Asana raises $75M Series D round led by Generation Investment Management
blog.asana.com
blog.asana.com
I still think a properly configured JIRA instance is the best framework for a growing software company to build upon. It's very easy to misconfigure or mess up JIRA but done correctly, it's one of the best pieces of software for getting things done at a larger company (50+ people).
It’s just not possible to have a good generic app to serve all of them. There’s just too much variety in workflows and edge cases to capture them all, and few companies will change the way they work to accommodate the opinionated workflow of some productivity vendor.
The best solution is still to build custom applications for each company, molded around the way they work, and owned by them 100%, so they can feel fully confident that the product will not disappear or change in ways they don’t like.
ERP products lack flexibility and generally have very poor user experience (since the buyers are not the users). I think there is a separate place for both these products and it depends on the organization when the switch from one domain to another.
Isn't this a take on Conway's law?
As for your Jira point, so many people abused it to build bad process that it's flexibility is a negative point these days.
Why can't people just make nicer themes for it lmao
There’s plenty of issues like JIRASERVER-1330
(Full disclosure: I work with a competitor of Asana, https://tasksinabox.com )
I worked in many companies previously where Asana was used. I can tell you with sheer confidence, at no point did we feel the "help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly." part. Not once, not ever.
Every time we used it, the project managers would love it for the first two weeks and they would simply revert back to email/slack for reminding teams of deadlines or deliverables.
But you know what REALLY helped out the most? Unsexy Excel sheets combined with regular checkin meetings. We would have ONE meeting every Monday morning where we would review our excel sheet for everyone's progress, updates and deliverables.
Heck, I think even Trello works much better than the god awful interface that Asana has. But, Asana has never worked for any of the teams I've worked with in the past, irrespective of the company size. Maybe that's just me.
For projects (like a big new feature with a clear set of tasks), a Google Docs document or spreadsheet works just as well, and usually it's best to have this stuff in the project manager's hands, and not let people mess with it individually.
That said, there's parts of the process that don't have an obvious place. A typical example is a customer issue that arises and needs input and coordination between multiple people, including devs and salespeople and the customer themselves, perhaps including some files that need to be shared. Email is so terrible at this, since adding new people late to the conversation don't let them easily see the chronology, and no email client has yet to make conversations (which sloppy top quoting and huge corporate signatures) readable. A group direct message on Slack, perhaps? I'm thinking Slack is a little too real-time and chaotic. Maybe a private Discourse install?
Managing one's personal queue of tasks (which don't necessarily map to the project's tasks, they could be things like "refactor X") is where I personally seek a better tool. A Markdown file really isn't sufficient. Apple's Reminders app is terrible. Evernote is not good at it. I've yet to find something good.
I like Things — both Mac and iOS apps have good UX — but it lacks some essential features, the most critical of which is the ability to add files to tasks. It's an absolutely must-have for development tasks. Its limited notational support (just a tiny, cramped text field) also makes it less useful for anything except basic personal reminders.
The lack of file support also makes Things less useful for other things, such as doing research into things to buy (new sofa, that kind of thing) or places to go. I use Evernote for this, but it's also a terrible app.
For one, it's tied to Markdown, which I find distracting to work with, especially on mobile. (I don't understand the tech community's current obsession with Markdown; it's fine for documentation or Github comments and so on where there's a clear workflow separation between writing and publishing, but for personal tasks? Ugh.)
Bear also makes the same mistake with regards to files that Evernote (and every other note-taking app for that matter) does, which is to only display them inline. If I dump in a bucketload of images into a note, they're all display as huge images that need to be resized. Actually, Bear doesn't support resizing images at all, all you can do is switch between displaying them full, and as thumbnail (just like Apple's Notes), which is even worse. Evernote's image editing/annotation mode is great, Bear doesn't have anything like that.
No folder support. Evernote is also bad here, but it does allow you create "notebooks" and to "stack" notebooks inside each other.
I like Bear's modern UI much more than Evernote's, but a note-taking app would have to be considerably better than Evernote for me to switch everything over, and it's unfortunately not.
Sorry about the rant, talking about note-taking apps fires me up. :-)
Disclaimer: I am the founder.
Meanwhile, I am bootstrapping and dreaming of launching and making a few $K or hundreds of $K. Maybe I am not ambitious enough when there seem to be so much "free" money up for grabs.
Let's celebrate their success rather than criticize their software.
Everybody here would probably be very happy to have created a company like this. Why be so negative?
With their amount of paying customers, there is no way they can justify their valuation. I would love to understand the raise from their perspective, and the investors'. Is it to stay afloat? Is it in hopes of boosting valuation for a medium-term acquisition? Why $75M more when their revenue is a sliver of that?
Why be so unary?
Overall HNers aren't the most supportive and compassionate bunch, but then again we're here for news and discussion and not back slapping.
That's $3M revenue per year justifying a $30M valuation at the high end. How do they come up with $1B with slow growth like that? Is it because they have a famous founding team? Seems like a small startup with little growth potential, who can raise any money they want anyway, because their founders are billionaires.
Not hating on that, but how do they think of paying back their investors. Is this an ego thing, that they think they MUST build a billion dollar startup even though their revenue and growth is tiny?
It looks like your numbers are way off https://asana.com/pricing
30,000 customers with an average of 100 users (on the non-enterprise tier) puts that revenue over $400m/year.
However, you're missing that the price is $9.99/month/user, not per year (for some reason I used $11.99, which is the price when not billed annually).
So it's 30,000 customers * 100 users * 9.99 * 12 ~= $360m per year. Your $30m is per month.
Last round valued at $600M. [1]
Any guess what this round is valued at? Unicorn?
[0]https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/asana
[1]https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/30/task-management-app-asana-...
1-20 users - churn 35%
21-100 users - churn 18%
100+ users - churn 7%
We can see that individuals value humanistic goals in the tech industry, and companies find it important to claim they fulfill these goals. As Mike Judge shows, often the claim is shallow – only put forth to gain status.
To judge the claim for a company suggesting positive social good, there’s an easy test: would the company claim a positive social good if there were no recruiting, PR, or status gains to come of it? If the answer is no, the company is simply behaving as the mimicking actor and the claim should be ignored. A company who truly has that positive social good as a mission will, simply in stating their reason for existence, claim the social good. As examples: OPower, Stellar, Khan Academy, Mosaic, SpaceX, etc. (note that I don’t work for nor own stock in any of these companies)
Really, their mission could be: "making work more efficient by helping all teams work together effortlessly" or "saving time for humans by making collaboration easier". Those would be decent without the puff.
Communication tools are a different matter, but generally, a mindful email culture seems to work well.
Anyone here been able to get a team to use Asana?
I think it works well for mixed teams- jira was too technical for half of our team, and I was opposed to email. It doesn’t absolve you of doing project management though - I wish its reporting tools were more powerful...
How are they burning this amount of cash? Am I missing something?
They probably burn $250k/yr per developer, higher than most other tech companies.
Edit: Backup now. When the Story was posted here, site was down.