Dustin Moskovitz, Asana: Fast Growth, Mindful Business

Please welcome to the stage forbes writer alex conrad and asana CEO and facebook co founder dustin moskovitz.

All right, Dustin Moskovitz, this is your life, guys. It's a pleasure to have Dustin here. Obviously, co founder and CEO of Asana has done a few other things, most notably your foundation work, which has been the last five years, and then co founding Facebook, which people here have probably heard of as well. It's a really awesome chance to talk about mindfulness and how it can create a better business. I thought it would be good to just give everyone an update if they're not super familiar with what Asana does. Where you guys are at in sort of your journey so far today?

Yeah, absolutely. So hopefully that video gave you a taste. But, you know, we really think about the SaaS collaboration market in terms of three big categories. So first two, you guys are all really familiar with, so, you know, files and document collaborations. That's everything from, you know, Dropbox, G Suite, things like Quip. The second category, messaging and communications. So that's, you know, Slack, obviously a big deal this year. And things like Skype and enterprise social networks like Yammer. And then the third category is really our bread and butter. So we call this work tracking. So the first two, all of these are really essential to having effective collaboration. But work tracking really helps you get clarity about what your team needs to do to get results. So it helps you answer the critical questions, like what steps are left between now and accomplishing our next goal? Who's responsible for each of those steps, and when are they going to be done? So really, any team in the world needs that clarity to be effective. So, yeah, to give you an update on where we are. So we just actually announced this morning that we're up to 20,000 customers. So really excited about that. And we're also announcing two key new hires. So we have Tim Wan, who is coming to us from Apogee, and he's our new head of global finance. And then we also have Oliver J, who's coming to us from Dropbox. He's our new head of global sales. So we're really excited about having them here to help us really take the business to the next step.

So you've been doing Asana for a few years so far. Would you say you guys are at sort of a hyper growth phase or a adolescent phase or where would you put Asana in sort of the overall arc of a company's journey?

Sure. You know, I think we're at a maturing phase. So again, we have 20,000 customers. So it's a very stable, real business. A lot of our growth is those individual customers continuing to expand and use the product more, but there's still a lot more to do. We're kind of, you know, if you think of the sort of crossing the chasm, we're sort of at the late, early adopters stage. There's still a massive market out there and we really think of our market as all knowledge workers with 500 million people around the world and most of them don't use any product in the work tracking category. So there's still a long way to go before everyone's part of this new collaboration world.

Now, is this a company where you can sort of be heads down and just work on improving the product one feature at a time, or do you feel like you guys are in a sort of high stakes, more stressful race or what would be sort of the atmosphere at you guys? Because, you know, as anyone who uses productivity software knows, there are a lot of very smart people working in this broad category.

You know, it's a little bit of both. Right. You can't really rest on your laurels. But, you know, again, the vast majority of the market doesn't use anything. They're still using the tools of 10 or 20 years ago. Email, you know, large meetings, full of status updates, just writing things on a whiteboard. So it's going to take at least a few more years for that to really develop. So we're really focused on just executing the strategy that sets us up for success in the long run.

So another thing I've always found interesting is when I cover the company, it's almost like in a lot of ways, you and your co founder, Justin Rosenstein are interchangeable in terms of the buck stopping with you guys, but kind of taking different focuses. So I'm not sure how many companies here in the audience might have sort of a dual leader structure. But how do you guys make it work at Asana? And how have you kept that going for, you know, well over five years at this point?

Yeah. So we definitely complement each other's skill sets a lot. And I almost think of it even as a tram break because we also have Chris Farinacci, who's the head of business, but, you know, Justin's very much focused on the product and external communication. So, you know, we had an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning. He was the main person interviewing there. So he's very sort of external focused and I'm much more focused on execution and helping the company Helping make sure we have a great culture and a great environment. So much more inward focus, focused on things like process and between us. And then with Chris running, you know, marketing and sales and customer operations, we've got everything all covered.

So I'm curious, has anyone checked the Glassdoor rating for Asana lately? Anyone raise their hand? All right, well, if you guys go look on Google before it gets changed, now they have a perfect score out of dozens of reviews. And Dustin also has a perfect score as a leader, which is pretty phenomenal. You can really only go downhill from there. How did you guys get there and how did I just screw it up, you know?

