
Trello Spins Out of Fog Creek With $10.3M - moritzplassnig
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/07/24/digital-whiteboard-trello-spins-out-of-fog-creek-with-10-3m/
======
johnyzee
Cool to see Fog Creek succeed like this. I've been following Joel for almost
fifteen years (the now defunct Fog Creek message boards were some of the best
on the internet for a couple of years).

From the beginning Joel made a simple assertion: Hire great people, give them
a great environment, then sit back and watch them kick ass. He said this
before all of this became conventional industry wisdom (and probably played a
major role ushering it in). With products like CityDesk, FogBugz, and Copilot
failing or seemingly meandering, it didn't really seem like much would come of
it. But they kept at it and look at them now. I guess good software _does_
take ten years (give or take) [1].

Of course it didn't hurt that Joel is one of the best bloggers who ever done
it, and I'm sure at least Stack Overflow benefited tremendously from being
seeded with Joel's captive audience, but they have still executed the hell out
of it and continue to do so, and obviously continue to spawn awesome stuff on
the side.

[1]
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html)

~~~
petenixey
I agree. It's so strange now that I will often make references to Joel or his
essays in talks and no-one will know who I'm talking about. I always have to
explain that back in the day there were two big software essayists - PG and
Joel. No youngsters knows Joel's stuff now - the internet's great at getting
you today's news, yesterday's tends to get lost underfoot.

Joel if you're listening please come back to blogging. You're a great writer
and I think you've got such an utterly different perspective on things now
after having done SE and Trello that it would be a massive waste for you not
to share it back with the world again.

~~~
ssalenik
Really? How young are you talking about? I graduated about a year ago and
almost everyone I knew who was really interested in writing software read at
least some of his stuff from joelonsoftware...

~~~
arthurjj
I think it's a cultural osmosis thing. If the older developers mention stuff
like "We're a 9 on the Joel test"[1] or "Obviously we shouldn't do a rewrite,
what are we Netscape"[2] or "Are code base is large enough that the tooling
requires static typing"[3] People will read the essays. If all anyone is
talking about is tech-crunch, probably not

[1][http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html)
[2][http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html[3]...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html\[3\]https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/is-
weak-typing-strong-enough)

~~~
thesz
You messed with your third link.

I've read it and I'd say that Steve Yeggie is making generalizations about
static type systems using greatest common divisor of them all: Java.

He attributes the need for patterns to OCaml type system, where they aren't
needed, for example. Or assumes that you need all interfaces up front.

Both those assumptions are not true!

I think SY is good at jealous humor like his post about "academy found an
software engineer who cares about Haskell". That's his natural domain. I
believe everything he writes is homorous and jealous, that way I don't have to
think he is just plain stupid.

------
filmgirlcw
I _love_ Trello. We use it as our editorial workflow board at Mashable
(meaning it is where stories live from assignment (or sometimes conception) to
the various editing/publishing phases. We use it to visually see what is
publishing next, to see embargos or scheduled posts for different areas and
more importantly, to see what everyone else is working on.

To me, that's the hallmark of a good tool: when it can be used in an industry
it really wasn't designed for (publishing workflow) as if it was built for
that purpose.

Props to Joel and to Trello!

~~~
ehurrell
I think especially with management tools like Trello robustness is a huge
factor, everyone seems to have their own series of cobbled together processes
that kind of work for them, but with the feeling that maybe if they could
digitise $PRODUCTIVE_METHOD it would be more productive. Trello's robustness
to this helps make it really valuable.

------
DigitalJack
I like trello and use it for personal stuff occasionally, but the work I do
just can't be hosted somewhere else. Legally. So I hate web apps and cloud
this, cloud that, mostly because they are no good to me.

The type of work I do would change before the need for controlled local
hosting will--in other words it might be that mine line of work will become
obsolete or transform so dramatically that the requirement of controlled local
hosting is moot. That would be nice, but I'm not holding my breath.

~~~
fencepost
Since they're apparently planning paid Business and Enterprise versions, I
wouldn't be surprised to see at least one of those be a fully in-house
solution. If they're not letting people do their own installs they may follow
the path of the Google Search Appliance.

