So I want to thank Dustin Moskovitz, who has for several years been one of my favorite people in Silicon Valley and I think one of the most underrated entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. And as he's asked me to call him all night long, the world's youngest billionaire.
Yeah, you're about to get richer, but we can't really talk about that very much. But I think it's going to be a good month for you.
Yeah, it's already quite a good month, actually.
Some other stuff happening.
So I know that everyone feels like they know the story of the early days of Facebook, but unfortunately, most people are taking that from an award-winning movie that was not entirely accurate. So I want to spend a little bit of time back in the dorm room. How did you and Mark meet?
Yeah, this is kind of an interesting story. Mark and I were pseudo-randomly paired together as roommates. Basically what happened is, 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. It's kind of a big deal. I ended up choosing to block with my girlfriend at the time, and she had a group of friends that she was walking with. Mark ended up in another blocking group. Basically, Billy, one of our roommates that doesn't often come up in the story, was rooming with me, and Chris Hughes was with Mark, and they put us into a four-room suite. That's basically how we met. I literally met Mark the first day of sophomore year. The rest was just kind of fate.
What did you think of him when you first met him?
When I first met him, he was definitely an interesting character. He had a ton of energy. It was the first day of school, so he was really excited. One of the things that stands out in my mind, and 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. I think it was in his parents' van, and it was the very first thing we moved into the suite. It must have been like 4 by 10 feet, in a very small college suite. We had a hallway connecting our bedrooms, and this was like the whole hallway. We hit it off right away. He's very personable and easy to get along with. It started off an exciting year.
In the early days when you guys first started working on this thing, were you thinking, as soon as I get out of Harvard, I want to start a company? Were you on that entrepreneur path? Was it something you had thought about? Were you one of those kids in college who sat in the back of the room reading TechCrunch and wanting to start a company, or did it just happen?
No, I don't think that would be an accurate way to describe me. I was kind of on the business track. I was an econ concentrator at Harvard. 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 I helped students with their personal computing issues. I always sort of fantasized about being the business side of a technology company, but I don't think I ever really pictured it as founding a company or being the entrepreneur. That wasn't really my mindset, and it was much less popular at the time in general. Was TechCrunch even around in 2004 or 2005?
Oh, there you go. A lot less of that community was around. I will say that was definitely the way Mark thought about things. He always had a couple projects going on on the side, and he made quite a bit of money in high school doing large websites and things like that.
I think there was a picture in the insert on the first book of you and Mark and Chris Hughes in a dorm room, cuddled under a blanket, and you all look about 12 years old.
I remember that picture very well. It actually has a really funny backstory. Somebody sent me this on Facebook message, and I remembered when we took it. Literally, somebody wanted to take a photo of us, and we were like, 'Oh, wouldn't it be funny if we put a blanket over ourselves? Won't this picture come out goofy?' And sure enough, it's the old picture of all of us from back then, so it gets printed over and over again.
What was the dynamic like between the three of you? Because you and Mark and Chris are all very different personalities.
Yeah, it's true. I think we got along really well. Considering that, it just seemed to be a really easygoing relationship. I was always pretty focused on the immediate needs of the site, especially back in the early days expanding to other colleges. Chris and Mark were more off pontificating about what could be and thinking about other businesses back then. It felt very fluid. We've continued to have a really great friendship ever since then.
Every time I've talked to you going back to around the David Z $500 million valuation deal, you've always been a big believer that Facebook would be a big company, even when other people in the company were like, 'Jesus, David Z, it's a $500 million valuation. There's no way in hell he's ever going to get that money back.' How far back did that go? Since I've known you, you've always had a big belief, but there had to be a time you didn't.
I think my belief was always quite large, but it got bigger over time. I was always just sort of one or two years ahead of everyone else. The first week of Facebook at Harvard was really quite incredible. It was just complete ubiquity literally on every screen as you walked around. That gave me a lot of confidence and put the big idea in my head. There's a passage in The Facebook Effect about Mark and I negotiating my compensation. I very distinctly remember saying something to him along the lines of, 'I think if you give me 1% of this company, that would probably end up being well more than enough, but it wouldn't quite feel fair.' So we ended up coming up with something else. I think that speaks to how I was valuing the company at day five.
