Fog Creek Software's Trello has spun-off into a $10M Company
If you're never used Trello before, I'd highly encourage you to do so. It's the equivalent of a digital whiteboard that allows teams to organize, collaborate, and collectively manage tasks. I discovered it in about 2011, set up a free Trello board for the team and project I manage, and have had no regrets at all: people love it, it's easy to use, and makes it easy to stay organized via tablet, phone, or desktop.And now, it's an independent company. The Wall Street Journal reports:
For the second time, Fog Creek Software Inc. has spun out a company-Trello Inc., an internal project management tool that became so popular, according to the founders, it needed to exist on its own. ... Trello takes with it $10.3 million in funding and follows a familiar path of companies that grew up around tools created somewhere else. Twitter Inc. started out as twttr, a short message service used internally by the podcasting company Odeo, while Yammer, acquired by Microsoft Corp. in 2012 for $1.2 billion, was an internal communications tool for the geneology website Geni.com. ...That last comment is a not-very-veiled swipe at SharePoint, and it fits my experience perfectly: management requires it, even though it's almost totally useless for our purposes.
"It reminds us of the early traction that Dropbox"and other apps up there had that have grabbed individuals and caused them to start using it and bring it to work and convince teams and colleagues to use it and it's gradually taken over organizations," said Index Partner Neil Rimer, whose brother Danny, also an Index partner, invested in Dropbox for that firm. "It turns out to be a better solution than the stuff at the top that's driven into the organization by policy."
Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, tells the story beautifully over at the company blog. Clearly, there's still tons of money to be made simply by creating things that help people accomplish things more efficiently. As an avid Trello advocate, I'm raising a glass to these guys [and hoping under the new arrangement corporate ownership doesn't screw the pooch or raise prices, etc.]