Technology History | Nasdaq MarketSite — The Australian Company That Listed as a British Plc

At 9:15 on the morning of 10 December 2015, two men from Sydney stood in a broadcast studio at 4 Times Square and rang the Nasdaq opening bell.

Atlassian had priced 22 million shares at $21 the night before, raising $462 million.

The range had started at $16.50 to $18.50, was lifted to $19 to $20, and the shares still priced above it.

Nasdaq's own market report put the opening trade at $27.48. The offer price had valued the company near $4.4 billion; by the close, after a gain of more than 30 per cent, the market was calling it closer to $5.8 billion.

The prospectus described what was being sold as Class A ordinary shares rather than common stock, and that wording is the interesting part.

The company listing on an American exchange was Atlassian Corporation Plc, registered in England and Wales, with its registered office at a London law firm's address on Primrose Street. The group had been moved to the United Kingdom the year before.

Australian founders, Australian engineers, a British legal shell, a New York listing: the arrangement ran another seven years, until Atlassian re-registered as a Delaware corporation in 2022.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's own records date the change from Atlassian Corporation Plc to 24 August that year, and the company's annual filings switched from foreign-issuer reports to domestic ones.

One more correction to the standard startup story. Atlassian had taken in $210 million before the listing, but through secondary sales in which existing shareholders sold to investors including Accel and T. Rowe Price.

None of it reached the company as working capital, and it had been profitable for ten straight years before it ever needed to be.

The MarketSite still wraps the corner of Broadway and 43rd Street with its curved screen, and TEAM has traded there since that morning.

Photo: ajay_suresh, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons