PandoMonthly with Facebook/Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz on both co.s and giving away his money

Yeah. Not quite yet.

Yeah, it's already quite a good month, actually.

Yes, exactly.

Yep.

Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, kind of an interesting story, but Mark and I were pseudo randomly paired together as roommates. So basically what happened is, you know, when you're a freshman at Harvard, you're in the freshman dorms, and then you enter the lottery system to choose your house for the next three years. Kind of a big deal. And I ended up, how does this go? I ended up just choosing to block with my girlfriend at the time. And she had a group of friends that she was blocking with. And Mark ended up, sorry, my memory is actually a little faulty on this, but I think what happened is actually I was in one blocking group and Mark was in another. And basically Billy, one of our roommates that doesn't often come up in the story, he was rooming with me and then Chris Hughes was with Mark and they put us into a four-room suite and that's basically how we met. So I literally met Mark the first day of sophomore year. And yeah, the rest was just kind of fate.

I first met him, you know, he was definitely, you know, an interesting character. He had a ton of energy. You know, he was, you know, it was the first day of school, so he was really excited, of course. And you know, one of the things that stands out in my mind and actually I think is the way David Kirkpatrick decided to open The Facebook Effect is this story about how he had this giant whiteboard with him that I think was in his parents' van and it was like the very first thing he moved into the suite and it was must have been like 4 by 10 feet or something like that and you know in a very small college suite so we had kind of a hallway connecting our bedrooms and this was like the whole hallway. And yeah, I mean, you know, we hit it off right away and he's very personable and easy to get along with and just yeah, started off an exciting year.

No. I don't think that's, yeah, I don't think that would be an accurate way to describe me. So, I was kind of on the business track in school. I was actually an econ concentrator at Harvard. And I was also involved in a lot of technology. I'd built some websites in high school. I was a user assistant at school. So that meant I, you know, helped students with their personal computing issues. And I always sort of fantasized of something along the lines of, you know, being the business side of a technology company. But I don't think I ever really pictured it as, you know, founding a company being the entrepreneur. You know, that wasn't really my mindset and was much less popular at the time in general. Was TechCrunch even around in 2004 or 2005?

Yeah. So, you know, a lot less of that community was around. I will say, you know, that was definitely the way Mark thought about things and he always had, you know, a couple projects going on on the side and, you know, made quite a bit of money in high school even doing, you know, large websites and things like that.

I remember that picture very well. It actually has a really funny backstory. This came up, somebody sent me this on Facebook message and I remembered when we took it and literally, you know, somebody wanted to take a photo of us and we were like, 'Oh, wouldn't it be funny if we like put a blanket over ourselves and like won't this picture like come out goofy?' And sure enough, it's like, you know, the old picture of all of us from back then, so it gets printed over and over again.

Yeah, it's true. You know, I think we got along, you know, really well. You know, considering that it just seemed to be a really easygoing relationship. You know, I was always, you know, pretty focused on like the sort of the immediate needs of the site and, especially back in the early days expanding to other colleges. And Chris and Mark were, you know, more off sort of like pontificating about what could be and thinking about other businesses back then. And, you know, it felt very fluid. And, you know, we've continued to have a really great friendship ever since then.

You know, I think my belief was always quite large. But you know, it got bigger over time. I was always just sort of like one or two years ahead of everyone else. You know, the sort of first week of Facebook at Harvard was really quite incredible. It was just like, you know, complete ubiquity literally on every screen as you walked around. And so that, you know, gave me, you know, just a lot of confidence and sort of put like the big idea in my head. And there's a passage in The Facebook Effect about like Mark and I negotiating my compensation. And I very distinctly remember saying something to him along the lines of, you know, I think if you give me, you know, 1% of this company, that will probably end up being well more than enough. But it wouldn't quite feel fair. So, we ended up coming up with something else. But I think that, you know, I think that speaks to how I was, you know, valuing the company at day five.

That's correct.

Well, when we left, we actually weren't like permanently leaving. We, I mean at the very beginning we were kind of just going for the summer. And then I think maybe the first week or two we were out there we realized it was going to take longer than that and it would be impossible to run the company while we were also going to school. I don't know how we thought that was ever going to work.

Yeah slightly challenging. I mean we had managed to do it for three or four months so we thought what were your grades like? Can't get any harder than that. They, you know, they were pretty good most of the guys.

Well, you know, one thing that I think will be heartening to people is, you know, I ended up taking Intro to Computer Science the fall before we started Facebook. Part of my rationale was I knew Mark was a pretty good programmer and I was like, 'Oh, you know, he'll help me with my homework and stuff like this.' That turned out not true at all. And the one time this happened in college was that course I got a B+. So it would still be a better story if it were a D.

Exactly. You know, I just find that really ironic.

Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, we were sort of caught in a wave of momentum to say the least. I mean, the site was just growing so fast. You know, we honestly weren't even thinking quite that far ahead. It was more like, you know, how do we keep things running? How do we, you know, prevent a competitor from overrunning us? You know, and really, especially for the first 12 months of the site's existence, just how do we make it not go down, you know.

I mean I may have been to a large part just sort of like insulated from that kind of attitude. I mean I was really, you know, much more so than Mark or Chris or Sean, you know, really focused on the product and focused on building. So I didn't get out of the house much and TechCrunch wasn't around so I wasn't seeing all the bad things they might have been saying about us. But yeah, you know, there was definitely, you know, some pessimism and, you know, some people who believed and the people closest to users of the site, you know, really kind of got it. It was really hard to sort of ignore the depth to which people were engaging with the app and I think that ultimately made believers out of people including, you know, Peter Thiel and later David Z.

You know, I think, especially with Sean, and in turn with Peter, they just had a big effect on our ability to control the company. So I think if we had, you know, kind of gone into fundraising, you know, without Sean by our side, we would have taken a radically different looking deal, given up a lot more control, probably would have given up, you know, control of the board in the first round, right? Just because we were, you know, novice entrepreneurs and didn't know better and didn't know how to run a company. But you know, having them on board both gave the confidence to other people that this was a serious company and could be run well and they were just enormously founder friendly. Especially after, you know, the experiences Sean had gone through with Napster and Plaxo he just cared a lot about making sure, you know, Facebook stayed in control, you know, especially in markets control but company controlled. And Peter was more than happy to feel the same way. You know, that's how they basically do every deal at Founders Fund now. And then for Peter, at the board level, you know, one of the things that really sticks out for me is just, you know, every single board meeting, he was really emphasizing that we needed to grow the company slower. He always felt like the headcount was going too quickly. And I only feel even stronger about that now, especially as we build Asana, something we talk about all the time. It's just really easy when you're caught up in this sort of fast user growth to just, you know, get in this mindset that you need to hire as quickly as possible. There's so many things falling apart. There's so many opportunities you could be trying. And you know, you just got to hire anybody who walks in the door. Aside from, you know, intrinsically meaning that ends up lowering your quality bar because you just can't hire well at scale, it also means you end up with mission creep and mission dilution and, you know, culture dilution and just a bunch of people that don't necessarily think about the company the same way the earlier people do. So now I definitely, you know, I think about this all the time. This is the number one advice I give to entrepreneurs if they're going to be in, you know, that type of market. You know, really hire slowly and carefully. And I definitely think, you know, we probably hired at Facebook much faster than Peter would have wanted us to but if he hadn't been there we would have hired way, way faster than that.

