 Everybody, I'm Josh Constine from TechCrunch. Thank you guys so much for coming. A very exciting panel for you today, because this guy, his company, just became a unicorn last week. They're now valued at $1.5 billion. But, very impressive. But I think the best founders have a superhero origin story. I think we all know the story of Batman. I was parents were murdered and he wanted to go clean up the city of Gotham. I think founders have that too. So I wanna know, Justin, what was that formative experience that turns you into a founder? I don't know if I have a superhero origin story, though I appreciate the vote of confidence. I do remember being a little kid and lying on bed awake at night and just sort of being in awe, being in awe of being alive. Like, that there's a universe and I'm this sentient creature who can interact with the world. And as I got older, I think it only got weirder to me. I mean, it is frickin' crazy to be alive. And the more that I've thought about that, the more that I've just felt, especially recognizing that we're this rare little planet alone in the solar system, wanting to dedicate myself to be as much in service to life as possible to make myself useful. And when I was 10 years old, I got a computer and being a nerd, started programming it. I was always just amazed at this idea that I could sit alone in a room and write a piece of software once that could then be useful to people potentially all over the world. And so, I'd say my career has kind of been this ongoing exploration of how can I be as useful as possible? At Google, I helped invent Gmail Chat and Google Drive out of the idea of if you could enable people to collaborate more effectively, would that help people to accelerate their missions? And I now think that there's more than chat and files that are necessary, but that was that. And then at Facebook, helped invent Facebook pages and the Facebook Like button. The Like button was the idea of could you help people, could you inject a little bit of positivity into people's lives? And I think that's gone well in some ways and has had unintended consequences in other ways. So I'm still on that journey to figure out how to be as useful and in service to life as possible with technology. So do you ever, I know you've talked a lot about your time at Facebook. What did you try to do differently when you were creating Asana? And how did you come up with the idea for it? Yeah, I'm always looking for these leverage points. Where are places that you can exert a relatively small amount of effort and have a potentially large outsized amount of impact. So at both Google and Facebook, I just felt constantly frustrated by how much time we spent, not on work, but on work about work, on the emails and the status updates and all the stuff to keep teams on the same page. Is anyone out there sick of email? Raise your hand. Well, yeah, I'm pretty sure that's most of us. And his product actually helps you do less email, which is kind of nice. Yeah, and so it was at Facebook that we developed this internal tool to replace email and to become this core central backbone, I think of HowFace, because able to get so much done as a company. And Asana is us bringing that to the world. And so Asana is software that enables teams to be able to organize and manage all of their work, whether you're talking about a five-person team that's managing their individual day-to-day tasks or an executive CEO that's able to manage the strategic initiatives of a giant corporation. And I think the reason that that's such a leverage point is that the average knowledge worker literally spends 61% of their time on this kind of work about work. And so while we're not helping to cure diseases or helping fix education or creating clean, sustainable energy, we have a lot of customers who are doing exactly those things. And so if we can build this single tool that enables all of them to work faster, we think that's just so amazingly leveraged. For example, in California, as you know, we've had these incredibly devastating wildfires recently, and there's a Fortune 100 insurance company that has said that Asana's been instrumental in accelerating their ability to be able to provide emergency disaster relief to victims of the wildfire, or the concerted care group as a company that provides comprehensive treatment to people who are fighting with opioid addiction. And they were in a serious situation in last year where they felt like the disorganization that they were experiencing was actually going to cause them to go under, and that it was Asana that was the make or break thing that allowed them to have the organization necessary. And so instead of going under, they've been able to provide care to over 300,000 patient visits in just the last year alone. And so I think these are both examples of how technology and collaboration can really help accelerate important missions. And also, as Yvonne Harari talks about in sapiens, I think he just makes the strong case for that collaboration is really at the center of human progress. And so if you can build software that accelerates human progress, that's just hugely forward. I mean, we are social creatures, we don't survive on our own. And so the idea that technology would eventually, not just let us communicate, but more accurately and more efficiently align our efforts and unite our efforts, I think is really important. So now that you've just raised $50 million at this $1.5 billion valuation, you've joined this big unicorn club, how does that feel, and what are you going to do with all that money? Well, first of all, it feels good to see that it's working. You know, at this point, Asana is one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the world. We nearly doubled our revenue in the last year. We now have over a million teams who have started Onasana with the free version and over this year, we passed the mark of 50,000 paying customers. And that includes small businesses, as well as giant companies like Google and NASA, as well as nonprofits like UNICEF and the Malala Fund. And also here in the Nordics, companies like Icelandair and Spotify. And so I think for us, it's where the series of money takes us from here is one, expanding that value to teams all over the world. We want everyone to be able to experience that benefit. The average customer says that they are 45% faster with Asana than they were before using Asana. So now customers can basically do in two weeks what used to take them three weeks. So getting that to everyone in the world. And then going from 45% to 145%, basically we want to radically change the nature of what teams are