Yeah, no, I am always worried about the sort of other shoe dropping there, but a lot of it has just been being really intentional about how we build the business and using mindfulness. I like to say that a lot of companies that grow quickly, they end up focusing almost entirely on the product, getting into the market. And then a couple years in, they are like, okay, we're still going to exist. We got to think about how the company's going to be, what our values are, what the culture is going to be. But it's kind of too late to change it at that point. Ben Horowitz likes to say that the book is basically sealed after 12 months, but we thought we'd be around for a while. So from the very beginning, we were intentional about how we built the culture and we were reflective. And so when we saw things that needed improvement, we put our attention there and iterated and just kept turning that crank until we had every part of the company running really well. And the result is we have employees that are really engaged, happy, productive, and give us good ratings on Glassdoor.

Now, that was not really the case at Facebook, though, early on. Right. I mean, I don't know if you guys have read this great blog post that Dustin wrote about a year and a half ago now where he talked about the work life balance, or lack thereof, that you had in early days of Facebook. I think you wrote that you were subsisting on soda and energy drinks for a while, which I'm sure people in this room can understand. That happens. But you said that it didn't make you a more productive person to be kind of grinding that hard or stressing that much. So could you talk a little bit about when you realized that and sort of what you would have maybe done differently today?

Sure. A lot of it, I think, was just how I was kind of pushing myself and some bad habits that I formed early on. But a Lot of it also, I think, is just the culture of the tech industry and especially Silicon Valley where, you know, it's kind of romanticized to like just be working 24 7. You'll hear people say they were up two nights in a row, you know, finishing this project, things like that. And it's easy to sort of get this idea that that's the optimal way to work, that's the way to get the most done. But when you talk to people that are further in their career, or if you look at any of the research that's been done about this, you get the exact opposite conclusion where you really have to treat it much more like a marathon and really pace yourself and work in a sustainable way. So, you know, I started Facebook when I was 19, so you can do that for a couple years, especially when you're young, but eventually you're going to burn out, eventually you're going to slow down. And so a few years in I was starting to feel that and it was starting to cost me. So the blog post I wrote is work hard, live well. It's on medium. And I just talk about better patterns for how to build sustainable habits. And it's at every scale of abstraction, right? You have to take breaks during the day, you have to go home and rest at night and sort of unplug, you have to use your weekends, you have to take vacations. And after a few years, ideally you can take some time off between jobs or take a sabbatical. That's really the way to keep going. And a lot of the people that I've seen in startups or coming from Facebook, they didn't learn these lessons and they burnt out. And frankly, some of them still stopped working for years at a time or just retired early. And so you really have to be intentional to avoid that outcome.

So when people defend hackathons or institute sprints, I often hear the argument in their defense that it's a way to sort of forge a culture really fast or kind of create a bonding experience for everyone to kind of suffer through where they come out more tight knit. Maybe they have a good idea, maybe not. But it's like a shared experience there. So do you think there's any sort of value there that you lose if you don't do that? Or what would be the alternative to maybe these kind of trial by fire type scenarios?

Yeah, well, you can still do those things for some period of time. So if we're going up to a big launch, yeah, we'll sprint and people will work harder than Normal, but the key then is to, after you get to that launch, actually rest after. And for our hackathons, we've been pretty thoughtful about this. And yeah, the younger employees at Asana, they want to stay up all night and do that. So once a year, we'll try and have a hackathon that's more oriented around that. But other times during the year, we'll have a hackathon that takes place during the day or maybe across multiple days to give people a chance to participate in that creative process who can't necessarily stay up all night. Maybe they have a family, or maybe they just get tired at night. And so really creating that environment for multiple people. But it's not really an either or thing for me. You can still have those intense experiences where you bond, but they just shouldn't be the norm.

So I, for example, have FOMO so bad with just checking Twitter that I had to download an app that literally makes me take deep breaths before I can open Twitter.

Great.

That's how often I check it during the day, and it makes me breathe more the more times I've opened it. So I have no self control. 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 know, 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 habits into the company? So we do orient our engineering teams around sprints, but in between, we do off sprints. And sprints for us are really also just about focus, where you have fewer meetings, fewer sort of other activities, but they are also a period of a little more intense work.

And hold on, I'm probably the least technical person in this room, so you have to bear with me. Could you explain a little more what an offspring would be?

So an off sprint would be catching up on other things. Like, a lot of people at Asana, they have their sort of primary responsibility with an engineering program, but then they have other areas of responsibility, which may be like cultural things like values or hackathons or something like that. So an off Sprint would be a time when you put more attention on that, maybe go back and fix some bugs that you created in your last Sprint, fill out some interview feedback you forgot to do, just sort of like catch up on things and sort of reset your patterns and also reflect on how the prior Sprint went and plan the upcoming one.

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 on Silicon Valley? Because we always hear the debate, you know, if you're serving dinner at 8 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, 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 to 10pm 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. And that's totally culturally okay.

