17 ms·

Asana S-1

384 points by sean_lynch 6y ago

paloaltokid 6y ago
Based on a few of the comments on this thread, I wanted to point out that filing an S-1 is not something that you just do overnight. When companies decide to go public it's a lot of work usually involving multiple dedicated teams on the business side. It takes many months and can take over a year. So while the timing here is interesting, nobody decided on Friday that many well-known tech firms would declare their intent to go public on Monday.
- grey-area 6y ago
  No, they decided that 6 months ago (or whatever the lead time is), but everyone decided at the same time, for fairly obvious reasons.
  - svbanker 6y ago
    This is false. A lot of these companies started their IPO process earlier but then got delayed due to COVID. Not everything is as pessimistic as you’re making it sound. It just happens to be before November (companies usually dont go public during election season) so this is the only viable window for companies to go public for the remainder of the year.
minimaxir 6y ago
...is there a reason a ton of tech startups are dropping their IPOs today?
- CleanItUpJanny 6y ago
  last chance to exit scam before the bubble pops
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    I totally get the feeling behind this, but you can't blame market participants for taking actions that are rational, regardless if the overall market fundamentals are/seem to be irrational. If the market is desperate for returns, and tech equities are one of the few remaining avenues for such returns, and you are the owner of those equities, what else would you expect to occur? "No no no, don't buy these valuable shares of my company, invest elsewhere!" No way, you're going to cash out as fast as possible before your gains evaporate when the market transitions.
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      Most undesirable actions by the powerful have a rational character. It's bizzare to me that this is so commonly used as a defense. It says to me that the problems are seen to be individuals, not systems of power. Note: I'm not commenting on the specific case here, just this argument in general.
  - rvz 6y ago
    It is indeed a race to the finish before the whole thing crashes down soon. Maybe as soon as they heard Airbnb and Palantir planned for their IPOs, everyone started to run for the hills for their own IPO filings before the whole thing falls over soon. Reminds me of the dotcom era. Now this is the time again.
  - mrkramer 6y ago
    Investors will decide. Supply and demand.
  - dang 6y ago
    Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
- mlacks 6y ago
  "tech startups" are IPOing almost daily. Happened to be a couple of big names today. https://sec.report/Form/S-1 https://sec.report/Form/S-1
  - tempsy 6y ago
    OP means in general, and to be fair the tech IPO market post financial crisis has actually been fairly weak. the number of tech IPOs happening right now is at multi year highs
- whatok 6y ago
  Summer is traditionally quieter since people are on vacation; still kinda holds true now. With S-1s out this week, you have more than enough time for the grunt work to be done before people are back in the office after Labor Day. I'm sure bankers have advised clients to get their ducks in a row because there's going to be a lot of supply and you really don't want to be the last out the door.
- tempsy 6y ago
  because the tech market is as frothy if not more so that 1999?
- shajznnckfke 6y ago
  The market is the highest it’s ever been. A lot of unicorns have waited for years to IPO and it there’s never been a better time to do it.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- caeril 6y ago
  With the sole exception of Aug 1999 - Feb 2000, public technology companies have never before commanded such high earnings multiples as we have now. It would be a dereliction of fiduciary duty for executives and boards NOT to fleece the public for cash right now.
  - nostrademons 6y ago
    I mean, the driver for these record high multiples is that the Fed has made it very clear that cash will be extremely abundant over the next couple years, and hence worth a lot less. It would be a dereliction of duty for those public investors to not get rid of it ASAP and put it into scarce resources, like the stock of hot Silicon Valley companies. The folks who are the real losers are any suckers who think they're going to get by with a fixed wage, particularly if they're in a competitive labor market.
- mbesto 6y ago
  Today specifically? Not sure. In today's climate? Yes. To give you an idea: The overall market is being carried by 5 companies...all "tech" companies: https://www.putnam.com/advisor/content/perspectives/7816 https://www.putnam.com/advisor/content/perspectives/7816 And most of the high growth SaaS companies are up YoY...by a lot: https://imgur.com/a/xjI3JBD https://imgur.com/a/xjI3JBD Wall st is foaming at the mouth to buy up more of these companies.
- switch11 6y ago
  see above for a very good answer I'll give my answer Fed is printing a lot of 'money' with its printing press some of it is going to large tech because it is 'safe' and still 'growing' However, there is $3 trillion of money printed, and even more being printed So, where does this money get put? Where can it get A RETURN? Tesla is one answer. That's why Tesla is 1,000 P/E Another answer is technology companies Let's say there is Family X, friends of Fed and its printing press Fed has printed $50 billion for them Where can they put this $50 billion, so that it doesn't get killed? A) Big Tech B) tech that might become big Tech (like Tesla) C) new tech IPOs So any tech company that can IPO, should IPO All this LIQUIDITY/Free Money/Printing Press Money is desperate to find ANY KIND OF RETURN Also, they have so much money and no where to put it, their thinking is 17 different SaaS companies - at least 1 or 2 will become trillion dollar companies in 15 years Invest in all 17 They literally 'printed' the money so it costs them nothing
- digi59404 6y ago
  Likely because it's the end of the second quarter and they all have high numbers because of Coronavirus and such. For some companies their Q3 ends inside of just after November. And we all know what happens in the U.S. in November every four years. So there's going to be great concern about the market dipping or taking a dive.
ryanmccullagh 6y ago
In case anyone forgot, Asana was founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.
- josh2600 6y ago
  And FB early employee Justin Rosenstein.
  - leahgnyc 6y ago
    Who founded https://www.oneproject.org/ https://www.oneproject.org/
- owenshen24 6y ago
