Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins. Source: supplied.
While Australia tends to be a laggard in company value creation compared to the US, Germany and even Israel, the last decade has seen the creation of three Australian giants.
Afterpay didn’t exist in 2014 and Canva is less than a decade old. Yet Atlassian founded in 2002 is valued at more than $70 billion, Afterpay almost $35 billion and Canva $19 billion.
If Atlassian was listed in Australia (rather than on the NASDAQ), it would be our seventh largest public company by market value.
To be clear, we’re talking valuations, not profit or even revenue. And we’re in the midst of a fairly gigantic bubble, led by the US global tech behemoths, so there’s every chance Atlassian and Afterpay’s valuations may not be sustainable (the founders of these businesses seem to agree, with all shrewdly selling plenty of stock in the past year).