Some of the feedback I saw in 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 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 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.

So I guarantee you that there's going to be a large number of people here who are nodding along to everything you say and will go back to work tomorrow or Friday and work a 14 hour day.

Sure.

And I think it's so much harder to practice these goals. So do you have any sort of first steps or sort of very high level fixes that people could actually think about implementing first to maybe move towards that culture that you have?

You know, it's tough. I mean, I imagine a lot of people here are the leaders of their company. So I would just make sure that you're aware that the best fix is just going to be you acting differently. And most of the other people in your company are going to be kind of at the effect of the tone that you're setting. So just make sure you understand you bear that responsibility. You can also just maybe tomorrow and Friday just imagine me on your shoulder just like shaking my head if you're still there too late. But I think the easiest thing to do is also just the sort of smallest scale of taking breaks during the day. Some asana's use like the Pomodoro method, just like literally have a timer. There's also apps like yours for the phone that just kind of remind you, hey, take a breath. Pause. There's an employee that Asana that has something like that actually on his desktop. So like every 50 or 60 minutes it actually takes over his screen. It's like, all right, chill out, take a breath. That I think is the sort of easiest thing to do. And then building on like going home at a reasonable hour, you know, taking your weekends. And there's some great tools for that of just like turning off notifications. Like, Slack has a great sort of like active hours feature for this. So just like really taking advantage of those things and being intentional about it so you don't fall into these habits of like, oh, I got a push notification. I got to respond to that right now.

Yeah, I mean, from what you've said in the past, it seems like you were facing some burnout at Facebook by the end. And now you've said that you take a day off, go for a hike or sort of unplug if you sense the burnout coming back. So what are the warning signs that you notice when you think, oh, I'm starting to get manic or I'm starting to. The old Dustin's coming out.

Yeah, the old Dustin. Well, for one thing, I get more irritable and maybe just like, like I'm not as great in interpersonal conversations with people and they'll reflect that back at me. And I'm pretty self aware about it at this point. And also I'm just not productive. It's like when you're sitting at your desk and you're staying late because you still have work to do but you're not actually getting it done, that means you're burnt out. So it's a lot more productive to say, hey, I need to actually unplug, I need to rest, and then I'll come back and do this in a much more time efficient way.

Now, I think another side of mindful business is also having interests where you can make an impact that are maybe aligned with the philosophy of the company, but are outside the company. You guys gave a lot of money through your foundation to a bunch of causes last year. Are we allowed to say how much you gave or.

Sure. Do you know?

Yeah, I think you told me it was $100 million all told.

I think we actually gave about 200 million.

Well, he downplayed it then. Yeah, 200 million. So I'm to. Yeah, let's get a round of applause. How did that become a focus for you? And I'm curious, how does being involved in causes that matters to you, maybe help you stay grounded as also a CEO.

Sure. So, you know, how it became a focus, you know, I guess it just, it almost felt like a compulsion or a moral responsibility of, you know, I came into a lot of capital very, very early in life. And, you know, a lot of people in the tech industry sort of think like, well, I'll spend my career accumulating capital and kind of give it away at the end. But we really had this philosophy, you know, my wife and I, Carrie, that, you know, the good you do in the world also compounds. So to give earlier is a lot better. I also have a philosophy that the world will be better 20 or 30 years from now. So in some sense, like, the opportunities will be worse for giving. So we really thought about, like, well, okay, you know, maybe we should start early. And if we're going to start early, how should we do it? And ended up finding the GiveWell team. So they. I don't know if people are familiar with GiveWell, but they're effective altruists and they really start from this premise that you should try and, you know, make every dollar count. So you want to be able to donate every dollar in the most leveraged way possible. And that means looking for, you know, categories and also nonprofits that are cost effective and leveraged. They're working on tractable problems, and they also have a funding gap. So it's the ones that don't already have a lot of attention. And that's been. We've been able to develop some really great areas so far. And just to give you some broad strokes on that, so the three big categories right now, one is global health and development, and that's really GiveWell's bread and butter. And then we also have a new organization, Open Philanthropy Project. They're a little different from GiveWell in that it's less sort of like proven cost effective and more sort of like probabilistically cost effective. So you're willing to take risks. And the two big areas we're working on there, one is global catastrophic risks. So sub focus is there on biosecurity and preventing pandemics, and also risk from advanced artificial intelligence. And then the third area which is really relevant to what's happening in the news right now is we work on US Public policy. So we've had a program for a couple years now working on immigration. Obviously that's very relevant. And also. Thank you. And also working on criminal justice reform is actually probably our largest program that hasn't been in the news. Lately, but if sessions get confirmed next week or later this week, then it will become a big deal.

