(2018-11-02) Two Facebook Engineers Made A Tool To Cut Down On Meetings, Now Its A $900 Million Company

Two Facebook engineers made a tool to cut down on meetings. Now it's a $900 million company. When Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein first built Tasks, they had few intentions beyond creating a tool to help Facebook’s teams manage their work and cut down on meetings. But it turns out their invention would lay the groundwork for a bonafide company that, a decade later, would be valued at $900 million.

In 2008, Moskovitz and Rosenstein left Facebook to start Asana.

It has been a big year for Asana. In January, the company announced $75 million in series D funding.

Asana passed 50,000 paying customers back in September, up from 20,000 in early 2017.

Today (Nov. 1), the company announced two new features: Portfolios, which gives workers insight into how their daily tasks chock up to company-wide goals, and Workload, which helps managers connect work to different team members’ skills and schedules.

Work-management companies are well-positioned to capitalize on the growth of distributed teams—and not just in the software industry.

Moskovitz, one of the more unassuming billionaires you might ever meet, leans back in his chair to think about his vision for the future. ”In order for remote work to work well, first of all, we need video conferencing that actually works reliably,” he says, “but we also need something that connotes more emotion.”

“I believe relationships will be as important as ever in the future,” he says. “These new tools are about helping teams find clarity about what’s important.” Congruence