Asana raises $50M at a $1.5B valuation
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
That being said, it's not 1.5B dollars cool and that kind of multi billion valuation creates unrealistic expectations that cannot possibly be fulfilled by staying humble and focusing on just what Asana does best. So, this kind of investment smells like a kiss of death. I fear the worst here in terms of layering on features nobody wanted, and attempts to make the product more appealing for the masses, etc. Is this going to be an actual IPO or a lazy acquihire by some company in need of an issue tracker?
Asana blogged this year about 50k organisations, 6 quarters accelerating growth [1].
Back in 2015 they blogged mentioning the heating up 'enterprise collaboration market'. There's countless office tools, diagramming tools, collaboration tools. Even in software there's more CI systems than I can count.
My guess is there's a big market which the VCs think is accessible to Asana in a way it's fundamentally not to a competitor. Combined with big growth it makes sense.
[1] https://blog.asana.com/2018/09/asana-company-updates-2018/
Are we adding Asana to the HN list “I’m Not Seeing Why This Isn’t Just a Weekend Project?” which includes: Twitter, Facebook, and DropBox among many others.
It seems everyone has their own idea of what basic enforcement entails, and JIRA is pretty much ~20 years of trying to please everyone in this regard.
I don't care how many features it's got for BAs/PMs to wank over. If the basic usability isn't there, the devs won't proactively participate, which means they'll either be forced to (incurring a big hit to morale), or they'll use other tools like Trello or physical boards to organise instead, and you end up with multiple sources of truth and synchronisation problems.
How it's ever become so popular is a mystery to me. I wouldn't inflict it on a team of my worst enemies.
One of the things that bothered me the most about Asana was how slow it was (also a UX issue).
Even more concerning is that you state your devs would have negative morale by being forced to use this tool? You must have bigger issues?
Well now we know how they pitched for the $50M.
This!
Exactly what happened to Evernote IMO. Otherwise excellent product almost killed by the expectations by the 1b valuation.
There are companies with even simpler products that are worth even more - Docusign is worth 6.5 billion for example.
While the revenue growth the last couple of years for Asana is obviously on an uptick you have to be careful that the growth is really a precentage not an absolute value. If they are growing 50% that's awesome, but if instead they are growing $25MM, from $25MM to $50MM, to $75MM, to $100MM that is a completely different story.
You need another dot on that plot to see which one it is.
Overall the valuations for SaaS companies are definitely well ahead of revenue but early on in a company's history that's ok as there is a lot of future growth potential.
However, listing that graph without a Y-axis label for revenue implies that it is well below $100MM in revenue and most likely that last plot is around the $50-60MM line.
So definitely an aggressive valuation for the time being.
The maturity difference isn't as large as you'd imagine.
A product that straightforwardly saves businesses time/money is easy-to-buy. Company valuation is just a few steps further. Primary danger is competition.
Atlassian's market cap is 19.981B [1], with $874.0 million for fiscal year 2018 [2,3]
Now, Atlassian sells other things beside jira/confluence (the asana comparable?). It also has a github-like comparable and also a CI/CD type thing. There's other small details, but as a rough estimate, make your own conclusions from the numbers.
1. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TEAM?p=TEAM&.tsrc=fin-srch
2. https://investors.atlassian.com/financials-and-filings/quart...
3. https://s2.q4cdn.com/141359120/files/doc_financials/2018/Q4/...
All of these services with these massive valuations still somehow struggle to get their core product right, it's like it lacks vision. These products are also mindbogglingly slow-moving. I don't know how Asana can justify a $1.5b valuation though. On paper, maybe, but when we talk about profit or revenue, I'm skeptical to say the least.
What exactly they need $50m for, I'm not quite sure.
To justify a $1.5B valuation.
In my experience, that directly correlates with the "enterpriseyness" of the project management software you use.
My theory here is that todo/work tracking apps are always doomed to end up like this. The problem is that we use the same words to talk about something that varies greatly from person to person, and even more so from organization to organization.
The upshot is that a company will start out with a strong vision, find a narrow segment of users who work perfectly in line with that vision, and make them happy. But then they want to expand, so they start adding features and options that let others groups find a way to work using the tool. Eventually either the tool stops expanding or feature creep and death-of-a-thousand-cuts changes make it an all-things-to-everyone nightmare (hi, Jira!).
Personally, I use Kanban Flow, which is very focused on a Kanban style approach. By the name it's obvious they're targeting a very specific niche. Since I happen to be in that niche, I love it. But I wouldn't recommend it to all comers, because for a lot of people it won't match their tasks or how their brain works.
