
Finally: Facebook Co-Founder Opens the Curtain on Two-Year Old Asana - atularora
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/07/finally-facebook-co-founder-opens-the-curtain-on-two-year-old-asana/
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danilocampos
A very rambly video. That's cool, that's what the journalists are for.
Hopefully the article can boil it down for me.

"I won’t belabor the features and screen shots here. Hear the pitch from the
founders yourself."

...Oh.

The author could have added a lot more value by actually describing the
product and its differentiating characteristics.

(edit: Ohhh! Is it uncharitable to assume she couldn't sit through the video
either? Maybe she doesn't know yet.)

Instead, the post waxed philosophical, at great length, about a bunch of
things tangential and ultimately irrelevant to what the hell it is they've
actually made. It's left as an exercise to the reader to slog through a loose,
_one hour video_ to figure out why this matters.

I don't mean to be a grumpy gus, but how do people get paid to do such sloppy,
self-indulgent work?

Anyone have a tl;dr on the magic and rainbows delivered by Asana?
(Hunch/spoiler: Basecamp plus complexity, splitviews, more AJAX, a non-2004
design)

~~~
petervandijck
I got tired with the video as well. Basically looks pretty complicated.
They're thinking they'll replace what people currently use (notepad etc). I
don't think so.

~~~
flashgordon
well id say you were lucky. The video was down when I got there, and I just
couldnt sit through the very generic descriptions the article was rambling
about.

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Maro
Some random responses:

\- It's Google Wave, this time by ex-Facebookers!

\- Software that messes with my email sucks.

\- It looks complicated.

\- People use text files and whiteboards because you can wipe it and start
over and draw and connect stuff and use colors and...

\- If their plan is to build something sexy and get acquired, they'll probably
succeed just because of their Facebook past.

\- If their plan is to build a product and live off it, they'll probably pull
it off because most other software sucks so bad and is limited.

\- But, based on the video, they won't fundamentally "solve" the problem
they're attacking, their software will just be another context (like text
files, stickies, emails, wikies, bug tracking, etc.)

\- Investors always ask at the end of your pitch, "How are you different than
X?" and "Why will you succeed where X has failed?". I didn't really see the
answer in this video.

\- Their virality plan sounds interesting in the context of Enterprise
Software.

Hopefully I'm wrong!

~~~
rumpelstiltskin
What virality plan?

~~~
Maro
About 3/4th into the video the guy says they're planning to attack companies
from the bottom-up by designing for, allowing and enabling individual
employees to start using it by themselves and then share their stuff. I think
even if their software fails, if they can come up with a model for this that
works, that would be a big deal and enable other startups. I know I'm already
thinking about this.

At least, that's what I got from fast-forwarding, it's an hour long
presentation.

~~~
mlinsey
Yammer is commonly cited as an example of a company which does this. As far as
I know, there's no public data on how well this particular tactic has worked
for them, but that doesn't stop every hacker/product entrepreneur from citing
them in pitches to dodge questions about how they are going to recruit and
manage an enterprise sales team.

~~~
abossy
This is exactly how Yammer has acquired a large percentage of their customers.
It's their competitive advantage, and the reason their sales force doesn't
largely subsume the rest of the company. The reason it has worked for them is
that they gained a lot of momentum from winning TechCrunch50, which caused
companies everywhere to try the product. That's not to say they've avoided
having a sales force; it's crucial to the company's success.

~~~
Maro
I guess Yammer is positioned more of a communications tools
(blogging/tweeting/messaging) whereas Asana is more of a productivity tool
(issue tracking/todos/projects)?

My point is that trying to spread an app aimed at enterprises using a large-
scale bottom-up approach seems to be a relatively unexplored approach. I don't
know how Yammer is doing, but I have never seen one of my business partners or
co-workers use Yammer and thus be exposed to it (=bottom-up).

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athom
Without looking at the page/video (And after what everyone else has said,
_pleeeeze_ don't tell me I have to?! ;), does this sound anything like that
Chandler project[1] they wrote about in _Dreaming in Code_ [2]?

[1] <http://chandlerproject.org/> Looks like they finally made it to a version
1.

[2] <http://www.dreamingincode.com/>

~~~
krakensden
Yup, it sounds like a hosted, web-based Chandler, although they seem to be
moving faster.