And then when you guys decided to move to Palo Alto, not everyone involved with the company did.
Since you had worked very hard to get into Harvard, did you have any trepidation about leaving?
When we left, we actually weren't permanently leaving. At the very beginning, we were kind of just going for the summer. 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.
I mean, Harvard is a slightly challenging school.
Yeah, slightly challenging. We had managed to do it for three or four months, so we thought, 'Your grades can't get any harder than that.' They were pretty good, mostly guys.
That's just annoying. I was hoping you were going to be a D student. Let's try that again. What were your grades like?
One thing that I think will be heartening to people is 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, he'll help me with my homework and stuff.' That turned out to not be true at all. The one time this happened in college was that course. I got a B+.
It would still be a better story if it were a D.
Well, yeah. It wasn't quite a D, but I was very heartbroken by it at the time and still managed to.
So your worst grade at Harvard was Intro to Computer Science.
Exactly. I just find that really ironic.
There's one of my writers writing that right now into WordPress. Probably. Yeah, I don't think I've ever said that one before, but now it's out there. But you were obviously quite studious, so you just were but when you got here, you were just bitten by it. Is that right?
Yeah, I think we were sort of caught in a wave of momentum, to say the least. The site was just growing so fast. We honestly weren't even thinking quite that far ahead. It was more like, how do we keep things running? How do we prevent a competitor from overrunning us? Especially for the first 12 months of the site's existence, just how do we make it not go down? It's just all scaling.
It was an interesting time because while you guys had all this heat and you were near Stanford and kind of around people who were consuming it, the valley generally was very bearish on the web at that point. There were a lot of people who were still in this sort of Friendster overhang, and MySpace has already won that. So what did you encounter being in Silicon Valley and trying to build a social media company in those early days?
I may have been to a large part just sort of insulated from that kind of attitude. I was really much more so than Mark or Chris or Sean focused on the product and focused on building. So I didn't get out of the house much. TechCrunch wasn't around, so I wasn't seeing all the bad things they might have been saying about us. But there was definitely some pessimism and some people who believed. The people closest to users of the site really kind of got it. It was really hard to ignore the depth to which people were engaging with the app, and I think that ultimately made believers out of people, including Peter Thiel and later David Z.
What do you think was the influence of people like Peter Thiel and David on the company? I think Sean's been talked about a lot, but even Sean, people always say Mark Zuckerberg produced in the early days, and typically the founder gets a lot of credit. But what are some of the untold stories of impact people had that they didn't get credit for?
I think especially with Sean, and in turn with Peter, they just had a big effect on our ability to control the company. If we had gone into fundraising 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 control of the board in the first round, because we were novice entrepreneurs and didn't know better and didn't know how to run a company. Having them on board gave confidence to other people that this was a serious company that could be run well, and they were enormously founder friendly. Especially after the experiences Sean had gone through with Napster and Plaxo, he just cared a lot about making sure Facebook stayed in control. Peter was more than happy to feel the same way. That's how they basically do every deal at Founders Fund now. For Peter at the board level, one of the things that really sticks out for me is that 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. I only feel even stronger about that now, especially as we build Asana. It's something we talk about all the time. It's really easy when you're caught up in this fast user growth to get in this mindset that you need to hire as quickly as possible. There are so many things falling apart, so many opportunities you could be trying, and you just got to hire anybody who walks in the door. Aside from 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 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 think about this all the time. This is the number one advice I give to entrepreneurs if they're going to be in that type of market: hire slowly and carefully. I definitely think 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 faster than that.
That's interesting. I think that one thing that people always admire about Facebook and is really one of these core things about the Facebook mafia is this real emphasis on pacing, not being in a rush. Facebook started with Harvard and then other Ivy League colleges and then colleges and then high school, and it's like this big walled garden slowly got out to encompass the rest of the web. You guys took a very long time launching Asana. You wrote a lot of backend stuff to run it. You took a lot longer than it needed to. The core guys' path took a long time, and this is a common trend. Is that part of the same thing that was Peter's advice, or was that just what you guys did at Facebook because servers and cost and expanding college to college was such a toll?