able to accomplish. So that's about turning Asana into this team brain, this kind of central nervous system for entire organizations, using computer intelligence to be able to help automate all of that busy work that people have to do day in and day out to keep everyone on the same page. And ultimately to become this core platform that all of the different tools you use at work can synchronize into and thereby basically create this new architecture for the future of work. So I have one concern about all this is that we're rapidly advancing towards this world where there is more efficiency, fewer people able to do more things, but potentially fewer jobs. Is that something you guys worry about that you're sort of accelerating that move towards automation and potentially that future where there's fewer people with jobs? What we hear from customers today is not that we're eliminating jobs but that we're taking people who are project managers or people managers, or taking that part of their job that they particularly dislike, which is running around asking people, hey, what's the status of that? Bugging people, hey, did you get that done yet? And by automating that and giving everyone clarity and putting everyone on the same page, they actually get to spend more of their time focused on the things they enjoy doing and the work that matters, like coaching people, helping people become their best selves instead of all of this busy work that's better done by robots. Yeah, I hope that is the future that we get out of all this technology is that people actually get to do more human jobs rather than just acting like computers. You talked about being on the same page. That's a big question between co-founders. Most startups don't actually fail because they run out of money or they get outcompeted. It's because they just quit and oftentimes that's because the founders have a disagreement. Now you and your co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, he was one of the co-founders of Facebook. How do you guys keep things in harmony? How do you guys keep on the same page and avoid those kind of disputes that can break up a startup? I'm really grateful for how strong our relationship is. Dustin often jokes that choosing a co-founder is like choosing a spouse, except you spend more time talking about money. I think the core of it for us is this foundation of deep mutual respect. So when we have those disagreements, we give each other the benefit of the doubt and we try to figure out, well, okay, why are we not seeing eye to eye on this? Do you have different information than I do? Do you have a different assumption, a different intuition and work through that core assumption? It also means that we're able to give each other a lot of blunt, honest feedback. So this happens all the time. I remember early in our career, Dustin once took me aside after a meeting and he was like, I think you probably think you just came off as passionate, but you actually just came off as an asshole. And I think in some co-founder relationships that would have been offensive, but for me it was a gift to get that kind of feedback. So I think deep mutual respect is the foundation of any strong long-term relationship. So at some point though, you guys must have had some of those disagreements and how do you get over them when there's something that you really feel like you come to an impasse on? Yeah, I think a lot of it is about, like I said, we can work through those different assumptions and get to, if there's some core disagreement, is there a way we can get more data on that? In a lot of cases, it's just that we nicely divide up our responsibilities. There's things that are my strengths and his weaknesses and vice versa. And so we try to defer as much as possible to the person who we think is stronger at that particular kind of scale. I think that's a really important insight, the idea that you divide and conquer and sometimes if you might have a strong preference but you know the other person has more expertise, just saying, I'm gonna let you handle this can be really valuable. Yeah, there's only a small number of decisions that are actually really worth going all the way into getting into the nitty-gritty. A lot of times it's better to just keep moving and move quickly. So Asana has been ranked the number one best tech workplace by Fortune and a bunch of other publications. What are the surprising or maybe just weird things that you guys do at Asana that make you such a beloved place to work? Yeah, I think some people think building a great place to work is all about the perks. We think it's all about the culture. We actually see culture as this core competitive advantage where if you can build a place that people can do their best work and instead of not being distracted by silly politics, that really accelerates your ability to accomplish your mission and your business goals. So we think of culture as a product just in the way that if you're doing great product development or you're doing great culture development, it entails really methodical design, careful implementation, and then constantly measuring and improving. So for example, every year, we send out an anonymous survey to everyone in the company with 70 questions. Everything from how's your relationship with your manager? Do you think you're getting the right career growth? And we're able to look at all of that information and figure out what are our culture bugs, just like software has bugs, culture has bugs. And we go after them and we squash them. And by figuring out what are the things we need to do to solve that, I think Asana's culture gets better and better over time, whereas a lot of companies get worse and worse over time through entropy. So a couple of examples of the features of that culture. One is authenticity. I think a lot of places want you to bring this kind of cookie cutter professionalism to work, but we really encourage people to bring their full selves to work with all their quirks. And many Asanas have many quirks. We think that unlocks a lot of creative potential in people. Also at a lot of companies, you'll get punished if you speak uncomfortable truths. Here we really encourage and celebrate people doing that. Another cool feature of the culture is autonomy. So I think we've probably all been at companies where decision-making gets bottlenecked because it's all concentrated in this small number of executives. At Asana, we try to push the decision-making as much as possible to the people who are actually doing the real work. In fact, to the point where when we draw our org chart, we put the CEO at the bottom rather