How Scaling a Hypergrowth Business is All About Collaboration with Asana's Justin Rosenstein

I don't know if I have a superhero origin story. I appreciate the vote of confidence. I think for me, it was just this sense of wonder at being alive and getting to interact with the world. And as I got older, I think it only got weirder to me. I mean, it is frickin' crazy to be alive. And the more that I thought about that, the more that I've just felt, especially recognizing that we're this rare little planet alone in the solar system, wanting to dedicate myself to be as much in service to life as possible, to make myself useful. And when I was 10 years old, I got a computer and, being a nerd, started programming it. I was always just amazed at this idea that you could sit alone in a room and write a piece of software once that could then be useful to people potentially all over the world. And so I think my career has kind of been this ongoing exploration of how can I be as useful as possible. At Facebook, the like button was the idea of could you help people, could you inject a little bit of positivity into people's lives? I think that's gone well in some ways and has had unintended consequences in other ways. So I'm still on that journey to figure out how to be as useful and in service to life as possible with technology.

Yeah, I'm always looking for these leverage points: where are places that you can exert a relatively small amount of effort and have a potentially large, outsized amount of impact? So at both Google and Facebook, I just felt constantly frustrated by how much time was wasted on work about work. Asana actually helps you to use less email, which is kind of nice. And it was at Facebook that we developed this internal tool to replace email, and it tended to become this core central backbone of how Facebook is able to get so much done as a company. And Asana is us bringing that to the world. It's software that enables teams to organize and manage all of their work, whether you're talking about a five-person team managing their individual day-to-day tasks or an executive CEO that's able to manage the strategic initiatives of a giant corporation. And I think the reason that's such a leverage point is that the average knowledge worker literally spends 61% of their time on this kind of work about work. So while we're not helping to cure diseases or fix education or create clean energy directly, we're helping the people who do those things to be more effective. We've had these incredibly devastating wildfires recently, and there's a Fortune 100 insurance company that has said Asana has been instrumental in accelerating their ability to provide emergency disaster relief to victims of a wildfire. Or the Concerted Care Group is a company that provides comprehensive treatment to people who are fighting opioid addiction, and they were in a serious situation last year where they felt like the disorganization they were experiencing was actually going to cause them to go under, and it was Asana that was the make-or-break thing that allowed them to have the organization necessary. And so instead of going under, they've been able to provide care to over 300,000 patient visits in just the last year alone. So I think these are both examples of how technology can help people work together more effectively. We are social creatures; we don't survive on our own. And so the idea that technology would eventually not just let us communicate but more accurately and more efficiently align our efforts and unite our efforts, I think is really important.

Well, first of all, it feels good to see that it's working. You know, at this point, Asana is one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in the world. We nearly doubled our revenue in the last year. We now have over a million teams who have started on Asana with the free version, and over this year we passed the mark of 50,000 paying customers, and that includes small businesses and large enterprises. The Series E money takes us from here to expanding that value to teams all over the world. We want everyone to be able to experience that benefit. The average customer says that they are 45% faster with Asana than they were before using Asana. So now customers can basically do in two weeks what used to take them three weeks. So getting back to everyone in the world and then going from 45% to 145%, basically we want to radically change the nature of what teams are able to accomplish. So that's about turning Asana into this team brain, this kind of central nervous system for entire organizations, using computer intelligence to help automate all of that busy work that people have to do day in and day out to keep everyone on the same page, and ultimately to become this core platform that all of an organization's work runs on.

What we hear from customers today is not that we're eliminating jobs, but that we're taking people who are project managers or people managers, or taking that part of their job that they particularly dislike, which is running around asking people, 'Hey, what's the status of that?', bugging people, 'Hated you, get that done yet.' And by automating that and giving everyone clarity and putting everyone on the same page, they actually get to spend more of their time focused on things they enjoy doing and the work that matters, like coaching people, helping people become their best selves, instead of all of this busy work that's better done by robots.

