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Asana S-1

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Re: Asana S-1

#121

Post by switch11 »

minimaxir wrote: post #2

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

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

Re: Asana S-1

#122

Post by [deleted] »

shajznnckfke wrote: post #11
minimaxir wrote: post #2

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

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]

Re: Asana S-1

#123

Post by cactus2093 »

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…

> 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?

Re: Asana S-1

#124

Post by ourcat »

[deleted] wrote: post #120
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]

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).

Re: Asana S-1

#125

Post by ZephyrBlu »

gregd wrote: post #53
actuator wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Shadow profiles? Huh? I simply put tasks in Asana and want to view it on a timeline like a Gantt chart. I can't do that unless I pay 5x10.99/month. There is a huge gap between $0 and $70/month. What revenue are they cannibalizing if I'm not going to go from $0/month to $70/month when I'm only one person? They just lose me as a customer going forward.

> They just lose me as a customer going forward

The thing is, they don't care. Companies don't make their money from individual users, they make it from other big companies.

Re: Asana S-1

#126

Post by jolux »

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…

We are currently in a large, broad recession. Unemployment is at 10%.

Re: Asana S-1

#127

Post by [deleted] »

gregd wrote: post #40
encoderer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Asana S-1

#128

Post by cellar_door »

gregd wrote: post #40
encoderer wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

Jira free tier has standard roadmaps for up to 10 users: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/features/roadmaps?ta...

Re: Asana S-1

#129

Post by aaronbrethorst »

deaddodo wrote: post #88
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...

Luna wasn’t a programming language, it was a framework. The link you yourself provided equates it to “React, RxJS and Firebase” and states the closest OSS equivalent as Meteor (developed by ex-Asana employees).

Sorry, my bad. Here's the blog post where they announced LunaScript, the ill-fated programming language that they built and then tossed.

https://blog.asana.com/2010/02/lunascript-our-in-house-langu...

Re: Asana S-1

#130

Post by snake117 »

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.
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