than at the top. And it's like a tree that grows outward where the fruit of the tree are the individual contributors who are actually doing the real work. And managers rather than being your boss are more of these branches that are people who are there to support you in doing your best work. And so, yeah, overall I think we have quite a few unusual practices that we've adopted at Asana. And I think they've been critical not only to the great employee satisfaction that you mentioned, to just being effective in achieving our business outcomes and our mission. You guys ever find one of those cultural bugs that you had a lot of trouble squashing? Yeah, I mean, we've had times when people had issues with their compensation and it was unclear. And people said they didn't know how to get a raise. The compensation system was unclear. And just took a few rounds of figuring out, okay, we need to improve our documentation. We need to hire a compensation lead. And then what was great is that because we do this regular measurement when we measured again a few months later we were able to see, oh, we have made real progress. You guys do have some cool perks at the company. I know you guys, one of the first companies I've heard of which had like a yoga room just built into an office. You guys only had like 50 people and you already had a yoga room. You guys have incredible food. What is it that you think makes people really like love coming to work each morning? The thing we hear consistently from people is that it's the people and the fact that it's such a friendly place to work. I saw someone just on their Facebook wall just talking to their friends about loving working at Asana and said something like, I feel like I'm working with 400 friends. Work isn't supposed to be this way. This is so cool. And I think that that's partially who we hire but partially also just this kind of warm, friendly culture. Things like those perks are in the grand scheme of things. Actually relatively inexpensive, relative to the benefit that you get from enabling people to stay with food actually be, instead of having to leave the office be able to talk to each other over lunchtime or with yoga be able to take a moment and re-center themselves and then get back into work. Are there ever culture problems because you've become too informal like too friendly with each other? I have not experienced that. I think that it's really nice when you're on a friendly basis with people and I think sometimes people can think of friendly as soft as meaning like, oh we're gonna dance around and not actually talk about real things but I think the kind of friendliness we have is that kind of friendship where you can be real with each other so I think it's been purely beneficial for us. So there's been too much of this culture of crushing it or this concept of hustle porn in Silicon Valley and in the tech world at large. This is where people spend all their time especially founders talking about how hard they're working, how many hours they're there, how late they're at the office and it gives this idea that, oh if you're not succeeding like this person then you're really failing and that's a big problem because it can lead founders to feel like oh if I'm having trouble, if things aren't going well for me, I'm the only one. Everybody else's company is succeeding and I'm the one that's failing and I'm some sort of anomaly. That's really problematic and how have you guys dealt with that? What do you do to make sure that you're not projecting that culture of crushing it? Yeah I don't know what you're talking about with problems, I mean it's just been smooth sailing the entire time. I somehow doubt that. Let's see, where do I start? Let's go with mobile. So our iOS app when it first launched had a 1.5 star rating in the App Store and some of the reviews it got are still seared into my memory. I can, worst app I've ever used makes me want to stab my eyes out. That's always what every founder hopes for in their App Store reviews I know. Yeah, smooth sailing. But we stuck with it and so we changed course, made some new technological decisions and it's only been about four years since then and now we have a 4.8 star rating in the App Store and just a few weeks ago Apple out of I think over a million apps named Asana the app of the day. So I think this is a really good example of kind of the entrepreneurial journey of how you can start off worst in class at something and if you have I'd say the humility to be able to recognize what you're doing wrong and really look those problems in the eye and then the perseverance to just one day at a time, one step at a time to keep trying to improve things it's possible to move from worst in class to best in class. On a more personal note I would say yeah the kind of anxiety and challenge that you're talking about is something I'm intimately familiar with in the first couple years of Asana's history I sometimes would have such severe anxiety that it would paralyze me for embarrassingly long periods of time. And I think that if you're a founder out there and you're experiencing a crushing level of anxiety I have bad news for you. This is normal. That's good to know that you're not alone out there but it is normal and you will have to deal with it. Yeah and I'd say that the solutions for me have been one to zoom out. So on a day-to-day basis you're always fighting fires you're always solving problems but often if you look at month over month you're over a year we are making progress. And the other thing that's been huge for me is meditation by taking the time every day to stop and inspect the contents of my own mind. It doesn't necessarily make the anxiety go away but it allows me to develop a healthier relationship to it where I can see it for what it is and keep working. So we're seeing this massive backlash in technology right now. People are thinking that technology companies are ripping the social fabric apart but meanwhile regulators are proving too slow or too clumsy to fix the problem and the users as much as we like tweet about it and we get mad about it we're not deleting these apps. You know we're still using a lot of these products by companies that we have moral disagreements with. So my question is who is going to help us and what can founders and employees out there do to help improve the culture of technology and its impact on society? Yeah I think we in technology can have an enormous impact. I mean for whatever our different reasons we've all taken the time to develop these extremely rare skills that now put us in the 0.001% of people in the world who are able to have an impact on this