Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's interview is with Michael Pryor.
Michael is the CEO of Trello, a free app that makes working on group projects as easy as using sticky notes on a whiteboard.
He's also the co founder and president of Fog Creek Software, the makers of products such as Fogbugs and Kiln.
To date, Trello has raised over $10 million in funding and is used by millions of people and companies of all kinds and sizes, including Google, Adobe and the New York Times.
Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael Pryor (00:57.510)
Hi Omer, thanks for having me on.
Omer (00:59.510)
Now, before we talk about Fog Creek and Trello, tell our audience just a little bit about yourself.
Who is Michael when he's not working?
Michael Pryor (01:09.030)
So I in the recent father of a three month old.
I also have a two year old.
Omer (01:13.990)
Congratulations.
Michael Pryor (01:15.030)
Thank you.
Not getting much sleep.
I live in Brooklyn, right across the Brooklyn Bridge.
Started a software company 15 years ago with my co founder Joel Spolsky, and that's what I do every day.
Omer (01:28.960)
Awesome.
Now, before we get into more details, we like to kick things off with a success quote to better understand what drives and motivates our guests.
What is one of your favorite quotes?
Michael Pryor (01:39.040)
So this is more of a principle that I picked and everyone knows this and has heard of it, and it's kind of trite, but it's really important.
When I tell the story about Trello, you'll see why.
Um, it's the KISS principle, which is keep it simple stupid, or keep it.
Keep it simple and straightforward.
Some people like to say.
Omer (01:54.690)
Yeah, depending on who you're talking to.
Right?
Michael Pryor (01:56.410)
Yeah.
Omer (01:58.570)
Okay, let's start by giving the listeners a better understanding of Trello.
I explained a little bit about the product and I am a user myself, but tell, tell the audience a little bit about who your target customers are and what are the pain points that you're trying to solve.
Michael Pryor (02:14.540)
So one of the things that we set out to do when we first created Trello was to create a horizontal tool that pretty much anyone could use.
And the goal of this tool was to give structure to projects that you have, whether that's in your personal life or at work.
And it all started from our experience as software developers.
My co founder, Joel Spolsky and I started Fog Creek 15 years ago.
We hired a bunch of programmers to do smart things.
We ended up building A bunch of developer tools that are pretty popular.
And that was basically our target audience.
He has a blog that a bunch of people read Joel on software.com and we had basically been building things for developers for a decade.
We saw a bunch of principles that developers were using that could be applicable to basically anyone in any area of their life.
And we tried to create something out of Trello that was much more flexible to be used in many different areas, instead of just for developers who are making software awesome.
Omer (03:24.710)
So we'll talk a little bit about that in a minute.
Now, before we do that, tell me a little bit about what you were doing before you started Fog Creek with Joel.
Michael Pryor (03:35.590)
So it was actually, I only worked for about a year and a half before we started Fog Creek.
So I met Joel at a company called Juno, which was back in the heyday of the Internet in the 2000s, was a company that was trying to get free email to people competing with aol at the time, you know, you had to pay a monthly fee to dial up to aol.
And their idea was let people do it for free and then show them advertising to support it.
I'm not even sure if that company still exists, but we worked.
Joel and I both worked there for a year, and then everything started crashing in the market, and we just basically set off on our own and decided to start a software company.
At the time, there wasn't a place in New York City to work at as a developer.
That was a pure software company.
Like, there were plenty of places to work as a developer, but you were either working at a finance company or insurance company.
You weren't building the end product that the company was selling.
You were supporting what they were doing.
Now, 15 years later, there's Facebook, Google, there's tons of startups in New York.
The scene has totally changed.
But at that time, what we wanted to build was a place where developers wanted to work.
So we wanted to focus on people like us and build a company that people like us would want to work at.
Omer (04:55.500)
What was the first product that you guys decided to build?
Michael Pryor (04:59.900)
It was a content management system called City Desk.
And so at the time, a big problem that people had was when they were trying to.
The tools that existed at the time, like TypePad, was a bunch of Perl scripts.
Essentially, if you wanted to install that, you had to have shell access to your web server in order to install it.
And basically that meant that not that many people could do it.
