Asana files to go public via direct listing

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

by doppp • 6 years ago

159 39 6 years ago

techcrunch.com

xfour• 6 years ago

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

iliekcomputers• 6 years ago

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

vinniejames• 6 years ago

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...

paxys• 6 years ago

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

s3r3nity• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

ahupp• 6 years ago

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

crtlaltdel• 6 years ago

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

xenospn• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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

baroomba2• 6 years ago

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.

ummonk4• 6 years ago

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.

core-questions3• 6 years ago

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.

toomuchtodo2• 6 years ago

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...

rchaud2• 6 years ago

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?

runawaybottle• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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• 6 years ago

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.

toephu2• 6 years ago

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

You can marginalize anything if you wanted to.

dadarepublic• 6 years ago

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.

graphememes2• 6 years ago

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.

toomuchtodo2• 6 years ago

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

graphememes2• 6 years ago

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

ummonk4• 6 years ago

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.

TylerE• 6 years ago

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

awa• 6 years ago

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.

lucasverra• 6 years ago

same, except Trello got my ProjectM heart

mszcz• 6 years ago

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.

ernsheong• 6 years ago

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

capocannoniere• 6 years ago

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

bdcravens• 6 years ago

"Asana files to go public"

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

dzonga• 6 years ago

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

Asana files to go public via direct listing

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