This is hilarious. Only in the bizarre world we live in could a half billion sale be spun out into a failure to get a billion. Would a billion have satisfied the author or would it have then needed to be two?
>Only in the bizarre world we live in could a half billion sale be spun out into a failure to get a billion. I can't speak for the author but selling Trello "for only $425m" is a failed outcome if the growth expectations was for it to become a massive $1 billion business. How do we know that? Because Trello took $10 million in VC money in 2014.[1] So we can just work backward from the $1 billion goal using basic math…
Only in the waning days of a market top would such an assertion (that such a return is a "failure" to anyone involved) even have a frisson of plausibility.
Also, most of your numbers & ratios are order-of-magnitude right, but as they say, "horseshoes and hand grenades." A $442 M fund size is big enough that returning even a 3x-4x overall, with any consistency, would be downright virtuosic. So, no, they don't need to return $3B or 6-7x the entire fund to be successful (nor do they or their LPs have any realistic expectation of doing so).
The long game, as always, is to try to have just ONE Google in your portfolio (the 400x+). But the short and mid games dominate, and they are about staying alive long enough to have enough at-bats to hit that grand slam. And the absolute, bar-none best way to stay alive that long, is to consistently make money for your investors.
Finally, the ex ante assumptions and hopes and dreams are not really the way to judge the decision to sell Trello. That decision must be judged on facts in hand at the time. And frankly, at that time, Trello was a leading Kanban app, with no obvious or de-risked path toward a 10x or 100x from where they were.
TL;DR: Nobody actually in that game is pooh-poohing a 9-figure exit for 10x in 2 years with a straight face.