
Atlassian acquires Trello for $425M - SwaroopH
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-acquires-trello/
======
zoom6628
Very happy for the folks at Trello. Great outcome for a great tool. Seems lots
of JIRA-haters in the comments but lets get back and look at this event. The
folks at Fog Creek brought us FogBugz, Stackoverflow, Trello.

We should celebrate their success because its events like this that create the
motivation for some of us to go create something that "stands on their
shoulders" or competes with them or creates some new paradigm of how tasks can
be managed. Fog Creek is almost the ultimate startup - they keep it small, do
things right, stick to their craft. What is the result? Regularly bring
fantastic products to the world. Anybody contemplating how to get setup and
run a software startup should start by reading most/all of joelonsoftware and
then the later blogs about SO and Trello.

Yes Im huge fan - because i applaud geeks that put heart and soul into their
craft as well as running their business and getting great outcomes like this.
Would love to see more of it.

0.2c

~~~
solipsism
Hmm... How long does a company have to be around until it's no longer
considered a start-up?

~~~
oblio
Plus Fog Creek is more on an anti-start-up since it explicitly did not want to
grow fast at all costs. That's why Trello was spun off.

~~~
dx034
Do all start ups have to grow at all costs? I know it's standard for most
start-ups to accept as much VC money as possible and find ways to spend it,
but there are also young companies that don't need VC money and are
successful. Don't know why those shouldn't be start-ups.

~~~
closeparen
Because we already have the terms "small business" and "ISV" to refer to small
companies which are happily making small profits and not trying to take over
the world.

~~~
taneq
Like Trello was?

------
bhouston
This makes sense. Atlassian is good at making money from its services and it
is increasing its overall ecosystem here.

Github moves really slow in comparison. I guess Github is more focused, but
there are a lot of contrasts between Github and Atlassian, and in terms of
making money I think Atlassian is doing a lot better.

Has Github acquired anything significant? Github should have acquired Zenhub
(which is Trello integrated into Github for the most part) instead of slowing
trying to recreate it -- although I guess Github has better code purity if
they develop it themselves, but it means they move slower.

~~~
rb808
It makes sense mainly because Trello is a competitor to Atlassian and its best
to kill it now before it takes too much market share.

edit: Yes right now there might not be an exact competitor but in a few years
it could easily match everything Jira does.

~~~
ryanSrich
Is Trello really a competitor though? JIRA and Trello couldn't be more
different.

I'd think Trello and Asana are much closer competitors. JIRA is like an over
engineered spaceship with more features than anyone could learn in a lifetime.
Comparatively Trello functions more like a Prius. Priuses and spaceships don't
compete.

~~~
farkas
We don't view JIRA and Trello as competitors.

JIRA shines in areas that (a) have workflow and (b) require repeatable
processes across a number of people.

Once you have 20+ people on a project, you need repeatable processes.

In cases like bug tracking, project management, customer service, help desks,
HR onboarding and hundreds others you need workflow.

Trello shines in areas where you have (a) small teams or (b) require ad-hoc
semi-structured data.

In small teams, even if repeatable process would help you, it's not worth the
cost of setting up a system - you achieve it by social means.

Trello also has many, many use-cases where you want to start something quick,
or personal. In this case it really shines, with near-zero friction to get
started.

Scott, CEO Atlassian

~~~
makmanalp
This. I hear a lot of whining about JIRA, which is fair since it's a huge pain
to configure and learn all the quirks of, but usually it's overkill for those
folks (perhaps myself included right now).

But the folks who have a working process and a large number of people and
teams are usually complaining the other way round: that no tool supports their
workflow. Which is where JIRA shines. I don't know another tool that can be
configured to such ridiculous detail.

The Trello acquisition makes total sense because it fills in that gap that
JIRA is bad at.

------
alberth
This is a great acquistion for both parties.

1\. Trello was smart in only taking $10M in VC funding [1]. This allows for a
40x return for it's investors. If Trello were like many other startups, they
probably would have taken too much VC money and got themselves in a situation
where the VC wouldn't sell unless it was $2B+.

2\. Atlassian now has a product that is loved by many developers and business
people alike. It will easily be interegrated into their existing stack and it
complements their products very well.

TLDR: Both Trello & Atlassian were smart in this acquisition. Couldn't be
happier for them (and as a user).

Edit: typos

[1]
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/trello#/entity](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/trello#/entity)

~~~
calcsam
$10M in funding implies a valuation of $50-100M, which means a 4-8x return not
a 40x return.

~~~
dkrich
Also, I'm pretty sure that investment wasn't for 100% ownership, so it's not
like that $10 million turned into $400 million. The return would have to be
proportional to ownership percentage.

~~~
jtmarmon
yes that's exactly what the parent is saying. 10M at a 100M post money
valuation is 10% of the company. 10% of 400M is 40M - a 4x return

------
SonOfLilit
Open letter to Atlassian:

Trello are an amazing team and an amazing product, and what makes the product
so amazing is how domain-agnostic it is. They refuse at all costs to add any
feature that helps use Trello in one specific way over others (e.g. lists =
stages in task lifetime, cards = tasks; lists = assigned people, cards =
tasks; lists = dates, cards = events, ...), and that made Trello equally
useful as a Kanban board, a CRM, or for a beer microbrewery tracking its
different barrels and the stages of brewing they are at. The best thing about
Trello is when you start organizing your board one way, then organically drift
towards a more natural way to organize them, sometimes without noticing as you
do. Trello is for processes that you're not sure yet about the right way to
manage.

Atlassian is all about development team collaboration. Trello can be used for
that, but not anymore than it can be used for brewing beer. Trello shines when
you don't know in advance how you will want to manage a project. If Trello
became a dev collaboratin tool, I would stop using it for dev collaboration
because there are better specialized solutions for that. Keep Trello general.
Please.

~~~
mhp
Thank you for the kind words.

I promise you Atlassian understands why Trello is so successful. You described
Trello's core strength perfectly - and this one of the reasons they are
committed to keeping it as a standalone service.

(disclaimer: I'm the CEO of Trello)

~~~
farkas
I want to add to what Michael said above.

