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Asana S-1

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Re: Asana S-1

#71

Post by aresant »

An article by Tom Tungz that relates SAAS co marketing budgets to to annuity grabs helps me contextualize this S1.

Asana's gross margin is ~85%!

Their net retention is tracking @ 120% in 2020.

So every $1.00 dollar of sales to a customer last year turned into $1.20 this year.

AKA negative churn.

Which explains the reason you see them spending $105m in sales & marketing to generate $142m in topline.

Obviously this runs its course eventually, but at that point you cool down your S&M & R&D engine and try to keep up with counting all the cash flows.

SAAS is just a remarkable business, absolute cash pigs.

(1) https://tomtunguz.com/does-better-ndr-imply-greater-toleranc...

Re: Asana S-1

#72

Post by dmoy »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #65
gen220 wrote: post #60

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 (whic…

That's a fair question. I am not a lawyer or accountant or anything in that field, but I can try to answer anyway. 1) Often trusts and LLCs are used for liability protection and anonymity; you see this used by investors owning multiple residential real estate properties. 2) Your comment on tax is interesting; of course, capital gain in the US is taxed at 20% (plus your state), while income tax gets to roughly twice t…

Trust tax brackets are steep enough that income tax and cap gains benefits are negligible. Anything that could be done in a trust w.r.t. cap gains could also be done as an individual, so there's no win there.

Inheritance tax benefits might be substantial though.

You're probably very right about the liability and anonymity aspects.

Re: Asana S-1

#73

Post by ummonk »

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?

Have they? This is the first time I've noticed a surge of IPOs this year.

Re: Asana S-1

#74

Post by gregd »

jimnotgym wrote: post #67

I know Asana is prettier than MS planner but: 1. Planner is bundled with 365 2. Planner works with Azure AD SSO for free. 3. Planner is 100% integrated with Teams. This makes Asana an outside bet for me.

Except Planner has no timeline or Gantt charts, despite claiming most of last year, that Gantt charts where on their roadmap. I've found Planner to be nothing more than a glorified Kanban board, which is also something Trello does much better even on their Free Tier using your 1 powerup of a Gantt chart.

Re: Asana S-1

#75

Post by ummonk »

natrik wrote: post #59
danaur wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

And AirBnB is much earlier in the process but has filed confidentially.

Re: Asana S-1

#77

Post by eloff »

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…

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.

Re: Asana S-1

#78

Post by aaronbrethorst »

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…

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...

Re: Asana S-1

#79

Post by vikramkr »

dman wrote: post #58
tempsy wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 crazy/driven by politics and the fed as this one

Re: Asana S-1

#80

Post by solutron »

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…

What specific indicators besides covid / asymmetric v-shaped recovery (v-shaped recovery not distributed evenly across economy) are you pointing to? I understand VC's want to favor profitability earlier on in the funding cycle now than say in 2014 - 15, but that was kinda expected before the 'rona hit in March anyway.
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