10 ms·

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 the

by mhp 10y ago

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-beloved-trello-for-425-million/ http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/09/atlassian-is-buying-my-bel... (disclaimer: I'm the Trello ceo)

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
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 :)
- misiti3780 10y ago
  it has worked out for instagram so far - no ?
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    How many handcuffs have expired?
    - mooreds 10y ago
      It has been over 4 years, so I imagine most of them have. http://www.businessinsider.com/its-been-1-year-since-facebook-bought-instagram-for-1-billion-heres-how-co-founder-kevin-systrom-spent-it-2013-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/its-been-1-year-since-faceboo...
- DannyBee 10y ago
  I'm with you. Truthfully, unless you are being acquired by an aggregator like berkshire hathaway, I don't get the "nothing will change attitude" you often see. Of course it will change. They bought you to change something (usually about them). The number that stay truly autonomous is ... very very very low.
- gilini 10y ago
  I get where you're coming from but the guy above was straight up declaring Trello's death. Even with skepticism you can agree it's being too pessimistic too early. And if it goes down a different path, there will be a hole in the market waiting for the next Trello and that's good too.
  - huckyaus 10y ago
    > there will be a hole in the market waiting for the next Trello and that's good too Good for someone willing to take advantage of the market opportunity, maybe. But is it good for users that have to deal with their company churning from one enterprise to-do list to another? Familiarity (or lack thereof) with software like Trello can be the difference between enjoying your day to day and finding it endlessly frustrating.
- jlarocco 10y ago
  Exactly. No acquisition ever starts off with, "We're going to change a bunch of stuff as we assimilate this new company." It's not hard to find "______ is being acquired by ________" headlines on HN, where everybody involved promises not to change anything, and then find the corresponding shutdown post on https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ sometime a few months later. Unfortunately, even if Jira were really serious about not changing anything, it's not entirely up to them. No doubt there are some Trello employees who don't want to work for Jira, and a lot of them will eventually leave. Even if everybody at Trello honestly believes it, in a few months it's not going to be their decision any more.
  - eloisant 10y ago
    To be fair, Atlassian acquired BitBucket a few years ago and I didn't see them butcher it or merge it with Stash. On the contrary, it went in a good direction under Atlassian ownership.
    - shortstuffsushi 10y ago
      They did merge it with Stash, though, didn't they?
      - pkaeding 10y ago
        More accurately, they merged Stash with Bitbucket (Stash is now called 'Bitbucket Server').
  - quanticle 10y ago
    Exactly. No acquisition ever starts off with, "We're going to change a bunch of stuff as we assimilate this new company." What about FitBit's acquisition of Pebble? Fitbit was pretty clear that they were going to shut down pretty much everything that Pebble was doing, and fold the Pebble team into FitBit. More generally, don't pretty much all acqui-hires work this way?
    - 10y ago
- BurningFrog 10y ago
  The again, 1-3 years down the road things would have changed a lot anyway. A lot of the time, the executive team that grew a startup into something big are not the best people run that new big company. Nothing is forever, change is the only constant, cherish the time you had, and so on...
- inglor 10y ago
  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.
  - throwawaymaroon 10y ago
    That's a terrible example. Remember Google+ accounts and Youtube?
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      >didn't turn into Google Videos 2.0. // Yeah, agreed, I was going to say the same. YouTube was used as leverage to boost Google+. They backed off soon enough to save things (or perhaps YouTube is just too big to kill with such a mistake) but it was badly messed up IMO.
    - xiaoma 10y ago
      I still haven't gotten any assistance from Google after losing my YouTube account when my f#@!ing plus account (which I didn't even want) spawned another account from the gmail address I'd signed up before Google bought them. Plus was the real turning point where I went from loving Google to tolerating them.
      - cellularmitosis 10y ago
        I also lost access to my first YouTube account. That was the first time my faith in the cloud had been shaken.
      - fuck_google 10y ago
        "Most people love taking it up the ass according to our A/B testing. We are sorry you are not one of us." -Googler
  - 10y ago
- grey-area 10y ago