Yeah, it wasn't even necessarily cost, but definitely just our ability to, you know, re-engineer the site and literally, you know, rack servers fast enough at Facebook was definitely the limiting factor. You know, I remember there was one time we, you know, we decided to like double the number of servers from like 20 to 40 and we're like, okay, now we'll be able to expand as fast as we want and we put the servers in, made the site run faster and people just used it more. And we're immediately at capacity again. So, we did this, you know, we did this, must have done this two or three times. And then when the, you know, the school season was starting, all the sort of prefrosh wanted to get on there and they were using it really heavily. And they just, you know, time and again sort of exceeded our expectations on how much hardware we needed to solve the problem. And honestly, you know, if AWS had been around, Amazon Web Services, I think we would have done it a lot, lot faster. It was really just this, you know, two-month delay on making a server order and getting them physically shipped and racking them and configuring them. And nowadays at Asana, you know, we'll do this the day before a press cycle. Well, you know, we'll add web servers to the tier and we'll just overprovision because it's easy to take them back out when you're done and makes it a lot easier to deal with things like that.

I debate this all the time with people. It's really hard to know.

Yeah, I kind of take the side that it would have just grown faster. There's a distinct possibility that, you know, other people would have noticed sooner and sort of, you know, turned around decided we were a threat and paid attention and, you know, it ended up taking three or four years for that to happen. And, you know, that's the one thing that I think might have gotten in our way but I don't fully buy into the idea that the, you know, the closed community was kind of like a secret sauce of it. I think just compared to the other social networks at the time it functioned better and, you know, the pages loaded in less than 20 seconds, helps a lot.

Sure. Yeah, you know, I think that was a, you know, a valuable lesson for all of us. You know, I think the sort of number one mistake that we made then was sort of entertaining the idea at all that we were planning to sell because we never really wanted to. And we kind of got caught up in this, you know, this mindset that it's foolish not to see what's out there, not to see what the safe route looks like. And then you kind of get, you know, you kind of get pot committed in a way and you've set expectations with people and then other, you know, the other people who didn't feel the way we did got to see what the safe route looked like and some of them thought about the company in much more conservative ways and a large part of the market was bearish. And so it just became this enormous pressure from people. You know, like I said, I was always thinking sort of a year or two out on how I thought the company. So everyone, you know, I was like, billion, you know, of course we can do better than that. And everyone else was like, that's crazy. Like there was not a moment of hesitation of that's a billion dollars. We should take this.

Yeah, I mean sports car guy. A lot of it just had to do with, you know, for me and definitely for Mark, you know, everything he says it just wasn't about the money. It was about, you know, making that product and making it big. And we spent a lot of time thinking about, well, you know, can we do that better at Yahoo? You know, what are the advantages of that distribution?

Yeah. You know, it was a little more ambiguous back then. Now it's very, very clear. And sued a lot of people for patents. Right. Exactly. You know, it was a little ambiguous then but the track record of fast growth startups being acquired by companies and then doing something better after that is basically non-existent. And so, you know, it was really about the mission and would acquisition make us succeed in the mission? No.

Other than Mark and I? Yes. I don't know if I want to name names, but I'd say 20%.

Yeah.

Not counting Mark and I, but luckily Mark and I counted a lot. Or maybe we'll call it 30%. Depends who you're thinking of as in the management team.

When she said no? Well, you know, to their credit, you know, I think every one of them, you know, basically said, you know, I think you're making the wrong decision, but this is your company and we're going to support you and now we're going to, you know, build something bigger. You know, there was definitely, it definitely made things more stressful because, you know, then if you lose, you kind of squandered that. But, you know, again, it was about sort of maximizing the big outcome, not guaranteeing the payday.

Yeah. You know, I think this is one of the ones I have to stay away from.

Yeah, I do think there's very different rationale there. I always like to point out people like to give me a lot of credit for backing Dave there, but Brian Singerman was also, you know, very much at the table with us and having the same conversation was, you know, super supportive of Dave. And I think again that just speaks to the track record of Founders Fund always just, you know, what the founder wants, right? And yeah, you know, for that situation it was much more of a personal thing where, you know, it was very clear that the reason Google wanted Path, you know, wasn't the product as you said there wasn't much there yet. Now of course it's doing extremely well. They really wanted Dave and this was basically a very expensive employment contract that was going to be very beneficial to the other people who were in Path. But Dave, you know, unequivocally didn't want to do it. Not only was it not the role he saw for himself, but, you know, very likely he would have basically been competing against Facebook and, you know, helping them develop their social products. And, you know, I can't imagine any early Facebook person that would be thrilled about doing that.

