I understand that being small leaves you vulnerable to the predatory tactics of big players, but I see that as a consequence of lax regulation. There are too many mono/duopolies already, and the bigger they get, the harder it will be to split them apart.
This, I think, is the core of why. It's not that being a medium sized publicly traded company is immoral or unprofitable - it's that in a public market your stock is priced on future earnings and choosing to be smaller than possible means your tech can be bought for cheap. If you choose to stay smaller than maybe you could be - you're leaving ROI on the table in a lot of peoples' eyes (even if you're right and you'd lose money trying to get huge). So, as your stock price drops off to reflect the expectation that you're not going to get super impressive earning growth, you start to look appealing as an alternative to developing technology for an industry giant. Why spend $5bn over 10 years to develop competing services when you can borrow $5bn today, buy atlassian, get a tax break on the debt and start making a play for market dominance with the atlassian tech?
If you want a small or medium company, staying private is a more sustainable approach.
Salesforce vs. Siebel being a great example of exactly that.
While I agree with your statement, I had to look that up because it sounds interesting. In 1999, the year Salesforce was founded, Siebel was the dominant player in the CRM field, holding 45% of the market, so not precisely a small company.
More than a budget war against a deal-with-the-devil startup, what killed Siebel was its inertia. Siebel sold expensive in-your-premises software, while Salesforce sold SAAS, and emphasized a cheaper cloud model. Siebel didn't react until 2003(!), when it released its first cloud version. By tht time, the expertise of cloud solutions of Salesforce made Siebel look like an amateur.
Siebel surpassed 1 billion revenue in 2000, while Salesforce did it until 2009. They had their chance.
I still agree that even if a small company did everything right, another one with more money and no fear of heavy losses would eat their lunch even if their product was inferior.
>In 1999, the year Salesforce was founded, Siebel was the dominant player in the CRM field, holding 45% of the market, so not precisely a small company.
Sure, but CRM was a new market back then (many argue that Siebel invented CRM) and Siebel was roughly equal in revenue scale to Peoplesoft and c. 10% the revenue scale of Microsoft. It would be very hard for anyone to argue that they ran out of space to grow (vs. choosing to slow down growth for profitability, especially in light of the dot-com crash)
>More than a budget war against a deal-with-the-devil startup, what killed Siebel was its inertia. Siebel sold expensive in-your-premises software
One great way to stop being an expensive piece of software and to grow faster is to lower your prices (but then you run the risk of becoming unprofitable).
Also worth noting that in 2000, Siebel spent c. 33% of revenue on Sales and Marketing, while Salesforce chose to spend 500%+ of revenue in the same period.
>while Salesforce sold SAAS, and emphasized a cheaper cloud model. Siebel didn't react until 2003(!), when it released its first cloud version.
Again, Seibel chose to spend 13% of revenue on product development in 2000. Easy to crush competition, but only if you're willing to spend for it.
>Siebel surpassed 1 billion revenue in 2000, while Salesforce did it until 2009. They had their chance.
Exactly, and choosing to harvest profit out of that $1bn of revenue too early is what did them in (though arguably, they are still probably something like $1-2bn of market cap for Oracle).
Seibel is and always will be the perfect example of disruption/the innovator's dilemma, which ultimately boils down to 'if you're comfortable with your current profits and not worried about growing top-line revenue, you will likely lose both.'
Markets pull towards potential, and the potential of Atlassian is valued higher than it's stable state.
Except the government got addicted to printing money and throwing it around to boost GDP (and taxes) through bullshit business models and bullshit investments. They literally created framework where being an overstaffed money-bleeding behemoth creates higher returns for the shareholders than being a lean-and-mean niche business.
If you don't go the unsustainable blitzscaling route you'll be outcompeted by those who do, just as Atlassian did to plenty of smaller, more sustainable competitors.
> I understand that being small leaves you vulnerable to the predatory tactics of big players, but I see that as a consequence of lax regulation.
That's nice, but that doesn't make it go away. Do you have a plan to make the regulation non-lax?
1. Companies provide useful products to customers.
2. Growth means that you built products that more customers paid more money for, because it was useful.
3. Thus, growth means your company contributed more to human prosperity.