On the other hand, it may not be _affordable_ depending on the size of your
shop, but that's a different matter.

~~~
mhp
We are planning _new features_ for those products, but we've already been
selling those things for over a year: [https://trello.com/business-
class](https://trello.com/business-class)
[https://trello.com/enterprise](https://trello.com/enterprise)

We also have no plans to make an in-house solution. While the tide has not
100% turned, in most places at big companies like Amazon and Microsoft, they
can already use SaaS solutions (you sign a big contract, but even if your app
is on AWS, msft employees can use it). For the companies that cannot, the
added complexity to development and support is likely not worth it (for us).

~~~
smussmann
Somewhat off-topic, but on
[https://trello.com/enterprise](https://trello.com/enterprise), you say that
you provide "24 x 7 x 365 incidence response" where I think you mean "24 x 7 x
365 incident response".

~~~
smarx
Regardless of what word comes next, it should probably be "24 x 7 x 52".

~~~
pc86
Since a business closing does not typically occur in week-long increments,
probably not. "24 x 7 x 364" is generally understood to mean one day off a
year (usually Christmas Day in the US), and "24 x 7 x 51" would not be clear
at all.

------
vojtech
Co-founder of Trello Joel Spolsky wrote a blog post about today's news. Worth
reading if you're interested in the thinking behind the deal:
[http://indexventures.com/news-room/news/trello-
raises-10m-se...](http://indexventures.com/news-room/news/trello-
raises-10m-series-a-funding-from-index-ventures-and-spark-capital)

~~~
Flenser
The original post on his blog has more images:
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2014/07/24.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2014/07/24.html)

~~~
T-zex
Thanks for the link. I was concerned, that the top story might not contain a
Flat Wight coffee picture.

~~~
jacalata
do you mean flat white?

------
wsxcde
Great to see Trello, Fog Creek and Joel doing well.

Joel/Fog Creek are one of the few entities in the startup ecosystem that I
read about and think to myself, I want to be a CEO like Joel and build a
company like Fog Creek.

A lot of startups claim they want to "change the world." And I think Joel can
actually claim to have done that thanks to his influential blog and the humane
company culture he's setup at Fog Creek. And this is without even counting
stack exchange.

~~~
cwilson
100% agreed. He is one of the first to inspire me at a young age to become an
entrepreneur myself, and it's stuff like this that continues to inspire me:

"That architecture is all the stuff I spent ten years ranting on this blog
about, but y’all don’t listen, so I’m just going to have to build company
after company that runs my own wacky operating system, and eventually you’ll
catch on. It’s OK to put people first. You don’t have to be a psychopath or
work people to death or create heaps of messy code or work in noisy open
offices."

------
jhonovich
So Trello is not currently profitably? "Fog Creek is profitable and could
afford to fund Trello development to profitability." Given its growth rate and
presumably low sales / marketing expenses, it would seem to be easy for them
to be profitable.

What is their revenue? There's 4.5 million 'members' though less than 25% have
used it in the last 28 days, from what the chart shows
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2014/07/24.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2014/07/24.html)

Is it just that very few of these people are paying currently? I do see they
are adding a business class tier now.

~~~
gecko
I am no longer a Fog Creek employee (I left to join an education startup a bit
ago), so this is not an official opinion, but anyway:

Joel wants Trello to grow a lot faster than Fog Creek could bootstrap it. In
my personal opinion, a big reason why Copilot and Kiln never quite made it was
that we didn't have the developer resources to dominate the market when we
were in a good position to do so. Because we insisted on bootstrapping, we
necessarily had very small teams, meaning that competitors, who were willing
to go into debt to have larger teams, were able to come from behind and
surpass us in both marketing and features. In other words, while both products
are successful and profitable, they likely could've been a lot _more_
successful and profitable if Fog Creek had thrown a lot more resources onto
them back at the beginning.

What you're seeing with Trello is an attempt to avoid that happening again.
Trello is currently in a strong leadership position; taking VC now to secure
that will pay for itself later. While Trello could likely be profitable very
quickly if Fog Creek wanted it to be, doing so would require a very small team
bootstrapping itself again, meaning that Fog Creek could repeat the same
mistake a third time. And that's why you're seeing this.

~~~
mhp
I don't agree with what you wrote at the end. It's not a "mistake" to
bootstrap and have a much higher probability of success with a lower possible
return. I know that's probably not what you meant, because you wrote earlier
that we could have been "more successful", but it also ignores what would have
been a much higher risk and loss of ownership in your assumption.

Joel and I are naturally conservative in nature and having succeeded at Fog
Creek with what we set out to do (building a successful company where devs
wanted to work) allowed us to swing for the fences with Trello and Stack
Exchange. The risk is much higher. The reward is bigger, but we own a lot less
of those VC funded companies.

