A Rebel Alliance Rises: Old Street and Resolution Team Up to Resist the Empire

In an ecosystem where everyone is being acquired, we’re teaming up with Atlassian Marketplace stalwart Resolution to continue prioritizing people and passion over profits. Our recent ‘coalition’ is not a merger or an acquisition, but an investment, by Resolution, in Old Street. It means we get to keep our independence while still benefiting from collaborating at scale.

What this coalition looks like for our customers and partners

Here’s the deal. From the outside, our coalition with Resolution won’t look much different. Well, apart from the fact that our apps will develop and improve more quickly with Resolution backing us, and we’ll have more capacity and flexibility to make lucrative partnerships with fellow Atlassian vendors. (So actually, that’s a pretty big deal!)

What does it look like from the inside? Last year, one of our co-founders, Tom, decided to leave Old Street. We looked for an Atlassian Partner with similar values to our own to take his place, and found Resolution. Resolution bought Tom’s shares and now we are harnessing their invaluable wisdom, experience, and insights to make our apps and services the best they can be.

Otherwise, Old Street and Resolution remain two separate corporate entities with their own branding and identity.

What our co-founders say

Old Street CEO Chris Cooke explains, “We’re very different companies, and that presented an awesome learning opportunity. Resolution have been around longer, with a bigger team, and larger customers, so they have more mature processes and incredible data-driven insights. Likewise, we’ve loved sharing some of the tricks behind our super-fast growth and fabulously diverse and global team. It’s wonderful to be laying our own path in a marketplace that’s looking dangerously monopolistic. A rebel alliance to the mighty empires forming around us.”

Co-founder and sales director Jacek Dębiec adds, “This team-up is a unique combo of Old Street’s energy, speed of implementation, and start-up mentality with Resolution’s structure, established foundations, and years of experience. Together this will enable us to level up and provide even more value to the Atlassian ecosystem.”

What our new directors say

Resolution’s investment led to their co-CEOs Christian Reichert and Björn Döhler joining our board of directors (Christian adding to a bizarre over-abundance of people called Chris within Old Street, as though we attract them).

Christian says, “At Resolution we make a select few value-enhancing investments. The proposition in short: making awesome teams more successful by accelerating their journey. That description fits Old Street incredibly well. They have a great reporting product with a proven market fit, together with a unique team and culture. Having 10 years as a thriving marketplace vendor under our belts, Resolution have a well-rounded, experienced team and a lot of great systems in place. This has enabled us to replicate some of those systems for Old Street and avoid re-inventing the wheel, growing their business faster and our own with it.”

Björn adds, “Old Street showed great potential with Custom Charts and a bunch of other app ideas. The combination of a great team + great products was crucial to invest in this partnership. The conversations were truthful, transparent, and inspiring from the beginning. Together we will prove that the OSS rocket has no brakes.”

And from a product perspective…

After all, Old Street Solutions is all about Old Street’s solutions, which empower everyone to create and collaborate in Jira and Confluence without barriers or bureaucracy. Ultimately, this investment is designed to help make our apps better, faster.

Our product director, Morgan Folsom, explains, “From a product perspective, this team-up has allowed Old Street to benefit from Resolution’s established systems, such as their tools for deploying test instances. In addition we’re getting some extraordinary data insights, which help the product team better understand trends, Marketplace data, and what areas we should focus our attention on. And of course, this is only the start.”

Berlin: the beginning of a much bigger collaboration… and schnitzel

In June 2022, the globally distributed Old Street team flew to Germany to meet the mostly Berlin-based Resolution folks. We were treated to cross-team knowledge sharing, schnitzel everywhere you looked, karaoke, a heatwave, and volleyball on sand hotter than the Sahara.

Chris Cooke says, “What Resolution and Old Street share is a commitment to prioritizing creativity and autonomy over standardization and micromanagement, and having a transparent and fun culture with a flat hierarchy. With so much in common, we got along very quickly in Berlin. People were quick to drop their defenses, as became apparent at the karaoke!”

Morgan adds, “Berlin was an awesome opportunity to share knowledge and talk longer-term plans with the Resolution folks, as well as a chance to eat lots of schnitzel and watch my colleagues attempt to play volleyball.”

At the end of the day, both Old Street and Resolution believe that we can make our customers happy while still remaining happy ourselves, something a lot of much larger corporations cannot seem to achieve. Success doesn’t have to cost the happiness of those succeeding, and with Resolution backing us, happiness and success are sure to remain inseparable bedfellows.

Chris Cooke offers a final note for other startup software companies: “To anyone that didn’t start a company to end up working for someone else’s, reach out. I’d be happy to discuss alternative models to growing and competing at scale. David beats Goliath all the time in the software industry.”