So we thought, hey, let's build a desktop app that does all the content management stuff on your computer and then publishes those HTML files up to the server at the same time.
I think all of the CMS creators were realizing this as well, and so that's why they ended up with mostly all hosted solution and basically removed that problem.
So that tool worked for a couple years, but then ended up not being a huge success.
And then in the background, we actually had some code that we had sitting around that was doing that we were using for bug tracking while we were creating this, this program.
And we decided, hey, let's put it together and sell it and see what happens.
And that ended up being a huge success for us, which was Fog bugs and basically being the cash cow for the company for the next 15 years.
So it was sort of like a serendipitous thing.
You know, we.
We basically were pouring all our effort into City Desk, and it was this thing that we just did on the side that ended up being the most successful.
And actually along the way, we've probably over the years have done 13 different products.
Some of them you've heard about, like Trello, Stack Overflow, Fogbugs, Kiln, but a bunch just sort of faded off into the distance.
Like, Joel's blog got a lot of readers, and one of the things that we did was create a job board attached to his blog where programmers could get job work.
And that was pretty successful.
So we decided, hey, let's do that for Indian programmers, and so we'll make a place for job postings in India.
And I think we made 25 rupees and that was it.
No one went to it, no one saw it, it just wasn't used.
We made a movie once about our interns and sold that as a dvd.
Omer (07:18.800)
Wow.
Michael Pryor (07:19.520)
Done a bunch of different projects.
Omer (07:22.170)
And so what's been sort of the driving philosophy for you guys, was it just because both you and Joel just have a ton of ideas and always sort of driven to pursue them, or did you sort of start off the company thinking we're going to be sort of this sort of maybe incubator for these new products?
Michael Pryor (07:43.930)
Well, I think when we started, the goal of the company was to make a place where great developers wanted to work.
So, you know, the.
The idea was that we get smart people working with us and then we see what happens.
Like we're not going to pigeonhole ourselves into one product at the time.
We'll just do things that are fun and make sense and seem to be exciting.
So, you know, at any point in time, what we're working on now might not be what we're working on in a couple of years from now.
And you know, over the course of the years, some of the things have spun off onto their own companies.
Some of the things we've sold, and some of them we're still working on.
So like Stack Overflow, which became Stack Exchange, the company, a huge network of Q and A sites, you know, came out of Fog Creek in conjunction with Jeff Atwood, who is a big programmer blogger like Joel, and Joel and him brought their audience together.
And then Trello, which we actually self funded at Fog Creek for a couple years and then recently took van and spun it off into its own company.
Omer (08:49.500)
So what was the reason for spinning that off?
Why not just keep it like you have fog bugs within the Fog Creek sort of family?
Michael Pryor (08:59.020)
Our goal with Trello, basically we're trying to get 100 million people using Trello and have 1% of them pay US$100 a year.
So that's like the sort of size of the market that we're going after.
We want so many people getting value out of Trello and the people that are getting the most value, they pay us a little bit of money and then that's a successful business.
But if you start from that, those numbers and it's sort of the magnitude is important there, not the specific numbers, but you realize that it has to be a total horizontal tool that anybody can use.
And when we first created Trello, we thought that's what we were building.
And after a couple years we saw that the traction was there and, and that it was going in the right direction.
And we decided to basically, you know, go full speed and it made sense.
We had a lot of people contacting us wanting to invest.
There was a lot of interest.
We didn't really even have to do the typical like go out and pitch it.
There were already people that were inbound interest and we decided it just made sense.
We had something successful.
But to really grow it, we're going to need to invest a lot more money than Fog Creek is able to invest.
Omer (10:10.610)
So can you tell me a little bit more about where the idea for Trello came from?
Michael Pryor (10:16.930)
So, you know, going back to how we did a bunch of different projects over the year, we were at a point in the company where we wanted to experiment a little bit.
And I think we, we separated out into a couple teams and tried to build four different products just to see, you know, what happened and whether any of them were interesting.
And the, the product that one of the teams was building was an idea that Joel had Which was called five Things.
And the idea for Five Things was you only, it was a list basically that only had five slots.
