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Atlassian Valuation

[WHAT]

] Atlassian, an Australian maker of online collaboration tools for businesses, is gunning for the same market as fast-growing startup Box Inc. And like Box, Atlassian is also now one of the world’s most valuable venture-backed companies with a new investment valuing the company at $3.3 billion.(8* 2010 valuation)

[WHY]

] co-chief executive officers Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes,
] builds software to help IT departments, computer programmers and other professionals work together online
] no sales force
] invests heavily on research and development, building products with the aim that they are good enough to spread by word of mouth (helped along by a modest marketing budget for billboards and online ads).
] “Fifteen years ago, as long as you had the best distribution you would win,” Mr. Farquhar said in an interview. “It didn’t matter whether Oracle was worse than SAP. These days, people are making decisions based on how good the products are.”
] Mr. Farquhar said Atlassian is profitable as a result, and it has been cash-flow positive each quarter for the past 12 years. Its sales have risen an average of 40% annually over the last five years, and its revenue run-rate, or the amount the company would generate by extrapolating current revenue over the next 12 months, is over $200 million
] Atlassian’s profitability stands in stark contrast to Box, the online-storage company founded just three years later that last month filed its public IPO prospectus. Last year, Box doubled its revenue to $124 million but it racked up a loss of nearly $169 million. Box spent more than 100% of its revenue — or $171 million — on costs like sales commissions, advertising and stock compensation. Box also had negative operating cash flow of $91.8 million.
] Atlassian says it spends just 15% to 20% of its annual revenue on sales and marketing and a much greater share, 35% to 40% of sales, on research and development. Box spent about 37% of its sales last year on R&D.
] no comment from Box
] as the company expands and aims to sell tools to larger businesses, it may need to bring in salespeople who can help manage those relationships, said Thomas Murphy, a research director at Gartner Inc. About 35,000 organizations use Atlassian products, up from nearly 12,000 in July 2010. Atlassian is trying to figure out, where and how do we service really big accounts? Often they want a sales guy.”
] DIFFERENT - never taking a direct injection of outside funding. Like the company’s previous funding from Accel Partners in 2010, Atlassian’s employees will cash out of some shares at a valuation of $3.3 billion,
] Atlassian has more than 800 employees – some who have worked there for more than 10 years, the company needed to give them liquidity as it puts off an IPO. Employees will be able to sell a portion of their shares in the secondary financing
] MVP === Jira, a system for creating and tracking service-desk tickets across an organization. Over the years, it’s added Confluence, a tool for team collaboration and document-sharing; Stash, an application for sharing code; and HipChat, a chat program the company acquired in 2012.
] no intention of competing directly with Box and larger players like Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in the crowded market for online storage. “more directly competes with companies including Rally Software, which went public last year, and GitHub,

[WHERE]

] READ THE FULL ARTICLE

] http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/04/08/atlassian-valued-at-3-3-billion-selling-business-software-sans-salespeople/

[WHEN]

] 2014-04-08

[EXAMPLE]

]
?] dont really see Box as == to Atlassian
*] didnt know hipchat was part of Atlassian

[HOW-TO]

]

[REFERENCE]

] Atlassian
]

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Atlassian Valuation

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