In meeting with Michael, and discussing how we could work together, Michael
could not be more clear that Trello's success is predicated on is breadth and
its appeal to many different use-cases.

This is most clearly displayed in their inspiration page, that includes many,
many use-cases:

    
    
      https://trello.com/inspiration
    

Keeping this strength alive will be key to Trello's long-term success.

Scott, CEO Atlassian

~~~
ilaksh
Hello, you received a reply in another comment about adding more time tracking
and reporting to Trello.

This goes right to the core of all of the issues/conflicts bundled into this
acquisition from UX details up through to target users and culture clash.

Time tracking is a manager-oriented feature, not a producer-oriented feature.
The users producing the work usually resent things like fine grained time
tracking and comparitive producer reporting because it distracts from actual
work, treats creative or complex processes as though they are part of an
assembly line, encourages micro-management, pits quality against time, and
emphasizes wage servitude.

Managers can use Trello to stress out their employees too, but not to the
extent that JIRA-ish tools enable.

The problem is you are selling to managers who love to micromanage their
employees and have nothing better to do than fiddle with configuration,
reports, or have meetings with the people they hired to do that.

This is why developers who are smart will probably try to protect themselves
by pre-emptively replacing Trello with one of the dozens of free or
inexpensive clones before you can start corporatizing it and their company.

------
joemaller1
I'm a big fan of Trello but I dread using Atlassian products. I do not have a
good feeling about this.

Hopefully Atlassian can learn from what makes Trello so wonderful instead of
JIRA-ifying it into oblivion.

~~~
throwaway5752
Funny how much opinions can differ. I've used them both professionally and I
think Trello scales poorly above 5-10 people while Jira is the least-worst
option for running a project at any team size.

~~~
slantyyz
Fogbugz (also created by Fog Creek) is actually a pretty good alternative to
JIRA.

~~~
problems
Fogbugz seems to really be pushing their cloud stuff though, so I basically
ruled it out instantly when I was researching options - it's unacceptable to
have to host our code and tracker off-premises on hardware we don't control.
Whereas even a small team can run JIRA or GitLab on their own hardware for a
very reasonable price.

~~~
slantyyz
They still offer an on-premises version though. IIRC, their on-prem version
price was fairly reasonable (that was almost 10y ago though)

~~~
anildash
(I'm the CEO at Fog Creek.) We've updated the on-premise version of FogBugz to
be completely in sync with the hosted version, so all the latest features are
on both now.

~~~
problems
If you're willing to talk publicly, what's the pricing like for a very small,
self-hosted group? I'm talking 3 normal users, might scale up to 5 or so.

We're probably too small to be worth your time, but JIRA is offering $10/yr
for up to 10 users, $10 more if you want the JIRA Agile features too.

~~~
anildash
Our pricing is here, you can check it out for yourself:
[http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/pricing](http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/pricing)

In short: We cost a little bit more, but include features that are separate,
add-on products for Jira, and generally software developers are a _lot_
happier using FogBugz. If you want to know more, just drop us a line; don't
want to be too spammy here.

~~~
problems
Just want to confirm - those prices hold for the self-hosted "On Site" version
too, where you don't have to provide any management of the data and hosting?

------
Communitivity
This saddens me, and I suspect the future Trello will be a much different
animal from what it is today. It could be better, but my gut says not.

~~~
msimpson
I'm optimistic in that there may finally be a self-hosted version of Trello.

~~~
Toenex
Whilst not as well produced as Trello,
[https://kanboard.net/](https://kanboard.net/) is self hostable.

~~~
djm_
If we're going for OS Trello clones, Wekan [1] is another choice.

[1] [https://wekan.io/](https://wekan.io/)

~~~
tshannon
Yep wekan + sandstorm is a fantastic combo.

------
aioprisan
There's an open source clone of Trello that you can self-host:
[https://wekan.io/](https://wekan.io/)

~~~
knocte
Gitlab also recently made their issues-UI very Trelloish. And Gitlab is
opensource too.

~~~
knz
Github also added "Projects" (basically Trello with integration to your issues
etc) in September 2016.

[https://github.com/blog/2256-a-whole-new-github-universe-
ann...](https://github.com/blog/2256-a-whole-new-github-universe-announcing-
new-tools-forums-and-features)

------
sanguy
This is really bad as Atlassian is like a prize winning show pony -- great
marketing and webinars but once you get deeply into the product usage you find
all sorts of problems and open issues. BitBucket has been waiting for 2FA for
5 years! Bambo was recently semi-retired going against a lot of users
investments. And these are just recent.

I would not expect wonderful things for Trello and thankfully it appears they
got their money out up front.

My words of advice to anyone looking is to stay away from Atlassian at all
costs. Once your in too deep you probably are trapped - which is what they
count on.

~~~
mitchty
I love their response to open issues like: we'd like to be able to delete pull
requests.

Response: what a silly notion, no

Or another one I found recently: we'd like to comment on code that isn't
within 10 lines of a changed file. You know, because one line change in file a
can impact stuff elsewhere. Or even in another project but the chances of that
happening are more slim than a tachyon hitting an atom as it passes through
earth.

Response: Good idea, here's stuff we did this year, and here's other stuff we
do. (aka the non committal middle finger)

It sucks because atlassian products are 80% of the way there, but the final
20% polish never seems to arrive. And its been years.

~~~
rbbitbucket
We appreciate the frank feedback, but I have to disagree with the
interpretation.

I really hate that we can't say yes to every feature suggestion, and what we
_are_ able to talk about seems to come across as non-committal to some. The
fact that a suggestion is open means we think it has merit too (we close
"silly notions"), it then becomes a matter of priorities.

\- Roger, Bitbucket Server PM

~~~
mitchty
That may be the case. However when such tickets are open for 6-7 years with no
update the general viewpoint everyone I know that uses Bitbucket has is that
it will never be a priority to Atlassian.

