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Asana S-1

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Re: Asana S-1

#91

Post by keepingscore »

dmart wrote: post #18

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.

Ooof I'm on asana for the first time after using jira for 10+ years. I hate it. Asana is a generic workflow tool where jira leans towards software development. This means that every part of your process you need to create in asana then explain to your team this is the one true way to use asana.

Example Epics. A way to roll pieces of a project into a larger ticket describing that project. There's no concept in asana. So you have to hack it by doing sub tasks and manually adding the project to each subtask so it shows up on the board.

Re: Asana S-1

#92

Post by adolph »

supernova87a wrote: post #16

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 oversimplify…

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?

Re: Asana S-1

#93

Post by xmprt »

phaedryx wrote: post #86
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

"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.

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.

Re: Asana S-1

#94

Post by the_jeremy »

natrik wrote: post #59
danaur wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Snowflake, SumoLogic, Asana, Unity all filed S-1's today. 4 relatively large, well known companies filing IPO's today.

and JFrog (I don't know anything about them, but the S-1 was posted on HN today).

Re: Asana S-1

#95

Post by ccheever »

gen220 wrote: post #60

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 (whic…

Since it isn't very anonymous and doesn't likely have any clear tax advantage, I think the mostly likely reason for the trust is just to avoid probate in California if he passes away. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/california-avoiding-....

Re: Asana S-1

#96

Post by ourcat »

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'?

Re: Asana S-1

#97

Post by supernova87a »

jahaja wrote: post #83
supernova87a wrote: post #16

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 oversimplify…

> 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?

Instagram?

Re: Asana S-1

#98

Post by untog »

xmprt wrote: post #93
phaedryx wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

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.

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.

Re: Asana S-1

#99

Post by user5994461 »

gizmo wrote: post #35

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…

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.

Re: Asana S-1

#100

Post by souldeux »

ourcat wrote: post #96

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'?

They are an, arguably, prettier Jira.
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