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Asana S-1

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Re: Asana S-1

#111

Post by dcolkitt »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #62
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) 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, bac…

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.

Re: Asana S-1

#112

Post by vmception »

eloff wrote: post #77
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…

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.

and a team told their manager they needed to redo all the unit tests in order to stay relevant

Re: Asana S-1

#113

Post by gregd »

goldengatebound wrote: post #85
gregd wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 per…

Ummm, I'm on a two seat plan currently, maybe it was a recent change to allow plans under 5?

Dunno. You can look at their pricing tiers for yourself: https://asana.com/pricing. Also, it's not obvious that the Premium tier and above, despite saying it's "per person/per month", it's 5 person minimum. Gah

Re: Asana S-1

#114

Post by vmception »

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…

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

Re: Asana S-1

#115

Post by switch11 »

wp381640 wrote: post #105
thecupisblue wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 t…

This is a Brilliant comment

I was wondering who was going to hit the nail on the head

LIQUIDITY

-> looking for a return, ANY RETURN

That's why all large tech stocks are booming

that's why Tesla has 1,000 P/E

Anywhere that all this Feb Printing Press Money can park itself, that might be safe and/or give return

IT WILL RUSH TO

Anyone who can IPO, should IPO

Re: Asana S-1

#116

Post by vmception »

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…

Another thing trusts and convertibles can be used for are getting around transfer restrictions placed on the securities or owner

You can always swap out the trustee on a trust, giving full control without transferring title of the security

A lot of fun things you can do in the financial engineering space

edit: I’ve seen them done on employee shares/stock options, or on LLC membership interests, but in this case I could imagine being able to change ownership without reporting insider sales (likely not 100% compliant from the regulatory perspective but its likely never been challenged in court especially if nobody knows the trustee changed lol), or just easier asset management for inheritance purposes

Re: Asana S-1

#117

Post by [deleted] »

goldengatebound wrote: post #85
gregd wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 per…

Ummm, I'm on a two seat plan currently, maybe it was a recent change to allow plans under 5?

[deleted]

Re: Asana S-1

#118

Post by switch11 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #68
john_moscow wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single-license freelancers are never the target audience. From my experience running a similar business, this is the hardest category of customers to deal with. Stuff like demanding very project-specific features for free overnight and cursing you when you explain how requests are prioritized from user numbers. Or demanding instructions on tangential topics (like how to troubleshoot some network issue their customer…

Sadly, I can confirm this is true. Most single-seat customers are fine, of course, but a very vocal minority can cause a lot of problems. I believe it's due to the mindset shift. If a team or company decides to use a specific software, people are more likely to accept the decision and learn to work within the tool's features and limitations. The cost of switching tools is high, so they tend to stick around for a long…

this is super true

we also sell to both single users and to companies

single users will write things like

I will destroy your business

you have no idea how many followers I have

etc etc

A single user with 10,000 followers on Twitter thinks they should be treated like they are GM or GE or Ford

Re: Asana S-1

#119

Post by sujinge9 »

dcolkitt wrote: post #111
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, bac…

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 corporat…

Sure, but it's economies of scale. You only have to do the hard stuff once at the source, instead of having every node do it individually.

Also if stuff goes wrong in the node model, the customer will blame you even if it's mostly their fault. So it's also important for brand benefits.

Re: Asana S-1

#120

Post by [deleted] »

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'?

[deleted]
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