Adding things like large file storage support is cool, I guess, but when you
never use it its rather a case of appearing to prioritize certain market
segments over others.

I know I've read the article that states how you prioritize, with a major one
being usage patterns. But I wonder just how accurate a metric that is given in
my specific group, we've started to avoid using the review tooling in
bitbucket because its almost impossible to use to accomplish the goal.

Unless the idea is for Bitbucket to have a completely minimal set of features
and for anything useful to pay license fees for plugins I can't quite make
sense of how the priorities are decided.

~~~
rbbitbucket
I think you've hit on a really important point. In isolation, a particular
suggestion might be something of a papercut with a workaround. An unwanted
pull request, for example, isn't going to stop others from getting their work
done. But, if there are enough of these things that happen to affect a team
together, it all adds up. It sounds your team is in that boat, and people not
wanting to use the review functionality is a serious concern. Whether or not
that's uniquely the case, I'd love to discuss further to make sure I properly
understand your experience. If you're willing, please email me (rbarnes
atlassian com) and we can set up a call.

------
deepuj
This is depressing. Trello is a beloved software for a lot of people. It's sad
that Trello decided to sell off to Atlassian. I can't believe the same company
that makes Jira is going to run Trello. SourceTree is the only software that
they make that doesn't suck.

~~~
mhp
The Trellists made Trello. And the Trellists are going to keep working on
Trello at Atlassian. Atlassian understands that Trello is unique and beloved
and they definitely do not want to mess that up.

Read this article that Jordan Novet wrote. I know seeing is believing and you
will have to wait and see, but I agree with everything Jay Simons says in this
interview.

"During the interview, Simons took time to assure me that Atlassian wouldn’t
ruin Trello." [http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-is-buying-my-
bel...](http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-is-buying-my-beloved-
trello-for-425-million/)

(disclaimer: I'm the Trello ceo)

~~~
BinaryIdiot
To be fair I've been a part of 3 acquisitions and have seen this story play
out tens of times with beloved software. It _always_ starts out this way. "The
original folks are going to run it, not the new company!" "Things will stay
the same" yadda yadda yadda.

1-3 years down the road, it'll be a different story. It'll be unlikely that
the executive team will stick around past whatever agreement they signed with
Atlassian.

I'm skeptical. I've yet to see this work out with a company I worked at or
followed (yes yes I know, Instagram but I never followed them so I wouldn't
know how or if they've changed). I'm sure it can and has happened. But you
have an uphill battle :)

~~~
inglor
I think WhatsApp and Waze are both pretty good examples of high profile
acquisitions that played out this way.

I also feel like (and I realize many disagree) that YouTube largely kept its
"feel" and didn't turn into Google Videos 2.0.

Of course there are plenty of examples of exactly what you describe. I feel
the same way about Java, Hudson (lol) and plenty of other acquisitions.

~~~
meerita
This is a minority sample of companies that survived post acquisition. There
is a vast example of companies that doesn't.

~~~
Sebguer
I mean, it's a minority of companies that survive period.

------
rkrzr
Trello has apparently about 19 million users. And I would bet that the
majority of them are not the typical target audience of Atlassian products
(i.e. software development teams).

So I wonder if they are mostly aquiring the user base here in order to expand
their potential market?

~~~
Retr0spectrum
Just to add my 2 cents, I've worked with a dev team that used Trello for
project coordination.

~~~
nerdponx
I'm a data scientist and I've been using it as an informal Kanban board
because JIRA is way too complicated-looking for me want to even try to learn.
Trello is about as dead-simple as it can get. There's already too much in my
brain.

~~~
xenadu02
Bingo... that's the whole idea here. Small teams within larger companies and
small companies can use Trello. When they grow up (or need to interact with
the rest of the company) they use JIRA. In fact I would expect JIRA
integrations that make it trivial to convert a Trello card to a JIRA task,
probably with an option to automatically convert a checklist into subtasks.

This acquisition makes total sense; Trello and JIRA target mostly non-
overlapping market segments and there are some easy low-hanging integration
fruits to be picked. I'll also bet Trello becomes a deal-sweetener going
forward. License JIRA and for +15% you also get Trello for your whole company.

~~~
creativityland
Very well said, the larger the company, the less flexibility it has in
choosing the right software for the entire company. Smaller teams can move
quicker, faster, and tend to find their own solutions within larger
corporations.

------
lstodd
Good night sweet prince.

Jira and Confluence are epitomes of corporate red-tape molasses. Not only the
process tends to get tangled to death in all the features everyone gets a
bright idea to use, but even without them it wants just too much hardware.

A measly company of 30 ppl|3 years history and you're scratching your head to
blood keeping the basic actions not taking more that 5 seconds while
attempting to not pay 10x license cost for the hardware.

Too bad there aren't many alternatives.

And thank god I'm not using Trello. It's dead, people it's dead.

------
SwaroopH
Atlassian's blog post on it: [https://blogs.atlassian.com/2017/01/atlassian-
plus-trello/](https://blogs.atlassian.com/2017/01/atlassian-plus-trello/)

------
DCRichards
I can only imagine it went something like this...
[http://imgur.com/Yf9Hz4J](http://imgur.com/Yf9Hz4J)

~~~
Dr0Dre
Your link goes to a 404.

