[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...

(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.

[DannyBee]

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.

[jlarocco]

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/ 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.

[gilini]

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.

[BurningFrog]

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...

[hyperpallium]

Atlassian acquired bitbucket, and seems to be going ok.

Though it's not a profit centre for them, so may be different.

[thewhitetulip]

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!

[grey-area]

Another example is slicehost:

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2974-the-slicehost-story

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.

[techcofounder]

Zappos is a good example of an acquisition that maintained its original culture.

[misiti3780]

it has worked out for instagram so far - no ?

[mmanfrin]

  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.

[pc86]

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.

[iamaelephant]

Which products do you think Atlassian messed up after acquisition? Disclaimer I'm an Atlassian employee, but just curious.

[bsparker]

Culture of greatness and all that, let him be.

[jsjohnst]

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]

I'm going to hazard a guess that the main thing that "needed changing" was "not having $425 million".

[Lazare]

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]

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]

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?

[foota]

Could be that Atlassian is looking to support two vastly different styles -- rather than diffuse either.

[moonman272]

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.

[OldSchoolJohnny]

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.

[bsparker]

Will the Trello/Slack integration be affected?

[mhp]

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

[hitekker]

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

[jjuel]

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.

[sjcsjc]

Perhaps one of them is Mrs Trellist of North Wales?

[xiaoma]

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!

[sngz]

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

[logicallee]

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.