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Asana S-1

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Re: Asana S-1

#201

Post by dx034 »

jmnicolas wrote: post #188
AlphaSite wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And honestly its actually even more work in many ways, since you need to be able to work anywhere, not just in a well known environment.

In the age of VMs and containers I'm not sure it's still true.

I've been involved in debugging a bug in a software that occurred on Kubernetes cluster at the client site but couldn't be reproduced locally. Reproducing that is so much harder than a similar software installation. You have so many moving parts that it's pretty much impossible to create a test cluster with the same properties.

Also, with SaaS you can get access to log files, if it's installed on prem that can be heavily restricted by regulation.

Re: Asana S-1

#202

Post by zaphirplane »

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…

a technology company’s operational work is larger than its development is a bad signal.

The reason reminded me of when I get quoted a large price for an hours work like dentist or plumber and they are like i have insurance and car expenses ;)

Re: Asana S-1

#203

Post by dx034 »

cryptica wrote: post #197
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…

>> 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. Most of these other things are absolutely useless.

Companies saving money on backups pay for it at some later date. Also, you won't/shouldn't really pass any audit without sound processes in place.

Billing is easy until you have to serve 200 countries, each with their own regulation and tax systems. Sure, you can outsource that but it won't be much cheaper once you reach scale (as parts remain manual).

And I don't think many would agree that customer support is useless. As a developer, I wouldn't want every customer request to hit my desk. Having customer support that cannot only filter out requests but also respond in a less technical way than most developers is invaluable.

Re: Asana S-1

#204

Post by dx034 »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #106
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…

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).

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.

Re: Asana S-1

#205

Post by WildGreenLeave »

gregd wrote: post #113
goldengatebound wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No there isn't a limit, like the person you are replying to, I am on a 2 seat plan as well. Total costs: +/- 26 euros a month.

Re: Asana S-1

#206

Post by dx034 »

yashap wrote: post #180
eloff wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a big part of it, but I wouldn’t downplay the inefficiency too much. A pattern I’ve personally seen: * Small team of 5 devs and maybe 1 manager working on some large area of the product is very efficient * Startup is growing users/revenue very fast, attracts big VC investment * Major hiring, a year or two later that same area of the product has 30 devs, 5 product managers, 5 dev managers, 3 designers, a manag…

It's also about the kind of features you implement. At the start you implement all the easy features, that's no problem. Once you mature and want to get B2B sales, you need to start supporting all kinds of connectors to legacy Enterprise software, networking stacks and environments. That's much harder and much more frustrating than building a simple ticketing system.

As an example, supporting OAuth is easy. But making sure your software works with all kinds of on prem LDAP for authentication is much harder.

Re: Asana S-1

#207

Post by dx034 »

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.

At Google or Facebook that makes sense. If you encounter much larger scale than pretty much any other company, it's hard to find libraries that work for you. So the observation was correct but they should've concluded that this is just a result of scale and complexity, not a general strategy.

Re: Asana S-1

#208

Post by dx034 »

usaar333 wrote: post #156
rokobobo wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any IPO at this point (combined with standard 6 month lockout) will result in capital gains being realized no earlier than 2021.

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.

Re: Asana S-1

#209

Post by dx034 »

danaur wrote: post #52
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…

> 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?

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.

Re: Asana S-1

#210

Post by dx034 »

vikramkr wrote: post #79
dman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am going to short this one once it is out- saying this as someone who has been a user.

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 cra…

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.

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