~~~
DCRichards
Oops, I was lazy... [http://imgur.com/Yf9Hz4J](http://imgur.com/Yf9Hz4J)

------
willvarfar
So Fog Creek - makers of Fogbugz, which lost out bigtime to JIRA - have now
sold Trello to Atlassian? Is there nothing left of Fogbugz?

~~~
ccostes
They spin out each of their products (Stack Overflow, Trello) as separate
corporations so Fog Creek didn't own Trello.

Edit: I guess the spinning-out doesn't say anything about ownership (though
the article does say Trello did a round of funding after the spin-out)

~~~
stonemetal
Stack was never owned by Fog Creek was it? I thought the only relation was
that they shared Joel as a co-founder.

~~~
willyk
that was my understanding as well, although there has occasionally been stuff
written that suggested more too.

------
hackergirl88
Here is a snapshot of what Bitbucket has launched over the last year:
Server/Data Center: [http://blogs.atlassian.com/2016/12/bitbucket-server-year-
rev...](http://blogs.atlassian.com/2016/12/bitbucket-server-year-review/)

Cloud: [https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/09/07/bitbucket-
cloud-5-mill...](https://blog.bitbucket.org/2016/09/07/bitbucket-
cloud-5-million-developers-900000-teams/)

\- Merge checks \- Bitbucket Pipelines (Continuous delivery service in
Bitbucket Cloud) \- 2FA \- Universal Second Factor (U2F) \- Improved SSH \-
Support for multiple SSH keys \- Build status API \- Smart Mirroring \- Git
LFS (including the embedded media viewer only in Bitbucket Cloud which allows
for better large file uploads) \- Smart Commits (allow repository committers
to process JIRA issues using commands in your commit messages) \- reviewer
status on pull requests \- Code search (Server only currently) \- 0 downtime
backups \- code review at commit level \- default review in pull requests \-
pull request merge strategies \- Deploy Bitbucket Data center with AWS \-
iterative reviews for pull requests \- pull request focused dashboard \-
Bitbucket Connect add-ons (deploy from Bitbucket with AWS, Azure or Digital
Ocean)

------
kevando
Can we all start using Trello clones as the tutorial substance? So in case
Atlassian screws it up, we have 100s of developers that know how to re-create
it? :D

~~~
konart
[https://zenkit.com](https://zenkit.com) for example. Really like it so far
(not trying to run from Trello, as I don't use it much anyway)

~~~
sororke
Thanks so much for the mention, we're glad you like it! For anyone looking for
more info about Zenkit & where we're headed, see here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13022663](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13022663)

------
bjacobel
Some of Atlassian's previous acquisitions have turned into products mostly
shunned by the developer community (Hipchat, Bitbucket) - I hope they've
learned what went wrong since then, but my gut says Atlassian isn't very good
at integrating external teams and supporting their products. Hopefully Trello
won't go down the same path.

~~~
egeozcan
Who is shunning Bitbucket and why? Something happened that I missed?

~~~
bjacobel
It never comes up in the same breath as GitHub and GitLab. The major
differentiator for Bitbucket that's the primary reason many people I know have
Bitbucket accounts - that they offered free unlimited private repos when
nobody else did - doesn't differentiate them anymore.

~~~
egeozcan
GitHub neither offers _free_ private repos nor Mercurial support. For me and
many others, Mercurial support is a big thing.

Bitbucket may still be less popular but I don't see it being shunned. That's
what made me wonder. I wouldn't mind if you said that it was _not given enough
attention_ or even that it was _being ignored_ (Although I'd still disagree).
Maybe bad choice of words?

------
nodesocket
_" In July 2014, Trello spins off from Fog Creek and becomes Trello, Inc.
naming Fog Creek co-founder Michael Pryor as its CEO. The company raises $10.3
million in a Series A round of funding led by Spark Capital and Index
Ventures."_

Spark Calital and Index Ventures must have gotten a nice huge return, Trello
only raised $10 million.

~~~
jessmartin
All depends on what valuation they got in at. Trello was pretty well on it's
way by July '14, so it's possible the valuation was already pretty high. Even
so, I bet it was a 3-5x multiple, at least.

~~~
nodesocket
Assuming a $50 million valuation at the time of investment, quick back of the
napkin is 8x return right?

------
bryanrasmussen
Anyone know a good simple trello competitor that I can import my trello boards
to really quick.

~~~
IanCal
I've heard wekan mentioned a lot (open source alternative).

Here's the migration docs: [https://github.com/wekan/wekan/wiki/Migrating-
from-Trello](https://github.com/wekan/wekan/wiki/Migrating-from-Trello)

~~~
tajen
Wekan is really a copy of Trello, it's awesome. Installing it through
Sandstorm.io makes it very easy, but I don't have production experience with
Sandstorm.io.

------
ridruejo
I wonder how much revenue was Trello generating? It seems it was 10MM middle
of last year [http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2016/05/23/trello-
get...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2016/05/23/trello-get-serious-
about-big-businesses-as-it-passes-1-1-million-daily-users-and-triples-
sales/#7b75d1376ce2)

------
taytus
I like Trello, I use it often. $450M... for a todo list. Yes, I use it. Yes, I
think is useful. Yes, I think this valuation is absolutely crazy.

~~~
dangoor
"I like Facebook, I use it often. $365B... for a message board. Yes, I use it.
Yes, I think it is useful. Yes, I think this valuation is absolutely crazy."

Not many todo lists have millions of users, including some that pay actual
money for the service. Having looked at many project management tools, Trello
has absolutely nailed certain aspects of the user experience that many of the
others get wrong. Try pasting an image into a card, for example.

It's not a perfect tool, but if you tried to recreate it yourself, you'd
probably start to realize why they netted $450M.

~~~
taytus
Not quite the same right? FB is way more than a message board. And even back
then when they were just a MB, they had millions of users in no-time.

~~~
dangoor
My point is that TodoMVC is a todo list. Trello is a lot more than that.

FB has 3 orders of magnitude more value than Trello with 2 orders of magnitude
more users.

------
buro9
What we really need from Atlassian is yet another syntax or markup to learn
for a product in their suite that is different from all of the other products.

I'm glad that now they've acquired another company, we have the opportunity to
soon look forward to this.

------
kenrick95
From [http://blog.trello.com/trello-atlassian](http://blog.trello.com/trello-
atlassian)

>> We will continue operating as a standalone service, and we will continue to
integrate deeply with all of the tools available out there that help people
collaborate (and you can look forward to some great integrations with HipChat,
Confluence and JIRA).

~~~
lmm
So that's all well and good as far as it goes. But e.g. I currently rely on
integration between Trello and Discord, which is in competition with HipChat -
is there a risk of them killing that off?

------
brunorsini
Really eager to hear what Spolsky has to say about the acquisition (nothing
yet either on his blog or on Twitter).

~~~
krallja
His company is Stack Overflow, not Trello, so he probably doesn't have much to
say.

