In this interview, Dustin Moskovitz explains how Asana cultivates a sustainable, health‑focused work environment. He describes the role of managers and peers in monitoring burnout, the engineering rhythm of focused sprints followed by off‑sprints, and the company’s mindfulness training that newcomers receive. Moskovitz notes that people self‑select for Asana based on a natural affinity for mindfulness, while others join to relearn healthier habits. He discusses the practical choice to serve catered dinner at 6:30 pm—earlier than typical Silicon Valley perks—to avoid encouraging late‑night work, and emphasizes that staying late is culturally acceptable but not expected. Finally, he connects these policies to combating ageism, arguing that a balanced culture helps retain experienced engineers and those with families, offering a more inclusive alternative to the youth‑centric narrative of many high‑growth tech firms.
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How do you embrace people being excited to be at Asana, being excited to be working on these projects, but also needing maybe for their own health to step away more than they might, you know, expect to?
Yeah, well, you don't want to get in somebody's way. If they're really excited, you know, again, for a couple weeks at a time or, you know, a couple nights in a row, you can work like that. But if you see somebody doing it just day in, day out, they don't seem to have a life outside of work, you know, we'll talk to them about it. And, you know, that's really kind of on their manager and on their peers to just, like, say, hey, like, are you sure you're taking care of yourself? Are you sure you're doing this in a sustainable way? And also building, you know, habits into the company. So we do orient our engineering teams around sprints, but in between we do off-sprints. And, you know, sprints for us are really also just about focus, where you have, like, fewer meetings, fewer sort of, like, other activities, but they are also a period of a little more intense work.
Now, is the sort of willingness to have a healthy approach to building software, to sort of going on this long-haul approach, is that something you have to vet for in the hiring process, or is it something that people can pick up and sort of reform when they arrive at Asana?
I think it's a little of both. I would say that people actually self-select for Asana in a lot of ways, so if they have this kind of personality where they're naturally into mindfulness. They'll see that Asana represents that and they'll want to work there. I also see people who realize they've been burnt out and have had bad patterns and they want to learn good habits, and they'll look to Asana as a place where they can learn those skills. But then, yeah, once they get there, we literally train people on mindfulness and we have processes and patterns that make that the natural way to behave there.
So do you guys have the same perks and sort of catered meals that a lot of companies offer around Silicon Valley? Because we always hear the debate, you know, if you're serving dinner at 8:00 or 8:30, isn't that just encouraging everyone to stay late? You know, is it a perk or is it sort of a golden handcuff that's keeping people there? So where do you guys come down on sort of that balance?
You know, we want to have a great environment, but again, it's in service of optimal productivity. So if you're keeping people till 8:30 or 9:00, Yeah, I would argue that's actually shooting yourself in the foot. Even though you're getting more face time, I got to assume that those hours, sort of 7:00 to 10:00 PM, just aren't as productive as the ones at the beginning of the day. So we do serve dinner. We serve it at 6:30. I think over time— there's actually kind of a long line right now. I imagine over time we'll shift that in a little earlier. And that's just sort of a compromise position. And maybe about a third of the company actually stays for dinner. And other people are going home before that. That's totally culturally OK.
Some of the feedback I saw on your blog post that resonated with me was actually took a response that I wasn't expecting about how this could actually combat ageism in Silicon Valley.
Yeah.
And actually encourage people with families, people who have been in the game for a long time to actually stay at a high-growth company like an Asana because they can actually think of a work-life balance as opposed to skewing just to young coders with with no kids to go home to. Do you see this ageism issue in other companies, or what do you kind of think is the response there?
Yeah, no, I mean, I absolutely see that at small startups. I think the saving grace is like ultimately those companies grow up, like literally. So the people who started at Facebook, they're now in their 30s, they have kids, Mark has a daughter, and so they need to kind of conform the culture to to make that possible. So most of the later stage companies, I do think, have sort of evolved in this way and are less ageist, though they may have some ingrained habits. But the startups, particularly when they're started by people in college, they tend to think like, oh, this is just what makes a good startup, and everyone else just has to deal with it. But yeah, it ends up having these byproducts.
