I'm pretty ignorant about financing. I have a question for finance folks:<p>This company is about 8 years old, profitable since day one, and made 58 million last year in revenue.<p>I never hear about companies getting such a cash injection at this stage in their lifespan. Perhaps I'm just primed for "things are different now" stories after reading Fred Wilson's recent post on the topic ( <a href="http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/07/some-thoughts-on-the-seed-fund-phenomenon.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/07/some-thoughts-on-the-seed-fu...</a> tl;dr : "While many businesses require a lot less capital to start, they don't require less capital to grow.").<p>But even by a new We Need to Grow yardstick, it seems Atlassian is mature.<p>What do you folks think?
I'm glad to hear they're continuing to do so well. Atlassian is one of the great Australian IT success stories - I really hope the government and people see them as a shining example of IT in Australia and why the industry should be further encouraged.<p>They're also quite generous to a number of causes. They sponsor the Sydney University IT Society and NCSS (which is a summer program in computing for talented high school students) and commonly come and give talks to the local universities on a wide range of topics (technical and entrepreneurial). They also provide free software for open source projects and host the local Java User Groups.<p>Overall I really do have a fond spot for them, even if they work in Java ;)
This is what Joel Spolsky was worried about a while back. <a href="http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-slow-death.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.inc.com/magazine/20091101/does-slow-growth-equal-...</a>
Has the usability of Confluence and Jira improved over the years? Those were key products in use at ThoughtWorks when I was there about 4-6 years ago. I can tell you that most people hated working with them.
This seems odd to me. I've looked at their products in the past, and they certainly aren't giving them away for free. I can't imagine they're not profitable, so what would they need this kind of money for?