Technology History | 350 Bush Street — The Home Market Was a Tenth of the Business

Atlassian's prospectus splits its 2015 revenue three ways: $159.4 million from the Americas, $127.7 million from Europe, $32.4 million from Asia Pacific. Asia Pacific is the region that contains Australia, and it was about a tenth of the business. That is the awkward arithmetic behind every decision the company made in its first fifteen years. It was built in a city whose working day barely overlaps the one where most of its customers live. At the listing, the American office was 1098 Harrison Street in San Francisco. The cover of the current annual report gives 350 Bush Street, Floor 13. The building is worth the detour. Nineteen storeys of glass rise directly behind a 1923 temple front with six Corinthian columns, designed by Miller and Pflueger for the San Francisco Mining Exchange. The name carved into the pediment belongs to a later tenant. SAN FRANCISCO CURB EXCHANGE took over the hall in 1928 and left in 1938, absorbed by the San Francisco Stock Exchange. After the exchanges came the Chamber of Commerce, then a title insurance company, and then nothing at all. The hall stood empty from 1979. Developers spent those decades buying up the parcels around it and working through approvals; the tower behind the facade was not finished until 2018, four decades after the assembly started. The old trading floor is now the lobby. Atlassian, Twitch and Publicis took the offices above it. Read the frieze from the footpath on Bush Street and you are looking at the front door of an Australian software company's American headquarters. Photo: Coolcaesar, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons