Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Asana Would Like to Help Larger Companies Collaborate, Too

What’s up with Asana, the work coordination startup from former Facebookers, including co-founder Dustin Moskovitz?

A steady progression from tools for small teams (launched 2011) to tools for large teams (launched 2012) — and today, tools for entire organizations.

The new Asana Organizations includes more traditional management tools, with executives being able to see across multiple departments, and IT departments getting access to administration tools. Now anyone who creates an Asana account using a company’s email address will be automatically added to their org, and get to see all the various groups their coworkers are using.

Today, Asana is used by lots of tech companies — Airbnb, Uber, Foursquare, Pinterest — as well as teams in industries like healthcare and real estate.

“Any company that’s organizing on email, Asana is a better way to do that,” said co-founder Justin Rosenstein.

But he’s also used to telling people not to think of Asana as Facebook for business. “The social graph is around people. Asana is around work,” Rosenstein said. “We always say, if we wanted to do Facebook for business, we would have stayed at Facebook.”

However, as Asana tries to become more of an enterprise software provider, the company isn’t planning to build a traditional sales organization. “We’re not planning to do sales flying around the country,” said Asana operations manager Kenny Van Zant. “It’s still mostly bottom-up.”

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Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work