Atlassian

History

Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar founded Atlassian in 2002. The pair met while studying at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. They bootstrapped the company for several years, financing the startup with a $10,000 credit card debt. The name derives from the Titan Atlas (/ˈætləs/; Ancient Greek: Ἄτλας) from Greek mythology who had been punished to hold up the Heavens after the Greek gods had overthrown the Titans. The logo reflects this through the blue X-shaped figure holding up what is shown to be the bottom of the sky.

Atlassian released its flagship product, Jira – a project and issue tracker, in 2002. In 2004, it released Confluence, a team collaboration platform that lets users work together on projects, co-create content, and share documents and other media assets. In 2006, Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar were named Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneurs of the Year for Australia.

In July 2010, Atlassian raised $60 million in venture capital from Accel Partners.

In June 2011, Atlassian announced revenue of $102 million, up 35% from the year before. In August 2011, Jay Simmons became president, while Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar kept their positions as "co-chief executive". For the June 2014 fiscal year, Atlassian reported $215 million in revenue, up from $144 million in 2013.

In a 2014 restructuring, the parent company became Atlassian Corporation PLC of the UK, with a registered address in London—though the actual headquarters remained in Sydney. Atlassian has offices in five countries: Amsterdam in the Netherlands; Austin, San Francisco, and Mountain View, California, in the United States; Manila in the Philippines; Yokohama in Japan, and Sydney in Australia. The group has over 1,700 employees serving more than 60,000 customers and millions of users.

In November 2015, Atlassian announced sales of $320 million, and Shona Brown was added to its board. On 10 December 2015 Atlassian made its initial public offering (IPO) on the NASDAQ stock exchange, under the symbol TEAM, putting the market capitalization of Atlassian at $4.37 billion.

Sales Setup

Atlassian does not have a traditional sales team. Instead, it lists all prices, information about products, documentation, support requests, and training materials on its website. Most of their products are available as hosted or installed versions.

Acquisitions and Product Announcements

In 2010, Atlassian acquired Bitbucket, a hosted service for code collaboration. In May 2012, the company introduced a website where customers can download plug-ins for various Atlassian products. That year, Atlassian also released Stash, a Git repository for enterprises, later renamed Bitbucket Server.

Additional products include Crucible, FishEye, Bamboo, and Clover, which target programmers working with a code base. FishEye, Crucible and Clover came into Atlassian's portfolio through the acquisition of another Australian software company, Cenqua, in 2007. In 2012, Atlassian acquired HipChat, an instant messenger for workplace environments. Doug Burgum became chairman of its board of directors in July 2012.

In 2013, Atlassian announced a Jira service desk product with full service-level agreement support.

SourceTree is a Git and Mercurial desktop client for developers on Mac or Windows.

A small startup called Dogwood Labs in Denver, Colorado which had a product called StatusPage was acquired in July 2016. In January 2017 Atlassian announced the purchase of Trello for $425 million.

Philanthropy

In March 2011, the company raised $1 million for the charity Room to Read from sales of its $10 "Starter" licenses.