IMHO you're missing the point. Sure many of us want to get rich, but probably more of us want to built a profitable, sticky long-term business. The article makes it clear that they didn't succeed as well as they could've in building a business. Getting somebody to buy you doesn't mean you created a business. The benchmarking of business achievement gets even murkier considering the notoriety of Trello's CEO, Joel Spolsky. It's the same issue as with Path's $100M or Slide's $200M exits, which also featured prominent CEO's with products of dubious business value.

RE: Trello, e.g., see the part in the post about "Trello's value proposition". Their $5/month Gold plan was really poorly thought out. Many other areas, again as articulated in the article, we're also not well thought out in terms of building a sustainable, profitable business. Signups != locked in, paying, happy customers.

> The 2013 blog post that announced the launch of Trello Gold highlighted three main reasons users should pay $5/month for Trello:

> Customizable board backgrounds

> 250-megabyte attachments for each card in Trello (vs. 10 megabytes on the free plan)

> Stickers and custom emoji