------
uniclaude
That's great!

Trello is one of those apps that you can dismiss too fast because you think it
doesn't do enough, but which to come back to because everything else is too
complex. I've been using it extensively, and it has almost gone viral around
me. As in, every time someone needs to manage a project, I hear "Hey, what was
this simple project management software you told me you're using for
everything you do?", and there comes a new Trello user.

I even remember using it for managing my own time when I was working for a
large Japanese company that was using excel spreadsheets to manage projects,
so I could have a clear interface and use a quick and dirty piece of JS I
wrote to generate the sacrosanct Daily Reports I was asked to provide.

~~~
mhp
Sometimes you need a detailed vertical app - like a bug tracker, or an
applicant tracking system or a CRM. But a lot of times, you don't. You just
need something simple because your needs aren't that complex. And using
something you are familiar with is easier than trying to learn something new.

Trello is the always going to be a horizontal app. And sometimes people will
need to move to something else to solve their problems. If you are using
Trello as an ATS and you start getting 50 applications a day, you are going to
go nuts. You need to switch to Jobvite or Greenhopper. If you have a team of
100 devs trying to track your bugs, you want to use FogBugz or Jira or
Pivotal.

Joel used a metaphor that I like: The verticals are like stones on a beach and
Trello is the sand that fills in all the space between.

In the future I think you'll see the Trello product evolving to support those
other verticals and adding value (i.e. quick overview) in the way Trello does
best.

~~~
twerquie
Or your needs are so insanely complex - as in project management - that
modelling the problem in any detail leads to a million features and an
inflexible solution.

------
weavie
It's incredible how such a simple idea could become so big.

I'm sat here trying to think up some grand scheme that's going to make me my
millions. Its a great lesson that really all I need is a simple idea. The key
is in the execution. Take that simple idea and develop (and market) it to
perfection.

~~~
andr3a
it's not a simple idea, it's a deep idea refined over decades and implemented
simply.
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban)

~~~
hamidpalo
I work at Trello. We actually don't think of Trello as Kanban. Trello at its
core is a collaborative list of lists. You can use Trello to implement a
Kanban workflow but Trello is not an implementation of Kanban. A lot of people
use Trello for things like to organizing their soccer teams where there isn't
a hint of Kanban -- each list could be a game and people add themselves to
indicate that they want to play.

~~~
NickPollard
I think the great thing about Trello is simplifying down to a pure visual
metaphor.

Trello is about putting lists of cards on boards. That's it.

You can use it to do all kinds of things, but it's a medium rather than a
framework. When I've tried other to-do list apps, or project management tools,
etc. they all end up becoming too restrictive. They try to teach you to do the
right thing in the right way, not realizing that it is different for different
people.

Joel himself once talked about Excel, and how for most people, Excel isn't
about spreadsheets, or formulas, or calculations - it's about laying things
out in a grid. That's it. People just want to be able to write things in
columns and rows, and colour them. And that simple behaviour is incredibly
powerful.

~~~
doorhammer
> "Trello is about putting lists of cards on boards. That's it."

100% this, for me.

That's how I'm able to get people to use it. They ask a lot of questions about
what means what and assume it's more complicated than it is. As soon as they
realize that the top level metaphor is seriously just a board with cards,
they're like "Oh! that's really cool. I can use this" and they're off.

------
andygcook
Does anyone know how this type of spin out works? I would imagine FogCreek has
an ownership stake in the company for "seed funding" Trello with resources.

~~~
mhp
It was a 355 spinoff. If you are into reading boring IRS guidelines, you can
start here:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Revenue_Code_section_3...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Revenue_Code_section_355)

tldr; imagine a stock split like Google did recently where the shareholders
end up with 2 different stocks.

~~~
moron4hire
Last time I worked at a company that did that, it was to dump their debts on
the old company and scurry off with the more promising projects so they could
raise more funding with the new company.

~~~
mhp
I'm pretty sure the 355 regs prevent you from doing something like that (not
that you couldn't just do it anyway, but that you might get caught if you are
trying to do something shady).

In our case, we didn't want to give up ownership in Fog Creek (which is
profitable) and the investors were happier with a separate entity.

~~~
te
How do the option holders in the parent capture their share of the equity in
the spinco in a transaction like this?

------
8ig8
FogBugz users: Did you know you can drag FogBugz cases into Trello cards?
Spolsky shared the secret...