  Dustin is also notable for starting Good Ventures (https://www.goodventures.org/about-us https://www.goodventures.org/about-us) which funds a lot of research and philanthropy into some great causes.
ponker 6y ago
I'm not a fan of the product but at least this isn't a company built on labor exploitation or fucking up some existing ecosystem.
- silentsea90 6y ago
  Guessing you don't use said labor exploiting services?
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    The only labor I exploit is my own.
    - maximente 6y ago
      my guess is that a detailed account of the consumer goods you have purchased - including possibly the device upon which you typed out and submitted this comment to this web property - would indicate otherwise
      - blueline 6y ago
        you criticize society yet you participate in society! how curious!
      - Aeolun 6y ago
        Maybe I should have have indicated that no other directly exploitative relationships exist.
    - djohnston 6y ago
      maybe, but probably not imo. the people who built my macbook are exploited, but i need it for work.
  - ponker 6y ago
    I do but try to rectify the exploitation. Always double suggested tips etc.
jasondc 6y ago
5 IPOs (S-1 filings) from Silicon Valley today: - Unity (San Francisco) - Jfrog (Sunnyvale) - Snowflake (San Mateo) - SumoLogic (Redwood City) - Asana (San Francisco)
- sdfhbdf 6y ago
  Maybe even more just these 5 are on HN homepage...
  - victor106 6y ago
    Is there a centralized place that we can track all the upcoming ipos?
    - superfrank 6y ago
      I believe this will have all acccepted S-1 filings https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=&CIK=&type=s-1&owner=include&count=40&action=getcurrent https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=&CIK=&type=...
  - foxdev 6y ago
    You can get a rough idea of it by looking at submissions from the sec.gov domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sec.gov https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sec.gov
    - marviel 6y ago
      Hey thanks, this is a neat tip.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Record high market, so why not?
  - actuator 6y ago
    Yeah, seems like that. When Covid-19 hit, there were layoffs in AirBnB etc. and everyone was talking about how IPOs will get pushed for future. Seems like all those worries have evaporated considering Tesla is trading at $2000.
supernova87a 6y ago
Wow, this is a torrent of IPOs today. Investors / boards are wanting to get money out before things turn south I feel. Aside from that, I'm surprised how much it costs Asana on engineering R&D, for essentially a ticket management system. How does a team grow to ~300+ developers ($89M R&D) to figure out how to attach PDFs and videos to tickets, and email people when there's a change in status? (ok yes I'm oversimplifying a bit, but not that much) And (as with all such companies) how much they need to pour into Marketing/Sales to sell this thing. These above costs basically wipe out the gross profits by 2x.
- mvkel 6y ago
  I know it’s hip to assume the market crash is days away, but what makes more sense is: saas companies have proven to be the most resilient type of company in this market. It couldn’t be a more perfect time to IPO. The reason the market looks so good right now is because tech stocks represent a significant portion of the indices. Many other stock are still way down (appropriately)
- sriram_sun 6y ago
  Look at Service Now.
- xenospn 6y ago
  I really don't understand how Asana excels at anything, let alone is a '10x'. They probably need to spend a fortune in marketing just to get people to sign up.
  - jsonne 6y ago
    It makes a lot more sense for marketers and others like us. I've tried getting away from Asana over and over but keep coming back. Everything else either isn't feature rich enough or is too difficult to use. They manage to strike the right balance. To me Asana is the epitome of the Churchill quote "Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried"
- tempsy 6y ago
dmart 6y ago
I've found Asana to be a much, much nicer product to work with than Jira (at least as a developer, not sure about from the management side.) I genuinely wish them success and hope they're able to grow their marketshare.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  What do you think about Trello?
  - throw03172019 6y ago
    We use Trello for a public roadmap and Asana for internal. Trello is much simpler so that may turn off some project/product managers.
  - dmart 6y ago
    Not a fan of the board/card focused view, mainly. I think it's visually cluttered and hard to read at a glance. Asana's list view (esp. with inline subtasks) feels a lot more like a to-do list, and I prefer that UI.
- godot 6y ago
  Do you have up-to-date experience on both? I ask because, this year is my first time using Jira in 10 years. I was in big corp 10 years ago and we were on Jira and it was a disaster to have to use. UI was a mess and it constantly went down or went slow (big corp; self-hosted.). My current startup started using Jira Cloud recently and I found it to be much better than my past experience, and better than Asana. I last used Asana at my last company, which I left 2 years ago. It was slow and a resource hog even on our pretty beefy work MacBook Pros. Compared to my current Jira Cloud experience in 2020, I much prefer Jira now.
  - dmart 6y ago
    This was about 2 years ago - at that time I found both Asana and Jira to be similarly slow, so kind of a wash in that regard. But it was corporate self-hosted Jira, so perhaps Jira Cloud is a smoother experience.
peter_l_downs 6y ago
Am I reading this correctly in that they had a net loss in 2019 of $50.1 (42.4 adjusted) million dollars, and then in 2020 a net loss of $118.6 (68.2 adjusted) million dollars? (bottom of page 58) And that their plan is to just continue trying to upsell and acquire new customers? Hmmmm
- encoderer 6y ago
  Yeah, what is going on at Asana? R&D costs outpacing revenue in the year before IPO really surprises me (from ~54% to ~62%). For comparison, Atlassian went from ~38% to ~36% in the year before IPO.
  - actuator 6y ago
    and to compare Atlassian was profitable for a decade when they went for IPO. Have always admired Atlassian on how it was run, at least till 2016 they had no sales team and grew the product with self serve.
  - gregd 6y ago
    The thing that drives me absolutely bonkers with Asana (others do this as well) is that the freelancer has to upgrade their "free" account to roughly $70/month to get functionality like seeing a Timeline (think Gantt). Their pricing isn't clear that to upgrade to Premium (to get Timeline) says it's $10.99/month. It's not until you get to the next screen that it tells you it's 5x10.99/month because there is a five person minimum. Almost none of these project management tools are built with full functionality for a freelancer who manages projects and people doing the tasks/projects, but doesn't need them to log into the project management tool.
