Joel Spolsky: CEO of Stack Overflow

**Spencer Rascoff** (0:03)
Thanks for joining me on Office Hours. I'm your host, Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Zillow Group and a student and enthusiast of all things leadership. This podcast will feature my candid conversations with other leaders and CEOs about management, business, and company culture. I came up with the idea for this podcast because I frequently speak with other execs about how they run their organizations, and I thought it would be interesting to move those conversations from behind closed doors and out into the light. So if you ever wondered what CEOs talk about when they're together, you're in the right place. This episode is a family affair. Today I'm in New York visiting with my cousin, Joel Spolsky, co-founder and CEO of Stack Overflow, an online community for developers and programmers to ask questions and connect with one another. Joel also co-founded Fog Creek Software, a software company and incubator in New York that created Trello, a visual project management tool for businesses and consumers. Trello made headlines in January for its recent sale to Atlassian for $360 million in cash and $65 million in stock. Joel has been a long-time advocate for bettering the way tech companies treat both consumers and employees, offering a unique perspective for CEOs, entrepreneurs and tech leaders alike.
All right. Hey, Joel. Thanks a lot for your time today. I'm excited to catch up with you.

**Joel Spolsky** (1:26)
It's a pleasure to be here.

**Spencer Rascoff** (1:28)
So tell our listeners about these different companies that you've created just at a really high level. I mean, you're involved in several different initiatives. Give us a quick overview.

**Joel Spolsky** (1:37)
I started Fog Creek in 2000 I thought I would do everything inside Fog Creek. various things happened along the way. In 2008, joint venture with Jeff Atwood to create Stack Overflow. Over time, it was clear that I should move into Stack Overflow and be the CEO of that. And Stack Overflow is doing so well that it took some investment and spun off as a separate independent company. So that separated Fog Creek from Stack Overflow. I became the CEO of Stack Overflow. Michael Pryor stayed behind at Fog Creek.

**Spencer Rascoff** (2:08)
And Fog Creek, is it fair to describe it as an incubator or how would you describe it?

**Joel Spolsky** (2:11)
Well, it has effectively become an incubator. I mean, we thought it was developer tools for all those years, but the net result is that it's been an incubator. It incubated, it did its own products, some of which are still exist, like Fog Bugs is sort of a more mature product. Stack Overflow was effectively incubated out of Fog Creek. And then Trello was incubated out of Fog Creek as well. That was in 2012, I think, and that spun off to be a third independent company. Michael Pryor went out to Fog Creek with that one to become the CEO of Trello, and that was effectively became the third company come out of that. And currently, if you look around at Fog Creek, what they're working on is a product as of right now named GoMix, which is sort of a simplified software development remixing kind of social platform for writing code to share with your friends.

**Spencer Rascoff** (3:05)
And Stack Overflow is a developer community, message board for developer tools?

**Joel Spolsky** (3:12)
Exactly. It's basically, we describe it as questions and answers for software developers. We've now extended also into documentation. So, developers contribute questions, contribute answers, write documentation for products and then edit it. It's a membership-oriented website with millions of software developers around the world that are members of the site. And then mostly the business model is around careers and talent for those developers. So, if you want to hire developers, you can come to Stack Overflow and search profiles.

**Spencer Rascoff** (3:43)
Let's talk about Trello for a moment and then come back to Stack Overflow. So, Trello just sold to Atlassian for over $400 million.

**Joel Spolsky** (3:51)
The number that I read was $425 million.

**Spencer Rascoff** (3:54)
Allegedly. I'm not going to ask you to confirm or deny. It got sold for a lot. Hopefully, we can agree on that. Talk me through that. When you're selling a company, what as a founder, and I think were you chairman at the show?

**Joel Spolsky** (4:08)
Yeah, I was chairman.

**Spencer Rascoff** (4:09)
Yeah. Co-founder and chairman. What was going through your mind? What did it feel like to sell that company? Were there any mixed emotions around it?

**Joel Spolsky** (4:18)
Definitely some mixed emotions. It was a little bit weird for my position. It's unusual because I did not have a day-to-day responsibility in the company. Michael Pryor, my co-founder at Fog Creek, was the CEO of Trello. He is now an Atlassian employee, and that was a change for him that didn't really occur to me. So now, a company that I had, I was just the chairman of the company, I'm no longer the chairman, and instead, I have some money. But it was a little bit less of a day-to-day change for me. It is a little bit weird. Like, over time, these companies that grow away from you, you get to know fewer and fewer of the individuals personally, and more and more theoretical.