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Asana S-1

sec.gov

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Re: Asana S-1

#51

Post by tempsy »

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…

Very crowded market - not very sticky either relative to other SaaS type cos. I would avoid this one personally.

Re: Asana S-1

#52

Post by danaur »

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?

Re: Asana S-1

#53

Post by gregd »

actuator wrote: post #48
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…

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.

Re: Asana S-1

#54

Post by john_moscow »

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…

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 has) by claiming that it stops them from using the product.

I mean, there are nice guys as well, but statistically it's just not worth it.

Re: Asana S-1

#55

Post by foxdev »

sdfhbdf wrote: post #25
jasondc wrote: post #14

5 IPOs (S-1 filings) from Silicon Valley today: - Unity (San Francisco) - Jfrog (Sunnyvale) - Snowflake (San Mateo) - SumoLogic (Redwood City) - Asana (San Francisco)

Maybe even more just these 5 are on HN homepage...

You can get a rough idea of it by looking at submissions from the sec.gov domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sec.gov

Re: Asana S-1

#56

Post by nostrademons »

caeril wrote: post #20
minimaxir wrote: post #2

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

With the sole exception of Aug 1999 - Feb 2000, public technology companies have never before commanded such high earnings multiples as we have now. It would be a dereliction of fiduciary duty for executives and boards NOT to fleece the public for cash right now.

I mean, the driver for these record high multiples is that the Fed has made it very clear that cash will be extremely abundant over the next couple years, and hence worth a lot less. It would be a dereliction of duty for those public investors to not get rid of it ASAP and put it into scarce resources, like the stock of hot Silicon Valley companies.

The folks who are the real losers are any suckers who think they're going to get by with a fixed wage, particularly if they're in a competitive labor market.

Re: Asana S-1

#57

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Asana S-1

#58

Post by dman »

tempsy wrote: post #51
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…

Very crowded market - not very sticky either relative to other SaaS type cos. I would avoid this one personally.

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

Re: Asana S-1

#59

Post by natrik »

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?

Snowflake, SumoLogic, Asana, Unity all filed S-1's today.

4 relatively large, well known companies filing IPO's today.

Re: Asana S-1

#60

Post by gen220 »

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 (which he obviously does, as one of the original co-founders of fb), is this essentially a method of getting compensation that isn't taxed as compensation? I'm trying to understand what the justification is for maintaining what looks like a fairly complicated transaction. It looks like they've done it a few times (2017, 2020 jan 2020 june). His entities also participated as investors in the Asana Series D and Series E rounds.

Not meaning to cast aspersions, just curious because I haven't seen these kinds of setups in S-1's before. But most S-1 companies don't have people with pre-ipo, >1bn net worth founder-CEOs, so it makes sense that this one might be a bit anomalous.

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