Inside Asana, whose CEO Dustin Moskovitz rejected Silicon Valley's hard-charging style while building the company, as it prepares for a investor roadshow
Covering venture capital, software and startups … At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, upbeat synth music announces the arrival of Dustin Moskovitz. Tweets: @alexrkonrad , @forbes , @forbes , @forbes , @alexrkonrad , @forbes , @forbes , @forbes , @forbes , @alexrkonrad , @alexrkonrad , @alexrkonrad , @joshconstine , @forbes , @forbes , and @hkanji Tweets: Alex Konrad / @alexrkonrad : As the cofounder of Facebook, Dustin Moskovitz learned how to “move fast and break things” first-hand. At his work software startup Asana, he's taking a very different approach. My cover story takes you inside the soon-to-be-public Cloud 100 standout. https://www.forbes.com/... https://twitter.com/... @forbes : That's in stark contrast to its competition, which includes monday. com, a New York- and Tel Aviv-based team-management business recently valued at $2.7 billion, and Notion, a next-gen note-taking app worth $2 billion https://twitter.com/... @forbes : Valued at $1.5 billion in November 2018, Asana operates without hype or splashy fundraises @forbes : “It takes time to build the snowball,” says Moskovitz. “The goal was to be fast, but fast in the long run, not fast in the short run. Now we're getting to reap the rewards that we sowed.” https://www.forbes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Alex Konrad / @alexrkonrad : Some ways Asana set up its corporate culture: - hired a D+I officer, @SonjaOttley, early - execs and lower-level employees alike tasked with owning a project or topic as its “head” - week-long Roadmap planning sessions - no-meeting Wednesdays - CLG coaching throughout the org https://twitter.com/... @forbes : But for the past dozen years since he left the high-flying social network, Moskovitz and his Asana cofounder, Justin Rosenstein have been lying low, quietly toiling behind the scenes to solve an age-old problem: how much effort we waste in the meta-work around work https://twitter.com/... @forbes : Asana brought on Sonja Gittens Ottley (left) as its diversity and inclusion officer in 2015, and Anna Binder as “head of people” in 2016. As of last year, 41% of staff were women, and 49% identified as non-white https://twitter.com/... @forbes : Moskovitz who is worth $14.2 billion, is best known as cofounder of Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg. He was the world's youngest billionaire for a few years starting in 2011 @forbes : Today Asana's software is used by employees at more than 75,000 companies including AT&T, Google and NASA to help them take back control of their days by managing everything from writing a memo to planning an event https://on.forbes.com/... by @alexrkonrad https://twitter.com/... Alex Konrad / @alexrkonrad : With their Facebook success, Asana's founders had some big startup advantages: pretty much any top Facebook exec or VC who could invest, did. But with that came high expectations. @ericries told me many of those Silicon Valley elite expected @moskov to move on to something else. https://twitter.com/... Alex Konrad / @alexrkonrad : Team software is a hot category now, with companies like https://monday.com/ and Notion both raising at multi-billion-dollar valuations. When Asana started, it was because its founders realized they'd both worked on internal tools like it at Facebook and Google. https://twitter.com/... Alex Konrad / @alexrkonrad : I've covered Asana for the past 5 years and reported this one via Zoom. Talking with Asana execs, analysts and VCs, it became clear that business prospects aside, what's most unusual about Asana is the way @moskov and @rosenstein went about its culture. https://www.forbes.com/... Josh Constine -SignalFire / @joshconstine : Lovely profile of Asana's Dustin & Justin, the gurus of getting shit done. https://www.forbes.com/... @forbes : The anti-Facebook: 12 years in, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz's slow-burn second act Asana finally has its moment https://on.forbes.com/... by @alexrkonrad https://twitter.com/... @forbes : 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 company Asana—a software success story powered by patience and the pandemic—public https://on.forbes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Hussein Kanji / @hkanji : “We are, to my knowledge, the two people on earth who have thought the most about the work management problem.” https://www.forbes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Forbes cover story lands at the end of a long runway: Quartz profiled Asana back in 2018 at a $1.5 billion valuation, tracing its roots as the task tool built for Facebook's engineering team, and this June Bloomberg reported the company quietly raised about $200M in convertible debt — with Dustin Moskovitz himself as the main lender — ahead of a planned direct listing in H2 2020.
What makes the roadshow narrative unusual is the pitch itself: instead of the growth-at-all-costs story most software issuers tell, Moskovitz is selling a deliberately anti-'move fast and break things' management philosophy, backed by early investments in people functions like hiring Anna Binder as head of people in 2016. With 75,000-plus customer companies including AT&T, Google and NASA, the question for public buyers is whether that culture translates into durable financials.
First-order effects
- Public-market investors evaluating the direct listing get a founder-narrative pitch rather than a traditional IPO bookbuild — and because no new primary capital is raised, the listing primarily creates a liquidity path for existing holders, including Moskovitz, whose reported $14.2B net worth already made him the company's dominant individual stakeholder.
Second-order effects
- Rivals monday.com and Notion now face a listed competitor whose valuation becomes a public benchmark for the whole team-software category, forcing their own investors and boards to price collaboration tools against Asana's disclosed numbers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — founder-supplied convertible debt plus a direct listing, followed by the post-listing share buying that later made Moskovitz Asana's majority owner — SaaS companies may increasingly reach public markets while keeping control concentrated in founder hands, weakening the traditional IPO's role as a governance reset.
The trend: Enterprise SaaS is reaching public markets through founder-financed direct listings that preserve insider control, trading the IPO's capital raise for a liquidity event on the company's own terms.