
Asana files to go public via direct listing - doppp
https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/03/asana-files-to-go-public-says-it-will-do-so-via-a-trendy-direct-listing/
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ummonk
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.

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core-questions
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.

~~~
rchaud
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?

~~~
ummonk
>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.

~~~
rchaud
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.

~~~
ummonk
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.

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xenospn
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"?

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

~~~
baroomba
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.

~~~
AJ007
It used to be faster. They’ve put themselves in a position where users are
ready to bail after any major price increase.

~~~
baroomba
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.

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s3r3nity
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!

~~~
montroser
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](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.

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

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awa
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.

~~~
mszcz
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.

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capocannoniere
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](https://blog.samaltman.com/asana)

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dadarepublic
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.

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

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bdcravens
"Asana files to go public"

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

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runawaybottle
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?

~~~
adventured
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.

~~~
sireat
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.

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

~~~
vinniejames
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...](https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/public-offerings-how-
confidential-ipos-are-changing-the-market.html)

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dzonga
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

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graphememes
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.

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

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