Two things that you're working on now, one that you're currently working on and one that you can work on in case that one blocks.
And then two things that you're going to work on next.
And then the fifth thing was something you would just never work on.
And the motivation for that was just that we saw the way businesses were working, the way software development was working, this SaaS model of releasing often, and it was just changing the way people worked.
Where it was like they wanted to ship and ship fast.
And if you had this huge backlog of items that you had to worry about, it wasn't really helpful because two weeks from now your product could be completely different.
So this was more of accepting you can only concentrate on a couple of things at once.
So this tool will actually force you to only concentrate on those things.
And what happened was that idea, the five Things sort of morphed into something different when we, it kind of, we went around and we were looking at software development teams and what they were doing.
And when you go into one of these, you know, open plan offices where they're all sitting around, you'd see these whiteboards where they had posted colored post it notes on the whiteboard.
And they were moving them around to track all the different things they were about to ship, whether they were shipping, whether they're tested, what they wanted to build next.
And they basically just had this really easy visual tool to show their progress essentially on what they were building.
And we realized that, you know, that coupled with this idea that you don't want to give people the ability to create an endless backlog of items to work on because that just sort of slows them.
I mean, look at how most people use their email inboxes, right?
They're just, they, they're upset because there's a thousand messages in there and they're like, I'm never going to get through this.
Like, there's something about the way that we work where we're afraid to just let go of things and accept that we can only work on a couple things at once.
And so it sort of married those two ideas together.
And that's where the initial version of Trello came from.
Omer (12:48.150)
Got it.
Okay, so you've got this idea before we get into that.
So do you guys, have you been doing this regularly where you sort of get teams together and just go and pursue these ideas to see if something will stick?
Is this kind of like a cultural thing there?
Michael Pryor (13:09.510)
Yeah, I mean, we don't have, like, a set schedule for it, but we call them Creek weeks.
At Fog Creek, it's called a Creek week, where you take off.
And sometimes they're trying to innovate in a way that we're just experimenting something outside of what we've done before.
And sometimes they're actually just a moment to be protected by the other people on your team so that you can focus on something that you haven't had any chance to work on.
And so back to the idea that we're just.
We have smart people.
They have lots of ideas.
Joel used to actually keep a text file on his desktop that had all his ideas in it, and it just kept getting longer and longer and longer and longer.
But, yeah, we've done a bunch of things, and we don't have a formal system for it, but it is something that is instilled in the culture and that we try to keep doing.
Omer (14:04.040)
And then how do you guys validate these ideas?
I mean, from my experience, you know, I've worked with developers who will come up with great ideas for products, but it doesn't necessarily mean it translates into a, you know, a business or a commercial success.
Michael Pryor (14:25.380)
Yeah, I mean, well, we've.
I think we're not actually that great at figuring out how to do that.
I don't think there's one.
Do it.
But, like, we had a tool.
There's this tool called jsfiddle that lets you put JavaScript up and test it on a website.
And we built something like that for css, and we thought people could basically point their.
They could host their CSS on our servers, and then it would allow them to edit it in a WYSIWYG way through a web browser.
And they would get all the benefits of being on a CDN and.
And able to edit these CSS files quickly.
And it was a cool idea, but it just didn't catch on.
We had a bunch of people using it, and at some point, we just had to pull the cord on it.
I told you earlier, we had made a movie about our interns, and that was a huge success at the time.
And then we went and basically spent a couple months building a whole series of movies.
There was five different movies about the process of making software.
And we priced it at like a. I think it was $2,500.
So this was kind of like a different type of product.
It wasn't a $20 DVD.
And, you know, when we went to sell it, we found there wasn't a really huge demand for that.
Another example where we didn't quite, you know, understand what the ramifications would be was when we first built our code review tool Kiln, we only supported Mercurial because at the time, Mercurial and Git were kind of competing to see which one was the winner.
We really liked Mercurial.
And then at some point we said, you know what, Git's kind of winning.
We have to get on board with this.
Let's support Git.
And we thought, hey, what if we allow people to use either Git or Mercurial on the same repository, which nobody does?
And we actually spent a lot of time making that work.
