Episode 47: The Atlassian IPO

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2017

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ben & David venture to the land down under (and reunite in-person!) to tell the story of the granddaddy of all bootstrapped tech success stories, collaboration software company Atlassian. How did two plucky college grads from Sydney, Australia go from just trying to escape working for the man to becoming two of the top 10 wealthiest people in the entire country, all without raising a dollar of venture capital? We dive in.

Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta

Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury

Topics Covered Include:

How Atlassian founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar met in college at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and their decision to bootstrap a startup as an alternative to finding a “real job” after graduation
Atlassian’s “no sales” model, and the resultant efficiency of their sales & marketing spend relative to other SAAS companies
Organic product growth and acquisitions over the years, starting with Jira and later adding Confluence, BitBucket, HipChat / Stride, Jira Service Desk and Trello
Rapid revenue growth and the decision to continue as a bootstrapped company, only raising secondary capital prior to going public
The IPO in November 2015 and subsequent stock performance (spoiler: it’s been good)

The Carve Out:

Ben: Phil Knight’s memoir, Shoe Dog
David: Bruce Springsteen memoir, Born to Run

Transcript

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0:00.0	The other thing I was thinking about is do we want to do any follow-up on Alaska Virgin?
0:05.8	Yeah, people hate follow-ups. Yeah. People definitely hate hot ticks. I mean they also hate follow-ups.
0:11.6	Yeah, I don't think we need to.
0:13.2	All right.
0:14.8	Actually, maybe I'll just use this for the teaser quote.
0:16.8	It didn't go well. Welcome back to episode 47 of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs.
0:34.0	I'm Ben Gilbert.
0:35.0	I'm David Rosenthal.
0:36.0	And we are your hosts.
0:37.6	Today we are covering the Atlassian IPO, and normally we're hesitant to do episodes
0:42.4	on such recent news unless we're like actually on the scene week of
0:46.9	Can like be the you know one of the first takes you here on it and otherwise ultimately we don't have enough enough to reflect on to
0:56.1	make a kind of recent a recent IPO or a recent acquisition something that we
1:00.8	should cover on the show however However, there's so much interesting
1:04.2	story behind that Lassian and there's already been so much data to go off of in the
1:09.1	last what two years and years two years since the IPO. Yeah, yeah.
1:13.0	In fact, when I was writing this little intro, I was like in the last couple of quarters since
1:17.2	the IPO, but really, really been two years that we want to talk about it and we think we have a good story to tell
1:24.5	Before we move on with the show David. It's great to see you in person. Yeah, it's great to be here Ben
1:30.1	Great to be on the show. So as I think most people know at this point,
1:36.0	we've been doing most shows remotely
1:39.0	because I actually, earlier this year, moved to San Francisco and I've been living there and
	...

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