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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 muc

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
Very crowded market - not very sticky either relative to other SaaS type cos. I would avoid this one personally.
- dman 6y ago
  Am going to short this one once it is out- saying this as someone who has been a user.
  - vikramkr 6y ago
    This is a hell of a market to short anything. In the near term anything that helps remote work like this is probably going to spike up. Good luck with that. I know that I wouldn't personally be comfortable being confident I could make collateral to outlast a bubble or guess correctly when the tide is going to turn to make money off of an option trade when it comes to a remote enabling company in a stock market as crazy/driven by politics and the fed as this one
    - tempsy 6y ago
      Not really - considering the massive premium a lot of "remote" tech stocks are getting I'm surprised that Slack ($WORK) is basically going nowhere. Asana is closer to Slack than other cloud stocks imo, and given Slack's mediocre performance could easily see the same thing happen with Asana.
      - itomato 6y ago
        Slack's not sexy. Slack will always be what it is, and a dongle or peripheral isn't going to improve that core product. Similarly, there is no iPhone or GoPro waiting for unleash Asana's potential. Needful stuff.
    - dx034 6y ago
      You can offset your short with a long in a competitor. That takes out the market beta. However, it isn't free and it can take a long time until a bad company goes under (not saying Asana is one, haven't used their product). Wirecard laundered money over years and the FT reported on it, it still took a long time for it to collapse.
danaur 6y ago
> Wow, this is a torrent of IPOs today. Investors / boards are wanting to get money out before things turn south I feel. People have been saying this for months now. Is there evidence that there are disproportionally more IPOs recently?
- natrik 6y ago
  Snowflake, SumoLogic, Asana, Unity all filed S-1's today. 4 relatively large, well known companies filing IPO's today.
  - ummonk 6y ago
    And AirBnB is much earlier in the process but has filed confidentially.
    - seattle_spring 6y ago
      If Airbnb filed their S-1 last week, and these companies filed their S-1s today, then wouldn't Airbnb be further along in the process and not "much earlier"?
      - ummonk 6y ago
        They filed confidential paperwork - the actual public S-1 will come months later. E.g. Asana had confidentially filed back in February.
  - the_jeremy 6y ago
    and JFrog (I don't know anything about them, but the S-1 was posted on HN today).
- ummonk 6y ago
  Have they? This is the first time I've noticed a surge of IPOs this year.
- dx034 6y ago
  Maybe a surge in IPOs for HN crowd? An IPO of a construction company won't make the front page but Asana does. Maybe VCs increase pressure to cash out or management is motivated by other successful IPOs of the recent past. I don't know any hard evidence to say if overall IPOs increased but the examples named in this thread are very biased towards tech.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> 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? As with most of these companies, user-facing feature development is only a small part of the engineering workload. I would assume the majority of those engineers are working on less visible tasks: Devops, build systems, infrastructure monitoring, security, backups and data integrity, internal tooling for customer support, billing and accounts management, and other critical but otherwise invisible tasks. Duplicating the core 80% of Asana's features as a one-off product wouldn't be extraordinarily difficult. Scaling it into something that can operate as a business with hardened security, reliable data storage, consistent uptime, and reasonable internal tooling for customer service is where things get difficult. That said, companies often go overboard with hiring in the run-up to IPOs or acquisitions. Excessive R&D spends can be fixed on the road to profitability. Restoring a company's reputation after a major data loss disaster or a security breach is much more difficult, so it's safer to err on the side of throwing too many engineers at polishing everything. If they can't scale revenues to match, expect the engineering workforce to be cut down significantly.
- sheeshkebab 6y ago
  A lot of internal tools is overengineered bullshit... if that’s what they are spending it on (doubtful though - it’s probably mostly some form of sales).
  - dx034 6y ago
    For most companies I've seen, enterprise sales is what costs most money. It's worth it in the end but there's nothing you can automate around all the calls, forms and processes you have to go through to get a big enterprise client. Yet many companies invest in it because in the end, the client is happy to pay for all your additional expenses, knowing that they can trust your service.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  This makes a lot of sense. But in some ways it shows the downsides of the modern obsession with SaaS. How many of those jobs would be required if Asana was simply sold in a shrink-wrapped box that you installed on your desktop or the downstairs server run by the corporate IT guy. In some ways SaaS is a big win because it offloads all those tasks to a centrally hosted service. No IT guy or tower server in the corporate mail room required. OTOH not everyone has the same ops requirements. Not every customer needs 99.999% reliabilty. Or ultra-hardened HIPAA-compliant security. Or heck, even remote access outside the office LAN. By delivering Asana as SaaS instead of shrink-wrapped software, it means the Asana hosting team has to deliver to insanely tight operational requirements to every single customer. If one customer requires 5-9s of uptime, then basically every customer requires it. That certainly explodes the cost-of-goods-sold beyond selling shrink-wrapped software.
thecupisblue 6y ago
