Asana files to go public via direct listing | Hacker News Reader

Asana files to go public via direct listing

techcrunch.com

159 pointsdoppp47 comments

I previously worked at Asana (and own shares), and am glad they’re going the direct listing route. It’s good to normalize the practice of cutting out middlemen in the IPO.

Yes. Far too many financial instruments seem to be explicitly designed to enable the already-moneyed to skim a cut off of every single operation; and while you could have made the argument decades ago that it was a somewhat laborious process, I don't really buy that anymore. Transparency and automation may yet help rid us of rent-seeking behaviour.

Direct listings don’t cut Investment Banks out; it just changes the fee dynamic. You’re still paying “the middle man”, just for different services.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-04/how-to...

Well, not a surprise, of course they're still in the mix somehow.

How do you automate the investment banks' most important function: underwriting the share issue so the company gets a guaranteed minimum share price?

Or the road show for that matter? Does the CEO of Asana have pension funds, mutual funds, PE, HFs, etc in their contacts list? Would they be able to negotiate a better price than the banks that already have a working relationship with these entities?

What process is the bank itself doing right now? Risk analysis in order to determine what makes sense to invest in, and then using its funds. I'm not saying there won't be banks, but perhaps we can stop letting banks be a vector to supply massive quantities of money to biased middlemen who have their own end goals in mind that might actually be larger than the ledger.

>Does the CEO of Asana have pension funds, mutual funds, PE, HFs, etc in their contacts list?

He might actually, what with his time at Facebook.

But the point of a direct listing is that you aren't negotiating a price - you put the company on the stock market, and let the markets do the negotiating for you.

If employees are partially compensated in options, it makes sense to negotiate a price that's at or above the strike price so that some of their options can be cashed out at the time of going public.

If Asana is profitable and their valuations check out, that would be a scenario where maybe the banks aren't needed. But if they're not, leaving it up the market to decide can be dangerous.

There are plenty of comparables in the public markets of similar companies (SaaS companies with high growth rates at the expense of profitability), including Smartsheet in particular being in practically the same market. It's pretty easy to estimate the range of valuations at which Asana would trade, and ensure that is well above the employee strike price.

I've tried using Asana for several months, and I don't really understand how it's better than any other competing product out there? The web UI is slow and it's definitely not cheap. Is there anything about it that's "10x"?

I had a similar experience and genuinely wondered why it was even used by anyone at all.

Same. It was incredibly slow and loved to eat most of a GB of memory if I left its tab open. I once had it pop up a "would you recommend this product to others?" form that managed to introduce ~3 seconds of input latency on each keystroke for its text feedback area. Which, as you'll recall, is a basic HTML element you shouldn't need Javascript intercepting input to in the first place without one hell of a good reason. I was... not kind.

IIRC they had a blog post up about their brilliant NIH Javascript UI framework and if you are familiar with that kind of thing you could read between the lines and generate some good guesses about what was wrong with it.

Not that Jira is a ton better, especially with each heavier-and-worse-than-the-last redesign. Friggin' "web apps".

[EDIT] and for all that the workflow wasn't any better than anything else as far as I could tell. Our PMs who lived in it loved the draggy-droppy interface and hotkey-heavy workflow, but again, everyone (of their competitors) has that too. To me it always felt like working on someone else's messy desktop shared over VNC. I was afraid to touch anything for fear of accidentally performing some kind of write operation without noticing, and fucking things up.

It used to be faster. They’ve put themselves in a position where users are ready to bail after any major price increase.

I stopped using it about two years ago and started... oh, four or so years before that. If it's even slower now than it was then, whoa. It was already probably the generally worst-performing "web app" I knew of at the time, which is saying something.

Congrats to the team - I've been an Asana user since day 1 when it looked like a glorified spreadsheet and was essentially a nice wrapper around Facebook Tasks (FB's internal task management tool.)

Ultimately I think they have the right ideas and long-run roadmap, but will have a lot of challenges executing in such a crowded space. Excited to see what they do next!

We used asana for a while. I love the clean UI, and we thought the calendar view was really helpful/good, etc.

The one thing we really missed though, was just first class support for being able to keep break down tasks into smaller ones through many levels. We've been trying out https://subtask.co for that, and finding it to be pretty good. It has its own shortcomings too, but seems to be an interesting new contender in this crowded space.

It might be a newer feature, but Asana does support arbitrary levels of subtasks.

I never cared for the software, but I’m excited to see how the direct listing plays out.

I have tried to use Asana for personal use cases multiple times over the years and it just feels "slow". Unfortunately, wunderlist is going away and I will need to keep hunting for a good alternative.

same, except Trello got my ProjectM heart

Try RememberTheMilk. I've been using it for years and highly recommend it.

The killer feature IMHO are the smartlists that you define by logical arguments, eg. "tag:home AND priority:1 AND dueBefore:tomorrow" creates a list of tasks that autoupdates as soon as something changes.

I built something similar to Trello/Pipefy/Asana. Kanban with bells and whistles built into the core.

Looking for feedback and PMF. Give it a shot: https://www.kanrails.com

While I personally find Asana clunky and slow (I've used many tools for project management: Notion and Jira are by far what I personally enjoy the most, followed by Airtable at a distant 3rd), Sam Altman's perspective on Asana are interesting to look at for a more positive outlook on the company: https://blog.samaltman.com/asana

Good for them.

I have mixed feeling about their platform. I do like the core functionality and the mobile app is decent.

However their paid "support" and "training" is an absolute joke. It was so bad that I haven't used them since I left the organization I had used them for. It's one area I would recommend investment.

Didn’t see anything there in the article about the financials, is that because they filed “Confidentiality”?

"Asana files to go public"

At first I thought this was a security breach, like an open s3 bucket or the like

So hold up, is this just project management software being listed on the stock exchange? Or are they offering like a suite of tools like Atlassian?

Historically small technology companies would IPO. Dell went public and was worth only $85 million in 1988. The last 10-15 years is an abnormality where tech companies wait a long time to IPO.

Slack is just team communication software, trading with a $12 billion market cap.

Shopify is just a modern remake of Viaweb handling site building and shopping carts, trading for $56 billion.

Snap is just a chat app trading with a $26 billion market cap.

Twitter is just a micro blogging service trading with a $26 billion market cap.

Zoom Video is just a video conferencing software company trading for $20 billion.

And so on. It's obviously a very good time for Asana to go public.

Shopify being valued at $56 billion is insane. That is about 40 times their SALES in a mature market.

With others at least you can imagine some paradigm shift, same as with Tesla.

Like how basketball is just throwing a ball through a hoop?

You can marginalize anything if you wanted to.

What does filing "Confidentially" mean? How are buyers supposed to see what they're buying?

They will still eventually need to disclose, a confidential filing allows them to work with the SEC on details before releasing public info. https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/public-offerings-how-c...

It is confidential right now. It will be made public closer to the IPO date.

btw this would be a good ballpark to estimate if Basecamp went public, what their financials would look like ? if we assume Basecamp to have 2x - 5x the revenue of Asana

Honestly, I bet the employees would much rather it just got acquired. Many companies should do an internal poll, I bet more than 50% want acquisition.

It's possible the direct listing is because an acquisition at a premium didn't occur and shareholders are anxious for liquidity.

Hopefully that's not the case, but it certainly appears so.

Why would employees prefer acquisition to IPO? Asana has a pretty unique culture which would be in jeopardy after an acquisition. But even without that, I don’t see why employees wouldn’t prefer an IPO.

Because they think the stock will tank after IPO and before their shares vest?

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