It wasn't even necessarily cost, but definitely just our ability to re-engineer the site and literally rack servers fast enough at Facebook was the limiting factor. I remember there was one time we decided to double the number of servers from like 20 to 40, and we were like, 'Okay, now we'll be able to expand as fast as we want.' We put the servers in, made the site run faster, and people just used it more. We were immediately at capacity again. We did this must have done this two or three times. Then when the school season was starting, all the pre-ro wanted to get on there and they're using it really heavily. They just time and again exceeded our expectations on how much hardware we needed to solve the problem. Honestly, if AWS had been around, Amazon Web Services, I think we would have done it a lot faster. It was really just this two-month delay on making a server order and getting them physically shipped and racking them and configuring them. Nowadays at Asana, we'll do this the day before a press cycle. 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. It makes it a lot easier to deal with things like that.
So how would that have changed Facebook though? Do you think there was something important about that pacing and about that restriction, or would it have just grown faster and everything would have been great?
I debate this all the time with people. It's really hard to know.
I kind of take the side that it would have just grown faster. There's a distinct possibility that other people would have noticed sooner and turned around, decided we were a threat, and paid attention. It ended up taking three or four years for that to happen. 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 closed community was kind of like a secret sauce of it. I think compared to the other social networks at the time, it functioned better and the pages loaded in less than 20 seconds.
We're still sort of working on that on our blog.
Sure. Bit of a problem. So you mentioned board control, which is obviously something that was really important for Facebook because there was this huge company-defining moment when Yahoo offered Facebook a billion dollars. Tell us about that time at the company.
Sure. I think that was a valuable lesson for all of us. The number one mistake that we made then was entertaining the idea at all that we were planning to sell, because we never really wanted to. We kind of got caught up in this mindset that it's foolish not to see what's out there, not to see what the safe route looks like. Then you kind of get pot committed in a way, and you set expectations with people. 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. A large part of the market was bearish. So it just became this enormous pressure from people. I was always thinking sort of a year or two out on how I valued the company. So I was like, 'Billion? Of course we can do better than that.' And everyone else was like, 'That's crazy.'
There was not a moment of hesitation of 'That's a billion dollars. We should take this.'
Maybe. A lot of it just had to do with for me and definitely for Mark, it just wasn't about the money. It was about making that product and making it big. We spent a lot of time thinking about, 'Can we do that better at Yahoo? What are the advantages of that distribution?'
I'm going to answer for the crowd. I'm going to answer for the world. No.
Yeah. It was a little more ambiguous back then. Now it's very clear.
Sued a lot of people for patents.
Right. Exactly. 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. So it was really about the mission. Would acquisition make us succeed in the mission? No.
What percentage of the company or maybe the management team do you think agreed with you and Mark?
Other than Mark and I? I'd say 20%.
20%. Not counting you and Mark.
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.
So what happened to that 70 to 80% once you guys said no?
To their credit, I think every one of them basically said, '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 build something bigger.' It definitely made things more stressful because then if you lose, you kind of squandered that. But again, it was about maximizing the big outcome, not guaranteeing the payday.
So do you think Instagram should have sold for a billion dollars?
Yeah, I think this is one of the ones I have to stay away from.
I just thought of that. I didn't even have it on the notepad. I feel a lot of pressure because your fiance told me in the green room that she used to be a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and she was talking about you on Disrupt and she was like, 'Well, as a former reporter, I thought it was a pretty good interview.' So I was like, 'Oh shit.' So it just suddenly put all this pressure on me. So that one was for her. It was my gotcha reporter question.
Nailed it. So getting back to this whole selling not selling thing. We've talked about this a lot in the rubric of how this is the impact this made on other people there. We talked about this a couple months ago on the stage with Dave Morin when we were talking about his decision not to sell to Google, and I know that he says you were one of the only people on his side then too. How was that different because Path certainly didn't have the amount of engagement or heat that Facebook did?