IMO this will be one of the failed IPOs of the 2020. I understand (but not approve) 300 devs - they got a ton of integrations, enterprise client handling, lot of mobile, frontend and backend surface area to cover, lots of devops and support, teams to build new features, maintain tooling and so on... given time, any software team will slow down and scale up, unless it is specifically countered by the company. There's always stuff to be done (create, maintain, or both), pressure comes from the top and the usual response is "throw bodies at it". The less hackerish/the more corporate the company, the faster the engineering team blows up. Kinda inverse function of the red tape. But the reason I believe Asana is going down is that their product is just what it sounds like - boring. It's a problem that's been solved a million times and they are just lucky they got on the ride in the early days. But they never evolved and the marked is getting new competition every day that is fighting to take their users away the moment they google asana alternatives. On one hand, they got Jira/YouTrack to fight on the enterprise side and Trello/Monday/Clubhouse/Notion to fight at the startup & SMB sides. If they don't evolve their product and bring something unique that will differentiate them and save their customers more time or mental context, they will remain the "boring" choice in a time where people are looking for the "fun" thing. And while it's good to be the boring choice, it's also a good way to haemorrhage users and profits. If I was steering Asana, I'd look at stuff like Notion and JetBrains Space for inspiration and product evolution, focus on minimising users context burn rate, developer and general UX optimisation and visual noise reduction. If there is no large changes soon, grab some popcorn and watch it burn - I give it about a year before it starts tumbling downwards.
- mvkel 6y ago
  By this logic, Zoom shouldn’t exist. Product innovation and quality represent very little of a company’s value. Distribution is where value is derived, and Asana’s distribution is incredible. And their product isn’t bad!
- wp381640 6y ago
  You're making the mistake of valuing this IPO on its fundamentals while currently the market is largely being driven by liquidity. It's really hard to have a failed tech IPO at the moment with all the demand which is why they're all rushing the gates. It'll take a large, broad recession to bring tech stocks back down I'd expect Asana, Unity, Sumo and Snowflake to all pop and stay up in the short term I'd add AirBNB to the list considering booking is only down 10% off it's high and Expedia is up 100%+ from it's covid-low
ummonk 6y ago
No, you're oversimplifying a lot. Just security and infrastructure operating at Asana's scale requires several dozen engineers. Additionally, Asana has been developing all sorts of features around working with "tickets" - Gantt charts, automation, 3rd party APIs, mobile apps, etc. All of this while working with a large legacy codebase that makes development slow. (Note: I worked at Asana when it was ~100-150 engineers, and it felt like we could use double that. Having since moved to a FB team, I find I can develop UI features at probably 3-4x the speed in comparison to my time working on Asana UI, simply due to using modern React code with jsx and functional components using hooks)
- tantaman 6y ago
  that relay rebuild tho
  - ummonk 6y ago
    Believe me, changing / writing queries ("projections" in Asana parlance) at Asana took longer.
eloff 6y ago
There's always a comment here on HN wondering why company X has so many engineers for such a seemingly simple product. The answer is, unsurprisingly, not that they're terribly inefficient. Rather it's that running a popular service at scale is hard, the long tail of features is really a long tail, and a lot of effort goes into even simple things because small differences really add up when multiplied by large N.
- grensley 6y ago
  There's always a mix between "now we're at scale and need to solve this really hard data sync problem" and "let's build an internal slack clone because we can".
  - eloff 6y ago
    Ouch, data sync his close to home for me. That was my first job. Not an easy problem at all. Tip for those of you with the same problem, if you can, try to sync both the data and the actions taken to produce the data (event sourcing) and try to eliminate sources of indeterminism.
    - swyx 6y ago
      why both? isn't that wasteful? which one wins if they disagree? do you sync both at the same frequency?
      - eloff 6y ago
        It depends on the business logic. If e.g. a user updates a numeric value on an entity, and there's a conflict probably you choose the most recent value. The action taken (user updates value) is pretty useless in this case. In other cases, e.g. inventory reduced by X because X units purchased/consumed - then it's more important to have the action itself, and a conflict would involve applying both actions and possibly alerting someone if that causes the value to be invalid (e.g. inventory below 0.)
- vmception 6y ago
aaronbrethorst 6y ago
Costs a lot of money to build your own programming language and then throw it out. https://blog.asana.com/2017/08/performance-asana-app-rewrite/ https://blog.asana.com/2017/08/performance-asana-app-rewrite...
- phaedryx 6y ago
  "Our founding engineers had learned from their experience working at Google and Facebook that to ensure a performant and stable application, they would need to build their own framework" Wow. Interesting.
  - xmprt 6y ago
    I didn't believe that was an actual quote from the article until I read it. It sounds like a joke and I can't imagine anyone reasonable would say that. There are definitely good reasons to build your own framework but performant and stable applications isn't one of them. Usually it's a solution looking for a problem.
    - untog 6y ago
      In fairness the decision was made in 2009. I still don’t think it was the right decision but it feels a lot more understandable to have made that choice when looking at the frameworks available in 09 rather than 2020.
      - chrisco255 6y ago
        Was this a front end web framework or back end?
        imslavko 6y ago
        I never worked at Asana but I heard it was both, it had code sharing between client and server, some server-side javascript before node.js (I think it was based on JSC) and something similar to isomorphic javascript before this term was coined by Airbnb. If you look at Meteor, a lot of similar ideas migrated there.