    - actuator 6y ago
      I am assuming that's on purpose. For them the number of people on project is proportional to the money they can earn. Why would they cannibalize their revenue by allowing shadow profiles. Edit: re-read your comment. It seems like you clarified or I missed about the five person being the minimum thing for that.
baron816 6y ago
Anyone else interested in filing to go public today?
gizmo 6y ago
According to the filing Asana has 1.2m paying users. Each user is worth maybe $1000. That puts Asana at 1.2bn. The median forward revenue multiple for public enterprise SaaS companies is 10x, and with 2020 revenues of 150mn that results in a 3bn market cap. A third data point is they raised 75M 16 months ago at a $900m post money valuation. With growth at 100% annually that puts their current valuation at 2.5bn or so. Three different 30 second valuation strategies that result in the same ballpark numbers.
- ummonk 6y ago
  That 3rd point is outdated, as you have more recent valuation data - the stock recently traded at 13.04-25.00 price, with 151M shares outstanding and 33M in unexercised options.
- tims33 6y ago
  I'm not sure where you get $1000 per user. Is that a CLTV number? The amount of money put into the company by Dustin himself, the declining efficiency metrics (costs increasing faster than revenue), and the 10x number you mention points to a valuation more around $1.5B.
- user5994461 6y ago
  Their business plan is $30 a month, so I'm tempted to say each paying user is definitely not worth $1000. Given their revenues of 142M and 1.2M paid users, that's an average a tad below $120 a year per user, which would actually be less than their cheapest plan. That doesn't add up, it smells of free trials counted as paid users.
  - gizmo 6y ago
    Asana's pricing is per user per month - https://asana.com/pricing https://asana.com/pricing
    - tims33 6y ago
      Many of those 1.2M users are on large corporate deals that are at a small fraction of list price. This is a common phenomenon in SaaS.
actuator 6y ago
While better than Jira in UI, I haven't been able to like Asana as a product for some reason. In my previous company we moved away from Asana to Jira because it seemed PMs and higher management found Jira easier to work with.
gen220 6y ago
Can someone in-tune to this world explain why Moskovitz purchases equity through a trust, in the form of convertible promissory notes? It seems like he isn't taking any compensation in stock or cash, but prefers to "invest" in the company's stock, through this trust and promissory-note scheme? If you're confident that the company's eventually going to exit (obviously a big "if"), and you have the cash liquidity (which he obviously does, as one of the original co-founders of fb), is this essentially a method of getting compensation that isn't taxed as compensation? I'm trying to understand what the justification is for maintaining what looks like a fairly complicated transaction. It looks like they've done it a few times (2017, 2020 jan 2020 june). His entities also participated as investors in the Asana Series D and Series E rounds. Not meaning to cast aspersions, just curious because I haven't seen these kinds of setups in S-1's before. But most S-1 companies don't have people with pre-ipo, >1bn net worth founder-CEOs, so it makes sense that this one might be a bit anomalous.
- jhylau 6y ago
  I believe these types of trusts (without knowledge of the exact trust setup) are to limit the inheritance tax when he dies, by having the trust own the shares at an early stage (lower valuation, lower inheritance tax). It can appreciate within the trust without accumulating additional inheritance tax on the appreciation. The downside is the trust owns the shares and he can't liquidate it for his own use, which he doesn't need to cos he's already rich enough.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  That's a fair question. I am not a lawyer or accountant or anything in that field, but I can try to answer anyway. 1) Often trusts and LLCs are used for liability protection and anonymity; you see this used by investors owning multiple residential real estate properties. 2) Your comment on tax is interesting; of course, capital gain in the US is taxed at 20% (plus your state), while income tax gets to roughly twice that. So, potentially, that could be a way to reduce how much taxes you will pay. However, in relation to #2, I doubt that Moskovitz really cares to save 100k-200k a year in taxes. It's probably more about #1. Again, this is my $0.02. Please correct me or improve my comment if you know the subject more than I do.
jimnotgym 6y ago
I know Asana is prettier than MS planner but: 1. Planner is bundled with 365 2. Planner works with Azure AD SSO for free. 3. Planner is 100% integrated with Teams. This makes Asana an outside bet for me.
- gregd 6y ago
  Except Planner has no timeline or Gantt charts, despite claiming most of last year, that Gantt charts where on their roadmap. I've found Planner to be nothing more than a glorified Kanban board, which is also something Trello does much better even on their Free Tier using your 1 powerup of a Gantt chart.
  - youngprogrammer 6y ago
    They probably didn't have a Gantt chart to help them figure out the dependencies to properly plan it on their roadmap
  - jimnotgym 6y ago
    Trello does it much better for a small team in a non-enterprise setting. Having to manually add and remove users, and manage external sharing is a huge drag in any bigger environment
aresant 6y ago
An article by Tom Tungz that relates SAAS co marketing budgets to to annuity grabs helps me contextualize this S1. Asana's gross margin is ~85%! Their net retention is tracking @ 120% in 2020. So every $1.00 dollar of sales to a customer last year turned into $1.20 this year. AKA negative churn. Which explains the reason you see them spending $105m in sales & marketing to generate $142m in topline. Obviously this runs its course eventually, but at that point you cool down your S&M & R&D engine and try to keep up with counting all the cash flows. SAAS is just a remarkable business, absolute cash pigs. (1) https://tomtunguz.com/does-better-ndr-imply-greater-tolerance-for-higher-cac/ https://tomtunguz.com/does-better-ndr-imply-greater-toleranc...
m3kw9 6y ago
FOMO on full blast
ourcat 6y ago
