Technology History | 341 George Street — Two Dollars of Engineering for Every Dollar of Selling

In the year it went public, Atlassian spent $140.9 million on research and development and $68.0 million on marketing and sales.

Both numbers come from its own prospectus, for the year to 30 June 2015, against revenue of $319.5 million.

Enterprise software companies of that size normally ran the ratio the other way round, and the prospectus made a selling point of the difference, telling investors the company put far more into building the products than into selling them.

Distribution was the mechanism that made the ratio possible. Products were priced low, bought online without a salesperson, and spread inside organisations by the people already using them — 51,000 customers and more than five million monthly active users at the time of the offering.

Eleven years on, the ratio holds at a different scale. The annual report for the year to 30 June 2026 shows $3.27 billion of research and development against $1.54 billion of sales and marketing, on revenue of $6.57 billion.

The Australian headquarters named in those filings is Level 6 of a bank.

341 George Street was built between 1927 and 1932 for the Bank of New South Wales, to a design by Robertson and Marks, and the heritage listing records its official opening on Saturday 19 March 1932 — the same day the Sydney Harbour Bridge opened.

It stayed the bank's head office until 1970, when that moved to 60 Martin Place, and it went onto the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 2 April 1999.

Westpac sold the building in 2002 and kept the banking chamber at street level. The software company sits above it.

Stand on the footpath and look up at the arch over the entrance: BANK OF NEW SOUTH WALES is carved into the stone above the door Atlassian staff walk through.

Photo: Collywolly, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons