> Atlassian has somehow become the Benjamin Button of the tech sector — profitable as a startup and loss making as it has matured.
They where profitable, they didn’t need funding the only funding they took was for staff to sell some of the equity.
Them now making a loss I think is more a deliberate choice, not a business failure. They could of continued as they where making $$$ but instead choose to go from 700 people at ipo to near 7k today for pretty much the same product suite.
Those 7k people have to be working on a lot of stuff behind the scenes, building on existing products and maybe yet to be released products. Atlassian always said they where big on long term investment. I’m sure they could be profitable if they wanted but then would need to massively cut the long term investment.
I’m not to worried about Atlassian. Every large org I worked at is run off Jira. I do regret not selling a small parcel of TEAM at the end of last year though when it was over $440usd a share
> Them now making a loss I think is more a deliberate choice, not a business failure. They could of continued as they where making $$$ but instead choose to go from 700 people at ipo to near 7k today for pretty much the same product suite.
But this is exactly the kind of thing that makes a market analyst yell "FIRE!" during a bear market. Nobody trading stocks is going to look at a 10x headcount increase without meaningful additions to the product offering as a good thing.
The product suite differs significantly from 2015. Put aside new and acquired products like Trello and OpsGenie, the existing products have significantly expanded their capabilities and added Premium and Enterprise tiers.
Revenue in 2015 was $320M,
In 2021 it was $2B. That kind of growth requires growth in Supporting functions and infrastructure teams, not just in product.
They IPO'd 7 years ago, which looks even worse. They've had all this time and hired all of these people and largely kept the same product offering with no obvious improvements to performance or stability. Again, that's a market analyst's nightmare.
They where profitable, they didn’t need funding the only funding they took was for staff to sell some of the equity.
Them now making a loss I think is more a deliberate choice, not a business failure. They could of continued as they where making $$$ but instead choose to go from 700 people at ipo to near 7k today for pretty much the same product suite.
Those 7k people have to be working on a lot of stuff behind the scenes, building on existing products and maybe yet to be released products. Atlassian always said they where big on long term investment. I’m sure they could be profitable if they wanted but then would need to massively cut the long term investment.
I’m not to worried about Atlassian. Every large org I worked at is run off Jira. I do regret not selling a small parcel of TEAM at the end of last year though when it was over $440usd a share