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Comment by hbhakhra | Hacker News Reader

I hope to see them succeed with their IPO, they seem like just a good company. They got solid revenues that they have been reinvesting while staying profitable, so this IPO could let them grow much faster. With $319.5 million revenue, the IPO valuation is only 13x revenue, which is a solid company in this tech market.

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Definitely share the feeling.

I've never been a huge fan of their products, apart from HipChat (a bit too "enterprisey" for me). My initial experience with Jira had been pretty bad and I just had labeled Atlassian as boring/enterprise/old school.

That was until I read a piece about the two founders (I believe in Forbes [1]) and started digging. I'm still not interested in their services but I find their story pretty interesting; they definitely look like a pretty good company, built by two hardworking Aussies who have fairly conservative and rational ideas about business. It's pretty refreshing in a world of VC hungry ventures.

[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexmorrell/2014/04/09/new-finan...

You said $319.5 million revenue, and the other poster said $6.8 million profit. Which is right?

Edit: Ok I get it. Revenue vs Profit. Of course.

Speaking as a non-stockmarkety person: comparing the valuation with profit it looks like a much worse deal and who would run a company for 2% profit let alone buy a part in one?

According to the article, $319.5 million was revenue and $6 million was profit.

It's deceptive to try and calculate the valuation of a company, particularly a growing company, based on it's profit. People who manage those companies have two options - stop investing in growth, and customer acquisition, and collect profits off a smaller base of revenue, or, ramp up the growth, increase revenue, and then later collects profits off a much bigger base of revenue.

As long as the company is well managed, and the growth opportunities will (eventually) become profitable - the better long term strategy is to invest in growth, and future revenues/profit, and not cut costs and try and collect profit on todays revenue.

>who would run a company for 2% profit let alone buy a part in one?

People who think putting that revenue back into the business today will result in even more revenue tomorrow. Money they take in and spend on making the company better isn't counted as profit, just like how paying the costs of accruing that revenue lowers the profit.

If you know how to turn $1 in to $2, you should keep investing those $1s.

  > who would run a company for 2% profit let alone buy a part in one?

Amazon is an example of a company with large revenues and generally comparatively small (or zero) profits.

13x revenue, not earnings? That's pretty high for a fairly mature company... I guess we'll see what their growth numbers have been.

You can check out their F1: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000155837015...

2013: $148.4M

2014: $215.1M (44% growth)

2015: $319.5M (48% growth)

Ah thanks! That is quite strong...

We're part of that growth. As much as I tried to avoid JIRA, it's just that good (and, that integrated) and once you're on JIRA, you realize just how well their other products are aligned. It's pretty amazing, and I think one of the few times a tech IPO feels quite worth its valuation.

We went with JIRA because every other system I've used was super-clunky, Windows-only, or both. We do embedded systems but the last time I needed Windows for anything was about 5 months ago when I needed to email myself a pdf from the QA team's tracker. Everything of consequence we do in Linux.

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