~~~
briandear
Have a look at the history please. Trello came out of a company Joel created.

~~~
krallja
I started working at Fog Creek Software in 2006. Joel hasn't worked for Trello
since 2014.

------
josh_carterPDX
Great acquisition for Atlassian and I'm super pumped for the Trello team. The
people here who are concerned that the culture will change are ill informed
and likely haven't gone through an acquisition themselves. This makes perfect
sense and look forward to seeing what's next for both companies.

~~~
eCa
> The people here who are concerned that the culture will change are ill
> informed and likely haven't gone through an acquisition themselves.

No, but many have been users of companies that ended their beatiful journey
soon after being acquired.

I'm cautiously optimistic that Atlassian don't want to waste half-a-billion
dollars.

~~~
josh_carterPDX
It's good point and a valid concern (Parse). But I think there is value there
for both Atlassian and Trello. I don't think this will be a bad thing for end
user.

------
xiaoma
Looks like too many customers decided they JUST MIGHT HAVE TO GO OVER TO THE
AUSTRALIANS! So many that "the Australians" bought the team. This is poetic
and this is why I'm glad blogs often stick around.

[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/07/20/fruity-treats-
cust...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/07/20/fruity-treats-
customization-and-supersonics-fogbugz-7-is-here/)

~~~
krallja
FogBugz is still wholly owned and operated by Fog Creek Software.

Joel is the CEO of Stack Overflow, and does not work for Trello (nor
Atlassian).

~~~
xiaoma
That essay was written about 5 years before Trello was spun out of Fog Creek.
You can see Joel in the photo on the WSJ article covering that story:
[http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/07/24/digital-
white...](http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/07/24/digital-whiteboard-
trello-spins-out-of-fog-creek-with-10-3m/)

To connect the dots, it's overwhelmingly likely that Atlassian was in fact
"the Australians" referred to and Atlassian's tremendous growth (which was
foreshadowed in Joel's piece) is _why they could_ by Trello 7 years later.

It's interesting to look at in JOS in retrospect because he literally blogged
the birth of company A, its competition with company B and it's spin-off C,
which B later bought.

------
yeasayer
Why did Fog Creek approved this acquisition? With products like Stack
Overflow, Trello and GoMix I thought they want to become a big player on the
market of software development. Why sell our own assets?

~~~
jon-wood
My sense is that Fog Creek is more of an incubator than a traditional software
company now, albeit one which is incredibly selective about what they invest
in. Stack Overflow and Trello are both independent companies which started out
as side projects for Fog Creek, and I imagine GoMix will eventually go the
same way.

~~~
Kiro
Fog Creek should still be the majority owner, no?

~~~
runevault
I would assume either FogCreek as a company or Joel and Pryor as owners
thereof (especially Pryor since he was CEO of Trello).

------
bonaldi
I'm a big fan of Trello and Atlassian both. Personally speaking, if all they
do is take away the crippling "add on" restrictions in Trello for solo users,
this will be a huge win.

------
sidcool
Not sure how JIRA will marry Trello. They are different in their user base. I
use both but for very different cases.

~~~
tajen
Yes – Just like Bitbucket Issues didn't marry JIRA. One core difference
between Trello and JIRA Agile is, in Trello you can't hide tickets that you
don't want right now in the sprint – In JIRA Agile, you only put a few issues
in the sprint so the board looks clean.

Anyway. Not sure why some people want to move away from Trello now. Is it that
they don't want an identity connection between JIRA and Trello (SSO or
similar)?

~~~
oakesm9
I think it's likely that people who use Trello appreciate the simplicity and
Atlassian aren't exactly known for creating simple software (speaking as a
past Jira user/admin).

I had the same feeling of "oh well, what else can I use in the future" when I
read this post.

~~~
nyanev
You can try [https://ora.pm](https://ora.pm)

~~~
ohstopitu
This is great! But it's fairly lacking in some features. Any word on release
of API docs so devs can integrate their workflow into it?

~~~
nyanev
We are planning to open API but it will be after the launch. What kind of
features do you want to see?

------
tejasmanohar
Sounds like a move to capture the lower bound of the market. Right now, lots
of teams leave Trello to something more robust like JIRA after crossing
somewhere between 5-10 people, but with this, they're on Atlassian from the
beginning. I also think the JIRA team could use some UX help from Trello :P

------
ggregoire
Not related at all but I interviewed for Trello in 2016, the meeting was super
cool (video call in the browser, nice RH girl apparently very excited about my
profile), the job was full remote, they needed help to move from Backbone to
React and they have millions of users (!) so I was quite hyped. Then I
received an email of refusal from another guy containing only a quote from the
CEO. I asked for feedback (probably my spoken english was not good enough but
I wanted a confirmation) and the guy replied me that he couldn't say anything
for legal reasons... and the same quote from the CEO. Cold shower experience.

About the topic: we used JIRA in my last job and it was not that bad. Curious
to see what they are going to do with Trello.

~~~
shostack
What was the quote?

~~~
ggregoire
I just looked at my emails and actually my message was not exactly accurate. I
received the refusal from the CEO and this email contained the following
phrase:

> _sometimes we have to make very painful choices and pass over some
> extraordinarily promising candidates._

Then I asked for feedback and the next reply from the recruiting team quoted
this phrase.

They didn't give me any feedbacks for legal reasons (?).

~~~
adrienne
Yes - that's very typical for US companies, because they're afraid of being
sued. It definitely shouldn't be read as cold or uncaring on the part of the
people responding to you; the worst that can be said is that they were paying
too much attention to their lawyers. :D

------
Flenser
I suspect this is as much about getting a dev center in New York, away from a
tapped-out Sydney startup scene that is hostile to bringing in overseas
talent, and having a brand with a reputation as a good employer; as it is
about acquiring the IP or user-base.

------
unixhero
[http://wekan.io](http://wekan.io)

Libre open source alternative.