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 very much at the table with us and having the same conversation and was super supportive of Dave. I think again that just speaks to the track record of Founders Fund always just wanting what the founder wants. For that situation, it was much more of a personal thing where it was very clear that the reason Google wanted Path 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 unequivocally didn't want to do it. Not only was it not the role he saw for himself, but very likely he would have basically been competing against Facebook and helping them develop their social products. I can't imagine any early Facebook person that would be thrilled about doing that.
Thrilled because they thought they couldn't compete or thrilled because of friendships and not wanting to?
Well, just nobody wants to destroy the thing they worked to build. In as much as you view that as a zero-sum market, then you're just working against your past self. If you're mission-oriented, what's the point of doing that? So to me, it just looked like basically indentured servitude almost. I saw no ethical quandary or irrational risk-taking to turn that down. The only thing that... well, I won't talk about that piece.
Well, my next question might anticipate what you're going to say. I guess the question is, there's a lot of entrepreneurs in the audience. Is the founder always right if he doesn't want to sell? I experienced this acutely at TechCrunch because I didn't want TechCrunch to sell to AOL at all. But Mike had spent five years building that company, and I'd seen what he had gone through to build it. At the end of the day, he was right even though I think most of the staff did not want that to happen.
I haven't thought too hard about that. I'm certain there are cases when they're wrong. But I think, I hope I don't eat my words on this later, but to some extent, acquisition is a sign that the company's on a bad trajectory. There are exceptions. Without naming names, I do think there are a lot of good cases where there's just an enormous synergy and it makes a lot of sense. Peter actually talked about PayPal and eBay in this way, and of course he's right, especially if you have that much overlap on your revenue streams. 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 basically life rafts for teams that have gotten to the end of a run. It makes sense there. 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.
So let's talk about you deciding to leave Facebook. You just got done telling us that there was no hesitation in turning down a billion dollars because the mission of building Facebook was so important.
But you're not at the company anymore. Was there a point where you felt the mission was accomplished enough, or did you just get seduced by a new mission?
That's a bit of a leading question. I certainly don't think the mission is done enough. I do think my part in it had changed. The story of Asana is basically that for the last year and a half I was at Facebook, I was working basically 100% of my time on internal communication tools. 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. For me, the thought process was 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. Finally, I could do a better job building them with a team dedicated to that purpose. I was literally one guy with kind of 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 feature request list was just growing out in front of us and was never going to be accomplished with just a few people working on it. So I thought, maybe it makes sense for Facebook to go into this product category and put a real engineering team on it and productize it. But very quickly, I decided that didn't make sense and was just mission creep for them, and Mark agreed 100%. Once I got to the end of that reasoning, it basically just became something we needed to do that Justin and I needed to manifest this vision in the outer world. Every time somebody asks me why I left Facebook, they often have these ideas built up in their head of maybe there were tensions or maybe you didn't like it anymore, maybe it was big.
Well, there's a big rumor that it was Sheryl.
She cleared that up on stage.
Yeah, it wasn't Sheryl because she happened to come in at the same time.
Yeah, Sheryl hates that rumor, by the way. Dustin is like one of the most beloved people at Facebook. There was a company that had a lot of tension and a lot of warring factions at different points, but you were always the guy everyone liked. So it did not look good that Sheryl ousted you. Just poor timing on her part, honestly. To finish the thought, people have a lot of these possible answers, and the only one I ever give and the only one I think is true is that I left Facebook to start Asana. That's what I'm still doing.
There's no easy way to get that message across. I just called a one-on-one basically, 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. That was certainly one of the hardest things I've ever done.
He was disappointed, but I think he took it really well and said he was going to support me in the next step.
We're going to move on from Facebook in just a bit, but we talked maybe about a year ago. I think I was hugely pregnant at the time, so that's how I tend to mark things that have happened in the last year. I think you said that there are more people at Facebook now that weren't there when you were than were there when you were there at the whole company, or something like that. You had some figure for how much it's grown since you left and how much it's still growing.
