9 ms·

Asana files to go public via direct listing

159 points by doppp 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
xfour 7y ago
Didn’t see anything there in the article about the financials, is that because they filed “Confidentiality”?
iliekcomputers 7y ago
What does filing "Confidentially" mean? How are buyers supposed to see what they're buying?
- vinniejames 7y ago
  They will still eventually need to disclose, a confidential filing allows them to work with the SEC on details before releasing public info. https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/public-offerings-how-confidential-ipos-are-changing-the-market.html https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/public-offerings-how-c...
- paxys 7y ago
  It is confidential right now. It will be made public closer to the IPO date.
s3r3nity 7y ago
Congrats to the team - I've been an Asana user since day 1 when it looked like a glorified spreadsheet and was essentially a nice wrapper around Facebook Tasks (FB's internal task management tool.) Ultimately I think they have the right ideas and long-run roadmap, but will have a lot of challenges executing in such a crowded space. Excited to see what they do next!
- montroser 7y ago
  We used asana for a while. I love the clean UI, and we thought the calendar view was really helpful/good, etc. The one thing we really missed though, was just first class support for being able to keep break down tasks into smaller ones through many levels. We've been trying out https://subtask.co https://subtask.co for that, and finding it to be pretty good. It has its own shortcomings too, but seems to be an interesting new contender in this crowded space.
  - ahupp 7y ago
    It might be a newer feature, but Asana does support arbitrary levels of subtasks.
- crtlaltdel 7y ago
  I never cared for the software, but I’m excited to see how the direct listing plays out.
garrygosh 7y ago
Worst product I’ve ever used
- thebitguru 7y ago
  That's a not a very helpful feedback, especially for folks that might be looking into using them. Any chance you can share more on what you don't like?
  - garrygosh 7y ago
    Incredibly confusing UI. We found using something like Trello was simpler and cheaper. The best way to describe Asana from a product perspective would be “just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean it’s good”
  - purerandomness 7y ago
    Not the original commenter, but for me, several things made me despise it: * No way of entering code blocks renders the product completely useless for technical teams. (JIRA also makes it particularly complicated with their "code block" element) * The clunkiness of the heavy-weight JavaScript frontend is inducing a very negative feeling the moment I think about having to open Asana. * The user interface breaks commonly established UX patterns: Middle click on a card doesn't open the task in a new window, as all other clickable things in a browser suggest. Cross-referencing two tickets is completely impossible (besides cloning the tab and opening two separate tasks in both)
    - baroomba 7y ago
      The feature I most wanted out of Asana, back when I had to use it, was a way to open links to individual issues as some kind of basic, plain HTML page so I'd rarely have to load Asana itself. I dreaded opening it every time, couldn't just leave it open because it ate too much memory and too many cycles for something I only needed to look at a few times a day.
    - karmelapple 7y ago
      Small note, but JIRA’s latest redesign did introduce easier code block support. Just hit three backticks in the editor and it switches to code entry.
xenospn 7y ago
I've tried using Asana for several months, and I don't really understand how it's better than any other competing product out there? The web UI is slow and it's definitely not cheap. Is there anything about it that's "10x"?
- whalesalad 7y ago
  I had a similar experience and genuinely wondered why it was even used by anyone at all.
  - baroomba 7y ago
    Same. It was incredibly slow and loved to eat most of a GB of memory if I left its tab open. I once had it pop up a "would you recommend this product to others?" form that managed to introduce ~3 seconds of input latency on each keystroke for its text feedback area. Which, as you'll recall, is a basic HTML element you shouldn't need Javascript intercepting input to in the first place without one hell of a good reason. I was... not kind. IIRC they had a blog post up about their brilliant NIH Javascript UI framework and if you are familiar with that kind of thing you could read between the lines and generate some good guesses about what was wrong with it. Not that Jira is a ton better, especially with each heavier-and-worse-than-the-last redesign. Friggin' "web apps". [EDIT] and for all that the workflow wasn't any better than anything else as far as I could tell. Our PMs who lived in it loved the draggy-droppy interface and hotkey-heavy workflow, but again, everyone (of their competitors) has that too. To me it always felt like working on someone else's messy desktop shared over VNC. I was afraid to touch anything for fear of accidentally performing some kind of write operation without noticing, and fucking things up.
    - AJ007 7y ago
      It used to be faster. They’ve put themselves in a position where users are ready to bail after any major price increase.
      - baroomba 7y ago
ummonk 7y ago
I previously worked at Asana (and own shares), and am glad they’re going the direct listing route. It’s good to normalize the practice of cutting out middlemen in the IPO.