And it turns out that no one does that, so there wasn't a lot of demand for it.
And it created a lot of complexity in our product on the back end.
So some of these things we just don't find out till later.
And we're getting better at sort of testing these ideas and figuring out what's working, so you don't have to invest a lot of time in them first.
But I think it's just a learning process.
Omer (16:49.770)
So you guys had been building software for developers for well over a decade, and then with Trello, as you said, you know, you focused on a horizontal tool which could be used by anyone.
So what did you do differently to go and market that product and acquire customers who weren't developers?
Michael Pryor (17:17.200)
Well, one.
So we had a couple.
There were some simple rules, like keep it simple in.
When I referred to earlier, we had some simple rules that we started with before we made the product that we hoped would actually make it organically, you know, spread organically, essentially.
So one of the ideas was that we were going to only use the latest technology, so don't build anything that's going to work for an old browser.
Essentially, that was just a rule that we had.
One of.
I mean, what you just said, one of the rules was don't build a developer tool.
So we knew that our early audience was going to be mostly technical people and that the kinds of features that they would ask for would sort of steer us down that road.
And when we.
Since we knew from the beginning that we wanted to build a consumer product that anyone's mom could use, they would just get it immediately.
We were able to sort of accept that feedback, but understand that that's not what we were building.
The other thing was we had to work pretty much on every device, like your mobile, iPad, the iPhone, Android, and it had to be real time so if somebody changed something on a Trello board on from their computer, it had to immediately update on your computer no matter where you were, so that you retained that sense of.
You're all looking at one document just like it was a big whiteboard in your shared workspace.
Omer (18:47.450)
Got it.
Okay.
So there's no shortage of product project management tools out there.
Did you guys spend much time or energy looking at what, what, what was already in the market and how you could differentiate, or were you very clear about the, the sort of, the vision for this product and sort of focus most mostly on that?
Michael Pryor (19:17.699)
I think that, you know, you called it a project management app, which is.
A lot of people call it that, or they might call it a to do list.
They might call trail a to do list because there's some.
You're trying to describe what Trello is and I think actually what we're trying to build is something that doesn't.
There's not a name for it because if you think about project management, that implies a certain type of tool.
I think it basically, if you were, for example, going to plan, get your family together to coordinate, who's going to buy gifts for, for your kids, like your mom and your uncle, and you don't want them buying the same gift, no one's going to go online and search for a project management tool to solve that problem.
But a lot of people kind of feel frustrated and don't feel like they have a lot of organization around that issue.
And we wanted to solve that problem.
I think that's actually one of our challenges is essentially we're trying to build a tool that people don't know what it's called.
There's not a term for this specific thing.
You can use Trello as a project management tool, but you can also use it as an applicant tracking system or a CRM or, you know, a bug tracker.
We see a lot of people doing those things, but the flexibility that we built in the product is sort of, the product has to stay really simple for, for people to be able to use it in all these different ways.
But that also means that it's hard for people to get, you know, that kind of level of detail that they might need when they actually have, for example, a thousand applicants applying to their company every day, then Trello is not going to work anymore.
But it's going to work for, oh, you're doing a kitchen remodel in your house and you have to coordinate with your contractor.
So I think trying to figure out how we communicate that to people that we have this solution for a problem they feel, but there's no word to describe exactly what it is.
I think that's one of the challenges that we have to figure out how to do in our marketing.
But, you know, it actually is happening organically.
We saw it happening organically, which we didn't even do anything to help.
But we'd see people writing blog posts about how they were using Trello, and they would describe all these different use cases.
They would just, you know, somebody that was a marketing person would write how they were doing marketing with Trello, or somebody that was, you know, an editor at a newspaper would write about how they were using Trello, or a recruiter would write about how they were using Trello.
And it.
They were basically telling people, oh, you can use this tool to do this one thing, and they were speaking to their specific audience, and then, you know, it would just basically spread like that.
And we're trying to figure out now how to.
To help people do more of that and how we can do more of that ourselves.
So
Omer (22:13.970)
what is the.
I know you said it was still a challenge for you guys, but what is the best way to sort of position Trello in a way that people can understand it easily, Right?
