Hello blog readers. Quite some time eh? Nothing new there. Life's been busy!
In the last 6 months I turned 30, travelled a few laps of the globe, got married to the most wonderful woman on the planet, took a long holiday for the first time since we started and now I'm back on deck in Sydney leading 250 awesome Atlassian's... and 2010 has barely started.
Phew!
It's going to be an absolutely huge year.
I'm hoping to write more this year, but like always - life seems to get in the way!
For now, we're looking for people... lots of people - software engineers, QA engineers, UX designers, support engineers. If you want to work for Atlassian, or move to Sydney or SF - this is your chance. For details, see our 32 hiring campaign page for videos on all aspects of the job and life at Atlassian.
Specifically, we're searching the world for an absolutely rockstar VP of Engineering to lead Atlassian's team of engineers in Sydney and San Francisco.
If you think that's you, see the job ad for details or watch Scott below talking about what the position will be like... oh, and you get to work for Scott and I! I guarantee it will be an experience you'll never forget ;)
If you know anyone suitable - or maybe you're just an engineer whose boss is absolutely kick ass but you want him to move so you can get his job, please send them a link.
If you heard about the job on this blog and you send the right candidate, I'll personally mail you a case of Aussie beer anywhere in the world.
Until next year blog readers, thanks for your loyalty ;)
]]>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!
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
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!
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!
]]>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:
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.
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:
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.
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)
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!
]]>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.
]]>
(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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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!
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.
]]>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:
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.)
]]>A few Atlassian, life and (Atlassian + life) updates:
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.
]]>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.
]]>Like it? Digg it :)
]]>In spite of the six thousand manuals on child raising in the bookstores, child raising is still a dark continent and no one really knows anything. You just need a lot of love and luck - and, of course, courage. - Bill Cosby, Fatherhood, 1986
Being a parent is at once hard and rewarding. It's a part joy, part frustration and always a learning exercise.
I am one of the two parents of Atlassian, the father of the crazy idea that became JIRA and a guy who bleeds Atlassian blue every damn day.
Today is a tough day to be me.
Yesterday we closed the top voted JIRA issue for Field Level Permissions (FLP) as "Won't Fix", with a long explanation as to why that is so. We communicated that it will not be included in JIRA for the next 18 months. As we expected, there's been varying reactions from across our community - mostly in the form of flames from users who really wanted this feature.
I can assure you this was a very difficult parenting decision for us to make. It was not taken lightly.
I know how many people want FLP. I know what they want it for. I know how hard and complicated it is to build nicely because I've tried (find me another system with the queryability, flexibility of JIRA and an equivalent FLP system to what's above and I'll send you a signed t-shirt).
I do believe that despite the votes, we have made the right decision for our 8,500+ customers.
We recently did a big internal exercise at Atlassian to articulate what our values were. I say articulate on purpose because values aren't something you go into a room and decide on. They're in the founders, they're in the early employees, they transmogrify themselves throughout the organisational DNA. You don't decide on values, you articulate them.
So what did we articulate as our 5 core values at Atlassian?
Well, I love 'em. They're heartfelt, they're irreverent, they're cheeky, they're bold, they are us.
I could explain any one of these values in a long blog post. We're open. We try to be upfront and straight forward. We try to make hard decisions being passionate and evenhanded to all parties. We put customers first, we stick together, we have fun and we're trying to change the world in our own way.
We ran a number of different exercises to try to draw out these values, for example - the Mars Group is roughly "Imagine you're recreating the company on Mars. You can only send 5 employees. Choose which 5 you would send. Why did you choose them? What values do they share or exhibit?".
We ran the exercises separately with our senior management team and with a group of employees from across the company. Both had to come up with 5 values they felt embodied the company.
The most fascinating (and gratifying as a founder) thing about it was the huge overlap between the two lists the teams came up with (which were merged to become the above). The correlation was scary, they were almost exactly the same list.
Fear not - the DNA runs strong in this building.
Values are only worthless if they're just stuck on a wall. They should be embodied in every employee, in every new hire, in your products and in all the company's dealings.
So how does the decision to close FLP stack up against our values?
Where does all this leave the users who feel aggrieved? I hope they know that we are learning a lot from this issue. We're learning how to serve customers better, how to be the open company we want to be (trust me - being open is hard) and how to better communicate our decision making and direction.
Judge us on this - certainly - but judge us on all that JIRA is, not just JRA-1330.
Amongst all the flames and anger, there is some balance - and I really would like to extend a thank you to those users, like Mike Brevoort:
Though I'm very disappointed and Atlassian shouldn't have let this drag on for this may years,* I applaud them for at least making a decision, a decision that in their opinion is in the best interest of the product*. How many times have you been strong armed to produce a feature that our constituants have choosen to not listen to the downstream consequences? Then six months later the same people are complaining about all of the things you warned them about. Just like parents, we need to make the best decisions for our children. Hopefully they made the best decision.
It's time to move on, re-raise your more specific issues and if Jira doesn't fit your need without this feature, go find another tool. Again, I applaud Atlassian for not falling into the be everything to everybody trap.
I couldn't have put it better if I'd written it myself. We should have made this decision earlier - I completely cop that.