We're using Notion right now to manage user research, sprint kanban boards, and a wiki for a Code for Canada project. As part of the wiki side, we can embed InVision mocks, RealtimeBoards, Google Drive docs, and many other things directly into our pages, in a way that allows us to interact with (comment, edit, etc.) them. About the only thing I find missing is full-text search across pages; other than that, it's been really quite great as a central place to organize the whole project.
No idea if that will remain true as they scale up, but for now they seem to have found a way to break the "only works for a specific niche" pattern, and they're carving out a meta-niche of "teams whose work isn't easily captured by previously defined specific niches".
Mind sharing what you like about it, why Asana wasn't enough?
We don’t actually know whether the numbers justified the valuation, though I agree that $50m isn’t a huge raise for the stage and valuation.
I wouldn't say they're not comparable, Airtable is commonly used for the same use cases as Asana, much like Trello and Notion. Airtable can also be used for other purposes, but this doesn't make comparisons unwarranted. It even has a Kanban view.
> "$50m is not that big of a Series E raise and will obviously go to engineering and sales & marketing."
I don't find that the product is good enough to warrant investment, and I don't believe it'll be successful in the long run unless changes are made. There's people who will disagree and love Asana.
I think Notion got it right with the focus on rich text content. The tasks you need to get done and the information about your project can all be in the same project. I think Notion could become a serious contender to overtake Asana.
Just for example, I dislike sorting with Asana. You can't sort in Kanban boards. You can't sort by X and then by Y. This is what their core product is. That doesn't instill me with confidence.
I guess mark-as-dependent functionality is nice though?
I must say I am very surprised by the ARR [0], which is much more than Atlassian's $619m last year. I'll admit I was wrong there. Congratulations to them.
[0] https://twitter.com/moskov/status/1068184742762229761
Edit: Shrunk reply.
Their revenue would probably still be pretty good since they have 50k+ organizations paying $20+ per user per month [0].
[0] https://blog.asana.com/2018/09/asana-company-updates-2018/
It just isn't working well. Empty tasks get generated, it takes 3 clicks to remove them for example.
It is not as easy to organize work.
I love Asana though. I put everything in there and have it hooked up to Alexa. The only downside is that I put everything in there. I haven't had a morning email with less than 30 tasks in over a year.
I'd expect those two premises to be highly correlated if not for funding.
Big fan of gravitas in the workplace. Probably because I'm over 40 (thus not qualified for "diversity") but wow, how does any work get done from the photos? Looks like something straight out of my elementary school in the 70's.
Guess truth be told I like working from my couch. No diversity teams blowing soap bubbles. No "Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking". Limited opportunity to play political games over Slack.
Although we will see if Asana lasts as long as IBM. Guessing not. And they seem to be a little further along the social engineering scale than Google is.
If people enjoy working in that kind of environment, fantastic. But it really looks like it would drive me bonkers and I'd long for a bland cubical with a neckbeard neighbor who didn't really like people.
Anyone here that actually had to use Asana, and somehow found it beneficial/useful? How?
Beyond that, I don't like how their board view (Kanban style) is hacked on and doesn't coexist with the list view yet, and a lot of the more complex stuff is done better elsewhere.
I have only found it useful for the most basic of tasks (like a personal priority list) or a single project's sprint tracking. It falls apart terribly when you need to introduce any sort of collaboration and process.
Compare that to something like JIRA. JIRA has a high floor, but can be very useful as long as people don't go crazy.
The other problem with PT is that it promotes a bottom-up view of your project rather than a top-down view. You end up missing the forest for the trees. With Trello, I can create a list for a high-level goal like "Validate that users want the features we're building" and then list sub-tasks within that.
Is it normal (in tech journalism, at least) to say "opening an AWS-based data center?" I had to read that a few times over because I thought the article switched to an Amazon article.
meaning they will provision AWS instances in these locations?
In a similar sense, an AWS VPC is a "virtual data center."
...maybe it’s because I use Firefox, but even then there’s little excuse.
I'm sure that allocating 0.01% of this funding round to the dev will be more than enough?
Also, how about being able to convert lists to kanban and vice versa?
Other than that, quite a happy user :)
Aside from really petty annoyances, I find Asana does what I want it to. I don't feel very strongly about it either way. If another product showed up that was better, I'd move in a heartbeat.
It just doesn't inspire.
A proper translation of this lingo is "$50m worth of shares were sold at a price that puts all the shares combined at a price of $1.5B"
Very little information exists at the project level - there’s no way to tag, sort, or filter through different projects. It’s almost a useless level of organization.