Because even to me, I completely get that it's not a sort of a formal project management tool.
And I think in many ways, that's the beauty of the product, right?
I mean, number one, whenever I show it to somebody, they get it instantly, right?
And then they're like, wow, oh, my God.
It's like, you know, I was, like, trying to deal with, you know, whatever other product and have a bunch of these lists, and it was really hard to kind of visually see what was going on.
And the other thing that I really like about it is the simplicity of it, right?
Which sometimes can be a little bit frustrating.
Like, for example, you know, maybe within a card, I may have a checklist of multiple things, and I want to give different items on the checklist, different due dates, right?
And it doesn't let me do that.
But in some ways, just being forced to think about what is the one due date that matters the most for this one card actually kind of brings some clarity to.
To what I'm doing, right?
So those are some of the things I love about it.
Michael Pryor (23:32.940)
But it.
Omer (23:33.220)
But it's how.
What is the best way to explain it to people?
Michael Pryor (23:36.720)
I think it's a tool that helps you organize.
Basically.
If I had to give a quick sentence, I mean, this is actually.
We're actually going through a branding exercise right now to try to figure out how the best way to explain this to people.
But the name actually Trello comes from the project code name, which was Trellis.
If you think about Trellis, it kind of gives structure to a plant as it grows.
And I think about people when they have things that they're working on their life with other people and they're just feeling a little bit frazzled and they're like, I don't know where this project is, or I don't know what's going on with my florist that's planning the flowers for my wedding, or I have no idea if this kitchen renovation is even.
If people are even there doing anything, you know, and it's just sort of solving that issue where it's allowing people to communicate and show progress in some aspect of their life or their work.
But that was a, was a pretty long sentence to describe something that's really simple.
We borrowed a lot from real world metaphors like that whiteboard, the post it notes.
I think that's why people get it so quickly, because there's not really a huge learning curve.
It's like, oh, you already get this.
There's cards and you put them on your fridge or on your computer screen in a certain place so that you remember to do something.
And that's what Trello lets you do.
And you were talking a little bit about how, you know, you had a card and you had checklist on the back and you wanted to put a due date on the checklist, but you can actually put a due date on the card.
And I re one of the other.
So there's, there's, you know, Trello has a certain hierarchy to it.
And I see sometimes people struggle because when they first start with Trello, they get the mental hierarchy that they have for how they want to lay things out, like off by one, right?
Like if all your checklist items were cards, then you would be able to put the due dates.
And I think that the flexibility of the system and the fact that you could just switch that card or switch that checklist to be a bunch of cards, like probably in 20 seconds, is what makes it so, you know, useful.
Because basically the way people, the, when you start, the old way that projects were done was you get a whole bunch of people together, you write a spec, there's a whole bunch of deliverables and deadlines, and use something like Microsoft Project.
And you know, the way people work now is, hey, let's iterate quickly.
The project might be totally different in two weeks than it was today.
And you need something that's just going to be flexible in the way that's flexible.
Like we're working.
Yeah, yeah.
Omer (26:08.020)
No, I think, you know, things like Microsoft Project are wholly, completely different beast of a product.
And in fact, that, you know, like I said, the, you know, for example, I actually use Trello to manage production of these podcast episodes, right.
And initially when I went out looking, people were like, yes, you can use X, you know, whatever product.
And as you move to a different phase, like, you move from maybe somebody has, you know, agreed to come onto the show through to there's some, you know, prep work or research you need to do before.
Before the interview.
You know, the workflow will trigger a bunch of tasks that.
That you can do.
And on the face of it, that sounded great.
And I looked at Trello and I said, oh, that's a shame that.
That doesn't really do that for me.
You know, I can move things around, but it doesn't really trigger a new set of tasks.
But what I eventually ended up doing was creating a, I guess an empty card, which on it has the full checklist that gets used through all the phases.
And every time I get a new guest, I just copy that card and it basically gives me everything I need behind there to make sure that I take this through, from research through to publishing and scheduling the show.
And again, I think the beauty of that was that it helped me to really simplify my process and to think more about what I was trying to get done, rather than how am I going to use this tool.
Michael Pryor (27:46.480)
Right?