What do they actually do (for 1m+ people)? I'm looking around their site and blog (and the S-1) and read a lot of 'marketing-speak', but no simple one-liner about what they actually do and what value they bring. Am I missing something obvious? What comparative companies are they like? I saw someone mention Jira. Are they 'a Jira'?
- souldeux 6y ago
  They are an, arguably, prettier Jira.
  - ourcat 6y ago
    Got it. Thanks. More useable too, I'd hope.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
  - ourcat 6y ago
    Thanks for this. Now I have a much better picture of what it is you do. 'The Elevator Pitch' is what I was after. It really was a bit hard to gauge from the info out there. If the product is great, then I think you're on to the right kind of thing that times like this need. (ie: due to far, far more remote workers).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
snake117 6y ago
I've read a lot of comparisons between Asana and Jira, but I was curious if anyone can explain the difference between Asana and Basecamp? I don't have experience with either service.
poisonta 6y ago
I bet half of their R&D is being spent to figure out how to do Kubernetes the right way.
1290cc 6y ago
Makes sense they're going for the IPO at the start of the work from home era. Asana has been around awhile and my team always used it for remote team communication and project management. We never saw the need for apps like Slack or Basecamp because working with the tool is very similar to the Getting Things Done system (or Toodledo).
AHappyCamper 6y ago
Mazal Tov! =)
archit3cture 6y ago
In the "History" section (p.2) they state that "We started Asana because our co-founders experienced firsthand the growing problem of work about work. While at Facebook, they saw the coordination challenges the company faced as it scaled. Instead of spending time on work that generated results, they were spending time in status meetings and long email threads trying to figure out who was responsible for what. They recognized the pain of work about work was universal to teams that need to coordinate their work effectively to achieve their objectives. Yet there were no products in the market that adequately addressed this pain. As a result of that frustration, they were inspired to create Asana to solve this problem for the world’s teams." I can only imagine that the complexity of the coordination inside Facebook continued to grow after Asana was created. So is Facebook a client of Asana to solve this problem ? How does a company like Facebook handle the "coordination problem" ? Do they have one tool that solves all the issues or a myriad of project management tools ?
ryanhunt 6y ago
Dumb question - but with all these tech IPOs, how does one get in/invest at IPO time without buying on the open market?
- el_nahual 6y ago
  Not a dumb question at all. The thing to keep in mind is that IPO stocks are allocated. There's a fixed amount of shares, and they are priced hoping for a "pop". So basically banks use IPO allocations (in hot companies) as a way to reward good customers. How important are you? Unless you are worth north of $100MM the answer is "not very." The first step is to have a relationship with a private banker at a big bank/asset manager. You can tell her that you're interested in purchasing stock at IPO. Most big banks will have some allocation available. Often the minimum ticket size is something like $100K--but there's no guarantee you'll get it. At some point before the IPO, your banker will tell you how much IPO stock was allocated to you. This will tell you how important you are to the bank. They might, maybe, throw you a bone and give you $10K of allocation. You have to remember that IPOs are intended to be "free money." They are purposely underpriced. This isn't actually as nefarious as it sounds--the only people getting hurt by this is the issuing company, and not really. They want to have as good a relationship with the big bags of money as the issuing banks do. And there is some risk involved, they don't always pop, etc etc. An important detail is that, because the IPOs tend to be mis-priced, they also tend to be pretty small. A company going public at a 2B valuation might only be offering 100MM worth of stock. At a 30% pop, that's basically 30MM of "free money" to distribute across the entire planet, which is honestly not that much.
bambax 6y ago
> Help humanity thrive by enabling the world's teams to work together effortlessly. I have no idea what any of this means. It's grandiose and therefore, upsetting.
2T1Qka0rEiPr 6y ago
As a non-American who knows little about the IPO process, is there a reason why there have been a flood of S-1 reports listed on HN over the past 24 hours?
- mark_mart 6y ago
  It seems just coincidence. The reason for coincidence might be cash-out for investors due to fear of covid-19? I do not know that.
jariel 6y ago
Good on them, but can Silicon Valley people stop conflating their corporate operating bloatware with Eastern Spiritual Terms? Completing that outstanding customer ticket is not like the process of achieving englihtenment.
nv-vn 6y ago
This filing looks like it has a ton of red flags about the way Asana is running their company. As an example, one of the images tries to highlight Asana's timeline and their achievements [1]. One of the things they mention is opening an international office with ~100 employees and <11k customers. Based on their current figures of 75,000 paying customers and revenue of $142,606,000, you would expect a revenue of ~$19 million for 11k customers. Why is a company with 100 employees & <$19 million in revenue opening international offices? Likewise, why is the company spending 74% of revenue on sales and 63% on R&D? How are they managing to lose 83% of revenue? It seems like the company has 0 responsibility with how they spend their cash and beyond that, it's unclear whether they even have a path towards profitability if they're spending 75 cents on the dollar just to make a sale and throwing almost $100 million at R&D every year. Despite substantial revenue growth y/y (~70%), they've managed to outpace it by growing losses twice as fast at ~140%. It seems like the company has a pretty good product and a great gross margin as well as good revenue growth, but I don't see them becoming profitable with their current management -- it seems like the folks in charge right now have no clue how to run a successful business and will just throw money away as soon as they're given it. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477720/000119312520228462/g855753g47s60.jpg https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477720/000119312520... Disclaimer: I'm not a professional investor and I'm not familiar with Asana's business

