 everyone for being here obviously I'm Giles I'm the journalist I'm wearing a shirt and this is Michael the successful entrepreneur in a t-shirt so I like to do a bit of let's see how many people use Trello first of all but unfortunately it's pretty dark so we can't see when to hold on what we're gonna do things is a tech problem so we solve problems okay can never hold their phone up if they use Trello put your screen on and I hold your phone up so we get an idea so you all you use Trello that's good how many how many of you use Trello on either pay for it or your company pays for it we'll get there we'll get there right so before we stop by Trello I kind of want to take it back because obviously you're a software developer at heart and there's an interesting story where you're at university and you wrote this script that try to tell everyone about what parties are on it didn't really go so well he's talk about what happened first it really did your research didn't you yeah okay I think when you first learned a program you kind of very interested in what you can do and you think a little bit less about what you should do I had figured out that the if you emailed people at the school by their student ID number which incremented they would get the email so I basically start with the first student ID and go from the freshman class and go all the way up to the seniors and I just wrote a script that looped through and emailed everyone at the school so I guess that was in 1994 so I spammed my entire college and the mail server stopped working for half a day so you broke the universe the entire email yeah like system yeah I think that's an interesting as a software developer because if I'm like the professor of ethics at university and I can't email my students you know what's going on in the lectures I'm gonna be like pretty pretty pissed yeah I mean I was like a privileged stupid kid and I didn't think about what I was doing you know I just thought oh I can email the whole school why not I didn't take my computer ethics course at that point no we really did have to take that later I don't think it came up in that course but I do spend a lot of time thinking about that now you need to think about technologies like the blockchain it's like a tool you could use it for a lot of different things you know even all this stuff about social media and all that thing where hey in the beginning it was connecting all these people that weren't connected before and now it's only connecting those people and they're inside echo chambers and so there's all these different facets to technology that I think you know we spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether we could build things over the last decade and now we're spending a lot of time trying to figure out should we and how should we can you just talk a little bit about the origin of of Trello before we come back to the ethics but talk about where the idea came from and when it all kicked off yeah sure I started a software company back in New York in 2000 with the co-founder of mine Jules Polsky and we made a bunch of different products over the years we would spend like a week you know just playing around with ideas and one day Joel had an idea we were trying to manage a company of about 30 people I think that's about the size that you get to where a lot of people are doing things and as a manager you're not really sure if everyone's doing the same strategic thing and they're moving the direction like you can see oh here's what they're checking in here's the code they're checking in but like strategically what are they thinking about so Joel's idea was that we give everyone a to-do list and you only get one list and you'd be able to put only five things in the list so it'd be two things you're working on now two things you're gonna work on next and one thing you're never gonna do so basically if somebody showed up and asked you you'd point to that in your list you're like I told you I'm not doing this and then you imagine a web page where you have all these lists next to each other and you could look at it you could just browse through and you can see okay here's what everyone's working on and if you think about that in your mind you can kind of start to see Trello in there and that's how it came out of that idea okay it was it was a program for developers at the beginning right because you're all developers at the very beginning actually wasn't I think you know we had built a lot of things for developers over the years and at that point in time it was about a year before that we sort of co-created a website called Stack Overflow which is a popular question-and-answer site for developers when we built Trello there were a lot of tools out there that did Kanban and agile software methodology like targeted at developers and they're very specific about the way developers worked and had a lot of intricacies around that and I think what we were trying to do is like take the bones of that and try to figure out how that was useful to a lot of people like if you went to offices you could go to startups and you'd see that a post-it note's all over their wall and they're managing their project with that and we were kind of like there's something there that visual nature the tangible nature of the post-it note that people really can understand very quickly and if we could take that and distill it down and just give that to people to build something to manage their projects it would be universally accepted and I think that was the difference to take take the sort of idea from a developer tool and make it more horizontal for the rest of the world I think you saw the same thing with you know ICQ and you know the IRC and these tools that were mostly used by developers and then sort of went through this iteration where now everyone's on WhatsApp and okay so basically the maker of post-it notes Haiti right now you've disrupted the post-it note market that's that's done yes have you stopped using post-it notes in the office though you know I still think there's a there's sometimes there's a place for that I the the thing that Trello excels at is giving you a map for where you're going and where you've been so the idea is that this is a shared collaboration space it's not just about you but it's about the other people so they can see so everyone's on the same page you know I still use post-it notes if I'm in a call and I have to keep track of stuff when did you understand that this project management tool was more than just something internal like when do you think oh this could be something yes it's interesting you call it a project management tool because I don't like that it's not that I don't like it I just think that it's an interesting way to describe it because I