solutron 6y ago
What specific indicators besides covid / asymmetric v-shaped recovery (v-shaped recovery not distributed evenly across economy) are you pointing to? I understand VC's want to favor profitability earlier on in the funding cycle now than say in 2014 - 15, but that was kinda expected before the 'rona hit in March anyway.
jahaja 6y ago
> How does a team grow to ~300+ developers ($89M R&D) Is it possible to reach a S-1 with a decent valuation with just ~30 employees "market confidence"-wise?
- supernova87a 6y ago
  Instagram?
  - jahaja 6y ago
    Bought by Facebook?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
adolph 6y ago
I’m astonished by all the sibling comments to the affect of “takes a lot of R&D to scale.” Spending to scale some things, like fb, makes sense because the value of the participant network is higher than the cost to scale. What value is created by scaling a todo app past the group of teams level?
- sciurus 6y ago
  Are you going to stop signing up new customers because you've scaled enough?
vmception 6y ago
Yes I am surprised too We do need a return to the regulatory environment where IPOs are non-news due to their frequency and prevalance
cactus2093 6y ago
> Investors / boards are wanting to get money out before things turn south I feel. How would you distinguish that motivation from "Investors / boards feeling that the business is in a strong position, and the worldwide uncertainty from the pandemic has stabilized enough to feel confident about continued growth, so they're ready to go public"? Why assume such a negative viewpoint without giving any reasoning or arguments for it? One other conflicting thing about your view, is that if filing now investors are still probably a year out from being able to sell their shares. If they thought things were about to turn south, that's a long time to wait. Surely it would be better for them to sell on a secondary offering and get out sooner if they were sure of that?
sgustard 6y ago
I'm at a company that grew from 10 to 200 engineers. Basically the first 10 build the actual product, and the next 190 build one-off customizations for enterprise customers.
rokobobo 6y ago
I think at least part of the motivation to IPO is that if the US has a new president starting 2021, said person has stated his intent to vastly increase capital gains taxes, probably starting with tax year 2021. Add to that increased corporate tax (which probably affects VCs' math, although I'm not sure how), there's probably a lot of people who would prefer to accelerate their taxable events.
- usaar333 6y ago
  Any IPO at this point (combined with standard 6 month lockout) will result in capital gains being realized no earlier than 2021.
  - dx034 6y ago
    And you don't plan IPOs depending on polls. They're way too expensive and complex for that. You can accelerate the process or delay it if markets aren't receptive but the general decision to IPO won't be made because there might be an unfavorable election.
siemprenocasa 6y ago
Related - why are there so many IPOs particularly right now? It seems like there is more than usual IPOs this August compared to previous years: https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/ipos https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/ipos
- unreal37 6y ago
  How about the government stimulus has ended, the economy is in horrible shape, and people are just waiting for the economic crash...
- noodle 6y ago
  There are a few more coming, too. My armchair guess would be, this is a win win market. Its booming, so you can ride it as it goes up. And if you don't do well, you can blame COVID. A lot of companies were on the cusp and this probably accelerates them all.
- james-mcelwain 6y ago
  Just look at the price action on any big tech stock and pretend you're a tech investor looking for a big exit. People are pouring money into equities, particularly tech.
dzonga 6y ago
wait and hear, all the justifications around hn that they need 300 engineers. when their competitor basecamp has around 50 engineers. only difference is one is vc funded + dustin's fb funds, while basecamp is bootstrapped. and a lot of sv hype in terms of the tools they use to build asana. basecamp html + sprinkles of js. asana react + redux. on the backend asana 100s of microservices, basecamp 1 monolith. reading the comments, based on experience at fb | google they made their own language. if that's not peak sv shoot me!!
throwaway1777 6y ago
Things already turned south (in March) and are on the rebound now. Those who would've IPO'd a few months ago are starting to do it now.
- warent 6y ago
  This was my take on it as well, bottoming out around June-ish (off the top of my head. can't exactly recall). I thought we were beginning the steady slog back up?
- itsoktocry 6y ago
  >Things already turned south (in March) and are on the rebound now. The stock market is not the economy. What has changed since March, except a whole lot of small-business bankruptcies and closures, cities burning in mass protest, and an even-closer, tightly contested election with massive political consequences?
  - throwaway1777 6y ago
    There’s plenty to be worried about in the real world, but what’s changed is in March the market was down 30%, and now it’s back at all time highs. The Fed is the most important factor in the market these days, not the economy, and since we’re talking about ipos the market is what matters.
zelly 6y ago
That's just the way corporate America operates. They hire lots of people because it's a better utilization of money than just giving money back to investors. If you give money back to investors, you're not growing anymore and have failed. If you reinvest (and for a pure tech company with no physical assets, that has to be hiring), maybe one of them can grow the company.
poisonta 6y ago
I bet half of their R&D is spent to figure out how to do Kubernetes the right way.
gandutraveler 6y ago
Most of the tracking systems require enterprise integrations and need to support migration from other platforms.
amadeuspagel 6y ago
See: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

