Hacker News Reader

Valuations in the low billions of dollars for a SaaS company with a relatively simple product aren't that unusual. The closest parallel for Asana is Smartsheet, which IPO'd earlier in the year and has a market cap of ~2.6 billion.

There are companies with even simpler products that are worth even more - Docusign is worth 6.5 billion for example.

Trello sold for nearly half a billion with a product that is arguably simpler than Asana and a monetization process that was far less aggressive. So I'd say that the 1.5B valuation isn't too ambitious

DocuSign is not even remotely as simple as you think. Notice how there's no one else in the same space. Microsoft tried and failed and ended up with DocuSign integrated inside Outlook ( the only third party integration I believe). The nightmarish regulation of signatures is complex enough, let alone the doc management system.

HelloSign and others are in the same space and seem to be doing just fine.

EchoSign was one of the originals, and there is also SignNow, HelloSign, and many other smaller vendors. It's becoming rather commodity for most.

Have to be careful comparing mature companies which show consistent and predicatable growth with those that are still early in that cycle.

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.

Smartsheet had 74,116 customers in its IPO filing. Asana recently announced that it had hit 50,000 paying customers, and revenue growth had reached 90% year over year.

The maturity difference isn't as large as you'd imagine.

> ... 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

This!

Exactly what happened to Evernote IMO. Otherwise excellent product almost killed by the expectations by the 1b valuation.

Yep, simple comparable:

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/...

Without insight into their internal numbers how do we know it's not 1.5B cool. They've been around for 10 years, so I can see it being the case that they've built something profitable

Pretty sure the CEO says they're close to profitability, but not, in the article.

I use it at work and as far as I can tell it's just a web app where you can move cards around. I do like the fact that it's simple and snappy and doesn't have a shitload of options and features no one wants that cause it to load super slow (Cough cough Jira) However, some basic workflow enforcement would be nice (Cards marked done when you put them in the "done" column) In its current state it seems like it could be cloned in a week. Edit: cloned in a day if you wanted just the functionality and not a cute little UI

weekend project

It's easy to make a (poor) copy of the product. It's hard to execute the idea, take market share, and capture customer revenue.

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/

Taiga.io is a pretty good facsimile, but Taiga tries to incorporate too many of JIRA's Agile-related non-features rather than sticking to the basics. There is no good alternative (right now).

Cloned in a day? I could clone it in four minutes

> I use it at work and as far as I can tell it's just a web app where you can move cards around.

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.

One persons “basic workflow enforcement” requirements is another persons “shitload of options and features no one wants” :)

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.

It seems that it’s fashionable to hate JIRA on this forum. I’m not sure how one can be so religious about a workflow management tool.

It should be pretty obvious to anyone that's used both JIRA and it's competitors that it's a piece of shit. It's missing basic functionality that competitors have like live updates (I guess I'll just telepathically guess when my teammates have made an update and hit F5), it's got basic UX problems that everyone else seems to have solved just fine (opening outbound links in a new tab etc), and their new redesign appears to have done fuck all to make any of it better.

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.

Interesting. These seem like relatively minor issues to me. We switched from Asana to JIRA about a year ago. We spent about 2 years using Asana, and I hated working with it daily. JIRA is very far from perfect but like it many times more. We have significantly better understanding of where our team is and our projects now, and we scoured the web for every way to use Asana we possibly could find. To each their own...

One of the things that bothered me the most about Asana was how slow it was (also a UX issue).

Hmmm...I don't really share the same opinions about JIRA. Complex teams with a lot of stake holders and JIRA was light years better than what was used before. Maybe you just have super simple needs? I also don't see at all what's so complicated about using the tool, and my org has some super complicated customized workflows to get a ticket to flow efficiently through all facets of the org. Also, even on our smaller teams, that have simple processes right now, people can open up and create a ticket easily with most of the effort in filling out the description?

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?

>> (Cards marked done when you put them in the "done" column)

Well now we know how they pitched for the $50M.

Valuations in Silicon Valley are not based on some rational price to earnings multiple. It is based on what investors think a large monopoly like SAP, MSFT, GOOG, CRM, etc would pay for it. Even the 8 times revenue is not a good benchmark anymore. The buyer will have umpteen ways to justify the price- new users, complementary products, etc. Just see SAP buying travel expense app for $8B.

Asana was founded by Dustin Moskovitz. He has enough money to personally fund them for many years. It's not going anywhere.

Imagine being so rich that founding a $1.5B company only adds marginally to your net worth

or just imagine being an early employee at a $1.5B company and watch it only add marginally to your net worth

I thought dropbox was a really cool idea, well executed both in engineering and marketing... but not 7.1 billion really cool.

A product that straightforwardly saves businesses time/money is easy-to-buy. Company valuation is just a few steps further. Primary danger is competition.