Quick Left and Sprint.ly pair up to form a web-development superpower

Sometimes two companies just belong together.

That seems to be the case with Sprint.ly, a provider of software project-management software, and Quick Left, a web development consulting company. The former kept turning to the latter, and today the companies are announcing a merger.

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“We employed Quick Left to work on some of the more complex JavaScript issues we had with that piece of software,” Matthew Work, until now Sprint.ly’s chief strategy officer, told VentureBeat. “We were truly and deeply impressed with their technical expertise … and the people.”

So while Sprint.ly purchased all stock in Quick Left, really two companies are being blended together, said Work, who becomes chief executive of the combined company, which has around 33 employees in Portland, Ore.; Boulder, Colo.; and San Francisco.

It’s an interesting solution to a problem many startups face — how to attract and retain great talent. In this case, while the company will operate under the Quick Left name, both the web-development consultancy and the Sprint.ly web service will continue to be available, Work said.

And the deal makes sense for both companies. Quick Left comes with brand recognition, having worked with Comcast, Disney, Kraft, Old Navy, and Yahoo. That’s one reason why it makes sense to stick with that company’s name. But because Quick Left’s developers weren’t always operating at full capacity, a merger will ensure they stick around.

And with Quick Left’s talent and style of business, the Sprint.ly team, which had taken on $1.45 million in funding, will be better equipped to meet “periodic and cyclical needs for different skill sets,” not to mention capital needs, Work said.

Quick Left could well expand, he said, and introduce a new developer-focused product to sit alongside the Sprint.ly tool, which competes with Pivotal Tracker, Rally Software’s Flowdock, and Atlassian’s JIRA.

Ironically, Work previously was general manager of Pivotal Tracker while it was part of Pivotal Labs. He helped sell Pivotal Labs to EMC, which later worked with VMware to spin out Pivotal into a separate company.

Work respects the other companies that help developers see what’s going on with issues and show managers the status of ongoing projects. But that doesn’t mean they’ll prevent the growth of the new and improved Quick Left.

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“Since software development is not going away, I think there is a lot of room here to continue to create new, interesting products that facilitate this stuff,” he said.