think if you're technical and this audience is probably mostly technical I think when you say those words it makes you think a very specific thing and you know the idea behind Trello is that we're trying to make it so simple and sort of the concept there that sticky note in a list on a board that's it if you get those three things you get what Trello is that anybody can use it and they can use it not just for work but also for things at home or like to plan a wedding like no one goes to plan a wedding and says goes into Google and looks for project management software right and and so that's I think there's a difference there it's hard though because then what is Trello what is the category that it's in and I think it's a much broader planning category but it's hard to describe it in terms that you know don't fit a preconceived notion when did you when did you figure out this tool was going to be something that you could you could spin out and make much bigger than something just used by your own employees well the the first you know it's a kind of a project we worked on it for nine months and we decided we wanted to launch it at a conference because you know this was going to be for not developers and the people that we could market to were all developers so we went to Tecros disrupt competed in a competition there called start at battlefield and lost we came in second but the team that came in first doesn't exist anymore so I feel like we won and at that that day 50,000 people signed up for the tool and I think that showed us there was that had some traction on it took us a couple years before we got to that point every day where were that many people were signing up but in 2014 we had so many different things that we wanted to do and we spun the company out into its own entity and took VC funding okay I was interested in how it was received when you develop this tool in your own company because it's a Bloomberg we started using Trello and I'm kind of worried about I think it's great it's a really good tool but now I can really micromanage my reporters which they obviously don't really like like how does internally like the battle of making people see that this could be something that could add value rather than something that it's gonna be micromanaging you yeah I mean I think there's subtleties in the way that it works so we're talking about project management software before which I think is focused on a very specific way of working like you'd have tasks and they be assigned to people and somebody would be assigned to all the tasks because you wouldn't want a task to just be dropped on the floor those concepts don't really exist that way in Trello right like you can put people's faces on cards or not like you just put a card up there they give in the nature of that the the individual unit in Trello is a card it's not a task it could be that could be what you make your card into for a particular board but you could also just make a card in the top left corner that's like here here's how you use this board and it just has a description so if you think about Excel like the way that I think the reason why Excel was so successful was that they took this model where you just give you a big grid you could put whatever you want wherever you want right you could just go in this cell and write a comment or you go in this cell and you know put salaries but if you have a whole roll of salaries you get on the bottom you can write a note in there it's not a typical way that a programmer would think about that like a programmer if just starting from scratch where they had to design what a spreadsheet is they would probably come at the problem and be like okay tell me what your columns are going to be tell me whether they're going to be numbers or money or dates and then you know it's a very structured way of thinking about it but that's a database that's totally different than what Excel is and and that sort of flexible nature of Excel made it useful in so many different ways and I think that's you know part of what we're trying to do at Trello which was give people just enough structures that they can collaborate openly and then they can all be on the same page to sort of take away the anxiety of not knowing what's going on okay where do you come up with the the name and I'm always interested question because when startups if you did a pie chart of like how startups like think they spend their time obviously a lot of is getting a product ready and they hope that the very small sliver is how much time they waste trying to choose a name but actually in reality people spend a lot of time over this like how did you do it it's an interesting story there because like we we had to internally we had a code name for it and it was based on the sort of visual like lists you know the way that look but also the fact that Trello was like a little bit of structure we called it trellis which is obviously like a structure for our plants to grow on and we got to the point where we were gonna go to TechCrunch and we had a deadline for submission and we needed a domain and all the domains were taken like trellis.com was taken trell.is like every sort of different you know way of slicing and dicing that word was taken and so we decided to hey we only got a couple hours we really need a name we got down to the wire we got everyone into the kitchen and we sort of crowd sourced the name like hey throw up your name ideas we'll write them on the board and the name that we came up with we were big into mascots like Trello has a husky named taco that's the mascot for the app at the time it actually was a manatee I was really pushing this cute manatee as the mascot for Trello it didn't really take people were not into it and so the name we came up with and everyone voted and this is the name that we were gonna name Trello was Planatee which is a combination between planning and manatee also a terrible name awful awful name and I I just shook my head coming out of that meeting and my co-founder Joel is like I don't know what you want me to do the deadline we only have a couple minutes you know like he's like go find me a better name you have a half an hour and I sat down on my desk and just started typing names into an instant domain searching tool and nothing was coming up I went around and around and finally just type trellis again is all they were all taken but an ad came up on the side for Trello.com and I was like shit that's it so that's where the name came from is there a certain thing that you think is the most responsible thing for your growth I mean it's very much word of mouth and that's how people seem to pick up on it but is there something else you think that's a real catalyst to get you where you are I think there's two