  Another example is slicehost: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2974-the-slicehost-story https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2974-the-slicehost-story http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/229402851/rackspace-clarifies-slicehost-shutdown-cloud-servers-transition.htm http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/229402851/rackspace-clarifies-... It always starts with good intentions and fine words about nothing changing and ends with an incredible journey.
  - nocman 10y ago
    Amen to that. I used slicehost for years and was totally happy with them. Then Rackspace bought them and killed them off. Needless to say, Rackspace did NOT get me as a customer after that. I switched to another provider.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    I was a longtime Slicehost user and while Rackspace eventually phased them out, they were not competitive with the new crop of VPS providers anyway. I was paying $70/mo for my slice. I don't remember the specs, but when they went away, I switched to a Linode that was about half the cost. (Linode has now also been outmoded for my uses, and I just have Vultr and DigitalOcean servers (+ 1 dedicated server in a rack somewhere) now).
- hyperpallium 10y ago
  Atlassian acquired bitbucket, and seems to be going ok. Though it's not a profit centre for them, so may be different.
- thewhitetulip 10y ago
  I've not been a part of acquisition but I've seen many from the outside, take the exame of Whatsapp, when they sold off to facebook they were like "we will never add calling to whatsapp, it will always focus on text messaging", " we care for privacy very much, never will we send your data" et al, less than one year after the acquisition, they do everything that they had promised not to do!
- techcofounder 10y ago
  Zappos is a good example of an acquisition that maintained its original culture.
pc86 10y ago
I'm sure you made quite a large sum of money off of this deal, but Atlassian doesn't have a great track record of purchasing non-Atlassian products and not messing them up. And... "Trellists?" They're just people.
- bsparker 10y ago
  Culture of greatness and all that, let him be.
  - angersock 10y ago
    It really has been An Incredible Journey.
- iamaelephant 10y ago
  Which products do you think Atlassian messed up after acquisition? Disclaimer I'm an Atlassian employee, but just curious.
  - iambateman 10y ago
    I'm not sure about acquisitions, but compared to github, jira and bitbucket are poor. I tried to figure out what confluence even does and I'm still not sure. Considering I'm forced into the atlassian ecosystem at work, this is my plea for y'all to improve.
    - pfranz 10y ago
      Not sure if you're playing dumb, but Confluence is a wiki. When I was using it, it was much better than any other I've tried (with or without live view). People at my company seemed to gravitate towards Google Docs when that came around--which is much better for creating and updating content, but isn't as good about searchability, linkability, versioning, or pulling docstrings from code. At that same company, we switched to Jira from 6 or 7 different ticketing systems (a mix of in-house and third party systems split up by department). It was a herculean effort to transition, but the result was much better than any of the individual ticketing systems with the huge benefit of just opening a ticket anywhere and moving it to where it needs to go while preserving the history. Now the cons I've seen are; I have no idea how much it costs and it seems to require a small to large team to manage and deploy it for maximum usefulness. For ad hoc deploys I've heard/seen performance issues if the server isn't beefy or configured correctly and the UI can be inscrutable if users are just dropped into the default. That's about (the best case scenario of) what I expect for enterprise software, though. I have used GitHub Enterprise and haven't used BitBucket. I might not be using it correctly, but I don't see what's so great about GitHub Enterprise (especially for the cost). We still have to use a separate ticketing system for non-project related things (same with documentation). I've used different ticketing systems since leaving the place that used Jira/Confluence, but have been disappointed at what they were using and what else I could find out there. What have you found out there that has worked better?
bsparker 10y ago
Will the Trello/Slack integration be affected?
- mhp 10y ago
  We will continue to support integrations with all kinds of other tools (regardless of the fact that they may compete with some other Atlassian product). Let the people use the tools they want to use - if they don't want to use your tool, then make a better tool. For example: https://slack.com/apps/A0F7YS3MZ-jira https://slack.com/apps/A0F7YS3MZ-jira
hitekker 10y ago
Right on. We are all hoping for your success in Atlassian.
Lazare 10y ago
I really, really, hope you're right. Because the obvious parallel is Hipchat, and while I know Hipchat has a lot of users and even fans still...well.
briandear 10y ago
