Unlike a number of high-growth technology businesses that also have fetched private valuations in the billions of dollars, Atlassian is both growing and profitable. It’s unusual by several other measures: a private company more than a decade old; a technology darling not from Silicon Valley; more than 51,000 customers, including Cisco Systems Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which used some Atlassian products on the Mars Rover.

“Among the 145 companies or so that are valued above $1 billion there aren’t very many that could point to fundamentals like Atlassian put forth in its IPO,” CB Insights Analyst Matthew Wong told Bloomberg. “It really puts the spotlight on this way of doing things for a tech company: really paying close attention to the fundamentals, operating on profit, not relying on outside money.”

Gold standard

Atlassian was not only the last scheduled IPO in 2015, it also set the gold standard for public offerings not only for 2015 but for the years ahead in the tech sector.

Sure, many of this years IPO’s have surged by high percentages on debut but what we’ve seen with many of them is that after that crazy first few days the reality of their mostly always loss-making enterprises sees their shares fall.

Atlassian by comparison priced their shares at a realistic level because they didn’t need to float to raise capital to run the business, and their fundamentals mean that while the market will watch for profit growth, they actually have the pure novelty (when it comes to tech IPO’s) of being profitable to begin with.

A personal note of congratulations to Atlassian founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brooks: good things happen to good people.

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