New York Times (May 21. 2012)
From a Facebook Founder Comes a Way to Streamline Work Flow
May 21, 2012 1:02 By QUENTIN HARDY / The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook's success has spawned a multimillion-dollar
boom in social networking. There are networks for photo-sharers, for
children and for workers inside companies. Yammer and Jive, for
instance, promise to energize employees and increase their productivity
by enabling fast information sharing.
Dustin Moskovitz thinks this is a bad idea that won't fly. "The first
time I looked at Yammer, I thought I was on Facebook," he said. "Work
is not a social network, with serendipitous communications and photo
collections. Work is about managing tasks, and responding to things
quickly."
Mr. Moskovitz does know a little bit about running the operations of a
fast-growing company. He helped found Facebook along with Mark
Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes while at Harvard in 2004.
His job was to make sure the computers straining to run Facebook's
expanding network never went down.
After leaving Facebook in 2008 with enough equity to make him one of
the world's youngest billionaires, Mr. Moskovitz, now 27, works on his
own version of company management software for the networked age. He
calls it Asana.
Asana is task-based software, a shared to-do list for the company. Work
is assigned and completed by a potentially unending set of teams
created on the fly. Asana is a Sanskrit word meaning "easeful posture."
Yoga practitioners think of it in terms of complex poses done
effortlessly. "You should read a lot into the name," Mr. Moskovitz
said.
Tasks can be named and assigned across the company, then shut down or
subdivided as the work progresses. People can rank, or have others
rank, which of their jobs need attention soonest. If a company wants,
anyone can look in on anyone else's work, offering help and criticism.
"We think of e-mail, in-person meetings, and whiteboards as our
competition," said Justin Rosenstein, Mr. Moskovitz's co-founder at
Asana.
Like Mr. Moskovitz, Mr. Rosenstein came from Facebook, though he
stopped first at Google where he built an early system for engineers to
organize their work. At Facebook, he helped invent the "like" button
and ran Facebook's Pages project, which is a way for brands and
celebrities to build networks. He was frustrated, he said, building "an
enormously ambitious project, and losing a lot of time around
coordination."
Mr. Moskovitz, who was used to working one on one, was by then managing
200 engineers. His solution was something called "Tasks," which is
similar to what became Asana, but it was mainly for engineers.
Eventually the two men decided that helping whole companies get things
done might be something important that they were good at doing, and
they left Facebook to start Asana.
Mr. Moskovitz is uncomfortable with his outsize wealth. It remains a
complex legacy of the Facebook years, he says. What he finds far more
interesting to talk about is the ambition derived from having built
something so big. "You learn what an enterprise is capable of.
Everything else measures against that," he said. "One of the purposes
of life, and selfishly what makes people happy, is building things that
are impactful."
Mr. Moskovitz left Facebook on good terms. He socializes with Mr.
Zuckerberg, who still gives Mr. Moskovitz credit for building much of
Facebook.
Asana was released and tested on only a few companies in February 2011,
then more broadly last November, with several thousand users. The
company has not revealed the size of its user base, but said it had
been growing rapidly.
Asana will compete with corporate networking products from fellow
start-ups like Jive Software and Yammer, as well as the offerings from
big companies, like Chatter, which is owned by Salesforce.com, and
Socialcast, owned by VMWare. These corporate social networks are now
used by millions of employees.
The privately held Asana has a small fraction of that. Early adopters
of Asana include Foursquare, a location-based social network, and The
Sacramento Bee, where it is used in the online news department. "Having
all the jobs you have to do in one place definitely speeds up the
amount we work, though," said Sean McMahon, director of digital media
at The Bee. He still likes to oversee his employees, though he can do
it with a lighter hand than in the past.
Managers will probably have to learn new tasks when they use corporate
social software. "Businesses are in the midst of a retooling because of
cloud computing, social media, mobility and lots of data," said Tony
Zingale, chief executive of Jive Software, the largest of the corporate
social networks. "Groups are starting to make decisions, and
information to them has to be filtered and personalized."
Mr. Rosenstein, Asana's co-founder, says people will have to learn to
work independently. "Each company will have to develop its own
conventions," he said. "I spend a lot of time developing people,
setting a vision, and explaining why we do what we do." For the faint
of heart, Asana does offer tools for centralized management.
For the bold, there are outcomes like Asana itself, where everyone can
name and assign tasks to anyone else, or kick them back to the
originator if they do not like what they were assigned.
Both Mr. Moskovitz and Mr. Rothstein say their job titles simply are
"Asana," as are the titles for their 22 colleagues. Pay, however, still
varies widely, depending on qualifications and how early someone joined
the company. Mr. Moskovitz pays himself $33,280 a year, which his
lawyers have advised him is legally less risky for the company than a
salary of $1 a year.
The title sharing is a pragmatic attempt at company building. "It
wasn't uncommon for people to call themselves Googlers or Facebookers,
so we just took it further," Mr. Moskovitz said. "We brought in people
who could all be managers elsewhere. If one person was named the
manager, the rest would leave."
For a company full of young, successful people that is run by a
billionaire, Asana is a remarkably hard-working and down-to-earth place
-- all the way down. It is on the ground floor of a building that looks
out on a parking lot of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals.
Instead of the fancy pool tables found in Google or the open bars and
expensive murals at Facebook, on the floor is a single game of the
1960s hit Twister -- a social game, and one particularly suited to a
young and flexible work force.
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