Yeah. So Asana was one of the tech companies that signed a amicus brief supporting the state of Washington against Trump's executive order on immigration. It seems like you have certainly positioned the company to be a voice for the tech community. Is this something that your employees are calling for? Is this something that, as a CEO, you guys kind of are setting this culture for the company, or how do you end up in this position as sort of one of the leaders in opposing a policy that might have moral or business or both Ramifications?

Sure. You know, I think it's a little of both. Certainly, you know, Justin and I and Chris, too, are just, like, very quick to want to respond to these things. So when something happens, you know, we're almost immediately sort of discussing what we should do. But, yeah, our employees at this point just kind of expect it. And if we go more than 24 hours without saying something, you know, they're going to start to ping us. I'll also just point out we're in really good and numerous company on the. On the brief that you discussed. So there were 97 companies that joined. Little bit of background there. The deadline was actually pulled in, and it kind of became a fire drill on Sunday. But there is another, like, hundred or more companies that were meant to join and maybe will join later. So there's really almost any company I could think of was in this giant list of everyone they had collaborating on it. So I think it just seems like a consensus viewpoint at this point.

So you give tens of millions to causes that might kind of be related to the current political climate. You also, as CEO, have a great platform to speak out for people who maybe don't have the personal wealth to give on that side. How would you recommend they leverage what networks they have or what impact they might have to make a difference more on that second side?

Yeah, I think this is something we're all sort of still collectively figuring out, but the things that immediately come to mind. So certainly just being active, paying attention to what's happening in the news, I think there's an instinct for a lot of people to kind of just like, turn away because it's very upsetting. But being educated, I think is a big deal. And also just like talking to the people in your networks that may feel differently, including some hard conversations with family and then actually engaging with the political apparatus. I think we've got a lot of evidence that, you know, calling your congresspeople is really effective, particularly if you live in red or purple districts. And I know people are here from all over the country and all over the world, but they respond to that. They want to hear from you. And I think that the pressure that the public is putting on their politicians is really helping.

Yeah. I do feel like for some tech companies, especially ones that are even smaller than Asana, it's hard to figure out how much you want to watch the political climate and maybe get distracted or just depressed and not feel like you can do that much versus sort of keep your head down and focus on creating jobs that way and sort of just doing your company's business. Right. And so I'm curious if you feel like it's something where there's a certain scale where it does make sense to be active, or if you would say it's healthy for any company to be sort of watching the news or trying to join a brief where maybe they don't get called right away because they're a smaller startup.

Well, you know, again, I think on this brief there were a lot. There were startups of all sizes and larger companies, too. And, you know, I think that's a question that everybody has to ask themselves. But there's no sort of bright line for me where it's like you're too small to matter. And particularly when you're thinking about these sort of larger protests or engaging with politicians, the numbers matter. So, like, every voice counts, just like in voting.

I feel like we also need to ask about diversity and how a mindful business approaches sort of including more underrepresented groups within your employees, within the customers you meet with. And basically just tackling that issue is another one that maybe people sometimes want to shy away from or wait for someone else to lean on.

Yeah, I mean, partially just because it's really hard. And there's a lot of things that require your energy and attention in a growing company. But like I said earlier, a lot of the sort of rule book of how our culture works is sort of cemented in stone early on. So a lot of our attitude about it is just if you start early, it will be a lot easier later on when you're starting and you're already Facebook or Google or Amazon sized and you say, oh, you have a diversity problem. You have to hire thousands of people to move the needle. And I think one of the things that's clearest about diversity is people from underrepresented groups want to work at a place that already has people like them. They don't want to be the first person in the door representing that group. And so if you just make a little bit of progress, again, that's something that I'll compound and build over time. They'll help teach you about your biases and help you fix your processes and become more mindful about it. And then, of course, there are just some proactive things you can do, like unconscious bias training, thinking about your interview processes, and how to set candidates up for success. And again, a lot of that is just the hard work. And I highly recommend having a person who sort of fully focused on that. So we have a head of dni, Sonja, and she's just been able to make a lot of progress in a short amount of time.

You still do one on ones with a lot of employees on a somewhat regular structure, right? To get a sense of what people are thinking at even any level.

Sure, yeah. I only have recurring set one on ones with a few people, but I also just sit down at lunch and breakfast every day and talk to people there and, you know, just try and make myself available.

Great. Well, can we get one more round of applause for Dustin? Thank you.