I gave you an upvote bc I mostly agree, but as a counterpoint...
Atlassian is a big company that is successful at what they do, bigger than Loom and presumably with more resources. So I am confident they could have just copied Loom's business model and maybe even implemented better to fit their needs, since they have staff in place. It would certainly involve staffing up where needed, but I think they could have pulled it off and saved money. Also, with an acquisition, now they ave to integrate Loom into the broader Atlassian org, which wont be trivial.
So there are legit trade-offs with an acquisition.
That being said, spending $1B on a acquisition also saves time.
It's not just about saving time. Acquisitions like these also help companies like Atlassian increase brand value because Loom is extremely popular and is a great product. Now Atlassian gets to claim all of that under their brand.
Along with existing integrations into other enterprise software (like confluence, jira, and zoom)
The compliance work for storing and distributing this data is already done.
The staff of experts that don’t need to be sourced by recruiters.
The new ability to prevent sites like Monday from integrating with it.
Not to mention the existing loom customers.
Reducing an entire company down to the simplest form of their product and comparing that to the price of the company is kind of dumb.