From lunch to acquisition: How Atlassian bought Trello

https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/21/how-atlassian-bought-trello/

by andytolt • 9 years ago

134 74 9 years ago

skrebbel• 9 years ago

I've always wondered what the Fog Creek people think about this. After all, their little baby got scooped up by their biggest competitor.

Is that good or bad?

jimnotgym• 9 years ago

I just hope they keep the free Trello up and running forever, and it stays simple on the surface at least.

I have this nightmare where one day I open Trello and it looks like Jira.

desireco42• 9 years ago

You are not alone in that thought.

openmosix• 9 years ago

I guess "it's good". With the traction they were having, I think they could have raised more money and stay independent. So I don't think it's "it got scooped up", but more Trello decided to sell to someone they liked.

segmondy• 9 years ago

Of course it's good or they wouldn't have sold.

jedberg• 9 years ago

Remember Trello is separate from Fog Creek. Until the acquisition, they were complementary products. Now they are still complementary but being offered by a direct competitor.

So the question is how do the people who were left behind at Fog Creek feel about something that was spun out of them now going to make their biggest competitor stronger.

mathattack• 9 years ago

I suspect the owners of Fog Creek are happy with the financial windfall.

krallja• 9 years ago

I'm proud of MHP and Trellists.

Seeing how successful Trello has become makes me sad for the lost potential of our former promising stars, like Copilot and Kiln.

p0wn• 9 years ago

"When we sat down, it was all about the vision and what we wanted to build,"

Blah blah blah. It's all about them benjamins. Who likes atlassian software? Shittiest software I've ever used. They have a shitty version of everything you could want.

Bitbucket, JIRA, HipChat. All suck. RIP Trello.

omouse• 9 years ago

Atlassian found their niche: enterprise sales. Because the buyer is not the user usually so it's way easier to sell shitty products.

paulddraper3• 9 years ago

"Shitty" is too far. I'd call it "adequate".

Atlassian's genius is having lots of adequate enterprise collaboration software under the same brand.

ptrptr• 9 years ago

From my experience Hacker News community dislike post like this but I have to agree, RIP Trello. Atlassian bought 17 startups and for better or worse they're not thriving.

tajen• 9 years ago

So BitBucket, HipChat, and so on, you say they're not thriving? Bb didn't even have git repos when they sold!

oblio• 9 years ago

Jira doesn't suck. It is extremely complex, especially if there is a (misguided) desire for agile plugins and such, by Jira on its own is quite usable. You must have not used their competitors to consider it crap.

Jira's default state in many companies is more likely proof of broken processes. Something which no tool can solve.

blowski• 9 years ago

If you like lightweight, fast apps then you hate Jira. If you like being able to tweak absolutely every single feature, then you love Jira.

It's nice to imagine an app with all the flexibility of Jira and all the speed of Trello, but it's probably a trade-off.

7ewis2• 9 years ago

Complex != Good

Have to admit, I haven't used any of their competitor's software, but just because you can change every single setting, doesn't mean people will want to. I'm pretty sure no one in my company fully understands it. Settings are all over the place, and even small changes require many clicks to get to where you need.

I know it's a different product, but if you look at Zendesk, it's so simple to get setup, and there are still many integrations to achieve what you need but all at the click of a button, in a friendly interface. It just works™...

bigiain4• 9 years ago

The corollary of Jira being "extremely complex" turns out to be that most Jira instances are not set up optimally - meaning that the experience for a lot of people is "this is crap".

I'm not sure the blame for that can be placed on Atlassian thouh - the problem space they're trying to solve is large, varied, and complex (perhaps _that's_ Atlassian's fault, trying to do too much?) I've yet to come across any alternative to Jira that solves a large subset (or superset) of the problems Jira solves, that isn't equally difficult and resource intensive to set up and customise for a specific company/team. Trello's a great example of a _much_ simpler (and on the surface much less "crap") piece of software, but it falls _way_ short of doing everything a typical Jira shop needs Jira to do... A 5-10 person bike shop building custom bikes? Yeah, Trello will probably crush it. A 10-20 (or50-100) strong dev team working on multiple complex projects? Nah - Trello won't solve all your problems.