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

Very crowded market - not very sticky either relative to other SaaS type cos. I would avoid this one personally.

dman 6y ago
Am going to short this one once it is out- saying this as someone who has been a user.
- vikramkr 6y ago
  This is a hell of a market to short anything. In the near term anything that helps remote work like this is probably going to spike up. Good luck with that. I know that I wouldn't personally be comfortable being confident I could make collateral to outlast a bubble or guess correctly when the tide is going to turn to make money off of an option trade when it comes to a remote enabling company in a stock market as crazy/driven by politics and the fed as this one
  - tempsy 6y ago
    Not really - considering the massive premium a lot of "remote" tech stocks are getting I'm surprised that Slack ($WORK) is basically going nowhere. Asana is closer to Slack than other cloud stocks imo, and given Slack's mediocre performance could easily see the same thing happen with Asana.
    - itomato 6y ago
      Slack's not sexy. Slack will always be what it is, and a dongle or peripheral isn't going to improve that core product. Similarly, there is no iPhone or GoPro waiting for unleash Asana's potential. Needful stuff.
  - dx034 6y ago
    You can offset your short with a long in a competitor. That takes out the market beta. However, it isn't free and it can take a long time until a bad company goes under (not saying Asana is one, haven't used their product). Wirecard laundered money over years and the FT reported on it, it still took a long time for it to collapse.

danaur 6y ago

> Wow, this is a torrent of IPOs today. Investors / boards are wanting to get money out before things turn south I feel. People have been saying this for months now. Is there evidence that there are disproportionally more IPOs recently?

natrik 6y ago
Snowflake, SumoLogic, Asana, Unity all filed S-1's today. 4 relatively large, well known companies filing IPO's today.
- ummonk 6y ago
  And AirBnB is much earlier in the process but has filed confidentially.
  - seattle_spring 6y ago
    If Airbnb filed their S-1 last week, and these companies filed their S-1s today, then wouldn't Airbnb be further along in the process and not "much earlier"?
    - ummonk 6y ago
      They filed confidential paperwork - the actual public S-1 will come months later. E.g. Asana had confidentially filed back in February.
- the_jeremy 6y ago
  and JFrog (I don't know anything about them, but the S-1 was posted on HN today).
ummonk 6y ago
Have they? This is the first time I've noticed a surge of IPOs this year.
dx034 6y ago
Maybe a surge in IPOs for HN crowd? An IPO of a construction company won't make the front page but Asana does. Maybe VCs increase pressure to cash out or management is motivated by other successful IPOs of the recent past. I don't know any hard evidence to say if overall IPOs increased but the examples named in this thread are very biased towards tech.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

