The Birth of Trello

Name: The Birth of Trello
Uploaded: 2017-09-05T20:06:10+00:00
Duration: 1 min 20 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: In this excerpt, the speaker explains how Trello originated from a company culture that encouraged developers to experiment with new ideas during…

5 Sept 2017 · 1 min

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1:20

In this excerpt, the speaker explains how Trello originated from a company culture that encouraged developers to experiment with new ideas during dedicated innovation periods called “Creek Weeks,” similar to Google’s 20% time. He recounts an earlier intern‑built screen‑sharing product named Copilot, which addressed a real need but suffered from a misaligned marketing strategy, illustrating both success and failure of internal experiments. The narrative concludes that Trello itself was born out of this pattern of taking time to build and test new products.

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What's the story of the birth of Trello? So we sort of had this, um, because we started the company as just a place for developers to work, like a great place for developers, um, we had a, uh, um, a culture of, hey, let's just try different things, right? And we would do what we called Creek Weeks, you know, or like, it's like Google's 20% time, except we would, take time out and just try new things. Like, let's build a new product. So that actually works? Yeah, I mean, we had a bunch of things. Like, if you, one summer we took a bunch of interns and built a screen sharing tool called Copilot. Yeah. And that was before LogMeIn and GoToMyPC existed. And so that was actually serving a real need at that time. We didn't see it. We marketed it to customer service people. Instead of the way that LogMeIn and GoToMyPC sort of marketed it more to consumers. Yeah. And so I think that was like the right product, right time, but wrong marketing strategy. That was like another example of failure in some sense. I mean, we made decent money off of it, but it never became as, you know, those other companies IPO'd and became giant successes. So, but we had this pattern of, hey, let's take some time off, build new things. And Trello was born out of that. Yeah.