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Asana S-1

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Re: Asana S-1

#231

Post by yashap »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #191
yashap wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would argue that some of that baggage doesn't make you less efficient. I mean it makes you less efficient at the features per hour metric, but what about the business value metric? If you have meetings to really think things through and plan, maybe whole areas of sterile development work are avoided and that is valuable. Remember there are businesses that do well writing no code at all! Code or features isn't what…

Yeah, fair point. This is more an answer to “how can you have such a large product/development team, and ship so few new features”, as I believe that’s a natural consequence of having a larger business, with far more communication overhead, far more focus on planning and predictability, etc. That’s not necessarily bad for the business, but it does mean you have a lot of people shipping a relatively small number of features, especially compared with your velocity in your startup days.

Re: Asana S-1

#232

Post by jolux »

adventured wrote: post #151
jolux wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We were. It's doubtful that we still are. GDP growth has clearly popped back above negative for the third quarter, which will break the two quarters technical requirement. Most economic readings right now are strong, from manufacturing to retail to job creation. It's more like we're in the equivalent of the first or second inning of the post great recession recovery now. This recession isn't broad, it's unusual in it…

A thousand people are dying of COVID-19 every day, it’s not a normal recession, but pretending it’s over is silly. The markets have likely priced in a second stimulus which at this point probably depends on a different president.

Re: Asana S-1

#233

Post by itsoktocry »

throwaway1777 wrote: post #162
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…

Things already turned south (in March) and are on the rebound now. Those who would've IPO'd a few months ago are starting to do it now.

>Things already turned south (in March) and are on the rebound now.

The stock market is not the economy.

What has changed since March, except a whole lot of small-business bankruptcies and closures, cities burning in mass protest, and an even-closer, tightly contested election with massive political consequences?

Re: Asana S-1

#234

Post by eloff »

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…

Yes companies definitely get more inefficient as they grow, for all the reasons you cite and more. I've experienced it first-hand.

Adding an engineer to a team slows down the whole team a little. There comes a point where adding head count actually results in less productivity overall. This is typically countered by splitting up work into various teams with minimal interaction between them. Like Amazon's famous two-pizza team strategy. This is the main attraction of microservices, each team can own their own piece of the code and change it and deploy it without (ideally) having to consult with anyone else.

Re: Asana S-1

#235

Post by waheoo »

jariel wrote: post #220
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…

Isn't AWS supposed to handle most of that? Kik messenger had 300M users and a tiny team. Same with WhatsApp - and it's reliable. Asana scales more or less horizontally, meaning that they don't do anything much at the scale of all of Asanas customers. No individual customer repo should be massive (unlike say Facebook, where a user search searches the entire world.)

Messenger services live or die by network effects.

SaaS services with easily replicatable software live or die by building barrier to entry, usually this is done by building up a wall of feature add ons and integrations, in the case of Asana, integrate with all the things and suddenly it's a pain in the arse to replicate it all.

I would hazard a guess most the development effort is based around building up that wall of features.

Re: Asana S-1

#236

Post by jariel »

waheoo wrote: post #235
jariel wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't AWS supposed to handle most of that? Kik messenger had 300M users and a tiny team. Same with WhatsApp - and it's reliable. Asana scales more or less horizontally, meaning that they don't do anything much at the scale of all of Asanas customers. No individual customer repo should be massive (unlike say Facebook, where a user search searches the entire world.)

Messenger services live or die by network effects. SaaS services with easily replicatable software live or die by building barrier to entry, usually this is done by building up a wall of feature add ons and integrations, in the case of Asana, integrate with all the things and suddenly it's a pain in the arse to replicate it all. I would hazard a guess most the development effort is based around building up that wall…

Yes I agree. But my point with the Messengers is that it's not really 'scale' so much. Or dev ops. It's more likely the 'wall of features' and perception in business as being the Gartner 'Magic Quadrant' leader etc..

Re: Asana S-1

#237

Post by throwaway1777 »

itsoktocry wrote: post #233
throwaway1777 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things already turned south (in March) and are on the rebound now. Those who would've IPO'd a few months ago are starting to do it now.

> Things already turned south (in March) and are on the rebound now. The stock market is not the economy. What has changed since March, except a whole lot of small-business bankruptcies and closures, cities burning in mass protest, and an even-closer, tightly contested election with massive political consequences?

There’s plenty to be worried about in the real world, but what’s changed is in March the market was down 30%, and now it’s back at all time highs. The Fed is the most important factor in the market these days, not the economy, and since we’re talking about ipos the market is what matters.

Re: Asana S-1

#238

Post by shostack »

jolux wrote: post #126
wp381640 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

Where are you getting your unemployment numbers from?

Re: Asana S-1

#240

Post by eloff »

swyx wrote: post #224
eloff wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ouch, data sync his close to home for me. That was my first job. Not an easy problem at all. Tip for those of you with the same problem, if you can, try to sync both the data and the actions taken to produce the data (event sourcing) and try to eliminate sources of indeterminism.

why both? isn't that wasteful? which one wins if they disagree? do you sync both at the same frequency?

It depends on the business logic. If e.g. a user updates a numeric value on an entity, and there's a conflict probably you choose the most recent value. The action taken (user updates value) is pretty useless in this case. In other cases, e.g. inventory reduced by X because X units purchased/consumed - then it's more important to have the action itself, and a conflict would involve applying both actions and possibly alerting someone if that causes the value to be invalid (e.g. inventory below 0.)
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