Well, just, you know, nobody wants to kind of, you know, destroy the thing they work to build, right? Like, in as much as you view that as sort of a zero sum market, then you're just working against your past self. And if you're mission-oriented, what's the point of doing that? And so to me, it just looked like basically, you know, indentured servitude almost. I saw, you know, no sort of ethical quandary or, you know, irrational risk taking to turn that down. You know, the only thing that, well I won't talk about that.

I haven't thought too hard about that. I mean I'm certain there are cases when they're wrong. But you know I think I hope I don't eat my words on this later but to, you know, to some extent acquisition is, you know, a sign that the company's on a bad trajectory. There are exceptions so without naming names I do think there are a lot of good cases where there's just an enormous synergy it makes a lot of sense. Peter actually talked about PayPal and eBay in this way and of course he's right like, you know, especially if you have that much sort of overlap on your revenue streams. And there, you know, if the sum of the parts is going to be greater, then go for it. But I do think a lot of the acquisitions that are happening are more, you know, basically life rafts for teams that have gotten sort of to the end of a run. And, you know, it makes sense. It makes sense there. Yeah, but if the founder thinks that there's still a business to be built, then nine times out of 10, I'm probably going to support them and keep going.

That's a bit of a leading question. So no, I certainly don't think the mission is done enough. I do think my part in it had changed. And, you know, the story of Asana is basically, you know, that for the last year and a half I was at Facebook, I was working basically 100% of my time on internal communication tools. And part of the precursor to Asana is actually a task manager that I built for Facebook. That gained ubiquitous adoption there and is still the thing that basically runs the company today. And so for me the thought process was, you know, I'd gotten to a place where I believed that building these tools was the most impactful thing I could do for Facebook. But I also believed there were other companies with important missions and the tools were applicable to more than just Facebook. And finally I could do a better job building them with a team dedicated to that purpose. So I was literally, you know, one guy with kind of like half another engineer helping me. We were iterating on this tool and it was very specialized to Facebook so you could cut a lot of corners, didn't need to scale. But ultimately it was limited and the, you know, the feature request list was just growing out in front of us and was, you know, never actually going to be accomplished with just a few people working on it. And so I thought, well, you know, maybe it makes sense for Facebook to go into this product category and put a real engineering team on it and productize it. But, you know, very quickly, decided that didn't make sense and was just mission creep for them. And Mark agreed 100%. So once I got to the end of that sort of reasoning, you know, it basically just became, you know, something Justin and I needed to sort of manifest this vision in the outer world. So, you know, every time somebody asked me, you know, why did you leave Facebook, they often sort of have these ideas built up in their head of, you know, maybe there were tensions or maybe you didn't like it anymore, maybe it was big.

Yeah, she cleared that up on stage. Yeah, it wasn't Sheryl.

Yeah, but Dustin is like one of the most beloved people at Facebook. And I

Yeah. Just poor timing on her part, honestly. So just to finish the thought, you know, there are a lot of these possible answers and the only one that I ever give and the only one I think is true is that I left Facebook to start Asana. And that's what I'm still doing.

Yeah, you know, there's no easy way to get that message across. I just, you know, called a one-on-one basically, and sort of worked out what I was going to say and asked Anaka's assistant to find some time for me and then had that difficult conversation.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, I mean that was certainly, you know, one of the hardest things I've ever done.

You know, he was disappointed, but, you know, I think he took it really well and, you know, said he was going to support me in the next step.

Yeah. No, quite a bit. You know, this was a year ago and I probably said the company was at least, you know, twice as big as it was when I left and now it's probably three or four times as big even. You know, I've only even been to the 1601 California campus twice and I've never even been to the new campus. So, you know, to me, Facebook is still the sort of segmented set of buildings on University Ave.

