Making money from software is tough — but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Over at our sibling site Business Insider, Liz Tay has a detailed history of Australian software success story Atlassian and its journey from a two-man band to a billion-dollar public offering.
It’s a long read but well worth investing some time in over the weekend.
ATLASSIAN – THE UNTOLD STORY: How Two Australian Young Guns Built A Company Headed For A Billion-Dollar IPO [Business Insider]
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2 responses to “How Atlassian Made A Fortune Developing Software”
Jira, Stash (despite the confusing name) and Bamboo are great tools.
Until recently I didn’t realise that Atlassian were an Aussie company, but these are well deserved rewards.
No patience for ’em. A friend living out bush was up for a job with them, and after weeks of phone interviews, they wanted her to talk to their “culture fit” person, and it had to be over skype video. Because, you know, you can’t learn whether a person fits into your culture unless you know what they look like, and they weren’t even sure enough that they’d like what they saw to fly her out to have this conversation in person. BLECH.
My former coworker lived out bush and didn’t have a reliable net connection fast enough to do video, and couldn’t find any business in her non-net-savvy town who’d let her bring in her laptop with cr*ppy 300K pixel video cam to do this skype video call. The nearest reliable Internet was in Brisbane, about $500 of return flight away, which is not the kind of investment an out-of-work person makes completely on spec with no success criteria spelled out. Atlassian’s response: Well, please call us back when you are in a position to do this skype call, til then, we’re going to forget we wasted weeks talking to you. Implication being: if you’re the kind of person who’d ever take a job in an area where you wouldn’t have good Internet, you’re not what we want. Even though she was there for FAMILY reasons not entirely of her own choosing. Yeah, my friend is “old”, as am I. However, we both hold our own with people 20-25 years younger than us and aren’t old “pretirement” fuddy duddies tending toward luddite-hood.
At least in 6.1, they’ve finally fixed JIRA so that when it auto logs a user out and the user clicks Submit on an issue update, unaware that they were auto logged out, they no longer lose everything they typed.
So, PR spin aside, I’ve been left unimpressed by this firm beyond their ability to generate positive PR and funding dollars for themselves.