Asana Articles

Nearly a decade ago, Zuck’s college roommate became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire by moving fast and breaking things. Now Moskovitz is set to take his radically chiller cloud standout Asana — a software success story powered by patience and the pandemic — public.

Tech culture has the reputation for long hours, intense competition, and little time for reflection. But Asana, a workplace-productivity management company founded by former Facebookers and Googlers, couldn’t be further from this stereotype.

For Asana cofounders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein, mindfulness means embracing the inhale and the exhale of the workday–and getting beyond an obsession with productivity.

With Twitter’s recent IPO filing, the most popular graph dominating conversation is the “interest graph.” Before that, it was the “social graph,” courtesy of Facebook. But we’re now seeing the emergence of a third important graph: the work graph.

Whether it’s a giant infrastructure plan or a humble kitchen renovation, it’ll inevitably take way too long and cost way too much. That’s because you suffer from “the planning fallacy.” (You also have an “optimism bias” and a bad case of overconfidence.) But don’t worry: we’ve got the solution.

What happens when two Silicon Valley darlings set their minds to creating the world’s most high-performing team? At age 34, Justin Rosenstein has already had more cultural impact than most of us can hope for in a lifetime. In his first job out of Stanford as a product manager at Google, he invented and wrote the original prototype for Gchat in a single overnight coding push.

I’m a software developer, designer, and entrepreneur. I’m the co-founder of Asana, team productivity software that many great companies (e.g. Uber, Pinterest, Dropbox) use to run their companies. Back when I was an engineering manager at Facebook, I designed the internal team productivity tool that the company still relies on.

When I walk through a beautiful building, the first thing I experience is the emotional effect of the finished product: a sense of grandeur, or a feeling warmth. But my appreciation grows deeper when I consider how the building was made…