I'm not like avoiding it. No. Yeah. It's just, I don't know. I guess I would have to like, you know, just pick a date and decide like that's what I was doing that day. But I don't have like any other reason to go I guess. Right. Ironically, Carrie went recently, so she's seen it and I haven't yet. But yeah, you know, they haven't been there very long and I just opportunity hasn't come up.

Yeah. No, I mean, you know, I enjoyed the visits I had at 1601. It is a little funny because, you know, the security team doesn't know who I am. So, I always have to like wait at the front and say people should be fired. Anaka usually comes and gets me or one of the early people is like, 'What the heck's going on here?' But yeah, that's awesome.

Oh, no. I mean, just, I mean, Justin worked at Facebook for three years as well, so he believes very strongly in Facebook and, you know, I think he actually laments the fact that they're working on that and, you know, feels it's sort of outside of their sweet spot and a distraction from their core competency and their mission.

Oh. Well, you know, there were friend lists actually. They just, they were just implemented in a somewhat different way and adopted less. And I actually was a huge fan of the feature when we introduced it and was sort of dismayed when the users didn't really engage with it and kind of like let it drift. And so circles to me was, you know, great because I was like, 'Oh, well, this will bring the idea back.' And to some extent, you know, the lighter weight groups are a similar concept. So no, I definitely think that's sort of like, you know, the best part about it. But I think Facebook had the idea first.

Social as a market? I mean, clearly Facebook will still be social and be a big part of that.

I think I've got to deflect this one, too. So, I told Sarah at the beginning, just so you guys know. You could say anything that looks like he's pumping up the stock. Yeah. So I'm not a Facebook insider like Peter. I'm not banned from saying the word Facebook, but I just want to avoid anything that might give you information about the stock price.

Let me answer those in order. Did I know anything about selling to businesses? No, definitely not. Luckily that's not what we do at Asana. So, what we think we're doing differently and why we think enterprise can be sexy, is we actually have a bottoms-up distribution model. So, we have a free product. Teams with less than 30 can organize in a workspace. It's a full-featured product. People get a ton of value out of it. And then we upsell larger teams into premium functionality and larger workspaces. And we think that basically the reason enterprise software is so bad is expressly because people have been selling to businesses and not the individuals inside those businesses that actually have to use the product. So CIOs and executives at these companies end up making a decision that's largely based on a checklist of functionality and sort of making sure they're spending that part of the budget in the right way and they don't actually care, not nearly as much as they should, about how effective it is at improving their business. And certainly not about the usability of the product and how it feels. When you're actually trying to distribute the product by getting individuals in the company to use it, you have to care about those things. You have to build a high-quality product that people love to use that they're using every day. And as a result, our engagement and adoption metrics look a lot more like a consumer app. And if you, from the few bits of information I've learned about some of the more classic enterprise apps, you hear some of the retention numbers and your jaw drops, it's like, oh my god, like almost nobody's using that. And some of these companies are still making a ton of revenue because the companies are paying for a lot of licenses to these products. But they just go unused. So to us, the only reason enterprise isn't sexy is entirely about how the product's been sold in the past. So from that light, the fact that we don't know how to sell to businesses is actually a pro. And yeah, so until you kind of have that realization in our book or belief in other people's books, then you might think we're crazy to go into that sector. But to us, it's a really important mission. Everybody, you know, or everybody we know that we talk to about the pain we're trying to solve just immediately resonates with it. Regardless of what industry you're in or even if you're not employed, frankly, people really understand the pain of trying to collaborate on a project and keep people on the same page. So, when we first started pitching the company, we immediately sort of got the validation that this is an important problem. This is going to be something people care about if we get it right. And we felt like we had the product that got it right. And the getting it right part is really the hard part because billions have been spent by companies on tools that promise to do these things. And so you're going into a market where people are a little jaded that anyone's going to get this right.

