Power of Collaboration and Other Secrets to Asana’s Exponential Growth. Justin Rosenstein, the Co-founder of Asana Opens the Pink Stage | Slush News Archive 2018
Justin Rosenstein, the Co-founder of collaboration tool Asana opened the Pink Stage with useful hands-on advice on building powerful ideas and ‘growing smart’. He also announced the recent Asana’s $50 million Series E round, which catapulted Asana to a $1.5 billion valuation.
Justin, known as the creator of Facebook’s “Like” button shared how through working at Facebook and at Google he understood that too much of his time is misused doing work about doing work. This frustration and gap in available software created Asana.
Justin opened the conversation up by saying that from a young age he wanted to create an impact on the world in a positive way and it started from him creating software in his room as a kid. All the way from “Like” button to Asana, he affected people’s lives by adding some happiness and helping to spend time more productively.
Keeping the harmony with the co-founders
Having created Asana together with Dustin Moskovitz, Justin started off by giving some of the managerial tips for founders to remember: “Finding a great co-founder is like finding a spouse, except you spend most of the time talking about money.” He talked about the importance of giving true and honest feedback to one another and dividing the responsibilities in a smart way, complementing your skills and capabilities, instead of basing it on personal opinions.
At Asana, the harmony within the organization is also of the utmost importance. The company has been awarded The Best SM Workplace in Technology 2018, taking the happiness of their employees into consideration as much as the importance of open culture. They have annual anonymous improvement surveys for all employees, and they encourage their employees to speak out, even about the negative.
This creates a company culture beyond what any perk could buy. As one Asana’s employee said at Slush — “I feel like I’m working with 400 friends… no work is like that!”.
Being overstressed and overworked is common in the life of an entrepreneur. Instead of getting stuck in the continuous hustle-loop, Justin advises entrepreneurs to take a step back, accept the anxiety of an entrepreneur’s life, and put things into a larger perspective. Don’t compare today with yesterday, compare today to the long-term vision and tackle it step by step daily, moving from worst to best. And here’s a bonus tip from Justin: “Meditation helps. It doesn’t fix anxiety, but it helps to put things into perspective.”
On stage, Justin also discussed dedicating your time to creating an impact on society. “You can dedicate your time to work in a company, which creates addictive products or go work at Tesla, Nima and help to improve the world.” Justin advises us to ask ourselves: “What does the world actually need?”, instead of creating things we want.
Later in the Pink Studio, Justin was part of a Q&A session with the audience. He talked about how educational institutions should spend more time teaching young people about mindfulness. He also advised scale-ups to grow smartly instead of growing fast, to avoid losing the company’s culture to the waves. He also focused on the importance of self-awareness, to help us realize the importance of our actions: “Judge yourself by lifetime value, not by yesterday.”
Originally published at https://slushnewsarchive.wordpress.com on December 4, 2018.