JIRA is a 5 year old this year - a toddler. Many of our dreams for this little chap haven't been fulfilled yet. I'm really excited about the new features we have coming down the pipeline in the next year. I hope you'll be excited by them too.
And please remember that all this only happens because Atlassian is such an open company. Try to vote for features with Oracle or Microsoft or Sun any other large software company.
If we didn't let users vote on their issues, read each others comments, interact and scream at us - we wouldn't have this problem. Would that be a better place to be? Hell no. I still believe the gain to us and to customers from being open is far greater than the pain from publicly letting your customers down.
We're trying to be the best parents we can be. Time will tell.
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. - Oscar Wilde
I hope this explains our thinking. As always, I welcome your feedback - the love and the flames.
]]>“All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.” - Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince
Today we're making a big announcement and we think we're in good company.
Apple did it ten years ago...
"We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft must lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win Apple has to do a really good job." - Steve Jobs (see the video)
Novell did it last year...
"CIOs want to focus on their business, and they want their suppliers to focus on improving operating system interoperability." - Novell's Open Letter To The Community
Sun did it a few months ago...
"Does it signal a strategic shift inside of Sun? No - we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Running, virtualizing and supporting Windows opens doors." - Jonathan Schwartz
We're partnering with Microsoft and releasing the SharePoint Connector for Confluence.
(I've also recently had a haircut - losing a few inches off the shaggy locks and thus making me look a little less like Jonathan Schwartz - which is good - because today I must sound a lot more like him. As Jonathan said - "Remain calm"! )
Microsoft is today announcing two strategic partners at the Web 2.0 conference today to add improved social computing capabilities to SharePoint.
We're thrilled to be one of those partners, the other is NewsGator with their neat new SocialSites.
The beta of the SharePoint Connector for Confluence is downloadable now. (One thing we're doing differently to Microsoft - come on, I'm allowed one small jab - this is not a vaporware announcement.)
Here's a screenie of it in operation - here showing a Confluence page (with dynamic charts and more funky things) embedded within SharePoint. Note the "Edit in Confluence" link - only if you have Edit permission of course - and "Confluence" tab in the top left.
And another showing a Word document, stored in a SharePoint document list, that's securely embedded in a Confluence wiki page via a macro, opened with a single click inside Microsoft Office and saved back to SharePoint. Neat!
The Connector allows you to leverage the best capabilities of each application from within the other:
(read more in our new, funky, Panic-inspired feature tour)
One word: customers.
We've had a lot of customers ask us how to get Confluence and SharePoint to work together - today we're providing the answer. For example, Accenture is a huge customer of ours and a partner. They deploy both SharePoint and Confluence to their customers - they can continue to do that, but now they can integrate them, search across them and embed content between them.
With over over 4,100 enterprise customers, Confluence is no market minnow - but by comparison SharePoint has over 80 million deployed seats. That's a lot of opportunity.
I'd like to echo again what Steve said:
"We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft must lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win Apple has to do a really good job." - Steve Jobs (see the video)
Confluence often competes directly against SharePoint, but they can also be extremely complementary. As I said in my presentation, the wiki market at the moment is such that the competition is not so much from other wikis but from email, shared drives, intranets and the like. It's about upsizing the pizza rather than taking two slices.
We think for customers that use both SharePoint and Confluence (and there are a lot of those), this Connector will be fantastic.
Partnering with Microsoft makes most entrepreneurs quake in fear. To be honest we've actually found the process to be quite pleasant. We're avidly a Java shop through and through, but that never came up as an issue. Everyone we dealt with at Microsoft was more than helpful whether it be on a marketing and a technical level - and for that I must thank them.
Web services were the real winner here as the entire integration is made possible by the SOAP stacks in .Net and Java, and the ultimate pluggability of Confluence and SharePoint.
If you want to find out more, you can read our press release, Microsoft's press release, the Connector website, or just download it today.
If you're at the Web 2.0 conference, Jonathan and I will be demonstrating the Connector at the Microsoft booth quite a few times over the next few days.
Come say "G'day" and let me know your thoughts - good, bad or indifferent.
Mark Pesce's keynote to close the conference was - well - one of the most entertaining and informative presentations I've ever seen at a conference - and I go to a lot of conferences.
He talked about mob mentality, unbreakable networks, mobile telephony, free wifi and all manner of other topics - weaved together with YouTube and Robot Chicken clips. Fantastic. If you want to read the transcript, he put it on his blog but you'll want to see the podcast to get the full experience.
For those interested or those who couldn't attend, here are the slides from my presentation of Organisational Wiki Adoption (or view online):
The presentation seemed to be generally well received, with quite a few great questions afterwards and already one blog fan.
Isn't slideshare wonderful? It certainly seems to be gaining some dominance (from my totally unscientific view point) of the embedded PowerPoint/presentation-in-blog market. It's the only one I see used on any real regular basis.
FYI I set myself the challenge of doing an entire 1 hour presentation with no bullet points - and succeeded! I was even running quite a bit over time so had to run through the last few slides very fast.
Off to SF next week for two weeks if anyone is around for a drink or 5!
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