Profile of Asana, a provider of collaboration software for teams that has roots as a popular task management tool for Facebook's engineering department
There's work, and then there's the work that goes into doing your work. And a lot of workers spend more time on the latter. Tweets: @alexrkonrad and @jasonlk Tweets: Alex Konrad / @alexrkonrad : At a recent staff meeting I retold something I heard from “@moskov from Asana” and my colleagues were horrified I take meetings in a spa http://twitter.com/... Jason M. Lemkin / @jasonlk : I would say they were a little bit more than “Facebook engineers” http://twitter.com/... Expand More For Next Unexpand More For Next
Context & Ripple Effects
This Quartz profile catches Asana at an inflection point: six years after starting life as a task-management tool built for Facebook's engineering department, it is positioning itself as general collaboration software for teams. The coverage arc around it runs from the 2015 redesign and Track Anything launch that pushed it past simple task lists, through a [[a:867215|2016 Series C at a $600M valuation backed by Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and Founders Fund]].
Weeks after this profile ran, Asana closed a $50M Series E led by Generation Investment Management at a $1.5B valuation — more than doubling its mark in under three years. The profile matters because it frames how Asana sells that story: Dustin Moskovitz's deliberate, anti-hustle management style as a feature of the product company, not a quirk.
First-order effects
- The profile hands Asana a growth narrative just as it raises its Series E, letting the company pitch patient, culture-driven scaling rather than blitzscaling to Generation Investment Management and other late-stage buyers.
- Moskovitz's low-key operating philosophy — later examined in Forbes' roadshow-era profile — functions as a recruiting and retention lever against larger, harder-charging software competitors.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's engineering organization, Asana's original user base, acts as a credibility anchor that helps the company convert other large engineering teams, reinforcing the move upmarket from small-team task tracking.
- Rising valuations ($600M to $1.5B across two rounds) give Asana capital to absorb adjacent categories — spreadsheets, reporting, cross-tool coordination — squeezing point-solution rivals in each niche it enters.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, work-management vendors consolidate from single-purpose task apps into platform layers — Asana's later Enterprise Work Graph with CRM-integrating APIs is exactly that trajectory made explicit.
- That platform position sets up the question Moskovitz confronts in his 2025 Stratechery interview: what happens to seat-based collaboration software when enterprise AI agents do the coordinating instead.
The trend: Collaboration software is consolidating from single-purpose task trackers into platform-level work graphs, with founders' operating culture emerging as a durable competitive differentiator.