Congrats! However, I'm still pouring out a little wine on the ground for my fallen homies who died a slow death from being Jira'd and Bitbucketed and Confluenced to the point that their will to live was crushed. Being the anti-Jira is what made Trello great. If feels like Luke Skywalker just got bought by the Dark Side while claiming that nothing will change -- I'm still with the rebels.
- komali2 10y ago
  I feel like I'm the only one that likes Jira more than Trello. I started on Trello, then moved to a company that uses Jira, and couldn't be happier. It's just so functional. Why does everyone hate on it?
  - pcl 10y ago
    Bear in mind that Jira is hugely customizable. So, saying "I use Jira" is more like saying "I drive a Ford" than like saying "I drive a Mustang." Your experience will depend on the plugins you've installed, how you've configured custom fields and workflows, your org's SSO policies, the hardware you're deploying it to and how well you keep it up to date (if you're deploying on-prem), etc.
    - lox 10y ago
      Unless part of the reason you dislike Jira is that customizability.
    - taneq 10y ago
      "Customizable" is a two-edged sword. The ultimate in customizable software is an assembler - you can configure it to perform the function of literally any software possible! But its utility at solving any fixed problem is very low. The purpose of software is to specialize hardware to perform a required function. The more configuration is required to do this, the less overall value the software provides for that function. As a software designer your job is to maximize the sum of that value across all functions that you support. As a software consumer, though, you just want the least possible configuration to perform your required function.
logicallee 10y ago
tl;dr: mhp, since you're active in this thread, how can I quickly get in touch with you? Background: I didn't find a competing product a good match for how I tried to use it, so I pitched that competition (your closest direct competition) on specific improvements (that they should make) but they didn't see my vision. (I was in touch with the CEO and exchanged a few messages back and forth.) -> Do you have an email address I can forward the same thing to you to? if you want to after reviewing my forwards you can reply by email. You can also reach out to me at my email in my profile. At the moment I don't use either Trello or them, anymore. (But I do use Atlassian products actually, which as you correctly state in this thread, are orthogonal.) Thanks - I'd love to use specifically Trello products in the future. - EDIT: Why would anyone downvote this? (Let alone 2 people now.) I didn't have trouble getting in touch with the competition... Since mhp is active in this thread I don't see the harm of asking. I could probably find it out myself but I'm not going to waste any more time on this, since it was a waste of time with the other CEO.
mmanfrin 10y ago
The (Startup)ists made (Startup). And the (Startup)ists are going to keep working on (Startup) at (Acq. Company). (Acq. Company) understands that (Startup) is unique and beloved and they definitely do not want to mess that up. It's Startup Acquisition Madlibs.
jjuel 10y ago
I heard the same thing from Microsoft about Sunrise, but here I am still waiting for many features from Sunrise to get implemented into Outlook. Of course they also said they wouldn't get rid of Sunrise until all the features were implemented. That of course was a lie.
OldSchoolJohnny 10y ago
We've all heard that story before, it almost doesn't bear repeating at this point does it? As you say, seeing will be believing.
xiaoma 10y ago
I recently bailed from bitbucket when they stopped allowing me to log in without making an Atlassian account. I remain a happy trello user until that happens to your product as well!
jsjohnst 10y ago
David Karp (as just one example) said virtually the exact same thing re: Yahoo! acquisition. Don't be that guy and spin a Jobs-esque reality distortion field. If things were so perfect to begin with at Trello, you wouldn't be selling. The fact that you did indicates something needed changing. You hope things won't change for the worse, as do your users, but assuring people that won't happen makes about as much since as guaranteeing you have the winning ticket for next week's lottery.
- ajdlinux 10y ago
  I'm going to hazard a guess that the main thing that "needed changing" was "not having $425 million".
  - mjolk 10y ago
    I'm willing to prioritize "having $425mm" over all the cards I currently have in Trello.
sjcsjc 10y ago
Perhaps one of them is Mrs Trellist of North Wales?
sngz 10y ago
just like how the guy who made sourcetree is still working on it... oh wait....
moonman272 10y ago
This is the same thing that is said with every acquisition. It's basically boilerplate at this point. A better vector is how the parent product is doing, and currently, Jira is too bloated and swiss army knife in approach that it can't innovate or do anything well anymore. This bodes poorly for Trello and comes off as a play to funnel their users into Jira after they rip the basic superficial look and functionality into Jira as an update to its agile board, and kill the standalone product.

