rebelutionary / 2.0

A really super quick Atlassian Stimulus update.

We're 116 hours in, we have 4 hours left.

Total so far $97,470! That's right, we're $2.5k short of $100k. Given that the US is just starting to go out for a beer on a Friday night, it will go right down to the wire. What a ripper of a finale!

If you haven't yet - we'd love your support. One last hurrah. Grab whatever megaphone you have - your blog, Facebook, email, Twitter or just open your window - and yell into it loudly!

Maps

I was just updating our dashboard - in Confluence of course! - and wrote a neat page that shows live maps of where we've sold Starter licenses to.

The page is written using the Beanshell Macro - sorry, this one is not for the new players - to access the sales database and dynamically construct Google Charts maps. Took about 10 minutes to knock up, now we have live maps of all the awesome people who've helped us get here!

For your viewing pleasure:

Unique Countries: 86

The World

Europe

Asia

Africa

USA

South America

Middle East

Isn't that staggering? Look how much of the world we've covered. Fascinating. Back at you in 4 hours. Keep up the noise, and thank you for helping.

Another 24 hours and the snowball that is the Atlassian Stimulus Package keeps rolling. Just incredible.

In 75 hours, we've helped almost 5,000 startups and small teams in 77 countries get some kick ass software while raising over $66,400 for Room To Read - my favourite charity.

Small plug - if you're in Sydney or SF and want to work for the company that makes the kick ass tools, we're hiring!

Dashboard

I'm too tired right now (been a loooong 3 days) to snip out all the relevant bits, so instead I thought I'd just snap our entire dashboard (edited to censor the customer names - sorry folks - remember thought, it's a wiki so my change took seconds!).

Our entire company seems to be reloading this dashboard every 10 minutes, watching the numbers and graphs tick along, celebrating milestones, round numbers, new countries etc. Today different people around the company added metrics on countries, niftier support charts and more.

You simply won't find a better example of how a fantastic wiki like Confluence can get your team on the same page - so I thought I'd share it here.

This is how every team should work.

Of course... if you want your own, or your company / team doesn't operate like this... buy a Confluence starter license here or just click the pig!

(Click the below thumbnail to view the whole dashboard at full size - 800KB - lots of stats here. Any questions, just post a comment!)

Update: Should have mentioned I cloned the real dashboard to screenshot it - which is why you can't see any comments. Our actual dashboard currently has 99 comments from 42 people and has been edited 40 times by 8 employees - in 75 hours - in a 200 person company. How is that for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration!

It's all hands on deck here at Atlassian HQ. Our little stimulus package seems to have set the Internet alight.

A little ultra-quick update. What's happened in the first 48 hours?

First, the big announcement.

Remember how we had that little goal of raising $USD 25,000 for Room To Read to build libraries for kids in the developing world?

Well - we did that. Already. In fact, we did it in just over 23 hours. Yup! Holy s**t! Or as we say in Australia fan-fucking-tastic! But don't let that slow us down.

Here are some more detailed stats from 2 minutes ago:

Progress

Well, we haven't actually slowed down that much at all. 48 hours in we has just passed $47,000 in funds raised, selling over 6,000 starter licenses.

If you think about that in terms of libraries, at $USD4k per library - that's an extra 5 or 6 libraries we're going to build around the world for kids. Just thinking about the long term effects that will have is simply staggering to me. Thank you to everyone who has contributed!

As you can see from the real time chart, the Confluence and JIRA charts are jockeying for the #1 position and it's going to be a photo finish. Also, you can see that the customers are from around the world.

Targets

We also quickly put up a chart that showed our progress against the target 'worm' - but you can see we're doing well against that too:

Sales Per Hour

The most recent is a chart showing the number of sales per hour.

You can see the quiet period at the start where the US and Europe were asleep, then the nuts moment where we DOS'ed ourselves (at 2am Sydney time!) and then the steady, steady flow of orders since then.

Where do the figures come from?

It wouldn't be Atlassian if we didn't use our own tools for everything - in this case, tracking the status of our own campaign.