> 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? As with most of these companies, user-facing feature development is only a small part of the engineering workload. I would assume the majority of those engineers are working on less visible tasks: Devops, build systems, infrastructure monitoring, security, backups and data integrity, internal tooling for customer support, billing and accounts management, and other critical but otherwise invisible tasks. Duplicating the core 80% of Asana's features as a one-off product wouldn't be extraordinarily difficult. Scaling it into something that can operate as a business with hardened security, reliable data storage, consistent uptime, and reasonable internal tooling for customer service is where things get difficult. That said, companies often go overboard with hiring in the run-up to IPOs or acquisitions. Excessive R&D spends can be fixed on the road to profitability. Restoring a company's reputation after a major data loss disaster or a security breach is much more difficult, so it's safer to err on the side of throwing too many engineers at polishing everything. If they can't scale revenues to match, expect the engineering workforce to be cut down significantly.

sheeshkebab 6y ago
A lot of internal tools is overengineered bullshit... if that’s what they are spending it on (doubtful though - it’s probably mostly some form of sales).
- dx034 6y ago
  For most companies I've seen, enterprise sales is what costs most money. It's worth it in the end but there's nothing you can automate around all the calls, forms and processes you have to go through to get a big enterprise client. Yet many companies invest in it because in the end, the client is happy to pay for all your additional expenses, knowing that they can trust your service.
dcolkitt 6y ago
This makes a lot of sense. But in some ways it shows the downsides of the modern obsession with SaaS. How many of those jobs would be required if Asana was simply sold in a shrink-wrapped box that you installed on your desktop or the downstairs server run by the corporate IT guy. In some ways SaaS is a big win because it offloads all those tasks to a centrally hosted service. No IT guy or tower server in the corporate mail room required. OTOH not everyone has the same ops requirements. Not every customer needs 99.999% reliabilty. Or ultra-hardened HIPAA-compliant security. Or heck, even remote access outside the office LAN. By delivering Asana as SaaS instead of shrink-wrapped software, it means the Asana hosting team has to deliver to insanely tight operational requirements to every single customer. If one customer requires 5-9s of uptime, then basically every customer requires it. That certainly explodes the cost-of-goods-sold beyond selling shrink-wrapped software.

thecupisblue 6y ago

IMO this will be one of the failed IPOs of the 2020. I understand (but not approve) 300 devs - they got a ton of integrations, enterprise client handling, lot of mobile, frontend and backend surface area to cover, lots of devops and support, teams to build new features, maintain tooling and so on... given time, any software team will slow down and scale up, unless it is specifically countered by the company. There's always stuff to be done (create, maintain, or both), pressure comes from the top and the usual response is "throw bodies at it". The less hackerish/the more corporate the company, the faster the engineering team blows up. Kinda inverse function of the red tape. But the reason I believe Asana is going down is that their product is just what it sounds like - boring. It's a problem that's been solved a million times and they are just lucky they got on the ride in the early days. But they never evolved and the marked is getting new competition every day that is fighting to take their users away the moment they google asana alternatives. On one hand, they got Jira/YouTrack to fight on the enterprise side and Trello/Monday/Clubhouse/Notion to fight at the startup & SMB sides. If they don't evolve their product and bring something unique that will differentiate them and save their customers more time or mental context, they will remain the "boring" choice in a time where people are looking for the "fun" thing. And while it's good to be the boring choice, it's also a good way to haemorrhage users and profits. If I was steering Asana, I'd look at stuff like Notion and JetBrains Space for inspiration and product evolution, focus on minimising users context burn rate, developer and general UX optimisation and visual noise reduction. If there is no large changes soon, grab some popcorn and watch it burn - I give it about a year before it starts tumbling downwards.