- core-questions 7y ago
  Yes. Far too many financial instruments seem to be explicitly designed to enable the already-moneyed to skim a cut off of every single operation; and while you could have made the argument decades ago that it was a somewhat laborious process, I don't really buy that anymore. Transparency and automation may yet help rid us of rent-seeking behaviour.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    Direct listings don’t cut Investment Banks out; it just changes the fee dynamic. You’re still paying “the middle man”, just for different services. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-04/how-to-disrupt-the-ipo-pop https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-04/how-to...
    - core-questions 7y ago
      Well, not a surprise, of course they're still in the mix somehow.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    How do you automate the investment banks' most important function: underwriting the share issue so the company gets a guaranteed minimum share price? Or the road show for that matter? Does the CEO of Asana have pension funds, mutual funds, PE, HFs, etc in their contacts list? Would they be able to negotiate a better price than the banks that already have a working relationship with these entities?
    - core-questions 7y ago
      What process is the bank itself doing right now? Risk analysis in order to determine what makes sense to invest in, and then using its funds. I'm not saying there won't be banks, but perhaps we can stop letting banks be a vector to supply massive quantities of money to biased middlemen who have their own end goals in mind that might actually be larger than the ledger.
runawaybottle 7y ago
So hold up, is this just project management software being listed on the stock exchange? Or are they offering like a suite of tools like Atlassian?
- adventured 7y ago
  Historically small technology companies would IPO. Dell went public and was worth only $85 million in 1988. The last 10-15 years is an abnormality where tech companies wait a long time to IPO. Slack is just team communication software, trading with a $12 billion market cap. Shopify is just a modern remake of Viaweb handling site building and shopping carts, trading for $56 billion. Snap is just a chat app trading with a $26 billion market cap. Twitter is just a micro blogging service trading with a $26 billion market cap. Zoom Video is just a video conferencing software company trading for $20 billion. And so on. It's obviously a very good time for Asana to go public.
  - sireat 7y ago
    Shopify being valued at $56 billion is insane. That is about 40 times their SALES in a mature market. With others at least you can imagine some paradigm shift, same as with Tesla.
- toephu2 7y ago
  Like how basketball is just throwing a ball through a hoop? You can marginalize anything if you wanted to.
dadarepublic 7y ago
Good for them. I have mixed feeling about their platform. I do like the core functionality and the mobile app is decent. However their paid "support" and "training" is an absolute joke. It was so bad that I haven't used them since I left the organization I had used them for. It's one area I would recommend investment.
graphememes 7y ago
Honestly, I bet the employees would much rather it just got acquired. Many companies should do an internal poll, I bet more than 50% want acquisition.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  It's possible the direct listing is because an acquisition at a premium didn't occur and shareholders are anxious for liquidity.
  - graphememes 7y ago
    Hopefully that's not the case, but it certainly appears so.
- ummonk 7y ago
  Why would employees prefer acquisition to IPO? Asana has a pretty unique culture which would be in jeopardy after an acquisition. But even without that, I don’t see why employees wouldn’t prefer an IPO.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    Because they think the stock will tank after IPO and before their shares vest?
awa 7y ago
I have tried to use Asana for personal use cases multiple times over the years and it just feels "slow". Unfortunately, wunderlist is going away and I will need to keep hunting for a good alternative.
- lucasverra 7y ago
  same, except Trello got my ProjectM heart
- mszcz 7y ago
  Try RememberTheMilk. I've been using it for years and highly recommend it. The killer feature IMHO are the smartlists that you define by logical arguments, eg. "tag:home AND priority:1 AND dueBefore:tomorrow" creates a list of tasks that autoupdates as soon as something changes.
- ernsheong 7y ago
  I built something similar to Trello/Pipefy/Asana. Kanban with bells and whistles built into the core. Looking for feedback and PMF. Give it a shot: https://www.kanrails.com https://www.kanrails.com
capocannoniere 7y ago
While I personally find Asana clunky and slow (I've used many tools for project management: Notion and Jira are by far what I personally enjoy the most, followed by Airtable at a distant 3rd), Sam Altman's perspective on Asana are interesting to look at for a more positive outlook on the company: https://blog.samaltman.com/asana https://blog.samaltman.com/asana
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
bdcravens 7y ago
"Asana files to go public" At first I thought this was a security breach, like an open s3 bucket or the like
dzonga 7y ago
btw this would be a good ballpark to estimate if Basecamp went public, what their financials would look like ? if we assume Basecamp to have 2x - 5x the revenue of Asana