by mhp 10y ago

BinaryIdiot 10y ago

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 :)

misiti3780 10y ago
it has worked out for instagram so far - no ?
- brianwawok 10y ago
  How many handcuffs have expired?
  - mooreds 10y ago
    It has been over 4 years, so I imagine most of them have. http://www.businessinsider.com/its-been-1-year-since-facebook-bought-instagram-for-1-billion-heres-how-co-founder-kevin-systrom-spent-it-2013-5 http://www.businessinsider.com/its-been-1-year-since-faceboo...
DannyBee 10y ago
I'm with you. Truthfully, unless you are being acquired by an aggregator like berkshire hathaway, I don't get the "nothing will change attitude" you often see. Of course it will change. They bought you to change something (usually about them). The number that stay truly autonomous is ... very very very low.
gilini 10y ago
I get where you're coming from but the guy above was straight up declaring Trello's death. Even with skepticism you can agree it's being too pessimistic too early. And if it goes down a different path, there will be a hole in the market waiting for the next Trello and that's good too.
- huckyaus 10y ago
  > there will be a hole in the market waiting for the next Trello and that's good too Good for someone willing to take advantage of the market opportunity, maybe. But is it good for users that have to deal with their company churning from one enterprise to-do list to another? Familiarity (or lack thereof) with software like Trello can be the difference between enjoying your day to day and finding it endlessly frustrating.
jlarocco 10y ago
Exactly. No acquisition ever starts off with, "We're going to change a bunch of stuff as we assimilate this new company." It's not hard to find "______ is being acquired by ________" headlines on HN, where everybody involved promises not to change anything, and then find the corresponding shutdown post on https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ sometime a few months later. Unfortunately, even if Jira were really serious about not changing anything, it's not entirely up to them. No doubt there are some Trello employees who don't want to work for Jira, and a lot of them will eventually leave. Even if everybody at Trello honestly believes it, in a few months it's not going to be their decision any more.
- eloisant 10y ago
  To be fair, Atlassian acquired BitBucket a few years ago and I didn't see them butcher it or merge it with Stash. On the contrary, it went in a good direction under Atlassian ownership.
  - shortstuffsushi 10y ago
    They did merge it with Stash, though, didn't they?
    - pkaeding 10y ago
      More accurately, they merged Stash with Bitbucket (Stash is now called 'Bitbucket Server').
- quanticle 10y ago
  Exactly. No acquisition ever starts off with, "We're going to change a bunch of stuff as we assimilate this new company." What about FitBit's acquisition of Pebble? Fitbit was pretty clear that they were going to shut down pretty much everything that Pebble was doing, and fold the Pebble team into FitBit. More generally, don't pretty much all acqui-hires work this way?
  - 10y ago
BurningFrog 10y ago
The again, 1-3 years down the road things would have changed a lot anyway. A lot of the time, the executive team that grew a startup into something big are not the best people run that new big company. Nothing is forever, change is the only constant, cherish the time you had, and so on...
inglor 10y ago
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.
- throwawaymaroon 10y ago
  That's a terrible example. Remember Google+ accounts and Youtube?
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    >didn't turn into Google Videos 2.0. // Yeah, agreed, I was going to say the same. YouTube was used as leverage to boost Google+. They backed off soon enough to save things (or perhaps YouTube is just too big to kill with such a mistake) but it was badly messed up IMO.
  - xiaoma 10y ago
    I still haven't gotten any assistance from Google after losing my YouTube account when my f#@!ing plus account (which I didn't even want) spawned another account from the gmail address I'd signed up before Google bought them. Plus was the real turning point where I went from loving Google to tolerating them.
    - cellularmitosis 10y ago
      I also lost access to my first YouTube account. That was the first time my faith in the cloud had been shaken.
    - fuck_google 10y ago
      "Most people love taking it up the ass according to our A/B testing. We are sorry you are not one of us." -Googler
- 10y ago
grey-area 10y ago
Another example is slicehost: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2974-the-slicehost-story https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2974-the-slicehost-story http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/229402851/rackspace-clarifies-slicehost-shutdown-cloud-servers-transition.htm http://www.crn.com/news/cloud/229402851/rackspace-clarifies-... It always starts with good intentions and fine words about nothing changing and ends with an incredible journey.
- nocman 10y ago
  Amen to that. I used slicehost for years and was totally happy with them. Then Rackspace bought them and killed them off. Needless to say, Rackspace did NOT get me as a customer after that. I switched to another provider.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  I was a longtime Slicehost user and while Rackspace eventually phased them out, they were not competitive with the new crop of VPS providers anyway. I was paying $70/mo for my slice. I don't remember the specs, but when they went away, I switched to a Linode that was about half the cost. (Linode has now also been outmoded for my uses, and I just have Vultr and DigitalOcean servers (+ 1 dedicated server in a rack somewhere) now).
hyperpallium 10y ago
Atlassian acquired bitbucket, and seems to be going ok. Though it's not a profit centre for them, so may be different.
thewhitetulip 10y ago
I've not been a part of acquisition but I've seen many from the outside, take the exame of Whatsapp, when they sold off to facebook they were like "we will never add calling to whatsapp, it will always focus on text messaging", " we care for privacy very much, never will we send your data" et al, less than one year after the acquisition, they do everything that they had promised not to do!
techcofounder 10y ago
Zappos is a good example of an acquisition that maintained its original culture.