Yeah. So there's three key differentiators for Asana. One of them is just speed and we don't mean the latency to the server and how long it takes us to load pages in the app. There's actually just one page load for Asana and then you have the app loaded much more like a desktop app. But then everything you do in the app has been designed to just be as frictionless and lightweight as possible so that the information can be recorded in the system at the rate that you actually think. So most of the actions you take in Asana are actually completely non-blocking. Not just Ajax, but you just do things and the app responds immediately and just in the background it's sort of syncing things back with the server. And the result of this is it just doesn't feel like it's something that's in your way. So the second differentiator which is very related to this one is it's the thing that people use to organize themselves. So with traditional task management software, what you actually see is all of the individual contributors actually have something they're using to keep track of their task. They've got a Vim file or an Org file if they're a developer. They've got sticky notes on their monitor or if they're like the vast majority of people in the world, they just kind of leave things in their email inbox. And when you archive it or reply, then that's when the task is complete. And then there's a secondary system that the project manager uses or the product manager. And that's actually not the source of truth of the data, right? They're actually sort of going around every week and sort of guilt tripping people into, you know, can you please put this information in the project management system? Can you please put it on the wiki? And the effect of this is you can never trust the data. It's not what the person is actually working on. It's just the latest copy that has been made. And that really cripples the vast majority of these pieces of software. And then the third thing that we think of is really the secret sauce of the product design is this sort of balance we've found between being highly structured and being completely unstructured that gives you a ton of versatility. So on the one hand when you look at these apps on one extreme you have very niche products that implement a very specific methodology like agile or scrum and perhaps for a specific vertical. A lot of the task managers that are most popular are actually specifically for software development and these work really well for the projects that you want to use in that method and the things that fit into that model but as soon as you want to break out of it you're stuck, you have to go into something else and people try very hard to not be stuck. I hear stories all the time about people who track tasks in bug trackers even though a bunch of the fields don't make sense and things like this. But ultimately it just ends up being really cumbersome. And then on the other hand, you have completely unstructured things, which is actually what most of the world does. They use Google Docs or a master spreadsheet. That's your task list. And these are great because you can implement any process on it. But you're losing all of the power of having structured data, of having a database, of being able to search it in smart ways, being able to have different views for, on the one hand the project team and they're in their team meeting and on the other hand the individual and they just want to look at the list of the tasks assigned to them. And Asana has really found a sweet spot in between these extremes that gives you all of that power without losing the flexibility. And so when we see companies adopt, they end up using Asana for every part of their business and for all sorts of things you wouldn't even think of using task management software for. And that just makes it much more powerful.

Really great. You know, we launched the, you know, as you said we had a bit longer of a prelude to the beta and a lot of that was we were building a core technology, Luna, that allows us to implement the UI that has the speed that I was talking about and we always saw that from the very beginning is critical. If it was too much friction, wouldn't...

Oh yeah, definitely. It's paid off in spades now. I think our app among HTML sites is really, you know, one of a kind. And so yes, we spent a full year developing that technology. We spent another full year in a private beta iterating towards an MVP. And as you said, there's been a lot of products before this. So people had very high expectations and very high requirements for something they were willing to invest so much of their life into. And then November we launched, got an enormously positive response, especially in the valley. Just a ton of companies have gotten ramped up. We now have teams from Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Aereo, some teams from Quora, and it's just been really great seeing them get ramped up on the product. And just last week actually we announced our commercial product for the first time. So before we were marketing just to these smaller teams, the product was working really well for them and now we feel we've gotten into a place where it really works at scale and works for much larger teams. And the response from that has been gigantic. In the past two weeks, we've grown as much as we've grown in the past two or three months even. And just seeing a ton of companies that are like, okay great, it looks like other companies are finding a lot of success with this. We can too.

Yeah. So, when we first launched the product in November, we had a couple hundred teams in that private beta representing thousands of users and now we've got tens of thousands of active workspaces.

