All human progress comes down to groups
of people coming together and aligning
their energy in a common direction
to accomplish some shared goal.
As a result the history of human
progress accelerating is to a large extent
the history of our technology
improving around our ability
for groups of people to work together.
A lot of my life has been
spent trying to go after
something that'll be difficult.
When I left Facebook
there was any number of things
I could have worked on.
Healthcare, education.
or improving government.
Asana felt right to me because we
get to vicariously make the world better
through each of those different avenues.
Five and ten years in the future people
will be working in an entirely
different way than they are today.
Asana's mission is to solve the problem
of human beings working together.
We're solving the problem of collaboration.
That's a pretty ambitious vision.
How do you design a solution
that's going to be
radically better than email in its ability
to enable a team of people
to work together effectively?
To start out so simple
that anyone can use it
and so it'll reveal all sorts of
powerful functionality.
Creating something that's
in this perfect nexus of being elegant
and simple and straightforward,
but at the same time can bend to
the precise workflow that you need it to.
It's incredibly hard because
there are so few assumptions we can make
about what mindset people are
coming into the product with.
One of our favorite customers is
Possible Health, they give you health care
in remote areas of Nepal.
Then there we have Asana tasks that
represent each of the patients.
One day they were showing us this.
They had a list of patients
and some of them were marked off.
We were a little worried at first.
What does it mean when
a patient is complete?
And oh, that means they're cured.
which is really great to
see things like that and have them
tell us really clearly like
We're able to help more people,
We're able to do more
because the software
makes us more effective.
They're saving lives with
people of all levels of technical ability,
something that we can't do with most tools.
Asana is able to span this
broad spectrum of being a tool that
someone's able to use in their native
language all the way up to people
who are working in the corporate office.
But we're such a small fraction
of our vision.
We're getting to a point where
we get to think about higher level
product ideas to become accessible
to broader groups of people.
We need people who can think
both broadly and deeply.
We need people who can think both
empathically while at the same time
be able to take all this complexity
and think about the corner cases.
There really is decades more work to do
and it's just really exciting
to be at a company
that has that much forward momentum.
What happens when we get to the point
where we can do 10,000 people
working together or 100,000 people?
What can we do as a collective group
when we can have that much energy
pushing in the same direction?