Why did Fog Creek approved this acquisition? With products like Stack Overflow, Trello and GoMix I thought they want to become a big player on the market of software development. Why sell our own assets?
My sense is that Fog Creek is more of an incubator than a traditional software company now, albeit one which is incredibly selective about what they invest in. Stack Overflow and Trello are both independent companies which started out as side projects for Fog Creek, and I imagine GoMix will eventually go the same way.
Fog Creek and Trello are two separate companies that share cofounders (and an office here in NYC!) so we at Fog Creek are happy for Trello but it's not an asset of ours.
Fog Creek's model tends to involve spinning off their runaway hits into separate companies. They've done this with StackOverflow and Trello. Trello has been an independent company since 2014. (Although I'm not sure what kind of ownership position Fog Creek had).
Pryor and Spolsky have been running Fog Creek for sixteen years. That's a log of 'everyday at the office' to go without a big payday, particularly considering how much StackOverflow could have been sold for years ago.
From a strategic standpoint, selling Trello is probably a more favorable way for Spolsky and Pryor to raise $360 million in cash than through venture capital. In hindsight it's not implausible that the goal behind developing Trello was always to sell it off. Unlike StackOverflow, Trello has lots of competitors and it's value in is in integrating with the rest of a project's workflow. Essentially it's a commodity.
Trello had super ambitious growth plans but didn't have the leadership team in place to achieve them. They built an incredibly valuable and wonderful product and Atlassian is an appropriate partner to take it to the next level.