Can be self hosted or self hosted from within Sandstorm

------
lmm
So I guess we'll see JIRA rebranded as "Trello Server" and it will become
impossible to search for any help on it?

------
oliebol
If I was the Atlassian CEO reading this thread, I'd be really worried. There
are a _lot_ of comments from developers with zero faith in Atlassian's ability
to create (or even preserve) a great product.

------
gm-conspiracy
So, pardon my ignorance, but I wasn't aware FogCreek spun it off into its own
entity...

But, what was the $10mil of VC money used for?

Has Trello evolved since taking the money (features)?

Over $300mil in cash for kanban cards? Nice exit.

------
bane
What Trello has needed since day-1 was a self-hosting option. Many companies
won't allow their customers to use it since there's no formal agreement on
data protection.

------
agentgt
I have a hard time understanding how Trello is worth that much money. Does it
really cost 1/2 billion to get 19 million users and a Trello like app built?
Is the Trello team really worth that much? Was Trello that threatening to
Atlassian? There are a lot of there other successful collaboration SaaS out
there as well (e.g. Asana). This is not like social/content services where
there can only be one (or very few e.g. instagram, github, whatsapp).

~~~
CptJamesCook
Think about this from the perspective of a purchase like Google -> Youtube.

Google paid $1 billion for Youtube. It's now conservatively worth $50 billion.

That means they could have 50 large acquisitions go to zero and still be
breakeven on their Youtube deal.

You can use the same economics for most deals.

(to say nothing about consolidating the large apps in this space -- maybe
Asana is next on their list?)

------
AnnoyingSwede
Not the biggest fan of Atlassian (but an admin for 10 years). I am trying to
figure out what product to use for project management, and what path Atlassian
will take.

They started with Jira Agile, which became Jira Software where you could plan
agile sprints. Assuming this was the future i was a bit surprised to see
Portfolio pop up, but i am assuming this project will be shut down at some
point in favor of a new Trello for Jira? Or?

We currently bought Softwareplants BigPicture & BigPicture Enterprise, but
also played with TempoTeam Planner.

I see both Trello and Atlassian's CEO being here, please let you loyal
customers know what your intentions are so we can plan for our futures.

To clarify: My largest fear is not that they screw up Trello, but that once
more developing resources we pay ever doubling license-fees for will be
reallocated to making sure Trello works well with the rest of the stack, and
becomes a big seller.

It's all about new bells and whistles with Atlassian, while we the end-users
are begging for bugfixes or feature-requests for decades. This is clearly
reflected in not patching bugs in current version but instead force users to
upgrade, while sometimes losing functionality we loved just to keep the
application safe.

Jonas

------
randomdata
As a causal user of Bitbucket and Trello at work, I thought Trello was an
Atlassian product until today. Makes it an obvious acquisition choice.

------
mfukar
Atlassian follows MBA 101[1]: if you're selling an elastic inferior product,
you can always buy out the competition.

[1] As portrayed on The Wire

------
nurettin
Atlassian has supported me with educational tools and discounts. Their git
services and customer support has been the best for me and I became a paying
customer.

Glad they bought trello. I'm hoping they integrate it to the existing issue
workflow and make it a better product than it is. And there is a good chance
of that happening.

------
tomelders
Atlassian: We make the software other people make you use.

~~~
nimchimpsky
bitbucket I choose to use, for now.

------
SippinLean
Dear god please don't make it anything like HipChat

------
jjking
Jira is by far the worst and most convoluted application that I have used.
It's slow a d very horribly designed that I even wonder if they did tgat on
purpose. Heck you have to shell out $3000 for your team just to learn how to
use it.

Hopefully they'll leave Trello as it is.

------
nottorp
I bookmarked this comments page as reference for Trello alternatives in case
Atlassian ruins it :)

------
longwave
I hope they can learn from Trello to improve JIRA Agile. JIRA seems much
better for software projects with organised sprints and large numbers of
tickets, but front end performance is terrible and the overall UX feels like
it could be improved significantly.

~~~
maxxxxx
That would be nice. JIRA Agile definitely could use a push to get a better UI.
It also doesn't support real world bug tracking well.

------
cjCamel
Microsoft Planner was released as a free add-on to Office 365 at the backend
of last year, which seems to be a direct "good enough" competitor to Trello's
business & enterprise plans. Wonder if that was a factor in the sale?

------
george_swip
Don't sweat it. There are other services to migrate to. In my startup[1] we've
added a quick Trello Migration in just a day.

There is now a new market share to fight for

[1][http://www.getswip.com](http://www.getswip.com)

------
ravenstine
I just hope they leave the design alone and don't try enforcing their hideous
design philosophy upon it. (Why do big tech companies think that making all
their software look the same helps anyone or makes them more money?)

------
Jdam
How to get rich:

1\. Create an awesome ToDo list

2\. ???

3\. Profit

~~~
spacehacker
I think most of it is about the brand; about buying a name which is already
imprinted in millions of minds. The technology alone is probably only worth
1-5% (?) of the price.

~~~
christophilus
Agreed. Maybe the 2. ??? was "How the heck did they go from unknown to a
recognizable brand?"

~~~
weavie
I think it is more something like :

1\. Write really popular blog.

2\. Create Stack overflow and make it the goto for developers.

3\. Create todo list

etc..

The brand was there before they even started the todo list. All it took was a
blog post "We are going to create a todo list now" and it was pretty much set.

------
jjgomo33
Too much casualty that Asana is suffering a DoS problem right now.

------
jedahan
Can anyone point me to any acquisition that resulted in a net benefit to the
customers of either company/product?