pc86 10y ago

I'm sure you made quite a large sum of money off of this deal, but Atlassian doesn't have a great track record of purchasing non-Atlassian products and not messing them up. And... "Trellists?" They're just people.

bsparker 10y ago
Culture of greatness and all that, let him be.
- angersock 10y ago
  It really has been An Incredible Journey.
iamaelephant 10y ago
Which products do you think Atlassian messed up after acquisition? Disclaimer I'm an Atlassian employee, but just curious.
- iambateman 10y ago
  I'm not sure about acquisitions, but compared to github, jira and bitbucket are poor. I tried to figure out what confluence even does and I'm still not sure. Considering I'm forced into the atlassian ecosystem at work, this is my plea for y'all to improve.
  - pfranz 10y ago
    Not sure if you're playing dumb, but Confluence is a wiki. When I was using it, it was much better than any other I've tried (with or without live view). People at my company seemed to gravitate towards Google Docs when that came around--which is much better for creating and updating content, but isn't as good about searchability, linkability, versioning, or pulling docstrings from code. At that same company, we switched to Jira from 6 or 7 different ticketing systems (a mix of in-house and third party systems split up by department). It was a herculean effort to transition, but the result was much better than any of the individual ticketing systems with the huge benefit of just opening a ticket anywhere and moving it to where it needs to go while preserving the history. Now the cons I've seen are; I have no idea how much it costs and it seems to require a small to large team to manage and deploy it for maximum usefulness. For ad hoc deploys I've heard/seen performance issues if the server isn't beefy or configured correctly and the UI can be inscrutable if users are just dropped into the default. That's about (the best case scenario of) what I expect for enterprise software, though. I have used GitHub Enterprise and haven't used BitBucket. I might not be using it correctly, but I don't see what's so great about GitHub Enterprise (especially for the cost). We still have to use a separate ticketing system for non-project related things (same with documentation). I've used different ticketing systems since leaving the place that used Jira/Confluence, but have been disappointed at what they were using and what else I could find out there. What have you found out there that has worked better?

bsparker 10y ago

Will the Trello/Slack integration be affected?

mhp 10y ago
We will continue to support integrations with all kinds of other tools (regardless of the fact that they may compete with some other Atlassian product). Let the people use the tools they want to use - if they don't want to use your tool, then make a better tool. For example: https://slack.com/apps/A0F7YS3MZ-jira https://slack.com/apps/A0F7YS3MZ-jira

hitekker 10y ago

Right on. We are all hoping for your success in Atlassian.