Custom fields seem to be accessible across teams in an organization, though there is no easy way to carry them across projects. They also seem like they don’t do much - you can’t filter or search based on custom field values.
The UI has a bad sense of hierarchy and important information is easily hidden. Finding the notes associated with a subtask means you need to click a barely visible button that doesn’t change state when information is behind it.
For how long they’ve been at it, these seem like simple problems to not have solved.
I've recently stumbled upon Notion [1], and it's just so much better and more convenient for me, they have desktop and mobile app as well, which helps a lot. And their unusual free editing based on templates has been super convenient for me so far.
If Sam Altman's investment exits add such amounts to his bank reserve that the reserve gets bigger than $10 million, he spends the surplus above that $10 million on 'improving humanity,' which I read as charity. (1)
(1) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-ma...
What I find most fascinating about this company is that something that sounds relatively unsexy - work management for enterprise - can be so well aligned with a truly unique mission. Enabling teams to collaborate effortlessly. For anyone who's worked at a dysfunctional company - politics, low morale, low transparency - it makes a huge difference when you have tools that help you collaborate and get on the same page.
Yes employees have equity packages and we're well informed of what the terms of this raise are, the dilution and our leadership team has worked hard to get employee-friendly terms. We believe in this because our team members are the main function for Asana to grow and hit these expectations so it must be a trusting and win-win partnership in order for it to last.
If anything, I'd worry about the anchoring effect - e.g. if the SaaS valuations decline a year from now so that a prospective Asana IPO wouldn't be worth much more than $1.5B, would that result in them being more reluctant to IPO?
Do you know the terms of this latest round of funding? Has senior management confirmed the class of equity?
It didn't really work for me as a personal organiser. Paper was just too damn handy, didn't require a log in and I didn't need any of the collaboration features. It didn't work for my dad and his business because he didn't quite 'get' the task oriented nature of the beast and ended up with a weird mish mash of orders, inquiries etc which ended up being unmanageable and he abandoned it quietly.
I tried setting it up for the production pipeline at the video society at my uni. I thought it would help lower the barrier to entry so that people could more easily get involved, see what was in the works, see tasks that were available to contribute to. But no, nobody logged in. The motivated people were just motivated and didn't require any task management and the disengaged people were too disengaged and uncurious to find it a useful resource.
I tried setting one up at my internship - a small data shop where surely things could be easily captured as tasks. We could assign things, hand things over, track bugs in code, split up larger assignments into smaller ones. But again, after some initial curiosity and a lot of patience from the teams, it didn't quite take either.
It feels a bit like the slow rise of corporate instant messaging generally or slack more specifically. Tools can enable a massive improvement to an organisation's ability to keep in touch, react to change, collaborate and all that usual stuff, but unless the company embraces that change or has a mindset/culture that allows those benefits to come to fruition then even with something like Asana you won't be able to turn things around with tools alone.
There's a great book on this topic from the first dot com age. Necessary but not Sufficient (https://www.amazon.com/Necessary-But-Sufficient-Eliyahu-Gold...). The idea being you can adopt a tool but if you don't understand the mental models that go along with that tool then you won't fully reap the benefits.
As a company, this is still our responsibility. The best products educate as well as enable.
> The motivated people were just motivated and didn't require any task management and the disengaged people were too disengaged and uncurious to find it a useful resource.
What makes it so hard to target the plurality of the middle, I wonder?
A tool should either be simple and flexible enough that it invites creative uses (Trello, Slack) or have a very clear commonly understood purpose that has widely (if perhaps grudgingly) acknowledged value (JIRA, Salesforce). Asana is in this uncanny valley like Google Wave where some people are impressed but then ultimately no one knows what to do with it.
Just the fact that there’s a little button baked right into Visual Studio where I can see all my work items, and the fact that I can literally assign a commit to a work item as I push it makes VSTS the best IMHO
And what's happening, are the companies that more efficient with Asana et al?
I find it hard to believe, if im honest.
What the heck will these guys do now with $125 million that they couldn't do in the past 10 years with $88 million?
Without knowing things like yearly revenue growth, LTV of customers, churn, operational costs, etc. how could you make any claims about if the valuation or capital raised is or isn't justified?
It may not directly help investors, who are buying into the company as a whole. It may just be an important tool to holding quality talent, to help Asana be as valuable as it can be in the long run.
However, from a monetary perspective, the investors are willing to buy in today at $1.5B. Option buybacks are usually at less than full valuation. Employees are trading value for a sure payout today. Therefore, using the money to buy back those options from early employees reduces outstanding shares and options and improves the value of remaining investors' ownership.
https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/dustin-a-mos...