Yeah, quite a bit. This was a year ago, and I probably said the company was at least twice as big as it was when I left, and now it's probably three or four times as big even. I've only even been to the 1601 California campus twice, and I've never even been to the new campus. To me, Facebook is still the segmented set of buildings on University Avenue.
Is that intentionally? You don't want to go to the new campus?
I'm not like avoiding it. No. It's just, I guess I would have to pick a date and decide that's what I was doing that day. But I don't have any other reason to go. Ironically, Cari went recently, so she's seen it and I haven't yet. They haven't been there very long, and the opportunity just hasn't come up.
Maybe I'll go down there for IPO day. So it's not that you want it to stay in those buildings on University.
No, I enjoyed the visits I had at 1601. It is a little funny because the security team doesn't know who I am, so I always have to wait at the front.
Those 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?'
That's awesome. So what are your thoughts on Google+? I thought you said you were going to ask us about that because Justin, your co-founder, came from Google.
Do you guys ever have fights about it?
Oh, no. Justin worked at Facebook for three years as well, so he believes very strongly in Facebook. I think he actually laments the fact that they're working on that and feels it's sort of outside of their sweet spot and a distraction from their core competency and their mission.
There's no big ad to circles.
You didn't look at Google+ and think, 'Circles. We should have had circles.'
Well, there were friend lists actually. They were just implemented in a somewhat different way and adopted less. 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 let it drift. Circles to me was great because I was like, 'Oh, this will bring the idea back.' To some extent, the lighter weight groups are a similar concept. So no, I definitely think that's the best part about it. But I think Facebook had the idea first.
Do you think that social is over? Do you think there can ever be a Facebook killer?
Social as a market? Clearly Facebook will still be social and be a big part of that.
As in, over and they've won, not over as in like Google sort of won search.
I think I've got to deflect this one too. I told Sarah at the beginning, just so you guys know, you could say anything that looks like he's pumping up the stock. 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.
So when are you planning on selling? No, just...
So let's talk a little bit more about Asana. You talked about this mission to leave. When you guys left to do Asana, it's very sexy now to be doing what people are calling enterprise, but it's really even small business to business or to big business. But it was not something that was considered sexy then.
Did people think you were crazy to do this? Did you think you were a little bit crazy? Did you know anything about selling to businesses?
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. What we think we're doing differently and why we think enterprise can be sexy is we actually have a bottoms-up distribution model. 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. Then we upsell larger teams and premium functionality and larger workspaces. We think that 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. CIOs and executives at these companies end up making a decision that's largely based on a checklist of functionality and making sure they're spending that part of the budget in the right way, and they don't actually care 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 distributing 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. As a result, our engagement and adoption metrics look a lot more like a consumer app. 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, almost nobody's using that.' 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. To us, the only reason enterprise isn't sexy is entirely about how the product's been sold in the past. From that light, the fact that we don't know how to sell to businesses is actually a pro. Until you have that realization 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 we know that we talk to about the pain we're trying to solve immediately resonates with it, regardless of what industry you're in or even if you're not employed. People really understand the pain of trying to collaborate on a project and keep people on the same page. When we first started pitching the company, we immediately got the validation that this is an important problem. This is going to be something people care about if we get it right. We felt like we had the product that got it right. 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. So you're going into a market where people are a little jaded that anyone's going to get this right.
What is your insight where you are fundamentally nailing it where billions and billions of dollars have failed?
