Asana S-1

> 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, backups and data integrity, internal tooling for customer support, billing and accounts management, and other critical but otherwise invisible tasks.

Duplicating the core 80% of Asana's features as a one-off product wouldn't be extraordinarily difficult. Scaling it into something that can operate as a business with hardened security, reliable data storage, consistent uptime, and reasonable internal tooling for customer service is where things get difficult.

That said, companies often go overboard with hiring in the run-up to IPOs or acquisitions. Excessive R&D spends can be fixed on the road to profitability. Restoring a company's reputation after a major data loss disaster or a security breach is much more difficult, so it's safer to err on the side of throwing too many engineers at polishing everything. If they can't scale revenues to match, expect the engineering workforce to be cut down significantly.

I believe these types of trusts (without knowledge of the exact trust setup) are to limit the inheritance tax when he dies, by having the trust own the shares at an early stage (lower valuation, lower inheritance tax). It can appreciate within the trust without accumulating additional inheritance tax on the appreciation. The downside is the trust owns the shares and he can't liquidate it for his own use, which he doesn't need to cos he's already rich enough.

Hey thanks, this is a neat tip.

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 time.

Single-user freelancers can change tools at any time, because they don't have to negotiate with anyone else. As such, they feel they have more leverage in threatening to cancel their subscription if the company doesn't cave to their demands.

Most of them don't realize that the company isn't making much, or any, money off of their single-seat license when they're consuming hours of customer support or social media engagement time every month. It's better to see the squeaky wheels just leave the platform.

For another data point: At scale, you get a lot of threats from people claiming they're going to Tweet about how bad your product is to their thousands of followers, or write a newsletter about how much they hate your product, unless you implement the specific feature they're demanding. These threats exclusively come from the single-seat users, because no company is dumb enough to try to extort another company with threats of tarnishing their reputation in public.

It's unfortunate, but it's true. It's vastly easier to just deal with enterprise customers or larger teams who have better things to do than tie up customer support time for every little complaint or suggestion (or demand)

No, you're oversimplifying a lot. Just security and infrastructure operating at Asana's scale requires several dozen engineers. Additionally, Asana has been developing all sorts of features around working with "tickets" - Gantt charts, automation, 3rd party APIs, mobile apps, etc. All of this while working with a large legacy codebase that makes development slow.

(Note: I worked at Asana when it was ~100-150 engineers, and it felt like we could use double that. Having since moved to a FB team, I find I can develop UI features at probably 3-4x the speed in comparison to my time working on Asana UI, simply due to using modern React code with jsx and functional components using hooks)