The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 52 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: AI Expands TAM by Enabling Cursor to Charge Thousands Per Seat
“Atlassian got incredibly successful selling JIRA and other products for five bucks a month with discounts to folks at companies. Now folks will spend 400 dollars, in some cases, 5000 dollars on cursor. That's why it goes to a billion.”
Halligan: HubSpot Avoids Hiring Executives From Google and Microsoft
“The other hack that helped us is we just don't hire anyone from Google or Microsoft or a giant company that it's like a different level of abstraction from where we're at. It was used to having, you know, a lot of staff and a lot of help around that maybe we'r…”
Lemkin: Bootstrapped and venture SaaS models converge at $10M-$20M revenue
“Somewhere between 10 and twenty million in revenue, depending on your sales motion, the models converge. The models converge. So, if you have twenty million in revenue and you're bootstrapped, and you're willing to spend all 20, right, you can basically hire a…”
Adding enterprise sales to a self-serve business is easier than the reverse
“It's a lot easier To build a self-service business first and add sales later, then build a sales driven business first and add self-serve later.”
Atlassian Refuses to Negotiate Software Pricing With Any Enterprise Customer
“And to this day, 20 years later, and we have some of the biggest companies in the world, we have one set list price and it's all on our website. We do not negotiate pricing with any single customer. Every customer gets the best price.”
Simons: Needing human onboarding assistance is a bug in product-led growth
“The difference is, is that in our model, we identify that as a, kind of a bug in the model, right? It's something that we need to fix in the future. We don't want every single customer, if we're targeting 500,000, to have to raise their hand and for us to enga…”
Jay Simons: Atlassian spends twice as much on R&D as on S&M
“We spend twice on R&D, you know, that, that we do in sales and marketing.”
Simons: Atlassian has 2,000 channel partner salespeople in the field
“And if you think about it, like, our sales force, you know, we've got 2000 salespeople that are out in the field. They're not employed by us, but they effectively do the same job. They're salespeople.”
Lemkin: Atlassian Re-Accelerated at $5B Revenue but Trades at 4x ARR
“Atlassian beat the quarter. It's re-accelerated at five billion in revenue and it trades at Forex ARR.”
Lemkin: VCs Love Bootstrapped Startups for Their Clean Cap Tables
“VCs love bootstrap companies. If you talk to Excel partners, one of the top VCs at all times, they'll say our favorite investments were Atlassian, right, which I think they bought 20% of, bootstrapped. Qualtrics, bootstrapped, on and on. Why do VCs like bootst…”
Atlassian assigns account managers to only 5,000 of its 250,000 customers
“So of those 250,000 customers, we really only cover, call it five to 6000 of those with an account manager.”
Atlassian enterprise reps pitch company-wide standardization, not core product value
“So so what I always say is we, by the time we are actually engaging with humans, we're not there convincing them the value of Atlassian. What we're doing is convincing them of the value of standardizing on Atlassian.”
Atlassian founders avoided salespeople because they couldn't afford them
“They didn't hire salespeople because they didn't believe in salespeople. They didn't hire salespeople because they couldn't afford salespeople.”
Atlassian requires 50% YoY growth potential before assigning an enterprise rep
“Well, if I'm going to add as expensive sales rep, I need to ensure that there's an opportunity to grow that account 50% year over year for the next five years. Like that's how we think about that. Because otherwise I'm going to eat into operating margin or I'm…”
Atlassian Scaled to $3B Revenue With Under 15% S&M Spend
“We've been able to grow to over three billion in revenue, while keeping sales and marketing spend under 15% of revenue. For all 20 years we've been in business.”
Liu: Pure bottom-up growth cannot scale SaaS companies to $1B revenue
“It's, you know, it's probably not enough in most cases to provide durable growth. For the next 10 years, right? If your aspirations are to become a billion dollar plus revenue business, like it's very unlikely, even Atlassian has layered in like real sales at …”
Lemkin: Atlassian monetized its AI agent and drove its stock up
“Atlassian just launched. They finally were able to really monetize their AI agent and it's crushed their stocks up.”
Adding Freemium Tiers Accelerated Growth For Atlassian, HubSpot, And MailChimp
“And in fact, we are seeing more and more companies add freemium additions at lastly and adding free HubSpot, adding free MailChimp, adding free as Three mature examples actually allowed their business to accelerate.”
Expansion product pricing models must closely mirror the initial product purchased
“When you think about pricing and packaging for your expand products, realize you've already trained them how to buy. So try and keep it as simple as possible, you know, from a repeat purchase perspective that it's as similar to their first purchase. Then you d…”
Atlassian regrets waiting until 2020 to switch from trials to freemium
“We went from a trial-based model to a free model, right?
Yeah, we did that in 2020.
It's like, actually, Matt, actually, we believe this has been a massive success for us.
We probably, knowing what we know now, we probably would have done that in like 2017.”
Atlassian operated for 12 years before hiring a commissioned sales rep
“It wasn't until 2014 that we hired our first commission rep. So 12 years in business before we had to even think about a commission plan.”
Atlassian spends only 15% of revenue on sales and marketing
“We spend 15%, one to five percent of revenue on sales and marketing, roughly, mid-teens which is a fraction of any company that's in enterprise software of our size. And we spend, call it 35 to 40% on R&D.”