core fundamental technological infrastructure that influences millions and sometimes billions of people. That is a huge opportunity but also a huge responsibility. So I think the question that we all need to be asking ourselves is what does the world actually need? I think that as tech workers we often systematically underestimate the impacts that our individual decisions are able to have. So for example even if you're a computer science grad straight out of college where you go choose to work is you basically voting with a huge amount of your time and your effort on what mission you want to accelerate. And obviously we all have to make a living but you could go make a living by building software that is addictive and waste people's time or you could go work at a company like Coursera that is helping bring education to more people all over the world or you could go work at a company like Tesla that's helping accelerate our movement toward clean sustainable energy which we desperately need or at a company like NEMA which is helping to bring financial services to people who don't have access to banking. And so I think that fundamentally what we need is a new definition of success a kind of a new code of ethics or it's like it's called an ethics of code where we move from looking at for a website how much time do people spend on that website to figuring out how much time is well spent. Instead of celebrating companies based on who has the biggest market cap who's pulling in their most revenue celebrating companies based on who's having the most positive impact on the world who's drawing down the most carbon from the atmosphere who's educating the most people. And so at Asana while we're proud of the business success that we've had for us that's really the means toward an end that's the rocket fuel that we use in order to be able to achieve our mission and the metrics that I'm more interested in are things like the fact that companies are able to move 45% faster with Asana or the fact that 80% of companies say that they experience more clarity and transparency and accountability is because of Asana. That's the things I look at more than profit to see that we're succeeding in our mission. So to recap some of the awesome insights from Justin he came up just loving the existence of humanity but therefore wanting humanity to apply its efforts as best as it could. And so you created Asana and now with all this money that you've just raised you're trying to bring that idea of getting rid of work about work getting rid of that email that we're all so sick of so that we can actually work together better. And with you and your co-founder, Dustin you try to give each other that blunt feedback and give each other to different perspectives on problems and defer when something isn't your own expertise. And when it comes to your culture it's really about giving people that ability to speak up and ask questions. And meanwhile asking them as many questions as you can giving these surveys, making everything measurable so you can actually know how to improve. And you're trying to give people that concept that rather than having to constantly be crushing it be vulnerable, be real about the problems that you have because I think it's gonna make everybody else realize that they're not alone and they're not the only one experiencing moments of failure. And hopefully we can develop this ethics of code so we can build better technology for everyone. And we're not gonna fix the problems of the economy in these last few seconds, but I just wanted to ask you what else can people out there do if they wanna help avoid that polarization and bring the world closer together through technology? Yeah, I think it's a crazy time to be alive. On the one hand, we've developed these amazing capacities, right? We can have real-time conversations with people halfway around the globe. We're able to access the world's knowledge in a matter of keystrokes. We finally have the ability to produce enough food to theoretically feed everyone on the planet. And yet at the same time, we're in a lot of increasingly harrowing situations. We have this incredible climate crisis that's only accelerating. We see increasing political polarization. And we don't have our act together enough to actually distribute the food. And so hundreds of millions of people still go hungry every night. And so I think as a society, we're at this real fork in the road where I'm concerned that if we continue with business as usual, things could get worse and worse. You could see an acceleration of the kind of problems we're seeing with climate. If we don't get to global peace, I can imagine new technologies we're developing, like nanotech and biotech, being weaponized to basically be these kind of consumerized weapons of mass destruction. And yet at the same time, if we could get our act together, if we could create universal collaboration where everyone is pulling in the right direction and working together, I think we can create a world that's better and better. And what's amazing is that which of these two roads we choose has not yet been determined, right? We collectively are authoring our future. We can decide what road we want to go down. And so in the technology industry, I think we can choose to play a real role in that and embody that spirit of collaboration. Instead of seeing ourselves as a bunch of different sports teams all competing for who can get the highest score, who can raise the most money, get the highest valuation, if we can instead say ourselves as all part of one team, as part of this theoretical one project that's all working toward a common mission of creating a thriving, sustainable world for all people. And so I know that that may seem unrealistic, but doing unrealistic things is what the technology industry is all about. And I think it's necessary if we're going to be able to survive, let alone thrive in the next 100 years. And so my fantasy is that we move from seeing ourselves fundamentally as disruptors to seeing ourselves fundamentally as collaborators. We're working with experts in order to work in service of improving education and health and equality and democracy and sustainability and energy. And the reason that I work on Asana is because I do see teams who are doing all those things today. And I see Asana as this opportunity to accelerate all those teams at the same time because ultimately it's an incredible earth that we inherited and I just want to see as many people as possible working in service of life. Sounds like what we really need is business as unusual. Thank you very much, Justin. And thank you all for watching.