mvkel 6y ago
By this logic, Zoom shouldn’t exist. Product innovation and quality represent very little of a company’s value. Distribution is where value is derived, and Asana’s distribution is incredible. And their product isn’t bad!
wp381640 6y ago
You're making the mistake of valuing this IPO on its fundamentals while currently the market is largely being driven by liquidity. It's really hard to have a failed tech IPO at the moment with all the demand which is why they're all rushing the gates. It'll take a large, broad recession to bring tech stocks back down I'd expect Asana, Unity, Sumo and Snowflake to all pop and stay up in the short term I'd add AirBNB to the list considering booking is only down 10% off it's high and Expedia is up 100%+ from it's covid-low

ummonk 6y ago

No, you're oversimplifying a lot. Just security and infrastructure operating at Asana's scale requires several dozen engineers. Additionally, Asana has been developing all sorts of features around working with "tickets" - Gantt charts, automation, 3rd party APIs, mobile apps, etc. All of this while working with a large legacy codebase that makes development slow. (Note: I worked at Asana when it was ~100-150 engineers, and it felt like we could use double that. Having since moved to a FB team, I find I can develop UI features at probably 3-4x the speed in comparison to my time working on Asana UI, simply due to using modern React code with jsx and functional components using hooks)

tantaman 6y ago
that relay rebuild tho
- ummonk 6y ago
  Believe me, changing / writing queries ("projections" in Asana parlance) at Asana took longer.

eloff 6y ago

There's always a comment here on HN wondering why company X has so many engineers for such a seemingly simple product. The answer is, unsurprisingly, not that they're terribly inefficient. Rather it's that running a popular service at scale is hard, the long tail of features is really a long tail, and a lot of effort goes into even simple things because small differences really add up when multiplied by large N.

grensley 6y ago
There's always a mix between "now we're at scale and need to solve this really hard data sync problem" and "let's build an internal slack clone because we can".
- eloff 6y ago
  Ouch, data sync his close to home for me. That was my first job. Not an easy problem at all. Tip for those of you with the same problem, if you can, try to sync both the data and the actions taken to produce the data (event sourcing) and try to eliminate sources of indeterminism.
  - swyx 6y ago
    why both? isn't that wasteful? which one wins if they disagree? do you sync both at the same frequency?
    - eloff 6y ago
      It depends on the business logic. If e.g. a user updates a numeric value on an entity, and there's a conflict probably you choose the most recent value. The action taken (user updates value) is pretty useless in this case. In other cases, e.g. inventory reduced by X because X units purchased/consumed - then it's more important to have the action itself, and a conflict would involve applying both actions and possibly alerting someone if that causes the value to be invalid (e.g. inventory below 0.)
vmception 6y ago

aaronbrethorst 6y ago

Costs a lot of money to build your own programming language and then throw it out. https://blog.asana.com/2017/08/performance-asana-app-rewrite/ https://blog.asana.com/2017/08/performance-asana-app-rewrite...

phaedryx 6y ago
"Our founding engineers had learned from their experience working at Google and Facebook that to ensure a performant and stable application, they would need to build their own framework" Wow. Interesting.
- xmprt 6y ago
  I didn't believe that was an actual quote from the article until I read it. It sounds like a joke and I can't imagine anyone reasonable would say that. There are definitely good reasons to build your own framework but performant and stable applications isn't one of them. Usually it's a solution looking for a problem.
  - untog 6y ago
    In fairness the decision was made in 2009. I still don’t think it was the right decision but it feels a lot more understandable to have made that choice when looking at the frameworks available in 09 rather than 2020.
    - chrisco255 6y ago
      Was this a front end web framework or back end?
      - imslavko 6y ago
        I never worked at Asana but I heard it was both, it had code sharing between client and server, some server-side javascript before node.js (I think it was based on JSC) and something similar to isomorphic javascript before this term was coined by Airbnb. If you look at Meteor, a lot of similar ideas migrated there.

solutron 6y ago

What specific indicators besides covid / asymmetric v-shaped recovery (v-shaped recovery not distributed evenly across economy) are you pointing to? I understand VC's want to favor profitability earlier on in the funding cycle now than say in 2014 - 15, but that was kinda expected before the 'rona hit in March anyway.

jahaja 6y ago

> How does a team grow to ~300+ developers ($89M R&D) Is it possible to reach a S-1 with a decent valuation with just ~30 employees "market confidence"-wise?