Lazare 10y ago

I really, really, hope you're right. Because the obvious parallel is Hipchat, and while I know Hipchat has a lot of users and even fans still...well.

briandear 10y ago

Congrats! However, I'm still pouring out a little wine on the ground for my fallen homies who died a slow death from being Jira'd and Bitbucketed and Confluenced to the point that their will to live was crushed. Being the anti-Jira is what made Trello great. If feels like Luke Skywalker just got bought by the Dark Side while claiming that nothing will change -- I'm still with the rebels.

komali2 10y ago
I feel like I'm the only one that likes Jira more than Trello. I started on Trello, then moved to a company that uses Jira, and couldn't be happier. It's just so functional. Why does everyone hate on it?
- pcl 10y ago
  Bear in mind that Jira is hugely customizable. So, saying "I use Jira" is more like saying "I drive a Ford" than like saying "I drive a Mustang." Your experience will depend on the plugins you've installed, how you've configured custom fields and workflows, your org's SSO policies, the hardware you're deploying it to and how well you keep it up to date (if you're deploying on-prem), etc.
  - lox 10y ago
    Unless part of the reason you dislike Jira is that customizability.
  - taneq 10y ago
    "Customizable" is a two-edged sword. The ultimate in customizable software is an assembler - you can configure it to perform the function of literally any software possible! But its utility at solving any fixed problem is very low. The purpose of software is to specialize hardware to perform a required function. The more configuration is required to do this, the less overall value the software provides for that function. As a software designer your job is to maximize the sum of that value across all functions that you support. As a software consumer, though, you just want the least possible configuration to perform your required function.

logicallee 10y ago

tl;dr: mhp, since you're active in this thread, how can I quickly get in touch with you? Background: I didn't find a competing product a good match for how I tried to use it, so I pitched that competition (your closest direct competition) on specific improvements (that they should make) but they didn't see my vision. (I was in touch with the CEO and exchanged a few messages back and forth.) -> Do you have an email address I can forward the same thing to you to? if you want to after reviewing my forwards you can reply by email. You can also reach out to me at my email in my profile. At the moment I don't use either Trello or them, anymore. (But I do use Atlassian products actually, which as you correctly state in this thread, are orthogonal.) Thanks - I'd love to use specifically Trello products in the future. - EDIT: Why would anyone downvote this? (Let alone 2 people now.) I didn't have trouble getting in touch with the competition... Since mhp is active in this thread I don't see the harm of asking. I could probably find it out myself but I'm not going to waste any more time on this, since it was a waste of time with the other CEO.

mmanfrin 10y ago

The (Startup)ists made (Startup). And the (Startup)ists are going to keep working on (Startup) at (Acq. Company). (Acq. Company) understands that (Startup) is unique and beloved and they definitely do not want to mess that up. It's Startup Acquisition Madlibs.

jjuel 10y ago

I heard the same thing from Microsoft about Sunrise, but here I am still waiting for many features from Sunrise to get implemented into Outlook. Of course they also said they wouldn't get rid of Sunrise until all the features were implemented. That of course was a lie.

OldSchoolJohnny 10y ago

We've all heard that story before, it almost doesn't bear repeating at this point does it? As you say, seeing will be believing.

xiaoma 10y ago

I recently bailed from bitbucket when they stopped allowing me to log in without making an Atlassian account. I remain a happy trello user until that happens to your product as well!

jsjohnst 10y ago

David Karp (as just one example) said virtually the exact same thing re: Yahoo! acquisition. Don't be that guy and spin a Jobs-esque reality distortion field. If things were so perfect to begin with at Trello, you wouldn't be selling. The fact that you did indicates something needed changing. You hope things won't change for the worse, as do your users, but assuring people that won't happen makes about as much since as guaranteeing you have the winning ticket for next week's lottery.

ajdlinux 10y ago
I'm going to hazard a guess that the main thing that "needed changing" was "not having $425 million".
- mjolk 10y ago
  I'm willing to prioritize "having $425mm" over all the cards I currently have in Trello.

sjcsjc 10y ago

Perhaps one of them is Mrs Trellist of North Wales?

sngz 10y ago

just like how the guy who made sourcetree is still working on it... oh wait....

moonman272 10y ago

This is the same thing that is said with every acquisition. It's basically boilerplate at this point. A better vector is how the parent product is doing, and currently, Jira is too bloated and swiss army knife in approach that it can't innovate or do anything well anymore. This bodes poorly for Trello and comes off as a play to funnel their users into Jira after they rip the basic superficial look and functionality into Jira as an update to its agile board, and kill the standalone product.