"Atlassian’s IPO Isn’t Really A Referendum on Unicorns" (TEAM)

From Wired:

Australian software company Atlassian will begin trading on Nasdaq at opening today with the symbol TEAM. The company plans to sell 22 million shares at $21 a share, which would give it a valuation of $4.4 billion—a big jump from its reported $3.3 billion last year.

Atlassian sells collaboration tools for programmers and software project managers, such as the bug tracking tool JIRA, which competes with IBM’s Rational; the instant message app HipChat, which competes with Slack; and the code collaboration and hosting site BitBucket, which competes with GitHub.

Atlassian’s IPO is being touted as a referendum on the prospects of other tech companies with valuations of over a billion dollars—often referred to as “unicorns.” If the public market validates the billions it was supposedly worth when it was still private, the theory goes, then maybe the froth around other unicorns isn’t so frothy after all. But Atlassian isn’t exactly representative of the unicorn crowd....MORE

...While a weak showing for Atlassian today would be certainly be a bad omen for other unicorns, a successful IPO for the company won’t say much about how investors will view companies like Airbnb (valued at $25.5 billion), Dropbox (valued at $10 billion), and Uber (seeking a valuation of $62.5 billion). Rather, Atlassian’s IPO may be more of a bellwether for tech companies further down the food chain—those that have bootstrapped, or taken relatively modest amounts of funding, and those with old-fashioned business models like selling software licenses to large organizations....