[https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/433355023636897792](https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/433355023636897792)

------
nilkn
Is Trello getting its own office space or will it still cohabit the same space
as Fog Creek?

~~~
mhp
Currently cohabitating. Eventually will likely move. (Same as Stack Exchange's
history).

------
executive
We would use Trello if they added two things:

1) simple way to delete a card, list, or board (not this archive nonsense)

2) multiple lists in a column

~~~
jbigelow76
I wish cards could be tagged. I use labels for overall categorization but I
need tagging to tie cards back to our project management system (which I find
unusable for actual project management). Currently I just make the first line
of the notes my faux tag.

It's s minor gripe though, Trello is pretty great.

~~~
zo1
Trello has quite a good API that you can use. It's trivial to hook it into
whatever other system you happen to use. We linked Trello to our Redmine
ticketing system, and it works pretty well for our needs.

------
chucknelson
I've been using Trello daily for over a year now to keep track of projects and
tasks at work, and it has been great. While I sometimes freak out that Trello
alone holds my work to-do list (instead of nice, safe paper and pen), I have
yet to experience any significant downtime or lost data.

Good luck to them!

~~~
sciurus
You can export your data via their API. Here's one script for it:
[https://github.com/mattab/trello-backup](https://github.com/mattab/trello-
backup)

~~~
thedufer
You can also append .json to any board url to get a text copy of its data (or
.csv if the board is in a Business Class organization).

------
jogzden
It's really great to see good things coming Trello's way with all of this.
Those guys have worked ridiculously hard at it.

I distinctly remember them keeping Trello running through a disaster and
keeping all of it's users informed. Great job, guys!

~~~
libria
Yep, hauling buckets of fuel up the skyscaper stairs during Sandy
[https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/263460486203465728](https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/263460486203465728)

------
juvoni
Trello's simplicity and ease of use almost makes you feel like you're using
pen and paper and that's truly powerful and why so many people can learn how
to use it with so little onboarding.

Trello has a good balance of blending to your workflow and having your
workflow blend to it.

I was even able to find a clever way to use trello to manage all of my
personal reading: [http://juvoni.com/trello-book-reading-
management/](http://juvoni.com/trello-book-reading-management/)

------
Brajeshwar
Congratulations to Trello. I user Trello for almost everything, from planning
what to buy/not-to-buy, travel planning, to choosing a school for my daughter.

------
k-mcgrady
Great news, congratulations. I'm interested to hear what people think about
it's chance of survival now. As part of Fog Creek they started monetising
Trello and had a chance of building a long-term business. Now with the
investment there is greater risk they will end up acquired and shut down. On
all the Trello threads here people have always been very worried about that
scenario.

------
sahil_videology
Congrats on the funding from a happy gold member. I use it to manage (and not
forget) all the many small things I need to do or to keep track of ideas for
the future. One of the biggest features is that is does not mandate a workflow
because it's just boards with lists with cards. I use it in ways partly
inspired by Kanban, Getting Things Done, and the typical calendar.

------
ksec
$10.3M for How many %? And what is it value at?

I couldn't find the information anywhere.

~~~
mhp
We won't disclose that info because it just invites a bunch of unwanted
discussion about valuations. It's probably not too difficult to make an
educated guess.

~~~
andreash
$10M for 10%-20% = valuation of $50-$100M.

