, Bitbucket, GreenHopper (now JIRA Agile), SourceTree, FishEye, Crucible, Clover, Crowd, Bamboo.
They do seem to be the best in a very competitive market. There are loads of either commercial or open source issue trackers, wikis, combinations of both, etc. etc. How will they grow past that ? Acqusitions? Writing custom JIRA plugins that will make it more like an ERP ? Ideas?
> There are loads of either commercial or open source issue trackers, wikis, combinations of both, etc. etc
Yes, and they all suck. They go from a pain to use (Bugzilla) to a huge mountain of useless and worthless crap with a obscene price tag (Rational tools)
I hope you don't mean literally zero because there have been numerous Rails vulnerabilities in the intervening time. If you're been running the same instance for a few years unpatched and publicly accessible, chances are good your installation is owned.
Bugzilla is much easier to use than Jira; it does what it needs to (tracks bugs) and gets out of your way, rather than having eleventy different modes and dialog boxes and view rules to confuse you when you just want to resolve bug x.
For just straight-up bug tracking, Bugzilla isn't all that bad. Though we do some fun interactions where we put SCM commit messages on a bug as a comment, then have a Greasemonkey script to pretty format those commit comments on bugs.
For feature tracking of timeline type of views, Bugzilla is fairly useless, but for just doing bugs, it does a good job.
One of the biggest value-adds with Atlassian is the synergy between products. Bamboo, JIRA, BitBucket, and HipChat all integrate nicely together.
Eg. I put a JIRA ticket number in a commit message to a BitBucket repo. Bamboo is watching that repo and runs a build with the ticket # in message. The ticket number has also already been interpreted and links straight back to JIRA where you can mark the issue as deployed.
I don't understand any of this. Every atlassian product I have ever used has been terrible. All their software is full of performance issues, uncountable UI bugs, and every time we upgrade it's impossible to tell whether we lost any data in the process and several times we have lost data. Their continuous integration server, Bamboo, is pretty to look at but unusable except for the lightest of use cases. The message broker between master and slave constantly goes down, publishing artifacts is hit or miss based on various network conditions that are mostly out of my hands because we're in AWS and I think they use chunked encoding to transfer the artifacts.
Honestly, if they're worth $3.3 billion then the software industry is doomed. Maybe that's a bit over the top but the quality of the products based on what I read doesn't add up. How can you do so much R&D and still have a product that's so unstable and can't handle simple network hiccups?
Sorry to hear that you are having trouble with Bamboo. I'm Product Manager for Bamboo at Atlassian, so I'd be interested in looking into the problems and use cases you are having issues with. Feel free to drop me a line at james@atlassian.com and ill setup a time to give you a call.
Any basic functionality found elsewhere would be helpful really. It might integrate nicely, but it can't do much past running a script that would take care of everything (build-wise). Variables? Not really. Conditions? Not at all. Final steps? Nope.
Documentation (at least of API) is not that great. If it is available since atlassian's Confluence seems to be down most of the time. The API itself is pretty weak as well. And weird too.. getting an HTML error response on json request? Yay!
All in all, it's one of the worst tools I had to use in the recent years. It looks like a dummy product, just for the sake of it. But at least it's fast I guess. Or I don't get its purpose.
Generally they seem good at convincing management they offer some business like value add none of the users actually want. I've been at companies where we had to switch to their really poor wiki product, Confluence, instead of free and better alternatives because Confluence allowed management to lock down editing permissions on individual pages in a more detailed manner. Note that I then spent weeks trying to get access to write to a page whenever I needed to add something to the company wiki, and weeks trying to get an admin to install a plugin to allow some HTML syntax we needed. So the experience from the user side was absolutely terrible, but it made management happy they got to micromanage all the page write permissions. That's all you need to do to make money in enterprise.
Actually, they seem to be taking 'enterprise' seriously now (JIRA Data Center and Confluence Data Center are in beta currently).
Promoting their Enterprise Advocate to Enterprise Czar (or BOFH) would be good, so that person could finally force the dev teams to think of scalability first.
Don't really understand why they are comparing Box and Atlassian the whole article. Box is cloud storage. Atlassian is programming tools like issue trackers, wikis, etc.. It's like comparing DropBox and StackOverflow. It doesn't make much sense.