We've built a Confluence dashboard to show keep everyone internally updated to the second as to how the entire campaign is going. (Did you really expect us to use anything else?)

Besides being an absolutely excellent example of where Confluence just rocks for business intelligence applications. Our dashboard is made from the chart, cache, SQL and future plugins.

(Of course if you buy a starter license you can build your own nifty BI boards inside your own personal Confluence instance)

What's Next?

We're 72 hours - 3 days - from the Stimulus package finishing, and me getting some sleep! We've melted servers, replaced 'em, had staff on call almost 24×7, tweeted, Facebook'ed (is that a verb?), blogged and talked to the press like crazy men. It's been quite a ride... but it's not over yet.

I hope that gives you a little insight into where we're at so far. We'll have some more stats as the dashboard evolves.

Thank you so much to everyone who has helped out so far. You rock.

Remember, there's 3 days left so keep spreading the word, and if you haven't yet pick up a starter license - or just click on the pig!

Just a quick post to mention that the Atlassian Stimulus Package has gone live!

Following on from my last post on strategy, I have a muuuch longer essay coming covering the why behind it later (which I'll hopefully post later tonight Sydney time) but for right now I just want to get the word out.

The Skinny: Pretty simple. For the next 5 days, get Confluence or JIRA for $5 for 5 users. All goes to Room To Read

The Goal: To raise $25k to build 5 libraries for children in the developing world in 5 days... all whilst helping stimulate startups and small teams with kick-ass tools.

Get in quick. Tell your friends. Twitter it. Facebook it. Go nuts. Follow the pig.

Quite often when speaking I'm asked how we "came up with" Atlassian's strategy and business model.

(slide from Scaling Atlassian presentation)

For a long while, this question used to throw me. I'd answer something like "Uh... well, it just kind of evolved." or "Uhm... it was really just common sense?".

These answers of course aren't helpful to the person asking the question who is looking for some sort of learning they can build their own strategy on.

This post is my more thoughtful, updated answer.

Evolving Strategy

The simple answer of course is that we have built the strategy on a few points of initial knowledge, and then evolved it with what we learnt from customers, the market and other businesses over time.

Our initial hunches have proven to be correct. The internet has changed how software is distributed, the web has made it possible to be global from day 1, the cost of writing enterprise software has decreased.

The key point people miss is that we haven't stopped learning from other businesses in order to improve our own.

Too many people assume that your model or strategy for a startup is fixed. I believe it should be a lot more agile than that. The core values of your company shouldn't change, however strategies and models are there to be tweaked and evolved.

Learning From Others

I'm a big studier of other businesses. I think of it as strategy cross training. The chance to think about all manner of big, difficult challenges that other technology businesses are facing in order to evolve the strategic side of my brain.

Question like:

• If I as running eBay, what on earth would I do now? What are my strengths and weaknesses?
• Why did Apple release an iPhone? Is it really a "magic product" or did they put years of engineering into making it right before releasing it? Why did they invest so much?
• Is Yahoo! truly screwed as Google keep eating their lunch? How do they get out of their hole? Can they? Is Y!OS a lock, or a big gamble? Is it their only gamble?
• Can Google just sit back and rest? Have they already "won" the web? If I was Eric, Sergey or Larry - who would I be scared of?

Learn Don't Copy

It's extremely important to note that learning doesn't mean copying. There is no "one true" strategy, rather one that is the best for a given business at a given time.

Even if you think someone else has made smart moves and those moves would work for your businesses, they are extremely unlikely to work for you without modification to your own circumstances.

The "I Want To Be Apple" Fad

Case in point - I hear far too many people looking at Apple and making strategic calls on what they should do to their own businesses. Saying things like "We just need better design." or "We need to spend more on clever ads." without truly understanding Apple's business.

This is extremely dangerous!

To quote the man himself Steve Jobs:

"...when you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple with all these simple solutions, you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. And your solutions are way too oversimplified, and they don't work. Then you get into the problem, and you see it's really complicated. And then you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for awhile. But the really great person will keep on going and find, sort of, the key, underlying principle of the problem. And come up with a beautiful elegant solution that works."