I'm really grateful for how strong our relationship is. Dustin often jokes that choosing a co-founder is like choosing a spouse, except you spend more time talking about money. I think the core of it for us is this foundation of deep mutual respect. So when we have those disagreements, we give each other the benefit of the doubt and we try to figure out, well, okay, why are we not seeing eye-to-eye on this? Do you have different information than I do? Do you have a different assumption, a different intuition? And work through it. I remember one time early on, Dustin gave me some feedback that I came off as passionate but actually just came off as angry. And I think in some co-founder relationships that would have been offensive, but for me it was a gift to get that kind of feedback. So I think deep mutual respect is the foundation of any strong long-term relationship.

Yeah, I think a lot of it is, like I said, we can work through those different assumptions and get to it. If there's some core disagreement, is there a way we can get more data on that? In a lot of cases, it's just that we've nicely divided up our responsibilities. There's things that are my strengths and his weaknesses and vice versa. And so we try to defer as much as possible to the person who has the stronger intuition. Saying, 'I'm gonna let you handle this,' can be really valuable. There's only a small number of decisions that are actually really worth going all the way into, getting into the nitty-gritty. A lot of times it's better just keep moving and move quickly.

Yeah, I think some people think building a great place to work is all about the perks. We think it's all about the culture. We really see culture as this core competitive advantage where if you can build a place that people can do their best work and not be distracted by silly politics, that really accelerates your ability to accomplish your mission and your business goals. So we think of culture as a product. Just like we have a product team that's constantly iterating on our software, we have a culture team that's constantly iterating on our culture. Every year we send out an anonymous survey to everyone in the company with 70 questions, everything from how's your relationship with your manager, do you think you're getting the right career growth. And we're able to look at all of that information and figure out what are our culture bugs. Just like software has bugs, culture has bugs, and we go after them and we squash them. And by figuring out what are the things we need to do to solve that, I think our culture gets better and better over time, whereas a lot of companies get worse and worse over time through entropy. A couple of examples of the features of that culture: one is authenticity. I think a lot of places want you to bring this kind of cookie-cutter professionalism to work. We really encourage people to bring their full selves to work with all their quirks. Many Asanas have many quirks. We think that unlocks a lot of creative potential. Another is decentralized decision-making. We've probably all been at companies where decision-making gets bottlenecked because it's all concentrated in a small number of executives. At Asana, we try to push the decision-making as much as possible to the people who are actually doing the real work. In fact, when we draw our org chart, we put the CEO at the bottom rather than at the top. It's like a tree that grows outward where the fruit of the tree are the individual contributors who are actually doing the real work, and managers, rather than being your boss, are more like branches, people who are there to support you in doing your best work. So yeah, overall, I think we have quite a few unusual practices that we've adopted at Asana, and I think they've been critical not only to the great employee satisfaction that you mentioned but also just being effective in achieving our business outcomes and our mission.

Yeah, one that we had a few years ago was around compensation. The conversation system was unclear and it just took a few rounds of figuring out, okay, we need to improve our documentation and we need to hire a compensation lead. And then we were great. That's because we do this regular measurement. When we measured it again a few months later, we were able to see, oh, we have made real progress.

I think the thing we hear consistently from people is that it's the people and the fact that it's such a friendly place to work. I saw someone just on their Facebook wall talking to their friends about loving working at Asana and said something like, 'I feel like I'm working with 400 friends.' The benefit you get from enabling people to stay with food, actually instead of having to leave the office, be able to talk to each other over lunchtime, or with yoga, be able to take a moment and recenter themselves and then get back into work.

I have not experienced that. I think that it's really nice when you're on a friendly basis with people. And I think sometimes people can think of friendly as soft, as meaning like, oh, we're gonna dance around and not actually talk about real things. But I think the kind of friendliness we have is the kind of friendship where you can be real with each other. So I think it's been purely beneficial for us.