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sfphotoarts
wow, if they didn't come from such big companies I doubt anyone would pay the
slightest attention, the idea alone makes me want to yawn, then I started
watching the video and gave up.

How many times have people come up with these super new way to make people
collaborate better, only to find that it doesn't work. The last innovation in
this field that made any real impact on team collaboration was in the 70's -
email.

~~~
rguzman
I think it is fair to say that 37s had some impact on this with basecamp,
also. Of course, not of the same order of magnitude as email -- but, email
took ~20 years to be widely adopted and accepted.

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windsurfer
This seems almost exactly the same as Redmine so far, but I wasn't able to get
through the hour-long rambly and out-of-sync video. Anyone know the
differences?

~~~
jpadvo
It also seems the same as Action Method. I can't see any difference.

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podperson
One of the things that's kind of interesting to consider w.r.t. Facebook vs.
Asana (where Asana is assumed to be some kind of unholy amalgamation of a
wiki, exchange server, basecamp, MS project, and ... Things, say):

Facebook is kind of an _anti_-productivity application. Taking the Facebook
approach to developing a "live in it" productivity application would be
something of a disaster. I've been using using Facebook (fairly lightly, I'll
admit) for years and still don't understand its structure. E.g. when I'm told
"so and so" has made a comment on my wall or replied to a post or liked
something -- I'm not sure where those things are to be found.

In the end, most serious people "live" in their email inbox to some extent or
other (modulo some kind of discipline for not checking it too often or
whatever) and anything that doesn't wrap around email is essentially a waste
of time.

A tool that wrapped around email, [shared] calendar, [shared] to-do-list,
[specialized reddit-like forums, and a wiki might have a shot (is this what
asana is? I have no clue). This seems like something "easy" for Google or
Microsoft to do (since they have pretty compelling email infrastructure) and
impossible for anyone who isn't able and willing to do something 80%+ as good
as gmail to do.

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waxman
Whatever you want to say about the actual app, Luna, their new framework,
looks awesome.[1]

The idea is basically that complex web 2.0 design patterns
(ajax/comet/memcache/sql optimization/etc.) require a lot of tedious effort to
build and maintain, and wouldn't it be cool if you could simply define models,
views, and handler functions, and then have the framework take care of
everything else.

I honestly think that Luna has the potential to change web development the way
Rails did (i.e. by making it an order of magnitude easier), and could
transform web apps themselves the way G-mail did (i.e. by emphasizing things
like really-real time updating via comet the way G-mail initially introduced
the world to Ajax).

I have no idea how Luna is architected, but the concept really resonates with
me: javascript-based, web 2.0-abstractions that prevent repetitive things I do
in Rails like having to redefine some of the same functions in ruby code and
javascript code, and then having to manually keep them in sync.

It's so cool that I think I'm going to try to hack together my own, humble
Luna knock-off built on top of Node.js, jQuery, and MongoDB (which uses a
javascript query language and JSON-but-better (BSON) data models).

[1]<http://asana.com/luna/>

~~~
phatterhead
I kind of thought this was the real point of the app. They have an idea for a
great not-Ruby framework and investors said "platform plays are non-
starters...build an app".

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kloncks
Regardless of the actual demo, this is a very important task and I like how
Lacy described their aspirations:

 _There’s that almost hubristic mission: To fix how people work together and
make the global work place a better, more efficient, less frustrating place._

I like that.

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endlessvoid94
I had to stop watching the video because the audio was WAY ahead of the video.
He started talking about the product and it still showed him talking about
speed and structure.

How did that slip through?

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NonOrthodox
Wow, just wow... Not only Asana surprised me as aparently an awesome
productivity tool that I hope I might use in my start-up really soon, but the
bunch of stupid comments here also surprised me.

The video is long, but you can get a good grasp of the product in the first
few minutes. The rest of the video is in-depth discussion on how they started
thinking of how to do it, how they think they will reach the companies and
also inner workings on how the software work.