things so I think that the the simplicity of what's going on this sort of the metaphor is very approachable to people so the post-it notes like if you get post-it notes and you put them on a wall like you'll get Trello in a minute so the vocabulary to understand what Trello is is very small and a collaboration app that's super important because you're working with a bunch of people and it's not going to work if they don't use it the second thing I think is that you know for a long time going back to the can you build things I think the the technology that we use to build software today is getting much more approachable to many more people and it's just quicker to build things so like actually building features is just the entrance fee right like you have to be able to create the feature but that's not what's going to make your product stand out the thing that makes the product stand out is much more about the emotional connection that people have to the software and what I mean by that is you know like what's their connection to the brand how do they feel that when they're using the software I think if you think about little features in Trello like the fact that you can change the board background to some background that has meaning to you personally and then when you add images to cards you see the little image on the front so when you show up at a board your first impression is like a visual imagery of things that are important to you you see this with emoji reactions the custom uploading custom emoji reactions are inside jokes you know and I think sort of enabling that personalization actually builds empathy amongst the people that are using the software so the team that's using it and I think that's a really big part of unleashing the potential of all those teams okay so you the you saw the company at the beginning of this year to Atlassian for 428 million I mean that's obviously a very easy to understand marker of success but how about in two or three or four years time where there's what are those markers are you laid down we think about and got there I'm gonna be gutted yeah so I think go you go back to tech crunch when we got on stage my co-founder said you know we're gonna build a tool that a hundred million people use and I think that was a ridiculous number I laughed when he said it I couldn't fathom it and I think what's behind that number really was this idea that we wanted to build something that was very horizontal that connected people collaborate you know let them work distributed right like not all in the same place but let them be in different places and collaborate at the same time and when you're building a truly like we've translated into 21 languages it's a you know basically available in over a hundred countries those languages and when you're building a tool for the whole world that hundred million numbers starts to make sense like that's a sort of scale that you need to approach we've had 25 million people sign up for trial already so still there's still a lot of work to do but I think that's the direction we're headed that's the sort of marker of success I think is it you know can we be the next Excel what Excel did for spreadsheets can we do that for planning and you're launching are you launching a obviously because I everyone uses Slack and also Trello with their two very not similar but compatible platforms are those areas there's something you want to compete with them more and push into more you know as part being part of Atlassian as a whole like we build a lot of teams for collect where we build a lot of tools for collaboration so we have you know tools that deal with documents at tilt tools that deal with communication like chat tools there's vertical tools that sort of target tech teams in the way that they work and then this Trello which is you know a very horizontal tool that can be used by any team so for right now my focus is really making Trello more awesome and I'll let the rest of the company focus on on those sorts of pieces and I think you know you mentioned Slack which is widely used very popular communication tool and I think the analogy I tell people when they get it was funny they were doing the the little back and forth before we got on stage I tell people like if you're out in the woods and you're doing search and rescue you need to have your radio right to communicate back to base but even with your radio you could be in the woods and be lost the other tool that you need is is your map or your GPS it's like where have we been where are we going and you have those two things together and they work really well and I think you know the the communication tools are very focused on the ephemeral now they're focused on the present which is very useful it's like you know like we need to communicate now Trello's sort of focused on the other ends which is like what happened before and what are we gonna do next so where are we in this sort of journey that we're taking and this journey how many users have you got now how close to you to I the number that we talked about is 25 million sign ups so okay we're running out of time but it kind of just lastly with the benefit of hindsight and also the fact that you're a founder of a software company like what would you do to make the industry and the companies more diverse because developing is not a very like diverse industry let's be honest yeah other things you could do as a founder looking back and you think I hire remotely like number one I think that people need to get in when it's possible I think that the you know two thirds of our company works remotely and the that sort of opened up this huge talent pool for us that was so much more diverse but not just you know not just on gender or racial lines but also just geographies and cultures and languages and for us that was really important because we were building a tool that was supposed to be universal right so the people that made up the team that built the tool I needed to create a team like that otherwise you know as we'd build something a little bit more myopic but that would be my advice I think that the collaboration tools are getting really amazing at connecting people that are not in the same place at the same time and I think that can have a big impact on the way that you staff your company and hire employees ten times as many people were respond to a job posting if you open it up to remote work so if you're having trouble hiring developers and you put in your open to experiment with that and we just released a PDF the other day on like best practices for remote work and so it's something that I'm evangelizing and talking about a lot interesting okay well thank you very much you're on our time so obviously thank you Michael thank you very much everyone