Build the future of work HD

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?