159 points by doppp 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

xfour 7y ago

Didn’t see anything there in the article about the financials, is that because they filed “Confidentiality”?

iliekcomputers 7y ago

What does filing "Confidentially" mean? How are buyers supposed to see what they're buying?

vinniejames 7y ago
They will still eventually need to disclose, a confidential filing allows them to work with the SEC on details before releasing public info. https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/public-offerings-how-confidential-ipos-are-changing-the-market.html https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/public-offerings-how-c...
paxys 7y ago
It is confidential right now. It will be made public closer to the IPO date.

s3r3nity 7y ago

Congrats to the team - I've been an Asana user since day 1 when it looked like a glorified spreadsheet and was essentially a nice wrapper around Facebook Tasks (FB's internal task management tool.) Ultimately I think they have the right ideas and long-run roadmap, but will have a lot of challenges executing in such a crowded space. Excited to see what they do next!

montroser 7y ago
We used asana for a while. I love the clean UI, and we thought the calendar view was really helpful/good, etc. The one thing we really missed though, was just first class support for being able to keep break down tasks into smaller ones through many levels. We've been trying out https://subtask.co https://subtask.co for that, and finding it to be pretty good. It has its own shortcomings too, but seems to be an interesting new contender in this crowded space.
- ahupp 7y ago
  It might be a newer feature, but Asana does support arbitrary levels of subtasks.
crtlaltdel 7y ago
I never cared for the software, but I’m excited to see how the direct listing plays out.

garrygosh 7y ago

Worst product I’ve ever used

thebitguru 7y ago
That's a not a very helpful feedback, especially for folks that might be looking into using them. Any chance you can share more on what you don't like?
- garrygosh 7y ago
  Incredibly confusing UI. We found using something like Trello was simpler and cheaper. The best way to describe Asana from a product perspective would be “just because it’s complicated doesn’t mean it’s good”
- purerandomness 7y ago
  Not the original commenter, but for me, several things made me despise it: * No way of entering code blocks renders the product completely useless for technical teams. (JIRA also makes it particularly complicated with their "code block" element) * The clunkiness of the heavy-weight JavaScript frontend is inducing a very negative feeling the moment I think about having to open Asana. * The user interface breaks commonly established UX patterns: Middle click on a card doesn't open the task in a new window, as all other clickable things in a browser suggest. Cross-referencing two tickets is completely impossible (besides cloning the tab and opening two separate tasks in both)
  - baroomba 7y ago
    The feature I most wanted out of Asana, back when I had to use it, was a way to open links to individual issues as some kind of basic, plain HTML page so I'd rarely have to load Asana itself. I dreaded opening it every time, couldn't just leave it open because it ate too much memory and too many cycles for something I only needed to look at a few times a day.
  - karmelapple 7y ago
    Small note, but JIRA’s latest redesign did introduce easier code block support. Just hit three backticks in the editor and it switches to code entry.

xenospn 7y ago

I've tried using Asana for several months, and I don't really understand how it's better than any other competing product out there? The web UI is slow and it's definitely not cheap. Is there anything about it that's "10x"?

whalesalad 7y ago
I had a similar experience and genuinely wondered why it was even used by anyone at all.
- baroomba 7y ago
  Same. It was incredibly slow and loved to eat most of a GB of memory if I left its tab open. I once had it pop up a "would you recommend this product to others?" form that managed to introduce ~3 seconds of input latency on each keystroke for its text feedback area. Which, as you'll recall, is a basic HTML element you shouldn't need Javascript intercepting input to in the first place without one hell of a good reason. I was... not kind. IIRC they had a blog post up about their brilliant NIH Javascript UI framework and if you are familiar with that kind of thing you could read between the lines and generate some good guesses about what was wrong with it. Not that Jira is a ton better, especially with each heavier-and-worse-than-the-last redesign. Friggin' "web apps". [EDIT] and for all that the workflow wasn't any better than anything else as far as I could tell. Our PMs who lived in it loved the draggy-droppy interface and hotkey-heavy workflow, but again, everyone (of their competitors) has that too. To me it always felt like working on someone else's messy desktop shared over VNC. I was afraid to touch anything for fear of accidentally performing some kind of write operation without noticing, and fucking things up.
  - AJ007 7y ago
    It used to be faster. They’ve put themselves in a position where users are ready to bail after any major price increase.
    - baroomba 7y ago

ummonk 7y ago

I previously worked at Asana (and own shares), and am glad they’re going the direct listing route. It’s good to normalize the practice of cutting out middlemen in the IPO.

