Hacker News Reader

Comment by alberth | Hacker News Reader

This is a great acquistion for both parties.

1. Trello was smart in only taking $10M in VC funding [1]. This allows for a 40x return for it's investors. If Trello were like many other startups, they probably would have taken too much VC money and got themselves in a situation where the VC wouldn't sell unless it was $2B+.

2. Atlassian now has a product that is loved by many developers and business people alike. It will easily be interegrated into their existing stack and it complements their products very well.

TLDR: Both Trello & Atlassian were smart in this acquisition. Couldn't be happier for them (and as a user).

Edit: typos

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/trello#/entity

View on HN

> 1. Trello was smart in only taking $10M in VC funding

Trello wasn't "smart" for only taking $10M in funding (and only in one, late, round, which means it only gave away probably 20-30% equity.)

Trello happened to be spun off from an established company, which took care of financing initial product development and growth. This is equivalent to the founders financing maybe a $1.5M round and a $4M round from their own pocket.

Don't try to beat Trello's benchmark in funding strategy, unless you happen to be able to finance the first few rounds from your own pocket.

> 2. Atlassian now has a product that [.] will easily be interegrated into their existing stack and it complements their products very well.

Atlassian would be wise to keep this integration from being too tight. Trello shines as the most general project management tool out there (except maybe a spreadsheet, although that is the one thing I can't bear to do with a spreadsheet), and if it became a developer-centric collaboration tool I for one would probably stop using it, even for collaboration among developers.

$10M in funding implies a valuation of $50-100M, which means a 4-8x return not a 40x return.

Also, I'm pretty sure that investment wasn't for 100% ownership, so it's not like that $10 million turned into $400 million. The return would have to be proportional to ownership percentage.

yes that's exactly what the parent is saying. 10M at a 100M post money valuation is 10% of the company. 10% of 400M is 40M - a 4x return

>It will easily be interegrated into their existing stack and it complements their products very well.

Will it? i use both Bitbucket and Jira at work, and i'm constantly finding myself wondering how two products from the same org can work so poorly together. They use their products to market their other products, but as far as actually integrating things into a seamless experience it doesn't seem like that's atlassian's strength.

In many ways that will be a good thing though, trello will likely remain trello instead of becoming something else to fit atlassian's ecosystem.

Trello, however, is designed for integrations. There are a ton of 3rd party integrations into Trello (some using the API, some Trello blessed that show up in the add ons list).

I suspect Atlassian could easily create some Jira/Botbucket addons that would make Jira a very useful choice for some Trello users for a more structured backend.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com