Well, I feel like those are two different questions. We certainly, yeah, I don't know if I would say it's calibrating success. I mean, we really do think of Asana as having a similarly scoped mission. And in some ways, it doesn't need to necessarily have the reach on a population basis as Facebook does. But I think there's a plausible argument that it will one day as the sort of market of knowledge workers expands and takes on more of the economy. But it's a really big business idea. It's something, like I said, it's a universal pain. And it's something that there hasn't been progress in almost two decades, really since email, in changing the way that groups communicate, but it's super super important. So if we can crack that nut, we absolutely think it's a hundred billion dollar business or whatever price you might think Facebook is worth right now.

Yeah, it does definitely take longer. But hopefully not too long. I mean, like I said, we're trying to approach this with a very different model. And we've even got a lot of aspects of the product that are sort of inherently viral. And frankly, the media works very differently now and can spread our message very quickly. And the companies that are adopting are extremely enthusiastic. If you look at our Twitter stream, you just see over and over again people who say it's revolutionized their business and are basically doing our marketing for us. So I think, if the market were to recognize the value of this product, it could happen very quickly.

You know, there's definitely some similarities. I think in both cases, we really complement each other well. You know, I think both Justin and Mark are, you know, very much big product thinkers and big idea people and, you know, I think Sean has said this of himself before, but it applies to both of them. They sort of just think of the world as it's going to be 10 years from now. And but that's actually just the assumptions they make about how it's operating today. And, you know, allows them to sort of produce these elaborate product visions. And I'm much more of a focused operator type and can kind of get the business done, get the thing built. And, you know, make sure we don't drop any balls. And, you know, those pairings work really well. Peter also mentioned that just the common trajectory for these successful startups is to have two founders instead of one and said something along the lines of, you know, that way they can kind of bounce ideas off each other and keep things a little bit in check. So, you don't just end up on some random path and that's definitely the role I play for Justin.

Yeah. But you know, I always feel bad because you never know the counterfactual. I may have just been holding them both back all this time.

How does somebody know if they're on to something? You know, I almost want to say if you're unsure, you probably aren't. At least in Facebook's case, it was just very very obvious. And I think in Asana's case, it's very very obvious. It's maybe not as certain that we'll be the ones who win, but it is certain that there's an important market here. And we've stumbled on to the important pieces of it. But yeah, you know, I think you just have to believe so much in your idea that the alternative just is unfathomable. Like you just have to manifest it. And if you're thinking, well, staying in school sounds nice, too, then you should probably stay in school and maybe a better idea will come along later. And I do think there's, you know, talked about this before but I think there are a lot of people who are sort of arriving at the idea first that they want to be an entrepreneur and that they want to drop out of school maybe and then they go looking for the idea and I think that almost never works out. You know, I really think the only reason you should become an entrepreneur is because that's the only way the idea will come into the world.

Yeah, I think that's really wrong. Well, yeah, I mean I would just say one more thing on that. I mean it's not just bad for that person. They might be wasting some of their time, but I actually think it's really bad for the ecosystem where there's a lot of really great people and instead of joining and working on one of the bigger projects like Facebook or Dropbox or Quora, one of these companies that is already sort of proven an idea and an engineer is very clearly leveraged, they're instead sort of chasing something that doesn't exist yet. And I think this is rational in a lot of ways, but especially from a financial perspective, where it's really clear from where we're sitting now that the hundredth engineer at Facebook did way better than the vast majority of even really good entrepreneurs in the valley.

Yeah, I thought about this. You knew it was coming. Yeah. I didn't necessarily come up with too many great answers, but the ones that will at least be the most controversial. You know, one is, like Bill Gates, I really believe that nuclear power generation is a necessary part of our future and I think that's pretty contrarian among a lot of, especially environmental activists and I actually have come to truly feel like that's, as long as it can be done safely, that's actually going to be the thing that's going to be by far the cleanest environmentally and the most sustainable. And part of this is just an assumption that we will have very big power consumption needs and ever increasing. And I think that trying to match renewable energy with conservation and trying to call back some of the energy use it seems like a losing proposition to me.

Yeah, this is actually a great follow-on to the last question because the only other answer I was considering saying is that I believe poverty is a solvable problem and that it will be solved in the very near term. And that's basically the answer to why get started now.