I use Github for personal stuff and Bitbucket at work. They're pretty comparable. I don't really have a problem with either. Some parts of the Bitbucket UI are nicer, some parts of the Github UI are nicer.
It's hard to beat free private repos but note that they are limited to 5 users. If you have a larger team, you've got to pay.
Another key distinction of Bitbucket is that you pay per private collaborator, rather than per private repo. You could have a 5 person team but 100 private repos, and it would still be free. After that its $1 per user per month. With Github, the 50-125 private repo tier costs $100 per month for an organization.
Perhaps not applicable to many here, but for students you can get unlimited users. It's a great offering and could well pay off in the future at Github's expense.
It does have some warts but is the best out there. I believe the code review market is very ripe for disruption (especially for software hosted publicly on sites like github).
I have similar sentiment. Use a lot of Atlassian tools over the years and I am constantly bitching about various issues... eventually someone says "ok, find something else that's better"... and I can't. Not for lack of trying... there are lots of competitors... but they all are lacking.
I feel exactly the same way. I always end up cursing Atlassian's software (specifically Jira and Confluence), but when I look for an alternative (primarily for Jira), I can't ever find anything that does it quite as well or attractively as Jira. Even with its problems, it still does what I want, and does it well. I would, however, love to see something try to compete with it. There are a lot of decent alternatives, but it would be cool to see a bit more competition.
JetBrains, yes absolutely. YouTrack is not as popular as Jira but JetBrains' IDEs are very popular. TeamCity is also waaay better than Atlassian Bamboo and sells well in the enterprise.
We've had a rough, shaky time using Jira, but it's almost entirely due to internal politics and constantly-shifting business priorities. (aka CEOs and owners who are just megaphones for their corporate customers) We intended to replace our invented-here ticketing system (which has Zendesk integration) with Jira, but instead we integrated Jira into that invented-here ticket system.
On the other side, my team has been bit by a bug from 2008 which prevents us from changing any ticket's state to Resolved. We can Resolve tickets, but their Resolution remains Unresolved. Since the Resolved state is central to most of Jira's built-in features, this means Jira has been broken for me since we installed it 6 months ago. The Your Issues default display shows all my tickets, including my closed tickets. The interface is not customizable enough to build workarounds for this problem.
Also, the name (bastardizing the Japanese pronunciation of Godzilla) always feels somewhat racist to me.
We had this exact issue too. The answer was to modify the workflow. Select the transition that currently isnt resolving (in our case it was transitioning from "In Review" to "Done") and adding a new "Post Function" which updates the issue field "Resolution" to "Resolved". After that all the little graphs etc were correct.
You can also bulk modify issues that are unresolved by transitioning them to "In Review" and bulk updating them again back to "Done" which then correctly set the resolution field. Unfortunately this technique means that all your issues are now resolved on the same day so your graphs etc show a big spike on one day.
For some reason this bug occurs after a few days with any of the default workflows in Jira, but it's not too big a deal if you spot it early and fix the workflow to resolve issues correctly.
As for the Jira/Godzilla thing, I always thought it was a reference to Mozillas Bugzilla, which I thought was kinda cool :)
It's not even just the 'Japanese pronunciation', but the original name of that monster was ゴジラ - 'gojira' (gorilla/kujira (whale)) - which was anglicized into 'godzilla'. There's nothing racist at all about 'jira'.
Check out http://answers.atlassian.com if you want to try and get some crowd-sourced answers to your problems! Happy to try and help resolve any sticking points you may have.
This is fixable - I have done it myself. It's not possible to add an outgoing transition on an active (or draft of an existing active) workflow. So you work around this by:
* Create a copy of your workflow
* Add the outgoing transitions that you want to add
* Change the workflow scheme to point at the new workflow
It's not super elegant but if you need to work around it you can.
Feel free to connect with me on twitter (@jsinkers).
We had a similar bug that we worked around by adding a transition view of "Resolved Issue Screen" to all steps leading to done in the Add Workflow Transition page.
If you also want to fix existing issues, I'd suggest creating a "loopback" workflow transition on the resolved state, and adding a post-function that sets the resolution to "Fixed" or something similar.
You can then bulk transition all your existing issues and the resolution will get populated correctly.