Or as Mark Rafter coined it - Jobs is striving for the simplicity on the otherside of complexity.

Apple is a fantastic company that's truly kicking goals. However, they're not just about flashy marketing, or shiny aluminium bevels. To point to these small examples trivialises Apple's strategy, smart thinking and understanding of its customers.

If you want to truly learn from other's strategies, you have to truly understand both their strategy, and your needs. Only then can you learn and improve your own business. Trying to blindly adopt what they've done, you risk oversimplifying the solution and failing.

You were blind to the complexity, this didn't reach the simplicity on the other side.

Where can I learn?

Books are a great start. As I'm writing this, I have a stack of 15 unread books on the left of my desk, a fair few stacks at home and I came home with about 4 or 5 new books from the bookstore last night.

But books are the slow-burn energy of learning. They're the mental complex carbohydrates your body needs for endurance (aka whole grains) rather than the mental simple sugars you need for a quick high (aka Coca Cola).

The internet provides plenty of simple strategic sugars for quick learning!

(Apologies for the overly metaphor loaded post here - I'm trying to get back into blogging and it takes a while to find one's voice again. Writing is like a muscle, you need to exercise it often to improve. Oh - and there I go again!)

Want to learn about Apple's strategy? Steve Jobs' Master Plan is a great post covering the last 10 years of Apple's evolution and a few ideas about where they are going next. Good sugar here.

Yahoo! Open Strategy? You can learn a lot about the evolution of their strategy by understanding Yahoo's competitive position and reading between the lines of their Y!OS launch. TechCrunch has a good set of live blog notes and a follow up post

How about the big G? French consultancy faberNovel today released a fabulous presentation summarising Google's strategy that I've embedded here. Google is a large and complex company, and this is a great attempt at simplifying all the large strategic moves their making. I learned a lot from it that I feel I can reuse (with modification!) at Atlassian.

To finish where I started - another question I'm asked often when speaking is "What advice I took early?". My answer is often the same. Someone once gave me this advice (apologies, I forgot who!):

"If you take everyone's advice, you'll do nothing new. Your role as an entrepreneur is to know what to ignore."

Beautifully recursive, smart advice - that I didn't ignore.

And remember, seek the simplicity beyond complexity!

I'm not sure how this video got past me. I thought I was one of the biggest fans of early Steve Jobs history, yet somehow I'd never seen this video of Steve describing computers to him:

What a fantastic analogy - and prescient. Love him or hate him, the man is a genius.

In other Steve love, I thoroughly recommend reading Inside Steve's Brain by Leander Kahney. He fawns a little bit, but there are some gem stories in there. Also this analysis of Apple Strategy over at Fishtrain is quite well researched. Perhaps shallow, but gives good context to Apple's major moves over the last 10 years with Steve at the helm.

G'day. It's been far too long. Enough said.

Sometimes life gets busy, so you forget to blog. You'll have more time tomorrow. Then you forget again. And again. Soon you're completely out of the habit of blogging. Small impulses run through your brain periodically - "Oh right, blog - I should do that. Tomorrow.". People start asking "Did you stop blogging for a reason?" or "When are you going to blog?". Tomorrow. Sadly, tomorrow rarely ever gets less busy than today.

Then something happens which jolts you out of the stupor. For me, it was the confluence of two things.

Firstly, I'm in our SF office at the moment because of AtlasCamp - our first developer camp (photos, wiki). It was last weekend, and it was brilliant. A true shot-in-the-arm, slap-in-the-face reminder of what absolutely f**king awesome people we have in the Atlassian ecosystem.

From the tweets, it wasn't just me who felt it rocked:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

A true thank you to everyone who came and made it such a special weekend. You put a small dent in my universe. I think we all went away changed and re-energised. All I can say is, don't miss it next year!

Secondly, John Rotenstein (our guru of the internal systems) took his Fedex day project to shoot a video about life at Atlassian and Atlassian's values. And it turned out - spectacularly. Rarely do things in life make you look back and reflect on how far you've come, how much has come from all the hard work you've put in.