~~~
windsurfer
Can you explain why you would use this over, say, Redmine or Basecamp?

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bretthellman
Looks like they aren't big fans of MVPs.

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richcollins
I think that you're confusing a marketing launch with an MVP. They've had
businesses using it for months iirc.

~~~
bretthellman
I don't agree. Spending a year building a technology for an unproven product
is not MVP :)

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jackstahl
This is a totally legitimate point. But it's not that we're not fans of MVP,
we're just also fans of vision-directed products like Facebook and Apple.

We have some people who are more MVP-leaning, and others who are "let's build
the vision"-leaning. For example, Eric Reis is one of our board observers. But
we all believe we should't fall back on dogma rather than using judgment and
balance, and we think having a symphony of perspectives on the issue is
valuable to deriving that balance.

We're committed to validating our hypotheses via customer adoption and
metrics, but we're also committed to investing sufficiently in our framework,
platform, and product that we can realize the whole of our ambition.
Practically speaking, the user feedback right now is very consistent, and we
know where we need to go. We absolutely need search, for example. Adding tons
more users or doing more rigorous validation would slow us down from getting
there. As the path ahead of us gets less clear, we will scale up our userbase
and invest more in metrics and validation.

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rkalla
I thought building of the straw man of "people use Notepad" was slightly
inaccurate and unnecessary - the software looks very slick on its own.

Yes Basecamp and nameless other pieces of software might already do this, but
you could argue this is Bugzilla with a nice flashy Ajax interface on top of
it... technically I suppose it is, but the Ajax interface is really
functional. I would say as impressive as Gmail was to us when it came out --
keyboard short cuts, drag and drop, intelligent email parsing,
tagging/grouping/slicing/dicing.

This is like some marriage between Basecamp, Find Bugz and a Customer Support
app all married together.

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watdufa
omg. How can the same mind who writes and deliveres such a rambling, unfocused
talk also produce a useful task manager?

Atlassian might want to pay attention to this, but I think 37 signals is safe
from any real competition.

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rosenstein
fyi, TechCrunch is working on the sync issues now...

~~~
rumpelstiltskin
Are they also working on a tl;dw?

P.S. _Justin_ Rosenstein? Co-founder of Asana?

~~~
jackstahl
Yes, that was JR.

For a tl;dw, try [http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-cofounder-shows-
what...](http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-cofounder-shows-what-hes-
been-up-to-with-asana-2011-2)

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pinguar
As far as I could bear with the unsynced video, it looks like they are trying
to catch customers who are used to use Google Wave for project
management/collaboration..

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georgemcbay
>> "it looks like they are trying to catch customers who are used to use
Google Wave"

Both of them?

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clare
I may have missed it, but from the video it is not clear how Asana targets
improving productivity for each specific business role. Through my experience
the adoption of such tools highly depends on your role in the business org:
e.g. Yammer may be very appealing to a marketing/bizdev guy, but not so much
to an engineer. Wonder how this more generic approach can work out to fit the
need of everyone.

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shaggy
I may have missed this answer but how to they actually plan to survive as a
company since they are giving the product away? Will you pay them for support
or will they start charging for the solutions to the "longer term" problems
they describe which salesforce solves today? I could be stupid or naive but
why have otherwise smart people invested $9M into this?

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michaeldhopkins
Free to use in a freeform manner, but companies will pay to set policies etc.

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obiefernandez
Finally, someone made a collaborative, web-based version of Things (fantastic,
but solo-only GTD application for Mac).

I'm excited.

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mark_l_watson
Looks cool. I just signed up for the beta - hope to get to kick the tires.

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bluedevil2k
If Moskovitz has more more than God, why does he need funding?

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robryan
Maybe he doesn't want to cash out of Facebook till an IPO.

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tastybites
The headline makes it sound like he had an illegitimate child!

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zwadia
This seems like a cross between:

Facebook (layout/feeds) Twitter (async assign) Intentional Software (multiple
representations, same model) Google Wave (live updates, email integration)

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tuckbuck
bASecAmp+zeNdesk+wAve = ASANA