Apparently I'm extremely oversensitive. I'll focus more on not caring about potentially racist, sexist, ageist, Marxist, time-ist, technologist, social, political, extremist, terrorist, traveler's, vice-user, or otherwise self-destructive motives I see expressed by other humans.
I met Mike and Scott in 2004 and they were incredibly humble, focused and benevolent then. From what I can tell they seem to have maintained that through the years and all their success. They also had a President of their company names Jeffery Walker, who was one of the kindest and most interesting guys I've ever met.
This is a company that is learning too. Since the acquisition of HipChat they have made the product dramatically better. If they can get a good model in place for further acquisitions, and they can continue to successfully launch their own products as well as they have in the last few years, then this company is on track to being worth a hell of a lot more than $3.3bn.
I love Atlassian products. I use it on every project I make, and recommend it to clients when we need a place to keep workflow centralized.
We use:
JIRA - For issues
Bitbucket - For code repository
Confluence - For documentation
Bamboo - For a build server and CI
I'd love to settle on HipChat as well but it's stupidly difficult to get it to pull git commits and other things directly into chat.
Flowdock is much much simpler in usage, UI and integration - so Atlassian team, if you're reading this: Let me 1-click integrate git commit notification into a HipChat room of my choosing, you own both products - make them connect in the easiest most straightforward way!
Congratulations to Atlassian. We've been using a locally-hosted Confluence instance for over 3 years in a higher education setting and it's been a great experience. The more I use Confluence, the more I see it's true value as a collaboration platform. The uptake among users has been great and the sharing of information has grown exponentially. The product consistently improves and gets easier to use over time as opposed to typical enterprise applications.
What would be the exit for the VCs? they could have kept it private without the VCs, but I don't think VCs line up for dividends at the end of the years. That forces them to create an exit event for a company that seems in a nice path.
If you wanted to keep the company private and give the Vc's an exit you can always do a leveraged buyout. Basically borrow loads of money from a bank and use it buy back their equity.
Sure. It's not a perfect alternative, but it's an option. I imagine it would be a happy negotiation. Basically just trying to figure out what multiple the VC would want and negotiating a fair outcome.
I don't get the point of going public when you don't really need money. With the press trying to find sensational stories, the sheepish behavior of the markets etc.
Their git service is really first rate. I have always felt a little guilty that I don't pay them for services rendered, so I would like to at least give the Atlassian crew my best wishes.
The company I work for uses both Confluence and Jira. We find those very helpful, but the price of plugins for additional functionality is too high, imho.
Assuming from your username that this is your site, sorry if that's wrong. Anyway, how do you define a "startup"? Some of these companies are over a decade old (eg Atlassian), some have over a $B of funding (eg Dropbox), and a couple (Box, GoPro) seem to be pretty much at IPO. Also they're all in America, is that intentional or could you genuinely not find any non-US startup valued at over $225M?
The list is pre-IPO / private tech companies. There are several non US companies on the list - e.g., Spotify, Atlassian. Also, note that you can sign up to add or edit companies. It's a collaborative list and dynamic. Thanks for the feedback.
No, you're wrong in two points:
- they have higher profits than Snapchat or Whatsapp
- you have chosen 1 enterprise tech and 3 consumer tech company randomly, and based on that, you claim that consumer tech is more profitable than enterprise tech.
Well, I say Microsoft makes more profit out of enterprise then Facebook makes out of consumer. Does this prove anything? Not at all.
It is hard to compare companies that are bought out, since they are valued higher due to the network affects with their new parent company.
i.e. if Instagram had a valuation of $800 million the $1 billion purchase price could make sense if Facebook believes their combination could produce the difference in price.
It's not just network effects. Purchase of Snapchat at $21 billion, or Bebo at $870 million, had a lot to do with attempted strategic positioning and/or edging out competitors who were eyeing acquisition. Doesn't always mean the acq will perform to price.
I still remember their CEO building his original audience on TheServerSide.com, back when Enterprise Java was the thing.
They took 13 years to get to this point, a solid 8-9 years longer than most enterprise SaaS companies are expected to take (by VCs). And yet, not a single VC I've asked if they wish they were in Atlassian has said no.
You can build huge companies on your own terms and you don't have to swallow the story that everybody tries to feed you. You do need to do one thing though (and only one thing): get traction and keep it growing.