New land products should be treated as entirely separate businesses
“With a land product, you almost kind of want to treat it as a separate business, right? From a brand, like you actually want infinite flexibility on how you take that product to market, because you're trying to get a new set of cohort, and who knows what that …”
Founders mistakenly tie revenue targets directly to sales headcount capacity
“95% of companies I work with to have like, that I talk to have that business model. You've inevitably immediately tied. Like the first thing you do is tie your sales, your overall revenue number to how many salespeople you can hire, not how much innovation you…”
Atlassian drives one-third of bookings through third-party channel partners
“And we do roughly a third of all of our bookings through these third party channel partners”
Atlassian gathers 5 to 10 years of customer data before assigning reps
“So before anyone gets an enterprise rep, an enterprise advocate, we probably have five, maybe even 10 years of historic sales data with that customer.”
Ramp New Channel Partners by Feeding Them Existing Customers First
“You have to be thinking about, if you want to bring on new partners, how do we actually get their business growing? How do we get them addicted to the Atlassian business? You know, by introducing them to our customers. You have to open up your customer portfol…”
Jira Customer Retention Spikes When Users Install More Than Two Apps
“We know if a Jira customer installs more than two apps into their Jira instance, their retention rates go through the roof.”
Atlassian Marketplace Generated $2B in Sales, Paying Vendors $1.5B
“Over the last 10 years, we've done over two billion dollars in lifetime sales through our marketplace. Show the scope of what the type of business we've done here. More importantly, we've taken one and a half billion of that and given it back to our marketplac…”
Cloud Platform and Partner Ecosystem Returns Take Over 18 Months
“So if you were thinking about, we're going to build a big cloud platform and build an ecosystem, start partnerships, and money will start coming out of the, out the other side in 12 months or 18 months, you're fooling yourselves.”
Atlassian Generated Over $1B in Sales Through Solution Partners Last Year
“Last year alone, we did over a billion dollars in sales. I didn't know I was going to be in a tent today. Sorry. The over a billion dollars in sales. And on top of that, that doesn't include all of their own services and training, what have you.”
Atlassian Considers It a Failure If Customers Bypass Partners for Services
“If there's any incentive for a customer to come directly to Atlassian for a service, instead of working with a partner, then we have failed.”
Dietrich: Atlassian invests 35% of revenue in R&D, 15% in S&M
“At Atlassian, the whole business is set up around this, and we invest more and this is from a recent blog from the CRO, Cameron Dietsch On his LinkedIn that 35% of future revenue is invested in R&D, and only 15% is in sales and marketing, because there is no s…”
Dietrich: Atlassian and Twilio enterprise sales teams are farmers, not hunters
“Atlassian has an upsell, cross-sell enterprise sales organization that's not hunters. It's all farmers, and Sarah was talking about that. The Twilio sales group is farmers.”
Pryor: Atlassian sells enterprise software with a tiny sales headcount
“There's the companies that are like, I build enterprise software, and then 60% of the people that work at the company are enterprise salespeople. Right. And then there's other companies where you have a tiny percentage of the company is the sales team, but the…”
Atlassian operates with customer success rather than traditional sales
“Atlassian famously does not have a sales team. They have a customer success team.”
Box uses sales reps for 25-employee companies while Atlassian uses none
“Box has, I think, a sales team that staffs, even, you know, 25 employee company can talk to a sales rep and engage, and those people are on quota, and that's a full team right there. And then on the extreme, on the other side of the spectrum is Atlassian, whic…”
Simons: End-user NPS is the key leading indicator of SaaS growth
“So like end user NPS is probably like the important, ah, leading indicator of future growth. Like if your end users aren't happy, you know, even if I'm a Workday user, and if I'm not happy, long term that's not a great thing for Workday, even if the HR person …”
Simons: Atlassian could have gone public two to four years earlier
“So I think we had the profile of a company that could've gone public two or three or four years earlier.”
Atlassian delayed hiring sales reps until it launched a high-ASP enterprise tier
“When we first added sales reps, it was largely, we had just created a scale version of our product. Like we call it the data center edition. So we basically finally had a product that was built for large customers. And what I say is had an ASP high enough wher…”
Atlassian sustained 30-35% annual growth for 20 years without triple-digit spikes
“Atlassian never had triple digit growth, except for maybe like year one, where it's like, you know, from 300 K to one million.
Low base.
Yeah.
But instead we've been doing, you know, low to mid 30% growth every year for 20 years.”
In 2012, Atlassian's most expensive product was an $8,000 unlimited Jira license
“In 2012, the most expensive thing you could buy from Atlassian was 8000 dollars. An unlimited license, unlimited users on Jira was 8000 bucks a year with a 4000 dollar renewal, right?”
Atlassian decided early to optimize for one-to-many engagement across operations
“The reality is the way we made a decision very early on is, you know, we're going to try and optimize for one to many, everything Atlassian does. So instead of doing a demo for just one client, Let's do a demo, record it, post it on YouTube so everyone can see…”
Atlassian Spent Hundreds of Millions Building Its Cloud Platform
“So, we went over a multi-year, hundreds of millions of dollars in investment to build the Alassian Cloud Platform.”
Atlassian Grew From $100M to Over $3B in Revenue in Ten Years
“So, when I started the company, literally almost exactly 10 years ago, we were already a successful business. We really did about a hundred million in revenue, had about 20,000 customers. For all intents and purposes, we were a very established, well-known org…”
Atlassian Lands Thousands of New Customers Quarterly Without Sales Interactions
“But I'm telling you, we will land thousands of net new customers this quarter with zero sales interaction, and that's something that still drives our overall business.”
Butterfield: Atlassian Founders Uploaded Daily Company Videos Early in Lockdown
“I was talking to Scott and Mike from Atlassian, and in the early days, they were uploading a short video, like a 92nd video to the whole company every single day, just to say to people, you know, here's what we're hearing right now.”