Hi I'm Justin Rosenstein.
I'm the cofounder of Asana.
Asana makes software that enables
teamwork without email.
Email is an antiquated technology
that was really intended as
upgrade to the post offices
which is very lowest
common denominator system
that allow us to pass information around.
And when you think about
how email back in the day was used
email was used for everything
from in your personal life
to sharing photos
and organizing events
to in your work life.
Today you wouldn't dream of
sending a photo album to your friends
using email.
Instead you use more appropriate
sophisticated technology.
But the workplace has been still
stuck in that email era
and people and companies today
are still addicted to Outlook and Gmail.
And so we are providing
a better technology
that upgrades email for the workplace
and allows you to understand
all the things your team is working on,
who's responsible for what,
how all the pieces of the puzzle
fit together.
And something that's
much better than email
is really what the new world is coming to
and the best teams has already adopted
these new ways of doing things.
The reason people spend so much time
on this work about work
on just making sure the left hand knows
what the right hand is doing is because
teams fundamentally lack clarity.
There are really basic questions
that seems like
any teams would want the answer to.
What are all the steps between now
and accomplishing our goal?
Who's working on what?
Who's dependent on what?
What's the status of each thing?
What's the state of conversation
around each thing?
What's the high-level reason
that we're doing all this work
in the first place?
And while a lot of them are human problems
technology can really step in
and give people huge amounts of clarity
into answers to all of those questions.
Not through some painstaking process of
manually reading every single email
and sitting as a fly on the wall
in every single meeting
to try to piece together
all the state of the world
by giving tools that allow you to
do that automatically
by marrying the work itself
with the conversation into one place
and enabling that perfect clarity
of plan, responsibility, and purpose.