There are three key differentiators for Asana. One of them is just speed. We don't mean the latency to the server and how long it takes 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 everything you do in the app has been designed to be as frictionless and lightweight as possible so that the information can be recorded in the system at the rate that you actually think. Most of the actions you take in Asana are actually completely non-blocking. Not just Ajax, but you do things and the app responds immediately, and in the background it's syncing things back with the server. The result is it doesn't feel like it's something that's in your way. The second differentiator, which is very related, is it's the thing that people use to organize themselves. In traditional task management software, what you actually see is all of the individual contributors have something they're using to keep track of their tasks. They've got a Vim file or an Emacs file if they're a developer. They've got sticky notes on their monitor, or if they're like the vast majority of people, they just leave things in their email inbox. When you archive it or reply, that's when the task is complete. Then there's a secondary system that the project manager or product manager uses. That's actually not the source of truth of the data. They're going around every week guilt-tripping people into putting this information in the project management system or on the wiki. The effect 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. That really cripples the vast majority of these pieces of software. The third thing that we think of as the secret sauce of the product design is this balance we've found between being highly structured and being completely unstructured, which gives you a ton of versatility. On one hand, you have very niche products that implement a very specific methodology like agile or scrum, perhaps for a specific vertical. A lot of the task managers that are most popular are specifically for software development. 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. 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. Ultimately it ends up being really cumbersome. On the other hand, you have completely unstructured things, which is what most of the world does. They use Google Docs or a master spreadsheet as their task list. 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, of being able to have different views for the project team when they're in their team meeting and for the individual who just wants to look at the list of tasks assigned to them. Asana has really found a sweet spot in between these extremes that gives you all of that power without losing the flexibility. 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. That just makes it much more powerful.
So how's it going so far?
Really great. We launched, as you said, we had a bit longer of a prelude to the beta. A lot of that was we were building a core technology, Luna, that allows us to implement the UI that has the speed I was talking about. We always saw that from the very beginning as critical. If it was too much friction, it wouldn't work.
You still think that was the right move?
Oh yeah, definitely. It's paid off in spades now. I think our app among HTML sites is really one of a kind. We spent a full year developing that technology. We spent another full year in a private beta iterating towards an MVP. As you said, there have 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. In November, we launched and got an enormously positive response, especially in the...
In the valley, just a ton of companies have gotten ramped up. We now have teams from Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Ario, some teams from Kora, and it's been really great seeing them get ramped up on the product. And just last week, we announced our commercial product for the first time. Before, we were marketing to smaller teams, and the product was working really well for them. Now we feel we've gotten to a place where it really works at scale and works for much larger teams. 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. We're seeing a ton of companies that are like, okay, it looks like other companies are finding a lot of success with this, so we can too.
So how many companies, how many customers do you have now? How many users? What can you tell us number-wise?
When we first launched the product in November, we had about a couple hundred teams in that private beta, representing thousands of users. Now we've got tens of thousands of active workspaces.
Wow. So how do you calibrate success at Asana? Because there are probably a lot of people who think no matter what you do, you're not going to ever eclipse Facebook.
Well, I feel like those are two different questions. I don't know if I would say it's calibrating success. We really do think of Asana as having a similarly scoped mission. In some ways, it doesn't need to have the reach on a population basis that Facebook does. But I think there's a plausible argument that it will one day, as the market of knowledge workers expands and takes on more of the economy. It's a really big business idea. It's a universal pain, and there hasn't been progress in almost two decades, really since email, in changing the way groups communicate. But it's 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.
How long do you think it takes? Enterprise usually takes a long time.
It does definitely take longer, but hopefully not too long. We're trying to approach this with a very different model. We've got a lot of aspects of the product that are inherently viral. And frankly, the media works very differently now and can spread our message very quickly. The companies that are adopting are extremely enthusiastic. If you look at our Twitter stream, you see over and over people who say it's revolutionized their business and are basically doing our marketing for us. So if the market were to recognize the value of this product, it could happen very quickly.
Excuse me. I want to talk a little bit about founder dynamics. You've been a co-founder with two different companies and two very interesting personalities. Is there a similar dynamic between you and Justin that there was between you and Mark?
There are definitely some similarities. In both cases, we really complement each other well. Both Justin and Mark are very much big product thinkers and big idea people. Sean has said this of himself before, but it applies to both of them: they think of the world as it's going to be 10 years from now, and that's just the assumptions they make about how it's operating today. That allows them to produce these elaborate product visions. I'm much more of a focused operator type, can get the business done, get the thing built, and make sure we don't drop any balls. Those pairings worked really well. Peter also mentioned that the common trajectory for successful startups is to have two founders instead of one, so they can bounce ideas off each other and keep things in check, and that's definitely the role I play for Justin.
