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Atlassian history
Atlassian company history timeline
Jira was released for download in April 2002.
When Atlassian was founded in 2002, the founders had a choice to make.
In 2002—the tail end of a nuclear winter for tech—being a Silicon Valley entrepreneur was tough.
Atlassian was started by Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes in 2002 with some pretty simple goals: they wanted to not have to wear suits to work, and earn more than what Farquhan was offered by PwC.
Let’s put this timing into perspective: The launch of the most famous tech start-up ever, Facebook, was in 2003.
2004: Jira was bringing in revenue, but even in these first years, Atlassian was on the lookout for other potential revenue streams.
2005: Just three years after its founding, Atlassian was profitable without having taken any venture capital.
Revenues quickly grew from $1 million in the company’s first year to $14.9 million in 2005-06, when Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar were named Young Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs of the Year by accounting giant Ernst & Young.
Director of developer relations Jonathan Nolen joined in late 2005 and was the company’s second US hire after Walker.
By June 2006, Atlassian had some 4,340 customers and 50 staff in Sydney and San Francisco who developed, supported and marketed Jira, and a collaboration platform, Confluence.
In 2006, only 4 years after launch, the Atlassian Foundation was created along with a pledge to donate 1% of equity, product profit, and employee time to charitable causes.
Farquhar claims that he didn’t even know of the word “entrepreneur” until winning an award for it in 2006.
There was “a lot of showboating and stupid bets”, according to Justen Stepka, who joined Atlassian’s Sydney office after it bought his internet security start-up, Authentisoft, in mid-2006.
Lachlan Hardy, a former Atlassian design engineer who is now a technical evangelist for Microsoft Australia, said the Atlassian attitudes and people were the highlights of the two-and-a-half years he worked there, starting in December 2007.
2007: At this time, both Jira and Confluence sales were growing, and this validated that the developer market was a space with a lot of opportunity.
The two founders were each valued at $30 million on BRW’s 2007 Young Rich List.
According to Simons, who joined from BEA Systems as VP of sales and marketing in mid-2008, the deal came after a particularly difficult 12 months.
The freemium sales and distribution model, as well as the early acquisitions, created many revenue streams that lead to over $50M in ARR by 2010.
Bassat left the jobs listing site in 2011 and now invests in and mentors early-stage businesses with Square Peg Capital.
In July 2012, Atlassian announced that it had recruited former SuccessFactors and Great Plains Software chairman Doug Burgum, former Adobe CFO Murray Demo and former VMWare executive Kirk Bowman to the board.
HipChat, a web service for internal online chat and instant messaging, was acquired by Atlassian in 2012.
They’ve been rising through the ranks since, and have topped since 2012.
A 2012 Bloomberg analysis of cloud software vendors found that firms had an average PSR of about 8.1.
The original article stated Burgum held 6.98 per cent and Accel 9.72 per cent of shares as of 12 December 2013.
In 2013 as an incentive to raise $40,000 for charity, Scott, known for having long hair usually tucked into a trucker hat, said he would shave his head into a mohawk then dye it blue.
2013: Atlassian released a service desk offering on top of Jira that targeted the IT market.
Freelancer was forecasting 2013 revenue of $18.3 million at the time.
Analysts at the time expected Twitter to bring in 2014 revenues of $US1.14 billion, giving the company an astounding price-to-sales ratio (PSR) of 21.
Like electricity, it can augment us, enable us, even replace us in many areas,” Farquhar said at the 2014 JJC Bradfield Lecture.
2015: Atlassian held its IPO in December and started trading shares with a market cap of nearly $5.8 billion.
2015: Atlassian’s Git services were fast growing—Eric Wittman, the general manager of Atlassian’s developer tools, noted that Bitbucket’s customer growth the year before was around 80%, and that 1 in 3 Fortune 500 companies used Bitbucket.
2016: To build itself out into an even more ubiquitous tool provider and help companies maintain their software, Atlassian acquired Statuspage, which allows businesses to keep users updated about the status of their online services.
In 2017 Atlassian bought Trello, a collaboration tool for businesses ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies.
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Atlassian competitors
| Company name | Founded date | Revenue | Employee size | Job openings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NetSuite | 1998 | $53.0B | 4,603 | - |
| SugarCRM | 2004 | $60.0M | 450 | 15 |
| Box | 2005 | $1.1B | 1,934 | 146 |
| i Manage Holdings Pty | 2015 | $3.9M | 200 | 27 |
| QPharma | 1994 | $20.0M | 265 | 1 |
| HERE Holding Corporation | 1985 | $69.0M | 6,500 | 45 |
| IDEA | 1999 | $680,000 | 50 | - |
| RagingWire Data Centers | 2001 | $6.0M | 75 | 1 |
| Uit | - | $1.0M | 10 | - |
| Intergraph | 1969 | $7.4B | 4,000 | - |
Atlassian history FAQs
Zippia gives an in-depth look into the details of Atlassian, including salaries, political affiliations, employee data, and more, in order to inform job seekers about Atlassian. The employee data is based on information from people who have self-reported their past or current employments at Atlassian. The data on this page is also based on data sources collected from public and open data sources on the Internet and other locations, as well as proprietary data we licensed from other companies. Sources of data may include, but are not limited to, the BLS, company filings, estimates based on those filings, H1B filings, and other public and private datasets. While we have made attempts to ensure that the information displayed are correct, Zippia is not responsible for any errors or omissions or for the results obtained from the use of this information. None of the information on this page has been provided or approved by Atlassian. The data presented on this page does not represent the view of Atlassian and its employees or that of Zippia.
Atlassian may also be known as or be related to Atlassian, Atlassian Corporation Plc, Atlassian Inc, Atlassian Pty Ltd and Atlassian, Inc.