Thank you John for putting a small dent in my universe and reminding everyone at the company how special what we have is.

And now, back to tomorrow. It never gets freer, no matter what company, relationship or life you're building. Tomorrow has to be today. No excuses for not blogging anymore - there's just too much awesome stuff to tell the world!

(for those that don't understand the title, our logo-man is informally called Charlie internally - after a certain Mr Atlas.)

I'm back in SF for our User Group (last Thursday @ Stanford - thanks to everyone who came, fantastic UG!) and JavaOne next week.

We have a huge schedule for JavaOne this year - with 6 new product launches in the last three weeks in time for the show - JIRA Studio (the big one), Bamboo 2.0 (distributed builds, Confluence integration), Fisheye 1.5 (real-time per user line count graphs - sample), Crucible 1.5 (project pages, review searches), IDE Plugin 1.0 (our tools inside IDEA!) and Confluence 2.8 (new UI, dynamic page ordering).

Oh - and some pretty dang neat t-shirts to give away at the conference.

Come by our booth for a demo, or just to say G'day. We have a whole crew of Aussies (including both founders - in the same place at the same time!) here, along with staff from our SF office, here to answer your questions.

And speaking of that whole crew of Aussies, it wouldn't be JavaOne - or Australian - without copious pints of beer. So we're giving away free beer after CommunityOne. Monday night, May 5th @ the Thirsty Bear, 7.30 onwards. Call it the after party for the early birds.

(PS Extremely bad photo of me from the Stanford UG in our Atlassian 2008 shirt - our best t-shirt yet IMHO. Click to zoom in.)

As always, life became busy and I stopped blogging. Apologies!

A few Atlassian, life and (Atlassian + life) updates:

• Atlassian is doing a grand experiment in engineering with our 20% time trial - watch that blog if you're a software team, it's really going to be fascinating. We're being open.
• We've passed 10,000 customers and $3m in monthly sales, our products won 4 Jolt Awards in one year, Confluence is used to power the White House and we've opened an office in Poland which we're thrilled about. Expect great things from their Pazu project. Things are busy.
• In the last month I've been to FooCamp in NZ (which was utterly fantastic - I love Kiwis, they always put on fabulous conferences and werewolf is a new, twisted passion of mine), San Francisco, Poland, Adelaide and I'm currently sitting in sunny (but dark) Brisbane. I hate hotel rooms.
• For any JIRA customers, Beyond JIRA gives you a good overview of how all our tools tie together to provide simply the best development experience for technical teams. We're a Tina Turner for engineers.
• If you're a Maven 2 user, Sherali's series on how we use Maven 2 is pure gold. Become a Maven maven.

Beyond that, I'm going to bed and will (as always) endeavour to blog more. Do check out the 20% time blog as we're putting a lot of effort into it.

Having read a lot of resumes over the years, Jeffrey nails it in his post How to write a bad resume.

Most mortals can fit their background on one page. After about ten years of experience, you might merit a second page. Maybe. But think hard first. It might take 15 years before we need to hear it all.

I really don't understand the 3+ page resume fascination.

Charles replied with typical style from a developer's perspective:

I think what many people forget is that a résumé is an exercise in marketing. You’re trying to sell yourself to a prospective employer, but so often I get little more from a résumé than a dry list of technologies, and some useless self-assessments of the applicant’s ability.

I'll just point you to my post on Applying for a Java Job (and from the flip side if you're interested Startup Hiring) - tell me what you did in a resume!

"XYZ Corporation - Developer - Jun 2001-July2004" Thanks - very useful. What did you do? Did you make coffee for the architect and senior developers? Did you develop the documentation and help files? Did you design a brilliant three tiered, event driven system that blew the previous sytem's performance away by 100 fold? Tell me!

Now if all that hasn't scared you off, Atlassian is always looking for people (20+ open positions in Sydney and San Francisco) and specifically at the moment we're looking for a VP of Marketing.