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Comment by leobelle | Hacker News Reader

A hundred people to work on Asana? Asana is a great task manager, but that's a lot of people. Basecamp for example has 43 people, which still strikes me as a lot of people. I guess having mobile apps requires at least a few people working on each there. A backend team, and the webapp team. 100 seems like a lot though.

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Asana employee here. We have 58 people, about 20 of which are engineers. Even just focusing on engineers, there's so much we'd like to do and growing the team enables us to work on more of those things. It took 3 engineers to build the recently launched calendar feature, for example. And then there are other product features, growth, mobile, platform, data, and a bunch of us working on infrastructure (from keeping the site running to making it fast).

nice. now: task dependencies. get on it. please.. :-)

When I started at Google, everybody said the same thing. What do you need 3000 people for? They thought it should require like 50 people. It's just a box on a web page that you type into. But there was a lot going on behind the scenes to make that happen :)

I don't know anything about Asana, but there is this iceberg illusion where people judge the size of a company by the size of the UI. The size of the company is probably more related to the size of its customer base, among other things.

I find that I have a (probably irrational) inclination to think that about virtually every technology company I hear about, regardless of size. This can range anywhere from "how can they employ FIVE engineers, it's just a simple app that does X" to "how can they employ TWO HUNDRED salespeople, it's just a simple website that does Y."

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