Yeah, I don't want you to think that management's been smooth sailing the entire time. I somehow doubt that. Let's see, where do I start? Let's go with mobile. So our iOS app when it first launched had a 1.5 star rating in the App Store, and some of the reviews that got are still painful to read. And so we changed course, we made some new technological decisions, and it's only been about four years since then, and now we have a 4.8 star rating in the App Store, and just a few weeks ago Apple, out of I think over a million apps, named Asana the App of the Day. So I think this is a really good example of the entrepreneurial journey of how you can start off worst in class at something, and if you have the humility to be able to recognize what you're doing wrong and really look those problems in the eye, and then the perseverance to just one day at a time, one step at a time, keep trying to improve things, it's possible to move from worst in class to best in class. On a more personal note, I would say the kind of anxiety and challenge that you're talking about is something I'm intimately familiar with. If you're out there and you're experiencing a crushing level of anxiety, I have bad news for you: this is normal. That's good to know that you're not alone out there, but it is normal and you will have to deal with it. And I'd say that the solutions for me have been one, to zoom out. So on a day-to-day basis, you're always fighting fires, you're always solving problems, but often if you look at month-over-month, year-over-year, we are making progress. And the other big thing that's been huge for me is meditation. By taking the time every day to stop and inspect the contents of my own mind, it doesn't necessarily make the anxiety go away, but it allows me to develop a healthier relationship to it where I can see it for what it is and keep working.

Yeah, I think we in technology can have an enormous impact. I mean, for whatever our different reasons, we've all taken the time to develop these extremely rare skills that now put us in the 0.001 percent of people in the world who are able to have an impact on this core fundamental technological infrastructure that influences millions and sometimes billions of people. That is a huge opportunity but also a huge responsibility. So I think the question that we all need to be asking ourselves is, what are we going to do with that power? When you get out of college, where you go choose to work is you basically voting with a huge amount of your time and your effort on what mission you want to accelerate. And obviously we all have to make a living, but you know, you could go make a living by building software that is addictive and waste people's time, or you could go work at a company like Coursera that is helping bring education to more people all over the world, or you go work at a company like Tesla that's helping accelerate our movement toward clean sustainable energy which we desperately need, or at a company like Nema which is helping to bring financial services to people who don't have access to banking. And so I think that fundamentally what we need is a new definition of success, kind of a new code of ethics, where we measure success not based on who has the most money or the highest valuation, but based on who's having the most positive impact on the world, who's drawing down the most carbon from the atmosphere, who's educating the most people. And so at Asana, what we're proud of, the business success that we've had for us, that's really the means toward an end. That's the rocket fuel that we use in order to be able to achieve our mission. And the metrics that I'm more interested in are things like the fact that companies are able to move 45% faster with Asana, or the fact that 80% of companies say they experience more clarity and transparency and accountability because of Asana. That's the things I look at more than profit to see that we're succeeding in our mission.

On one hand, we've developed these amazing capacities. We can have real-time conversations with people halfway around the globe. We're able to access the world's knowledge in a matter of keystrokes. We finally have the ability to produce enough food to theoretically feed everyone on the planet. And yet at the same time, we're in a lot of increasingly harrowing situations. We have this incredible climate crisis that's only accelerating. We see increasing political polarization. And we don't have our act together enough to actually distribute the food, and so hundreds of millions of people still go hungry every night. And so I think as a society, we're at this real fork in the road where I'm concerned that if we continue with business as usual, things could get worse and worse. You could see an acceleration of the kind of problems we're seeing with climate. If we don't get to global peace, I can imagine new technologies making things worse. But if we choose the other direction and work together, I think we can create a world that's better and better. And what's amazing is that which of these two roads we choose has not yet been determined. We collectively are authoring our future. We can decide what road we want to go down. And so as the technology industry, I think we can choose to play a real role in that and embody that spirit of collaboration instead of seeing ourselves as a bunch of different sports teams all competing for who can get the highest score, who can raise the most money, get the highest valuation. If we instead see ourselves as all part of one team, as part of this one project that's all working toward a common mission of creating a thriving, sustainable world for all people. And so I know that may seem unrealistic, but doing unrealistic things is what the technology industry is all about. And I think it's necessary if we're going to solve the problems we face in education, health, equality, democracy, sustainability, and energy. And the reason that I work on Asana is because I do see teams who are doing all those things today, and I see Asana as this opportunity to accelerate all those teams at the same time. Because ultimately, it's an incredible Earth that we don't inherit from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children. I just want to see as many people as possible working in service of life.