Omer (27:46.800)
Which is where a lot of people get lost, right?
It's like they spend more time in Microsoft Project than they do sometimes managing their projects.
Michael Pryor (27:54.000)
Right, right.
And I think that you hit on it right there, which is that people have.
They have a process, and a lot of times they just want the tool to help them with their process.
They don't want to, like, adopt the tools process.
And that's what Trello lets you do.
Like, we actually just found out that there are a whole bunch of consultants out there right now who go into organizations and talk to them about their process and help them, you know, figure out what's going on at their big Fortune 100 company.
And then the tools that they give them to manage that process is Trello, like, is one of the tools.
So it's like, it.
It's a really flexible way to basically take a process and make it so that other people can see what you're doing.
And.
And you can figure out that you're actually making progress on this.
Another use case that we've that I really love is there's a company that uses Trello to do its onboarding.
So they have a template board where they have all the things that a person has to do on their first day, all the people that are at the company, the things that they need to read, the accounts that they need to create, and they basically just clone that board like in the same way that you cloned a card and they assign the new person to the board and then there's all the things that they have to do in their first week and then if they find out that there's something wrong with that process, they forgot something, they just go in and add another card, or they edit it or change it, or assign someone different.
You know, it's like it's just a really flexible way to sort of give structure to a process.
Omer (29:26.690)
Okay, I want to talk a little bit about Fog Creek and the culture that you guys have built there.
So I was looking at your about page and there were a number of things that really stood out to me and I just want to read them out just so for the audience benefit.
You know, in.
In a world of built to flip hyper growth venture capital fueled social media startups, Fog Creek was built for the long term.
Fog Creek was built to take ideas from a group of brilliant people and grow them into products that support future development.
And then we get into sustainable business model where Fog Creek is owned by its employees.
We don't have outside investors, so we're free to do things based on long term interests of the company.
We pay our bills and fund new development with the revenue from our products.
And we've been profitable since day one.
At Fog Creek we only work on products that grow organically from ideas we have in house.
And Fog Creek was conceived as a Silicon Valley style tech company located in New York.
We over invested in plush offices as our headquarters.
We're proud to over offer private offices for every developer.
Free lunch and snacks, high end espresso, great chairs, height adjustable desks, and all the 30 inch monitors you can eat.
Now that working remotely is just as effective as working from a single office.
All of our development teams do their work fully online.
That means any team member can work from just about anywhere with high speed Internet.
And we're happy to hire great people from anywhere in the world.
I read that and I thought I want to apply for that place.
Michael Pryor (31:07.660)
So
Omer (31:10.220)
what is it about the company that was this a vision that you and Joel had when you said you wanted to build a software company in New York, or how much of this has evolved over, you've sort of figured out over the years.
Michael Pryor (31:25.580)
No, I mean, the mantra of creating a place where the best developers want to work, you know, was basically our mission from day one.
So when we started Fog Creek in New York, we were like, we looked around.
There weren't any software companies that you could work out where you were working on the product that was actually getting shipped.
Like, you were the.
You were the important component of the organization.
And so we decided to start one.
And we knew that the only way that we were going to succeed is if we got really smart people to work for us.
And the way to do that was to treat them well.
So that's why we have private offices, we eat lunch together.
And, you know, in the early days, we used to see people looking at job offers and they would be like, online.
They'd be like, I know, I'm trying to decide between Google and Microsoft and Fog Creek.
And we just thought that that was funny.
I mean, like, that people are putting us.
You know, at the time we were probably like 15 people.
But, you know, and I, over the.
We had a huge advantage being in New York and being, you know, one of the only pure software companies here.
And then over the course of, you know, a decade, and there's more startups, there's more perks, people are treating developers right because they realize how hard it is to hire developers.
And so you get to a point, you know, a couple of years ago, where there's not that much difference between working at Fog Creek and working at a different, you know, software company in New York.
But that's when we realized, hey, we can work with all these great people that aren't located in New York City and try to figure out how we can work with remote people, essentially.
And we had a bunch of people in New York that wanted to move who previously would have just left and gotten a different job, and we were able to retain them.