Jira can _easily_ suck (and does, way too often). But it's almost certainly a config/training problem rather than a software problem.

underwater• 9 years ago

Complex Jira setups and bad management seem to go hand in hand. A bad manager will try and fix problems by introducing more process and avoiding the real issues. It lets them feel like they are doing something useful. And Jira is more than happy to let them do that. That's not a fault of the software, though.

eecc2• 9 years ago

Well, Jira has an 80/20 problem: it tries to do the 20% that satisfies 80% of the users (cases.) so far so good, but when you trip over one of the details that make up the remaining 80% you're SOL. JIRA-1330 is my favorite :)

Kiro• 9 years ago

How is Bitbucket bad?

baudehlo• 9 years ago

Bitbucket, unlike github, clung to a design of many servers connected to a big disk. GitHub instead went for many servers with their own disk and a distributed storage system. This means that bitbucket ends up being a lot slower in many operations than github.

Aside from that, it's fine.

ig1• 9 years ago

What makes you think Jira is worse than say BMC Remedy or IBM Rational ? - JIRA is certainly better than most of their direct competitors.

pjmlp2• 9 years ago

Oh the nightmares of using ClearQuest back in early 2000's.

zippergz• 9 years ago

Remedy is one of the worst software packages I've had the misfortune to work with, so saying something is better than Remedy is damning it with faint praise.....

pjmlp2• 9 years ago

Who likes atlassian software?

I do, and have been using it since Atlassian was a tiny startup.

Don't know any project management software as flexible and powerful, with integration with enterprise source control and bug tracking systems as Jira.

I really don't have any reason to suggest anything else.

eldavido• 9 years ago

This is an incredibly short-sighted comment.

Two CEOs sit down, culture had better be the #1 thing they discuss before one writes a check to the other for the better part of half a billion dollars.

Good M&A adds tons of value by combining two companies who are better together than separate. Bad M&A (Google's acquisition of Nest comes to mind) means fired CEO, delayed/ruined product launches, and incineration of nine-figure amounts of shareholder value. It all comes down to whether the two companies want the same thing.

I won't argue that Atlassian software has no rough edges UX-wise, but that isn't the point. The point is that, when one company buys another, they'd better have roughly the same idea of where they want to go, otherwise you may as well fire up an industrial blast furnace fed by shareholder capital.

riprowan• 9 years ago

This is all 100% true yet still quite naive.

Bad M&As happen all the time. Good ones are the exceptions not the norms.

"Companies" are groups of people, and their leadership.

What the leadership wants very often has nothing to do with the company's long-term future.

This is all observable behavior happening all around us.

edejong4• 9 years ago

Personally, I think Trello is pretty crappy. Unlike you, I'll give some examples:

- Not usable without browser plugins

- Referencing cards from other systems impossible (no stable urls)

- Referencing other systems from cards difficult. For example, try referencing a commit in a repo

- Not all actions on cards are logged

- Referencing cards from within cards in a stable way is impossible (hello web!)

- Limited keyboard control

- Changing certain things concurrently does not warn user

- Only two part hierarchy

- The complexity of over engineering processes shows up in a year in both JIRA and Trello. But in Trello you can't blame the program.

- Drag and drop frustrations in Firefox

- Side scrolling nightmare when pasting long logs because of narrow design of cards

- Endless gimmicks

- Advertisements in cards for plugins (at least I think it was)

I can go on, but I think I've made my point. Could you give specific reasons why you don't like JIRA?

tghw• 9 years ago

- What are you missing that browser plugins add?

- Cards do have stable URLs. Not sure why you think they don't.

- A Github url to a commit will link to that URL. Powerups can be used if you want tighter integration.

- Very few people actually need this. If you do, then you need a fully auditable system.

- Copy paste the card URL. Again, card URLs are stable and Trello will detect that it's a card URL.

- There are fairly extensive keyboard shortcuts: https://trello.com/shortcuts

- Such as?

- Boards -> Lists -> Cards -> Description/Comments/Check Lists/Polls/etc. At least 4 levels.

- Is this a prediction??

- Sounds like a Firefox problem.

- Are you putting logs in the titles of the cards?

- Such as?

- Haven't ever seen an ad in a card.

It sounds like you set out with the intention of not liking it and found (or made up?) reasons.

dasmoth• 9 years ago

The complexity of over engineering processes shows up in a year in both JIRA and Trello. But in Trello you can't blame the program.

Not a Trello user, but sounds like a huge positive to me. If you can't blame the software, there might be some chance of pushing back against the process-advocates.

sly0103• 9 years ago

It's an Australian company publicly traded, so they must be doing something right.

The only thing they suffer from is NIH syndrome.

I am a happy user of Bitbucket and a sad user of GitHub, so there is that.

iamcreasy2• 9 years ago

Can you elaborate on why you are a sad user of GitHub?

bane• 9 years ago

Atlassian products are about one step improved from corporate financial management software. Think about the last craptastic time keeping system you've used. They all seem to be terrible in some weird way.