384 points by sean_lynch 6y ago

Based on a few of the comments on this thread, I wanted to point out that filing an S-1 is not something that you just do overnight. When companies decide to go public it's a lot of work usually involving multiple dedicated teams on the business side. It takes many months and can take over a year. So while the timing here is interesting, nobody decided on Friday that many well-known tech firms would declare their intent to go public on Monday.

grey-area 6y ago
No, they decided that 6 months ago (or whatever the lead time is), but everyone decided at the same time, for fairly obvious reasons.
- svbanker 6y ago
  This is false. A lot of these companies started their IPO process earlier but then got delayed due to COVID. Not everything is as pessimistic as you’re making it sound. It just happens to be before November (companies usually dont go public during election season) so this is the only viable window for companies to go public for the remainder of the year.

minimaxir 6y ago

...is there a reason a ton of tech startups are dropping their IPOs today?

CleanItUpJanny 6y ago
last chance to exit scam before the bubble pops
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  I totally get the feeling behind this, but you can't blame market participants for taking actions that are rational, regardless if the overall market fundamentals are/seem to be irrational. If the market is desperate for returns, and tech equities are one of the few remaining avenues for such returns, and you are the owner of those equities, what else would you expect to occur? "No no no, don't buy these valuable shares of my company, invest elsewhere!" No way, you're going to cash out as fast as possible before your gains evaporate when the market transitions.
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    Most undesirable actions by the powerful have a rational character. It's bizzare to me that this is so commonly used as a defense. It says to me that the problems are seen to be individuals, not systems of power. Note: I'm not commenting on the specific case here, just this argument in general.
- rvz 6y ago
  It is indeed a race to the finish before the whole thing crashes down soon. Maybe as soon as they heard Airbnb and Palantir planned for their IPOs, everyone started to run for the hills for their own IPO filings before the whole thing falls over soon. Reminds me of the dotcom era. Now this is the time again.
- mrkramer 6y ago
  Investors will decide. Supply and demand.
- dang 6y ago
  Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
mlacks 6y ago
"tech startups" are IPOing almost daily. Happened to be a couple of big names today. https://sec.report/Form/S-1 https://sec.report/Form/S-1
- tempsy 6y ago
  OP means in general, and to be fair the tech IPO market post financial crisis has actually been fairly weak. the number of tech IPOs happening right now is at multi year highs
whatok 6y ago
Summer is traditionally quieter since people are on vacation; still kinda holds true now. With S-1s out this week, you have more than enough time for the grunt work to be done before people are back in the office after Labor Day. I'm sure bankers have advised clients to get their ducks in a row because there's going to be a lot of supply and you really don't want to be the last out the door.
tempsy 6y ago
because the tech market is as frothy if not more so that 1999?
shajznnckfke 6y ago
The market is the highest it’s ever been. A lot of unicorns have waited for years to IPO and it there’s never been a better time to do it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
caeril 6y ago
With the sole exception of Aug 1999 - Feb 2000, public technology companies have never before commanded such high earnings multiples as we have now. It would be a dereliction of fiduciary duty for executives and boards NOT to fleece the public for cash right now.
- nostrademons 6y ago
  I mean, the driver for these record high multiples is that the Fed has made it very clear that cash will be extremely abundant over the next couple years, and hence worth a lot less. It would be a dereliction of duty for those public investors to not get rid of it ASAP and put it into scarce resources, like the stock of hot Silicon Valley companies. The folks who are the real losers are any suckers who think they're going to get by with a fixed wage, particularly if they're in a competitive labor market.
mbesto 6y ago
Today specifically? Not sure. In today's climate? Yes. To give you an idea: The overall market is being carried by 5 companies...all "tech" companies: https://www.putnam.com/advisor/content/perspectives/7816 https://www.putnam.com/advisor/content/perspectives/7816 And most of the high growth SaaS companies are up YoY...by a lot: https://imgur.com/a/xjI3JBD https://imgur.com/a/xjI3JBD Wall st is foaming at the mouth to buy up more of these companies.
switch11 6y ago
see above for a very good answer I'll give my answer Fed is printing a lot of 'money' with its printing press some of it is going to large tech because it is 'safe' and still 'growing' However, there is $3 trillion of money printed, and even more being printed So, where does this money get put? Where can it get A RETURN? Tesla is one answer. That's why Tesla is 1,000 P/E Another answer is technology companies Let's say there is Family X, friends of Fed and its printing press Fed has printed $50 billion for them Where can they put this $50 billion, so that it doesn't get killed? A) Big Tech B) tech that might become big Tech (like Tesla) C) new tech IPOs So any tech company that can IPO, should IPO All this LIQUIDITY/Free Money/Printing Press Money is desperate to find ANY KIND OF RETURN Also, they have so much money and no where to put it, their thinking is 17 different SaaS companies - at least 1 or 2 will become trillion dollar companies in 15 years Invest in all 17 They literally 'printed' the money so it costs them nothing
digi59404 6y ago
Likely because it's the end of the second quarter and they all have high numbers because of Coronavirus and such. For some companies their Q3 ends inside of just after November. And we all know what happens in the U.S. in November every four years. So there's going to be great concern about the market dipping or taking a dive.

ryanmccullagh 6y ago

In case anyone forgot, Asana was founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

josh2600 6y ago
And FB early employee Justin Rosenstein.
- leahgnyc 6y ago
  Who founded https://www.oneproject.org/ https://www.oneproject.org/
owenshen24 6y ago
Dustin is also notable for starting Good Ventures (https://www.goodventures.org/about-us https://www.goodventures.org/about-us) which funds a lot of research and philanthropy into some great causes.