And, you know, the tools were getting better to work with people.
I. I mean, we use Trello all the time to coordinate that.
We use Slack to chat with people and Google hangouts all the time.
So the tools got better.
And I think it's still an administrative nightmare on the back end, taxes and all that kind of stuff, but we're able to basically get people that otherwise would not have worked for us.
Like at Trello, actually, we have one of.
There's only five in the US they're called Google Developer Experts gde and we have one of them working on the Android team and he lives in Minnesota.
Wow.
So I don't think we would have been able to attract someone.
I remember back in the day, actually we had the movie I was telling you that we made.
The interns that year made a screen sharing product called Copilot.
And it's basically what LogMeIn is now.
And it was actually we created it almost before LogMeIn even existed.
But one of the interns that helped create that brilliant guy just didn't want to live in New York.
And so we lost him.
He went to go work for Microsoft and that was about 10 years ago.
And now he works for a company called Firebase, which is a very successful database company.
But now he would have been able to work for us and live wherever he wanted to live.
Now it's, it's certainly there's a lot of challenges working with remote people.
I think, like, culturally it's very difficult because now everyone's not here, you don't get all those conversations at lunch and those types of things.
So we're trying to figure out, learn as we go on how to keep that culture alive even though those people aren't in the same physical space.
Omer (34:57.840)
So let's talk about the business today.
Do you guys disclose revenue?
Michael Pryor (35:03.790)
No.
Frog Creek is totally private and profitable.
Yes.
And Trello is in growth mode.
So we're just focused basically right now on just getting the product.
Like our top two development efforts right now are localization and offline mode in mobile.
So we're just hiring.
We raised a bunch of money so that we could spend more money than we were making.
So.
So that's not really our number one focus at the moment.
Omer (35:32.200)
And how many people do you have working at Fog Creek and Trello?
Michael Pryor (35:35.800)
There's about, I don't know, there's like 35 at Fog Creek or maybe 39, and there's I think just over 30 at Trello.
Omer (35:46.120)
So why did you decide to take on the CEO role at Trello?
Michael Pryor (35:53.320)
I previously was working as the president of Fog Creek, taking care of Fog Creek, and then also the CFO at Stack Exchange.
Because at the time when we first spun that company off, I was just running all of the operational side, you know, the accounting, the legal, all those things.
And as that company got bigger and bigger and bigger and we had three offices and 200 people working for the company and it just became very obvious that we needed somebody with real finance background to come in and, and get things in order.
So we found somebody hired him and I stopped my day to day role at Stack Exchange, still doing everything I was doing at Fog Creek and that sort of freed me up.
And basically at that time we had had the investors who wanted to invest in Trello and we were sort of pushing them off, saying it's okay, we'll just keep funding on our own.
I know we're growing a little bit slower because we can't pump all this money into it, but that's okay for us.
And it's just sort of made it more clear that I actually could spend some time doing that and it probably was a good time for us to take outside investment.
So all those things kind of coalesced into that moment.
Omer (37:11.830)
Got it.
So is there one thing in your business that you're most excited about right now?
Michael Pryor (37:19.440)
So for Trello, I told you about the localization and mobile offline mode and then we have sort of a wildcard project that we're working on and it's kind of top secret.
I'm not even sure if we're going to ship it.
But the idea is that what we see is a lot of people taking Trello into a stand up or like a weekly meeting or you know, even a one on one where you're just meeting one on one or a team.
But basically Trello is the content of the meeting.
They're using Trello to sort of look at what they were supposed to work on, how was, you know, report progress.
So it's sort of the.
They're all meeting in person and talking and they're looking at a Trello board.
A lot of times they have an iPad or it's up on a screen or something like that.
And so we're trying to figure out a way to facilitate that so everyone actually doesn't have to be physically located in the same room.
Got it.
Okay, so we'll see if that's interesting to people or it may just be some, you know, an experiment that we end up not shipping.
But I'm pretty excited about it.
I think it's going to actually change the way people use Trello.
Omer (38:29.450)
Cool.
Okay, Michael, it's time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you a series of questions just like you to answer them as quickly as you can.
You ready?
Michael Pryor (38:36.720)
Okay, sure.