core-questions 7y ago
Yes. Far too many financial instruments seem to be explicitly designed to enable the already-moneyed to skim a cut off of every single operation; and while you could have made the argument decades ago that it was a somewhat laborious process, I don't really buy that anymore. Transparency and automation may yet help rid us of rent-seeking behaviour.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  Direct listings don’t cut Investment Banks out; it just changes the fee dynamic. You’re still paying “the middle man”, just for different services. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-04/how-to-disrupt-the-ipo-pop https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-04/how-to...
  - core-questions 7y ago
    Well, not a surprise, of course they're still in the mix somehow.
- rchaud 7y ago
  How do you automate the investment banks' most important function: underwriting the share issue so the company gets a guaranteed minimum share price? Or the road show for that matter? Does the CEO of Asana have pension funds, mutual funds, PE, HFs, etc in their contacts list? Would they be able to negotiate a better price than the banks that already have a working relationship with these entities?
  - core-questions 7y ago
    What process is the bank itself doing right now? Risk analysis in order to determine what makes sense to invest in, and then using its funds. I'm not saying there won't be banks, but perhaps we can stop letting banks be a vector to supply massive quantities of money to biased middlemen who have their own end goals in mind that might actually be larger than the ledger.

runawaybottle 7y ago

So hold up, is this just project management software being listed on the stock exchange? Or are they offering like a suite of tools like Atlassian?

adventured 7y ago
Historically small technology companies would IPO. Dell went public and was worth only $85 million in 1988. The last 10-15 years is an abnormality where tech companies wait a long time to IPO. Slack is just team communication software, trading with a $12 billion market cap. Shopify is just a modern remake of Viaweb handling site building and shopping carts, trading for $56 billion. Snap is just a chat app trading with a $26 billion market cap. Twitter is just a micro blogging service trading with a $26 billion market cap. Zoom Video is just a video conferencing software company trading for $20 billion. And so on. It's obviously a very good time for Asana to go public.
- sireat 7y ago
  Shopify being valued at $56 billion is insane. That is about 40 times their SALES in a mature market. With others at least you can imagine some paradigm shift, same as with Tesla.
toephu2 7y ago
Like how basketball is just throwing a ball through a hoop? You can marginalize anything if you wanted to.

dadarepublic 7y ago

Good for them. I have mixed feeling about their platform. I do like the core functionality and the mobile app is decent. However their paid "support" and "training" is an absolute joke. It was so bad that I haven't used them since I left the organization I had used them for. It's one area I would recommend investment.

graphememes 7y ago

Honestly, I bet the employees would much rather it just got acquired. Many companies should do an internal poll, I bet more than 50% want acquisition.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
It's possible the direct listing is because an acquisition at a premium didn't occur and shareholders are anxious for liquidity.
- graphememes 7y ago
  Hopefully that's not the case, but it certainly appears so.
ummonk 7y ago
Why would employees prefer acquisition to IPO? Asana has a pretty unique culture which would be in jeopardy after an acquisition. But even without that, I don’t see why employees wouldn’t prefer an IPO.
- TylerE 7y ago
  Because they think the stock will tank after IPO and before their shares vest?

awa 7y ago

I have tried to use Asana for personal use cases multiple times over the years and it just feels "slow". Unfortunately, wunderlist is going away and I will need to keep hunting for a good alternative.

lucasverra 7y ago
same, except Trello got my ProjectM heart
mszcz 7y ago
Try RememberTheMilk. I've been using it for years and highly recommend it. The killer feature IMHO are the smartlists that you define by logical arguments, eg. "tag:home AND priority:1 AND dueBefore:tomorrow" creates a list of tasks that autoupdates as soon as something changes.
ernsheong 7y ago
I built something similar to Trello/Pipefy/Asana. Kanban with bells and whistles built into the core. Looking for feedback and PMF. Give it a shot: https://www.kanrails.com https://www.kanrails.com

capocannoniere 7y ago

While I personally find Asana clunky and slow (I've used many tools for project management: Notion and Jira are by far what I personally enjoy the most, followed by Airtable at a distant 3rd), Sam Altman's perspective on Asana are interesting to look at for a more positive outlook on the company: https://blog.samaltman.com/asana https://blog.samaltman.com/asana

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

bdcravens 7y ago

"Asana files to go public" At first I thought this was a security breach, like an open s3 bucket or the like

dzonga 7y ago

btw this would be a good ballpark to estimate if Basecamp went public, what their financials would look like ? if we assume Basecamp to have 2x - 5x the revenue of Asana