ponker 6y ago

I'm not a fan of the product but at least this isn't a company built on labor exploitation or fucking up some existing ecosystem.

silentsea90 6y ago
Guessing you don't use said labor exploiting services?
- Aeolun 6y ago
  The only labor I exploit is my own.
  - maximente 6y ago
    my guess is that a detailed account of the consumer goods you have purchased - including possibly the device upon which you typed out and submitted this comment to this web property - would indicate otherwise
    - blueline 6y ago
      you criticize society yet you participate in society! how curious!
    - Aeolun 6y ago
      Maybe I should have have indicated that no other directly exploitative relationships exist.
  - djohnston 6y ago
    maybe, but probably not imo. the people who built my macbook are exploited, but i need it for work.
- ponker 6y ago
  I do but try to rectify the exploitation. Always double suggested tips etc.

jasondc 6y ago

5 IPOs (S-1 filings) from Silicon Valley today: - Unity (San Francisco) - Jfrog (Sunnyvale) - Snowflake (San Mateo) - SumoLogic (Redwood City) - Asana (San Francisco)

sdfhbdf 6y ago
Maybe even more just these 5 are on HN homepage...
- victor106 6y ago
  Is there a centralized place that we can track all the upcoming ipos?
  - superfrank 6y ago
    I believe this will have all acccepted S-1 filings https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=&CIK=&type=s-1&owner=include&count=40&action=getcurrent https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=&CIK=&type=...
- foxdev 6y ago
  You can get a rough idea of it by looking at submissions from the sec.gov domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sec.gov https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sec.gov
  - marviel 6y ago
    Hey thanks, this is a neat tip.
MattGaiser 6y ago
Record high market, so why not?
- actuator 6y ago
  Yeah, seems like that. When Covid-19 hit, there were layoffs in AirBnB etc. and everyone was talking about how IPOs will get pushed for future. Seems like all those worries have evaporated considering Tesla is trading at $2000.

supernova87a 6y ago

Wow, this is a torrent of IPOs today. Investors / boards are wanting to get money out before things turn south I feel. Aside from that, I'm surprised how much it costs Asana on engineering R&D, for essentially a ticket management system. How does a team grow to ~300+ developers ($89M R&D) to figure out how to attach PDFs and videos to tickets, and email people when there's a change in status? (ok yes I'm oversimplifying a bit, but not that much) And (as with all such companies) how much they need to pour into Marketing/Sales to sell this thing. These above costs basically wipe out the gross profits by 2x.

mvkel 6y ago
I know it’s hip to assume the market crash is days away, but what makes more sense is: saas companies have proven to be the most resilient type of company in this market. It couldn’t be a more perfect time to IPO. The reason the market looks so good right now is because tech stocks represent a significant portion of the indices. Many other stock are still way down (appropriately)
sriram_sun 6y ago
Look at Service Now.
xenospn 6y ago
I really don't understand how Asana excels at anything, let alone is a '10x'. They probably need to spend a fortune in marketing just to get people to sign up.
- jsonne 6y ago
  It makes a lot more sense for marketers and others like us. I've tried getting away from Asana over and over but keep coming back. Everything else either isn't feature rich enough or is too difficult to use. They manage to strike the right balance. To me Asana is the epitome of the Churchill quote "Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried"
tempsy 6y ago

dmart 6y ago

I've found Asana to be a much, much nicer product to work with than Jira (at least as a developer, not sure about from the management side.) I genuinely wish them success and hope they're able to grow their marketshare.

arkitaip 6y ago
What do you think about Trello?
- throw03172019 6y ago
  We use Trello for a public roadmap and Asana for internal. Trello is much simpler so that may turn off some project/product managers.
- dmart 6y ago
  Not a fan of the board/card focused view, mainly. I think it's visually cluttered and hard to read at a glance. Asana's list view (esp. with inline subtasks) feels a lot more like a to-do list, and I prefer that UI.
godot 6y ago
Do you have up-to-date experience on both? I ask because, this year is my first time using Jira in 10 years. I was in big corp 10 years ago and we were on Jira and it was a disaster to have to use. UI was a mess and it constantly went down or went slow (big corp; self-hosted.). My current startup started using Jira Cloud recently and I found it to be much better than my past experience, and better than Asana. I last used Asana at my last company, which I left 2 years ago. It was slow and a resource hog even on our pretty beefy work MacBook Pros. Compared to my current Jira Cloud experience in 2020, I much prefer Jira now.
- dmart 6y ago
  This was about 2 years ago - at that time I found both Asana and Jira to be similarly slow, so kind of a wash in that regard. But it was corporate self-hosted Jira, so perhaps Jira Cloud is a smoother experience.

peter_l_downs 6y ago

Am I reading this correctly in that they had a net loss in 2019 of $50.1 (42.4 adjusted) million dollars, and then in 2020 a net loss of $118.6 (68.2 adjusted) million dollars? (bottom of page 58) And that their plan is to just continue trying to upsell and acquire new customers? Hmmmm

encoderer 6y ago
Yeah, what is going on at Asana? R&D costs outpacing revenue in the year before IPO really surprises me (from ~54% to ~62%). For comparison, Atlassian went from ~38% to ~36% in the year before IPO.
- actuator 6y ago
  and to compare Atlassian was profitable for a decade when they went for IPO. Have always admired Atlassian on how it was run, at least till 2016 they had no sales team and grew the product with self serve.
- gregd 6y ago
  The thing that drives me absolutely bonkers with Asana (others do this as well) is that the freelancer has to upgrade their "free" account to roughly $70/month to get functionality like seeing a Timeline (think Gantt). Their pricing isn't clear that to upgrade to Premium (to get Timeline) says it's $10.99/month. It's not until you get to the next screen that it tells you it's 5x10.99/month because there is a five person minimum. Almost none of these project management tools are built with full functionality for a freelancer who manages projects and people doing the tasks/projects, but doesn't need them to log into the project management tool.
  - actuator 6y ago
    I am assuming that's on purpose. For them the number of people on project is proportional to the money they can earn. Why would they cannibalize their revenue by allowing shadow profiles. Edit: re-read your comment. It seems like you clarified or I missed about the five person being the minimum thing for that.

