The vast majority of the transaction is in cash ($360 million), with the remainder being paid out in restricted shares and options.
Atlassian’s 18th acquisition and, as Atlassian president Jay Simons noted when I talked to him last week, also it largest. Just like with many of Atlassian’s other acquisitions, the company plans to keep both the Trello service and brand alive and current users shouldn’t see any immediate changes.
Trello launched in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in 2011 and in 2014, it was spun out of Fog Creek Software as a stand-alone company.
After it was spun out of Fog Creek, Trello raised $10.3 million from BoxGroup, Index Ventures, Spark Capital and others.
With Trello, Atlassian is acquiring one of the fastest growing project management services. It now has about 19 million users and just under 100 employees, all of which will join Atlassian.
( Trello webite indicates 5M users in 2014 )
At its core, Atlassian’s own JIRA project management service already features a Trello-like Kanban board, for example. That’s only a small part of what JIRA does, however, and for many potential users, a board is really all they need to keep track of their projects. JIRA also features a full-blown issue-tracking service, reports, and an on-premise version that enterprises can run on their own servers.
It’s also worth noting that both companies have taken similar marketing approaches that focus more on word-of-mouth recommendations and a freemium model than traditional enterprise sales.
“big audacious goal:” to get to 100 million monthly active users.
To get there, Atlassian has to go beyond its traditional market of developer teams and branch out into other verticals. It’s no surprise then, that the company’s press release specifically cites Trello’s popularity with business teams in finance, HR, legal, marketing and sales and notes that 50 percent of Trello users work in non-technical functions.
Looking ahead, Simons said that Atlassian is committed to developing Trello. The company will put more resources behind the product and help the team scale.
Atlassian is scheduled to report its Q2 results on January 19 and chances are we will hear a bit more about this transaction and how the company plans to integrate Trello’s services then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=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
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Lazare
> Seems lots of JIRA-haters in the comments
Not just JIRA; I think a lot of people were burnt by Atlassian's management of Hipchat or Bitbucket too.
Historically there's something of a track record where Atlassian is the place where interesting, innovative products go to stagnate. Bug fixes happen glacially (a 1 year turnaround seems to be standard), and new feature development doesn't happen at all. Running Hipchat is like looking through a window back at 2012.
> Very happy for the folks at Trello. Great outcome for a great tool.
Great outcome for a great team? Perhaps. But I don't really see how this benefits the tool, nor the people who use the tool, because I (and a lot of other people here) are assuming, with reason, that this deal heralds the end of further development of Trello.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=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 Atlassia
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dbg31415
GitHub + ZenHub work great.
* ZenHub - Agile GitHub Project Management Software || https://www.zenhub.com/
GitHub + Marker for bugs.
* Marker - Visual Feedback & Bug Reporting Tools for Web Professionals || https://getmarker.io/
GitHub + Unito + Asana even... for clients to get some pretty dashboards without getting bogged down... this works great too.
* Unito - Connect your project management tools and become your team's collaboration hero || https://unito.io/
I love how many things play nice with GitHub now
+ ref discusion git gui options
+ github, gitlab, bitbucket(atlassian)
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