From An Internal Product To A $4 Billion Company

We are now a community of 253! Thank you❤️

This newsletter is free and I don’t use paid advertising. I completely rely on organic growth through users who like my content and share it.

So, if you like today’s edition, please take a moment to share this newsletter on social media or forward this email to someone you know.

If this email was forwarded to you, you can subscribe here.

If you want to create a newsletter with Beehiiv, you can sign up here.

Does the name Dustin Moskovitz ring a bell?

He was a student in Harvard and started as the founder CTO of a tiny startup called Facebook. Dustin later went to be the VP of Engineering and played a crucial in scaling up the company in its early years, laying the foundation for Meta to become the multi-billon dollar giant that it is today.

In the four years that he worked at Facebook, he noticed that communication within and across teams had become full of friction and project management was becoming increasingly difficult.

So he decided to solve this internal problem and got to work with one of Facebook’s early engineers - Justin Rosenstein (of course, his name had to be Justin). Together, they built an internal project management tool called Tasks.

They realized such a tool could benefit multiple other tech companies with similar project management problems.

In 2008, Dustin and Justin left Facebook to co-found Asana.

The founders managed to secure funding of $1.2 million in their 2009 seed round and another $9 million in their Series A round. All this was before Asana’s launch.

Asana officially launched for free out of beta in November 2011 and commercially in April 2012.

Early customers of Asana included Uber, Dropbox, Foursquare, and Airbnb among others.

By January 2018, more than 35,000 paying customers were using Asana. Companies like IBM, eBay, and Icelandair were added to the list.

In September 2020, Asana went public on the New York Stock Exchange via a direct public offering.

In September 2022, Asana had 131,000 customers, while the number of customers spending over $5,000 annually increased to 18,040, up 41%.

Today, Asana is worth $4.25 billion with 1840 employees. Moskovitz has remained as CEO while Rosenstein has moved to a board role as an advisor.

The story of Asana tells us that sometimes you could be just solving problems at your daily job and end up making something impactful that transcends the boundaries of your current work regime. Dustin and Justin noticed that they were able to solve an industry-wide problem in their own company and saw this as an opportunity to apply their solution to different customers.

Clearly, they succeeded.

The newsletter every professional should be reading

There’s a reason Morning Brew is the gold standard of business news—it’s the easiest and most enjoyable way to stay in the loop on all the headlines impacting your world.

Tech, finance, sales, marketing, and everything in between—we’ve got it all. Just the stuff that matters, served up in a fast, fun read.

Look—over 4 million professionals start their day with Morning Brew’s daily newsletter, and it only takes 5 minutes to read. Sign up for free and see for yourself!

Check it out

Did you like today’s newsletter? Feel free to reply to this mail.

This newsletter is free but you can support me here.

I’d be happy to connect on Medium, LinkedIn and X.