Omer (38:38.040)
What's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?
Michael Pryor (38:42.920)
So there was something recently that Keith Raboy said on a podcast.
It's how to start a startup Sam Altman's putting on from Y Combinator.
It's called he said measure your false positives.
Because if you're just measuring one thing, you're not understanding how that affects the business.
And his example was at PayPal, if they had just told the fraud department to measure, you know, lower fraud rate, they could have done that by actually calling up every customer and vetting them before they were actually able to do a transaction.
But that would have been horrible to the business.
So you can't just measure, like, are we getting more trials?
Because maybe those trials are actually useless.
Omer (39:20.640)
I like that one.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
Michael Pryor (39:26.000)
Keeping the theme of keeping it simple.
There's a book that I don't even think it's published yet, but I just got sent it a couple days ago.
It's called Simple Rules.
So it's going to come out real soon.
And I just started reading it and it's fantastic.
Omer (39:40.120)
Wow, we're getting a lot of insider stuff here.
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
Michael Pryor (39:49.880)
So if I look back on my own experience, one of the things that contributed to all the amazing things that happened over my career is having a great co founder.
So I don't know, that's something you can, like, make happen, but it certainly contributed to my success.
Omer (40:08.690)
Well, you can make it happen by making sure you pick the right guy, I guess.
Right.
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit, apart from Trello?
Michael Pryor (40:20.450)
Oh, you pulled Trello.
I had written that down.
I was going to say Trello.
See.
Well, you know, we use Slack all the time as a chat program, and I think having, you know, being able to communicate on the computer with the rest of your team when they're remote is immensely useful.
And Slack is a great tool.
Omer (40:40.940)
So if you had to start over tomorrow, how would you go about finding that next business opportunity?
Michael Pryor (40:50.460)
I think I would look for frustrating things that I was dealing with as a business owner and try to make them better.
So that's basically what we've been doing for the past 15 years.
But there's a lot of things that I've dealt with recently that I'm still wondering why someone hasn't created a simple way or a better way to do it.
Omer (41:14.280)
Yeah, I think that's such a huge point that there are so many opportunities out there.
You just have to look.
Michael Pryor (41:20.230)
Right?
Yeah.
And sometimes you just reinvent this.
Like, how does you know why?
There were tons of content management systems out there, and now Medium comes out and everyone starts using Medium and it's this huge you know, like why?
I don't know.
You know, like there's something about the way that it works and solving problems that look like they're already even solved can be, you know, hugely successful doing that.
Omer (41:45.020)
Know what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
Michael Pryor (41:51.980)
So I'll give you a fun fact about Trello that most people don't know, which was that there are the.
Joel wanted to call it Five Camels, which doesn't make any sense, but that was so.
I don't know why so many funny.
And then we couldn't figure out a name for it because trellis.com, the domain was taken and we couldn't get it.
And so we had this company wide meeting and basically spent like, you know, all day trying to pick a name.
And the name, when you crowdsource a name, you come up with some, a lot of crap.
But the name that we agreed on was Planety.
And it was so bad that I went back to my office and I was like, I am going to find a better name, a better domain name that exists than Planety.
So.
So Trello could have actually been called Planetary Planeteer.
Omer (42:41.930)
I love that.
Okay, and finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work right now?
Michael Pryor (42:49.450)
My family number one, my two year old is so much fun and so being a dad is a lot of fun.
But also I'm a huge saltwater fisherman and I have a 400 gallon saltwater aquarium tank in the office.
Omer (43:03.370)
Wow.
Awesome.
Great answers.
Michael.
It's been an absolute pleasure talking with you today.
Thank you for sharing your experiences and insights and thank you for letting us get to know you a little bit better personally as well.
Now if folks want to find out about Fog Creek or Trello, they can go to fogcreek.com or trello.com if they want to get in touch with you.
What's the best way for them to do that?
Michael Pryor (43:27.760)
Just email me, Michael.
Trello.com Awesome.
Omer (43:32.070)
Thanks again and I wish you continued success.
Michael Pryor (43:34.550)
Thanks Omer.
Omer (43:35.430)
Take care.