baron816 6y ago

Anyone else interested in filing to go public today?

gizmo 6y ago

According to the filing Asana has 1.2m paying users. Each user is worth maybe $1000. That puts Asana at 1.2bn. The median forward revenue multiple for public enterprise SaaS companies is 10x, and with 2020 revenues of 150mn that results in a 3bn market cap. A third data point is they raised 75M 16 months ago at a $900m post money valuation. With growth at 100% annually that puts their current valuation at 2.5bn or so. Three different 30 second valuation strategies that result in the same ballpark numbers.

ummonk 6y ago
That 3rd point is outdated, as you have more recent valuation data - the stock recently traded at 13.04-25.00 price, with 151M shares outstanding and 33M in unexercised options.
tims33 6y ago
I'm not sure where you get $1000 per user. Is that a CLTV number? The amount of money put into the company by Dustin himself, the declining efficiency metrics (costs increasing faster than revenue), and the 10x number you mention points to a valuation more around $1.5B.
user5994461 6y ago
Their business plan is $30 a month, so I'm tempted to say each paying user is definitely not worth $1000. Given their revenues of 142M and 1.2M paid users, that's an average a tad below $120 a year per user, which would actually be less than their cheapest plan. That doesn't add up, it smells of free trials counted as paid users.
- gizmo 6y ago
  Asana's pricing is per user per month - https://asana.com/pricing https://asana.com/pricing
  - tims33 6y ago
    Many of those 1.2M users are on large corporate deals that are at a small fraction of list price. This is a common phenomenon in SaaS.

actuator 6y ago

While better than Jira in UI, I haven't been able to like Asana as a product for some reason. In my previous company we moved away from Asana to Jira because it seemed PMs and higher management found Jira easier to work with.

gen220 6y ago

Can someone in-tune to this world explain why Moskovitz purchases equity through a trust, in the form of convertible promissory notes? It seems like he isn't taking any compensation in stock or cash, but prefers to "invest" in the company's stock, through this trust and promissory-note scheme? If you're confident that the company's eventually going to exit (obviously a big "if"), and you have the cash liquidity (which he obviously does, as one of the original co-founders of fb), is this essentially a method of getting compensation that isn't taxed as compensation? I'm trying to understand what the justification is for maintaining what looks like a fairly complicated transaction. It looks like they've done it a few times (2017, 2020 jan 2020 june). His entities also participated as investors in the Asana Series D and Series E rounds. Not meaning to cast aspersions, just curious because I haven't seen these kinds of setups in S-1's before. But most S-1 companies don't have people with pre-ipo, >1bn net worth founder-CEOs, so it makes sense that this one might be a bit anomalous.

jhylau 6y ago
I believe these types of trusts (without knowledge of the exact trust setup) are to limit the inheritance tax when he dies, by having the trust own the shares at an early stage (lower valuation, lower inheritance tax). It can appreciate within the trust without accumulating additional inheritance tax on the appreciation. The downside is the trust owns the shares and he can't liquidate it for his own use, which he doesn't need to cos he's already rich enough.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
That's a fair question. I am not a lawyer or accountant or anything in that field, but I can try to answer anyway. 1) Often trusts and LLCs are used for liability protection and anonymity; you see this used by investors owning multiple residential real estate properties. 2) Your comment on tax is interesting; of course, capital gain in the US is taxed at 20% (plus your state), while income tax gets to roughly twice that. So, potentially, that could be a way to reduce how much taxes you will pay. However, in relation to #2, I doubt that Moskovitz really cares to save 100k-200k a year in taxes. It's probably more about #1. Again, this is my $0.02. Please correct me or improve my comment if you know the subject more than I do.

jimnotgym 6y ago

I know Asana is prettier than MS planner but: 1. Planner is bundled with 365 2. Planner works with Azure AD SSO for free. 3. Planner is 100% integrated with Teams. This makes Asana an outside bet for me.

gregd 6y ago
Except Planner has no timeline or Gantt charts, despite claiming most of last year, that Gantt charts where on their roadmap. I've found Planner to be nothing more than a glorified Kanban board, which is also something Trello does much better even on their Free Tier using your 1 powerup of a Gantt chart.
- youngprogrammer 6y ago
  They probably didn't have a Gantt chart to help them figure out the dependencies to properly plan it on their roadmap
- jimnotgym 6y ago
  Trello does it much better for a small team in a non-enterprise setting. Having to manually add and remove users, and manage external sharing is a huge drag in any bigger environment

aresant 6y ago

An article by Tom Tungz that relates SAAS co marketing budgets to to annuity grabs helps me contextualize this S1. Asana's gross margin is ~85%! Their net retention is tracking @ 120% in 2020. So every $1.00 dollar of sales to a customer last year turned into $1.20 this year. AKA negative churn. Which explains the reason you see them spending $105m in sales & marketing to generate $142m in topline. Obviously this runs its course eventually, but at that point you cool down your S&M & R&D engine and try to keep up with counting all the cash flows. SAAS is just a remarkable business, absolute cash pigs. (1) https://tomtunguz.com/does-better-ndr-imply-greater-tolerance-for-higher-cac/ https://tomtunguz.com/does-better-ndr-imply-greater-toleranc...