supernova87a 6y ago
Instagram?
- jahaja 6y ago
  Bought by Facebook?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

adolph 6y ago

I’m astonished by all the sibling comments to the affect of “takes a lot of R&D to scale.” Spending to scale some things, like fb, makes sense because the value of the participant network is higher than the cost to scale. What value is created by scaling a todo app past the group of teams level?

sciurus 6y ago
Are you going to stop signing up new customers because you've scaled enough?

vmception 6y ago

Yes I am surprised too We do need a return to the regulatory environment where IPOs are non-news due to their frequency and prevalance

cactus2093 6y ago

> Investors / boards are wanting to get money out before things turn south I feel. How would you distinguish that motivation from "Investors / boards feeling that the business is in a strong position, and the worldwide uncertainty from the pandemic has stabilized enough to feel confident about continued growth, so they're ready to go public"? Why assume such a negative viewpoint without giving any reasoning or arguments for it? One other conflicting thing about your view, is that if filing now investors are still probably a year out from being able to sell their shares. If they thought things were about to turn south, that's a long time to wait. Surely it would be better for them to sell on a secondary offering and get out sooner if they were sure of that?

sgustard 6y ago

I'm at a company that grew from 10 to 200 engineers. Basically the first 10 build the actual product, and the next 190 build one-off customizations for enterprise customers.

rokobobo 6y ago

I think at least part of the motivation to IPO is that if the US has a new president starting 2021, said person has stated his intent to vastly increase capital gains taxes, probably starting with tax year 2021. Add to that increased corporate tax (which probably affects VCs' math, although I'm not sure how), there's probably a lot of people who would prefer to accelerate their taxable events.

usaar333 6y ago
Any IPO at this point (combined with standard 6 month lockout) will result in capital gains being realized no earlier than 2021.
- dx034 6y ago
  And you don't plan IPOs depending on polls. They're way too expensive and complex for that. You can accelerate the process or delay it if markets aren't receptive but the general decision to IPO won't be made because there might be an unfavorable election.

siemprenocasa 6y ago

Related - why are there so many IPOs particularly right now? It seems like there is more than usual IPOs this August compared to previous years: https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/ipos https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/ipos

unreal37 6y ago
How about the government stimulus has ended, the economy is in horrible shape, and people are just waiting for the economic crash...
noodle 6y ago
There are a few more coming, too. My armchair guess would be, this is a win win market. Its booming, so you can ride it as it goes up. And if you don't do well, you can blame COVID. A lot of companies were on the cusp and this probably accelerates them all.
james-mcelwain 6y ago
Just look at the price action on any big tech stock and pretend you're a tech investor looking for a big exit. People are pouring money into equities, particularly tech.

dzonga 6y ago

wait and hear, all the justifications around hn that they need 300 engineers. when their competitor basecamp has around 50 engineers. only difference is one is vc funded + dustin's fb funds, while basecamp is bootstrapped. and a lot of sv hype in terms of the tools they use to build asana. basecamp html + sprinkles of js. asana react + redux. on the backend asana 100s of microservices, basecamp 1 monolith. reading the comments, based on experience at fb | google they made their own language. if that's not peak sv shoot me!!

throwaway1777 6y ago

Things already turned south (in March) and are on the rebound now. Those who would've IPO'd a few months ago are starting to do it now.

warent 6y ago
This was my take on it as well, bottoming out around June-ish (off the top of my head. can't exactly recall). I thought we were beginning the steady slog back up?
itsoktocry 6y ago
>Things already turned south (in March) and are on the rebound now. The stock market is not the economy. What has changed since March, except a whole lot of small-business bankruptcies and closures, cities burning in mass protest, and an even-closer, tightly contested election with massive political consequences?
- throwaway1777 6y ago
  There’s plenty to be worried about in the real world, but what’s changed is in March the market was down 30%, and now it’s back at all time highs. The Fed is the most important factor in the market these days, not the economy, and since we’re talking about ipos the market is what matters.

zelly 6y ago

That's just the way corporate America operates. They hire lots of people because it's a better utilization of money than just giving money back to investors. If you give money back to investors, you're not growing anymore and have failed. If you reinvest (and for a pure tech company with no physical assets, that has to be hiring), maybe one of them can grow the company.

poisonta 6y ago

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

gandutraveler 6y ago

Most of the tracking systems require enterprise integrations and need to support migration from other platforms.

amadeuspagel 6y ago

See: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/