For example, the system at my company has unexplained checkboxes everywhere, and for some reason disables copying of charge codes once their entered onto a sheet? Why? Nobody knows, it's probably not a feature, just some nonsense produced by some compatibility requirement for an old browser or something. Who knows. Other fun things: - search doesn't work right to find codes - it won't verify if you can charge to a code until you've tried it - it won't tell you codes have expired when contracts are over - it's a huge process to review old time entries, especially old sheets filed by employees - etc.

compared to this, the Atlassian products are at least usable when they're configured correctly. The problem is that they're almost never entirely configured correctly, or they'll somehow mysteriously fall out of correct configuration after months of working just fine. Oh, and this time keeping system is actually a step up from the old one we used to use.

I guess what I'm saying is that they aren't state of the art w/r to usability, but they're also not complete bottom of the pile garbage.

Trello is also a step or two above the normal Atlassian stuff, but the inability to self host and configure in certain ways also restricted the size of projects you could tackle effectively with Trello. Atlassian's normal project management stuff seems to work best at a scale just beyond Trello. And in that respect is superior.

josephjrobison• 9 years ago

Definitely see this with Vanguard - great index fund, terrible software as a user.

sumedh• 9 years ago

Who likes atlassian software?

I do, just because you dont like it does not mean others will have the same opinion.

If you think you can do a better job you should start your own company.

gempir• 9 years ago

I do. I love it actually. Separately they make good software but using multiple atlassian products together makes it amazing software.

Jira, Bitbucket, Confluence, Bamboo all amazing tools

raverbashing2• 9 years ago

Crappiest software I used: IBM

Atlassian might be not great but it's not sold on golf courses and actually works

nurettin• 9 years ago

My 7th year using it and I have nothing but good things to say about bitbucket (switched after using github for two years)

krzyk• 9 years ago

I have quite the opposite opinion. I really like working with Jira (as opposed to e.g. bugzilla, clearquest).

And I really prefer Jira agile plugin to Trello, some PO tried to force Trello on us (developers) but we had to resist for some time, until they stopped pushing it. Trello looks like a sticky notes app and nothing more to me. Not to mention it is not "on-premises" so if a given company cares about security it won't use it.

Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash) is also quite nice, but I don't have comparison to GitLab or Github Enterprise, so I don't know what I'm missing.

hyperman1• 9 years ago

I had to manage our corporate JIRA for a few years after the previous admins managed to get it stuck in an impossible configuration. My experience was it worked good enough if you stuck to the defaults. Spent a few weeks ripping out all kinds of weird workflows and started trusting the users instead. The thing was not perfect, but compared to the other stuff we had i'd give it 8/10 (or a B- for you Americans out there)

Then a bunch of contractors came in with a paper full of boxes and arrows, titled Enterprise Workflow, and demanded admin access to do everything themselves. One month later stability is down the drain for everyone, and a few of their issues are jailed in a state, unable to go back and forth in the workflow, never to be closed or disappear from their status report. They declared Jira a non-agile, buggy product and bought something different. Our users now hate both products and track issues in excel.

r29vzg2• 9 years ago

“When we sat down, it was all about the vision and what we wanted to build,” Pryor said. “The kind of people we hired, the kind of company we wanted to create.”

Soon as I read that line I knew this article wasn't going to be of any worth. Just a PR puff piece.

7ewis2• 9 years ago

If anyone else thinks Atlassian are going to run Trello into the ground, there is an open source alternative that's sprung up called Wekan. https://wekan.io/

I haven't used it personally, but it appears to look and work just like Trello!

PhilWright• 9 years ago

Did I miss something or is this a content free article?

Mike fly's from Australia to America. Has chat over meal saying they want to work together. Fly's back to Australia. Agree on a price. Deal done.

What am I supposed to learn from this?

simplehuman• 9 years ago

You are supposed to learn that content free articles can be good PR. They can make it to hn front page even.

maverick_iceman• 9 years ago

Most corporate puff pieces are content free.

tedunangst• 9 years ago

Please tell me the restaurant was mad dog.

stevoski• 9 years ago

A much better account of an attempted Atlassian acquisition is told by Peldi from Balsamiq. Fascinating story with lots of juicy details about why it didn't happen. AFAIK Peldi tells the story at conferences but asks for it not to be recorded, to respect Atlassian's wishes.

From lunch to acquisition: How Atlassian bought Trello

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