Or maybe I should not consider the users of a product the primary customers?

~~~
wwalser
Atlassian: Confluence - Went from very small user base to hundreds of
thousands of users. It's a great tool for internal content management (think
HR docs, decision documentation, meeting notes, etc.).

HipChat - Small user base and unscalable architecture. Hundreds of thousands
of users and loads of resources to rewrite nearly all of it's backend. Still a
work in progress but it's been very stable for the past year and the clients,
which were all non-native web views, are coming along nicely.

Fisheye/Crucible - Small user base, unprofitable. Now has thousands of users
and is hands down the best code search and review tool that lots of people
don't know about.

SourceTree - Massive expose for a very small tool that wasn't well known
before acquisition. Many new features, has remained stable throughout.

Greenhopper - Was a small, profitable, plugin. Now built-in, completely
integrated hundreds of new features and has adapted well to various trends in
Agile (scrum, kanban).

Despite this thread, which shows HN's consistent (and ironic) distain for (or
is it lack of understanding of?) successful software companies, Atlassian is
actually great at creating great products out of questionable acquisitions.

Outside of Atlassian:

Whatsapp is free now, people like free. That's neat. To people crying out
privacy, honestly… privacy is the only thing that VC backed b2c companies sell
that's actually worth real money. They were eventually going to open that
pandora's box.

Twitch gets to continue existing and it's ad-free for prime members now as
well. I like free :).

Firebase is better than ever. Let's all cry a single tear for Parse, we all
wanted a massive Mongo cluster backing our data, right?

~~~
shimms
Small detail: Confluence wasn't an acquisition, but Atlassian's second product
(JIRA was their first).

~~~
wwalser
You are correct. I thought that Conf was an acquisition of a very basic wiki
product that Atlassian built into a enterprise content collaboration suite but
I was remembering incorrectly. The story was that Confluence's main
development line was maintained by contractors instead of in-house developers
and after launch dev was pulled in. My mistake.

------
antoniuschan99
Trello is one of the best SaaS I've used.

Atlassian used to be loved before prior to its IPO.

I'm not too happy with Atlassian acquiring Trello. How much of Fog Creek will
still be part of Trello?

~~~
montecore
Fog Creek is dead, long live Fog Creek

~~~
antoniuschan99
Why do you say that? They just sold Trello for half a billion and still have
Stack Overflow. I'm sure Fogbugz is profitable although it's not anything
stellar and it looks like they have a new product

~~~
montecore
They shared an office with Trello, but it spun off long ago, so they made no
money on this sale. Same goes for Stack, totally separate company. AND now
their closest ally, Trello, has been sold to the direct competitor of FogBugz.

Thus, Fog Creek is dead, Long live Fog Creek.

------
apapli
Confluence is starting to move in on SharePoint's turf, I've witnessed it
first hand. The two products really don't compare, but for Digital teams who
just want to get something going Confluence is way easier.

I think this acquisition will add to the Confluence vs SharePoint story and
make Atlassian more attractice.

IF (it's a big if) Atlassian are planning to move into the
intranet/productivity tools space this acquisition is really sensible.

------
SBCRec
I love Trello!

At one of my internships (Elec Engineering) with a mining company they used
Trello to organize the majority of their work.

After that experience I started using Trello to organize all my daily stuff.

I had it to organise my book reading list, book purchase list, Quarterly and
Yearly goals, Job application status, plan and execute on my thesis,
assignments and side projects.

I can't believe how much value it has provided me for free!

It's good to see them get rewarded with a nice buyout.

------
omouse
one of the largest players in the project management game acquires another
tool and it's a-okay because there's loads of competition; but realistically,
trello was one of the competitors to JIRA that actually could hold its own
when being reviewed for use by non-developers. JIRA has been the default
choice of many companies and while not a monopoly I'd say it's approaching
that status.

------
alnitak
Well, since Atlassian is in the mood of acquiring, I have made an analytics
and data processing system that plugs into JIRA to create custom reports in
ways that are not possible currently by JIRA.

It also integrates externally to JIRA regardless of whether it's a cloud or
on-premise version.

We have been using it internally successfully since a few months, first in my
team and then in others in our company.

Would you guys be interested at Atlassian?

------
kevinburke
Congrats to Atlassian and the Trello team!

------
ChuckMcM
Makes a lot of sense although I expect at least one of my former co-workers is
really is really irritated because they hate Jira and were feeling "forced" to
use it. Perhaps with this acquisition there will be a 'local server' option
which is something some companies really look for.

------
mydpy
I kinda see Jira and Trello as separate target markets. Jira = Enterprise (for
me) and Trello = Small-to-mid-sized companies and personal use.

My company uses Jira (correctly) and it is great - for software. I keep all of
my personal lists in Trello.

Also - VersionOne <<<<<<<<< Jira

~~~
creativityland
Similar here. I don't see Trello and Jira overlapping for the majority of
users. For simple tasks, there are still alternatives like wunderlist and
taskcade.

------
ohstopitu
wow! I had recently decided to go all in on Trello for my personal use and I
was in the process of making a Trello-Gitlab powerup (just like Trello Github
powerup).

I wonder what the future of Trello is - both as a customer and as a software
dev (I loved their remote work policy).

------
mrmondo
Such a shame, I wonder how long it will take Trello to turn into heavy
'enterprise' bloatware like the rest of said companies products. There are a
few good open source alternatives out there now so I'll personally move to one
of those.

------
hashkb
So... it's going to stop being free and start sucking?

~~~
hehheh
What, you don't like decade+ old highly useful and yet ignored issues?[0][1]

[0]
[https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1369](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1369)

[1]
[https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-3821](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-3821)

PS: Here's a bonus issue that took 10 years to resolve (renaming users!):
[https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1549](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-1549)

~~~
tokenizerrr
Here's one I ran into just an hour ago:
[https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/5814/reify-pull-
req...](https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/5814/reify-pull-requests-by-
making-them-a-ref)

Not as old, only 5 years. Yet this is blocking my switch to a new CI server
(GoCD) and makes building pull requests in general a pain.

------
mtw
Congrats to Trello and Fog Creek Software!

I've moved on to Zenhub instead of Trello, but it's indeed a really nice
product that can be used by many, and not just people in software development

~~~
colept
ZenHub is nice but it's also overwhelming with information that's not
pertinent or contextual.

------
hermitcrab
If they kill the free tier, it will help our desktop card-based planner:
[http://www.hyperplan.com](http://www.hyperplan.com) ;0)

------
calypso
Trello is about to become an add-on for Jira that won't work 95% of the time
and be jammed down your throat by a scrum master as the only tool for the job.