------
8ig8
> Fog Creek, which was founded in 2000 and is owned by employees

What happens to the Fog Creek employees? Do they have a stake in the new
companies?

~~~
mhp
Fog Creek employees keep on making Fog Creek awesome, and yes, they have a
stake in Trello Inc. (Some of the longstanding employees now even have a stake
in both Stack Exchange AND Trello).

------
mehrdada
> In 2010, the company spun off Stack Exchange Inc.

This is not what actually happened. As far as I remember, Stack Overflow had
nothing to do with Fog Creek per se, except for Joel begin a founder of both.
Stack Exchange Inc. grew from Stack Overflow Internet Services LLC which Jeff
Atwood and Joel Spolsky were founders of. Fog Creek did not make Stack
Overflow.

------
krosaen
After trying so many tools, pivotal tracker, asana, google docs, Trello was so
refreshing and easy to use I immediately became an evangelist. I think a key
feature is you can share it with non-techincal folks and it makes sense to at
least some degree right away. Yay Trello, happy you will be around for a long
time to come!

------
fred_durst
One of the biggest things I loved about Joel and the entire Fog Creek / SO
history is that it always felt like a company. A real business with real
people. Not a cartoon and not a sweatshop. I hope with this news Trello
continues down that path.

------
skrish
Amazing to see the journey of a a blogger & company I have admired for the
past 15 years. His blog was one of those inspirations for me to want to start
building my own business. Big fan of Trello here. Many congratulations.

------
chiubaka
Wow that's pretty cool. Didn't realize Trello wasn't already it's own thing.

What do you all use Trello for? I've tried a number of different task
management systems, including Trello, but I haven't yet found a use case for
Trello feels 100% perfect. Curious to hear how others are using it!

------
tenzinnorgay
Love how Trello is customizable to everything I want. Easy to integrate with
other services, utilize their card feature and generally make task management
easier. Very happy for the Trello and Fog Creek team. Look forward to seeing
how it evolves on its own these coming years!

------
doorhammer
disclaimer: There's absolutely no real thought about how I'd implement this as
I'm saying it.

I like trello _a lot_. I'm practically obsessed with it.

It works really well for my small teams and my personal life.

A couple people have said it doesn't scale well to larger teams (with
necessary ymmv disclaimers).

I wonder if that's because of how inherently formless and simple it is (which
I think is its strength). It's a very general metaphor that narrows to lots of
specific use cases easily. It'd be interesting if there were more optional
constraints you could add to boards/cards/etc to formalize a specific
workflow. I'm just shooting from the hip here, not sure what that would look
like.

------
zkar
Anyone else seeing lots of parallels in functionality between Trello and
Google Keep (keep.google.com). I have been using keep a lot since google got
rid of their google.com/ig homepage. Not finding a overwhelming reason to
migrate to Trello.

------
deevus
I love Trello. I have used it for several years now at work and for personal
projects.

One thing I would like to know is what the hell is Yammer? Microsoft bought
them out for 1.2 billion and I've never heard of it.

~~~
wmeredith
It's Facebook for enterprise. Basically, everyone in your company joins the
social network and you have a wall, and can post and follow others and
message, etc... My company has it and much like Facebook, I have an ongoing
love hate relationship with it.

I'm in a completely remote company of ~65 people, and it's purpose is likely
to replace some of the water cooler talk and serendipitous culture that you
miss out on in virtual work spaces. I don't think it does this, but I'm also a
pretty light user.

------
joshbert
Trello is such a fantastic tool, I use it every single day. It has stood the
test of time for me, unlike Evernote, Clipboard and many others. This is
fantastic news, kudos to the Trello team.

------
richardwigley
I would be interested if anyone has used this for project management?

~~~
JunkDNA
My team tried it several times over the first 1 - 2 years it was out. I have
not tried it recently. That said, at that time, we could never get it to
stick. It was good for high level stuff, but like all project management
software, we ended up constantly working to keep it in sync with reality. This
was especially acute when using github because for any stuff that was code-
related, we were basically duplicating tickets and tracking in both places. So
github tickets were the real source of truth and Trello always lagged. Once
that happens, the non-code milestones start to suffer as you start wondering
why you're doing all this in the first place.

Tracking issues in github (and we use FogBugz as well) has the benefit of
being where the "rubber meets the road", so it's effortless and transparent to
keep up to date. Merging non-code tasks (e.g. design work) with code is still
something we struggle to track and keep tabs on.

~~~
crazypyro
Sems like a potential opportunity for either Trello, or a third party?, to
provide an easy way of combining github issues/commits with Trello lists.

~~~
bryanlarsen
[https://waffle.io/](https://waffle.io/)

~~~
cwilson
We implemented Trello + Github sync with Waffle.io and it was as close to
perfect we could get without spending a bunch of time writing our own code to
do it. It still wasn't perfect however and I spent a lot of time making sure
things were in-sync, which on a normal schedule wasn't a huge deal, but when
fires popped up would become a very small priority.

I'm surprised no one has built a better way to do this. We tried syncing with
Zapier first (a company I absolutely love), but if I recall correctly it was a
one-way sync, and we needed it to go both ways.

------
sergiotapia
I wish Trello would allow me to keep track of time for individual cards. None
of this 'addon' nonsense, just bake it right in there. :)

------
ireadzalot
Kudos to Trello team! I use it everyday to track my personal work. I used it
on web and on mobile apps.

------
mark_integerdsv
Used Fogbugz at my second real job in the world. Read a ton of this guys
blogs.

Good on ya man!