m3kw9 6y ago

FOMO on full blast

ourcat 6y ago

What do they actually do (for 1m+ people)? I'm looking around their site and blog (and the S-1) and read a lot of 'marketing-speak', but no simple one-liner about what they actually do and what value they bring. Am I missing something obvious? What comparative companies are they like? I saw someone mention Jira. Are they 'a Jira'?

souldeux 6y ago
They are an, arguably, prettier Jira.
- ourcat 6y ago
  Got it. Thanks. More useable too, I'd hope.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
- ourcat 6y ago
  Thanks for this. Now I have a much better picture of what it is you do. 'The Elevator Pitch' is what I was after. It really was a bit hard to gauge from the info out there. If the product is great, then I think you're on to the right kind of thing that times like this need. (ie: due to far, far more remote workers).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

snake117 6y ago

I've read a lot of comparisons between Asana and Jira, but I was curious if anyone can explain the difference between Asana and Basecamp? I don't have experience with either service.

poisonta 6y ago

I bet half of their R&D is being spent to figure out how to do Kubernetes the right way.

1290cc 6y ago

Makes sense they're going for the IPO at the start of the work from home era. Asana has been around awhile and my team always used it for remote team communication and project management. We never saw the need for apps like Slack or Basecamp because working with the tool is very similar to the Getting Things Done system (or Toodledo).

AHappyCamper 6y ago

Mazal Tov! =)

archit3cture 6y ago

In the "History" section (p.2) they state that "We started Asana because our co-founders experienced firsthand the growing problem of work about work. While at Facebook, they saw the coordination challenges the company faced as it scaled. Instead of spending time on work that generated results, they were spending time in status meetings and long email threads trying to figure out who was responsible for what. They recognized the pain of work about work was universal to teams that need to coordinate their work effectively to achieve their objectives. Yet there were no products in the market that adequately addressed this pain. As a result of that frustration, they were inspired to create Asana to solve this problem for the world’s teams." I can only imagine that the complexity of the coordination inside Facebook continued to grow after Asana was created. So is Facebook a client of Asana to solve this problem ? How does a company like Facebook handle the "coordination problem" ? Do they have one tool that solves all the issues or a myriad of project management tools ?

ryanhunt 6y ago

Dumb question - but with all these tech IPOs, how does one get in/invest at IPO time without buying on the open market?

el_nahual 6y ago
Not a dumb question at all. The thing to keep in mind is that IPO stocks are allocated. There's a fixed amount of shares, and they are priced hoping for a "pop". So basically banks use IPO allocations (in hot companies) as a way to reward good customers. How important are you? Unless you are worth north of $100MM the answer is "not very." The first step is to have a relationship with a private banker at a big bank/asset manager. You can tell her that you're interested in purchasing stock at IPO. Most big banks will have some allocation available. Often the minimum ticket size is something like $100K--but there's no guarantee you'll get it. At some point before the IPO, your banker will tell you how much IPO stock was allocated to you. This will tell you how important you are to the bank. They might, maybe, throw you a bone and give you $10K of allocation. You have to remember that IPOs are intended to be "free money." They are purposely underpriced. This isn't actually as nefarious as it sounds--the only people getting hurt by this is the issuing company, and not really. They want to have as good a relationship with the big bags of money as the issuing banks do. And there is some risk involved, they don't always pop, etc etc. An important detail is that, because the IPOs tend to be mis-priced, they also tend to be pretty small. A company going public at a 2B valuation might only be offering 100MM worth of stock. At a 30% pop, that's basically 30MM of "free money" to distribute across the entire planet, which is honestly not that much.

bambax 6y ago

> Help humanity thrive by enabling the world's teams to work together effortlessly. I have no idea what any of this means. It's grandiose and therefore, upsetting.

2T1Qka0rEiPr 6y ago

As a non-American who knows little about the IPO process, is there a reason why there have been a flood of S-1 reports listed on HN over the past 24 hours?

mark_mart 6y ago
It seems just coincidence. The reason for coincidence might be cash-out for investors due to fear of covid-19? I do not know that.

jariel 6y ago

Good on them, but can Silicon Valley people stop conflating their corporate operating bloatware with Eastern Spiritual Terms? Completing that outstanding customer ticket is not like the process of achieving englihtenment.

nv-vn 6y ago

This filing looks like it has a ton of red flags about the way Asana is running their company. As an example, one of the images tries to highlight Asana's timeline and their achievements [1]. One of the things they mention is opening an international office with ~100 employees and <11k customers. Based on their current figures of 75,000 paying customers and revenue of $142,606,000, you would expect a revenue of ~$19 million for 11k customers. Why is a company with 100 employees & <$19 million in revenue opening international offices? Likewise, why is the company spending 74% of revenue on sales and 63% on R&D? How are they managing to lose 83% of revenue? It seems like the company has 0 responsibility with how they spend their cash and beyond that, it's unclear whether they even have a path towards profitability if they're spending 75 cents on the dollar just to make a sale and throwing almost $100 million at R&D every year. Despite substantial revenue growth y/y (~70%), they've managed to outpace it by growing losses twice as fast at ~140%. It seems like the company has a pretty good product and a great gross margin as well as good revenue growth, but I don't see them becoming profitable with their current management -- it seems like the folks in charge right now have no clue how to run a successful business and will just throw money away as soon as they're given it. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477720/000119312520228462/g855753g47s60.jpg https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1477720/000119312520... Disclaimer: I'm not a professional investor and I'm not familiar with Asana's business