Dustin Moskovitz discusses Asana's culture of encouraging work life balance.

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, 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 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 gotta 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 no kids to go home to. Do you, 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 aegis 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.