------
desireco42
When I hear Atlassian, I hear Jira and we all 'love' Jira. I don't know, I see
how this is good for Atlassian, not really how it is good for me.

~~~
desireco42
Is there really anyone who things this is a good deal for us users?!

------
kaushalmodi
I am really glad I never started using Trello for my task organization. It
lacked the basic act of marking tasks as Done. I needed to manually drag the
done tasks to a 'Done' board.

On that note, my hunt for good task organization app led me to Todoist! It's
awesome! It has great web and Android apps and great API which I intend to
hack at some point to create an emacs interface for it.

So glad that Todoist wasn't bought by Atlassian. My biggest gripe with
Atlassian is that it natively doesn't support Markdown in Jira. It uses its
funky own markup that's really bad.

~~~
ylecuyer
For me the best todolist would be like a tree where you would be able to
divide tasks into sub tasks and see every thing in one screen.

I haven't been able to find such app so as for now I'm stuck with pen and
paper

~~~
kaushalmodi
If you are open to emacs, check out org mode. It's awesome!

[http://orgmode.org/features.html](http://orgmode.org/features.html)

------
jarnix
They bought 19M users for $425M, it's $22 per user, I don't know how many
users pay for the service?

PS: their pricing page says $10 / year and user

~~~
kamara
Trello has a free tier, not all of those 19M pay.

------
8bellyoctopus
Screen schemes, issue types and permission schemes. 10 years in Jira and more
confusing by the day. Coming to a trello board near you!

------
miheermunjal
my experience with Atlassian products tells me that this will likely become a
"third project type" to JIRA: Scrum, Kanban, Trello (or whatever generalized
name is given). They feel like different products.

Or Atlassian is using this to go after competitors like A-Ha! which it doesn't
currently serve (i.e. non software development projects)

------
Kanbanchi
Seems like it's the right time when we have made an easy importing from
Trello. Many people migrate to Kanbanchi.

------
dirtyhenry
Interesting match. Trello is a lightweight/fast tool. Jira is quite the
opposite. Where are they going to meet?

------
perlpimp
I've tried a few alternatives and what i dread is lack of keyboard navigation
in some. esp about a board.

------
jMyles
Somebody who knows this pattern better than me: are we likely to see Trello
shut down within 3 years?

------
nythrowaway
congrats! Anyone know how much the payoff for a standard dev at trello is in a
deal like this?

------
znpy
Oh god... Let's hope they don't spoil it. I just made a paid subscription...

------
huhtenberg
Oki-doki, time to move.

Does anyone know or, better yet, use any good self-hosted Trello alternatives?

~~~
stephanee
Try Active Collab. It does wonders for my team.

------
newsat13
If anyone is looking to selfhost, I recommend wekan or kanboard on cloudron.io

------
sjg007
Awesome. Nice to see that it was a spin out from Fog Creek as well. Well done!

------
foxhop
Please may I have "convert this trello card into a bitbucket issue"

------
landsat365
Is this why there hasn't been a stackoverflow podcast in a while?

------
jpmattia
Just to prepare: Does anyone have a way of exporting Trello data?

~~~
jglovier
Looks like you can export any board as JSON by going to Board Menu > More >
Print and Export (from [http://help.trello.com/article/747-exporting-data-
from-trell...](http://help.trello.com/article/747-exporting-data-from-
trello-1)).

There's also a Chrome extension to export a board to a spreadsheet:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/export-for-
trello/...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/export-for-
trello/nhdelomnagopgaealggpgojkhcafhnin?hl=en-US).

------
Jean-Philipe
Is it just me, or does the price seem a bit low?

------
faragon
$425M is a lot of money. Was Trello profitable?

------
Zelmor
Time to build a Trello spinoff! Who's in?

------
j-pb
Time to cancel that gold subscription then.

------
g105b
How long until Atlassian acquire FogBUGZ?

------
bencollier49
Is Slack next? Could they afford that?

~~~
rrdharan
I don't think anyone other than Facebook/Microsoft/Apple/Google can afford
Slack.

~~~
WorldMaker
...and Microsoft tried, was spurned, and built Teams and is pushing Teams and
Skype to attack Slack where it lives.

~~~
zoom6628
They need to get Teams right before they are attacking anything except the
coffee maker. I hope they do get it right cos we use s4b at work. I really
want them to make that a capable product so that i dont have to use a basket
of products to get communications done: yammer, s4b, email, FTP, sharepoint,
internal systems (that really just need a bot to chat with instead of a app
UI),....and many others.

------
barisser
Goliath Acquired David

------
rednerrus
Atlassian tries to be too much to too many. They are going to ruin Trello.

Checkout zenkit.com.

------
tzury

        > $425M / 716 comments => $593,575 per comment

------
snackman
_dread sets in_

------
lucaspottersky
clearly overpaid... not worth. my opinion. =)

------
justinzollars
oh no. : (

------
brilliantcode
Is it just me or the acquisition amounts decreasing?

Soundcloud - $500M potential buyout

Trello - $425M

I'm not aware of any other. All those 10,000 startups world wide and only a
couple gets bought out few IPO. The chances of a payout doing a VC funded
startup is marginally slim despite what PG wrote in his articles nearly 10+
years ago.

Coupled with rising interest rates, it seems like the ride is coming to a slow
crawl but this is just my gut feeling.

There's no better time to bootstrap than ever. Control your own company with
no outside influences. You don't need billions of dollars. If you can double
your day job salary with a SaaS then I think that's a huge success.

Here's to a happy & successful 2017 for the rest of us bootstrappers on HN.

------
andrewvijay
Kinda makes me happy for trello's founders. Have been using it as a reference
site for HTML and CSS development. I really liked those buttons! :D I hope
atlassin doesn't make it bloated and shitty. Hope it stays good for the small
teams as it has ever been!

------
peterschroeder
Oh yeah! Just leave everything exactly how it is now and I will keep on loving
Trello! :)

