SaaStr 104: Trello Founder, Michael Pryor on The 3 Key Elements That Make A Great CEO, The Fundamentals To Make A Pivot Successfully & The Secrets To Building The Most Efficient Workforce

**Harry Stebbings** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to another week in the world of SaaS and SaaStr with me, Harry Stebbings. If you haven't added me on Snapchat yet, then I'd love to see you there on at hstebbings with two Bs, and you can follow the main man, Jason Lemkin, at Jason LK on Twitter. However, for the show's day, I'm one of the exceptional guests we have in the hot seat today, so I'm thrilled to welcome Michael Pryor, co-founder and CEO at Trello, now head of product for Trello with Atlassian, following their recent acquisition. For those that do not know, Trello is a beloved visual collaboration tool that lets you work more collaboratively and get more done. Prior to the acquisition though, they raised from some of the best in the business, including the likes of Spark Capital, Index Ventures and Box Group. And if that wasn't enough, Michael's also a board member at StackOverflow. I do also want to say a huge thank you to Jason Lemkin for the intro today, without which the show would not have been possible. However, before we dive into the show today, Algolia is a robust search API that allows developers to integrate lightning fast, typo tolerant search into their SaaS product. Out of the box, Algolia offers developers a powerful platform for building great search experiences by owning the entire stack from engine to server. Algolia free up development teams to focus on adding intuitive search that delights users. This is perfect for existing search teams looking to spend less time on maintenance and infrastructure management and more time on user experience. For small SaaS teams, Algolia is a perfect investment on top of your existing stack that requires no specialist engineers. And you can learn more about how Algolia helps SaaS scale search. Because now SaaS podcast listeners can get one month free at algolia.com forward slash SaaS with the coupon code sasta podcast. That's algolia.com forward slash sasta. But enough from me. So without further ado, I'm delighted to welcome Michael Pryor, Founder and CEO at Trello.
Good, that's perfect.

**Michael Pryor** (1:40)
Okay, I think we're warmed up.

**Harry Stebbings** (1:42)
Michael, it's so fantastic to have you on the show today. A huge thank you to Jason Lemkin for the intro, but thank you so much for joining me today.

**Michael Pryor** (1:49)
Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

**Harry Stebbings** (1:51)
I'd love to get started though today, Michael, with a two to three minute founding story of Trello and the aha moment for you.

**Michael Pryor** (1:58)
So this product came out of Fog Creek Software. We have a culture of building new products over the years. And at one point in time, we were looking around, trying to figure out what everyone at the company was doing. My co-founder and I, Joel Spolsky, and he had an idea which was, what if everyone had a to-do list and it only had five slots in it? Two things you're gonna work on now, two things you're gonna work on next, and one thing that you're never gonna work on. And we were gonna call it five things. And then you could look around at everyone's to-do list and see exactly what they were working on. And that idea sort of morphed into what Trello became as we saw the way that people were using conbomb boards and they were using sticky notes on their walls and everything that was happening around the time is software development methodologies. But we decided to build a product really for everyone else, not for software developers.
And the aha moment came a little bit later when Joel had this idea, we were building this product for a much more consumer audience and Joel had the idea, hey, we should let, when you make the cards on the board, you should be able to put a card cover on the front, like upload an image, and you should be able to change the background of the board to be any background you want. It's sort of these ideas that were sort of personalizing the board and letting people really build something that was in. Yes, exactly, that was theirs. And that I think changed the way that people connected with Trello in a way that people don't usually have that type of connection with productivity software.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:24)
But I'm really, one of the very interesting moment of the journey for me, and in particular, the trajectory of Trello, is the transition that you made from the project management market to the process management market.
So I'm really interested here. What was it that made you make this decision? And what was the kind of fundamental thesis behind it?