Well-known New Yorker writer Ken Auletta has taken on Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in the magazine, with a largely glowing profile provocatively titled: “A Woman’s Place: Can Sheryl Sandberg Upend Silicon Valley’s Male-Dominated Culture?”

My short answer is: No, she can’t. But Auletta does yeoman’s work explaining the irksome issue by using Sandberg as his metaphor.

Sandberg has been very vocal about the issue of women in the workplace over the last year, in a series of speeches she has made.

But, actually, the Auletta piece is mostly a full-on Sandberg profile, hitting all the obvious stops in her life and in that of Google — her previous employer — and Facebook, her current one. Also, of course, we can’t leave out the fight between those two tech behemoths.

No news is committed, but it is a very good read (and the second big piece — the other was the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek — Sandberg has been the subject of of late.)

I was also interviewed for the piece, which started out as a larger one on women in Silicon Valley. No surprise, it quickly became largely about one of its most interesting ones.

Oddly, in a section about women in tech, I am quoted saying that I scare men. To be fair: I am an equal opportunity terrifier.

Sandberg, who comes off as quite a deft smoothie (which she is) in the New Yorker piece, is clearly not a terrifier and it seems to be working out well for her so far.

One of the best lines I ever heard from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — who has been very vocal about casting light on women’s challenges in the workplace — was about her service on the Disney board.

Discussing the depiction of its happy-ending female animated characters, she joked to me that what she always pushed for at meetings were “princesses with jobs.”

Sandberg seems to have gotten her wish now, with this upcoming movie from Disney unit Pixar, “Brave.”

Incredibly, it’s the first time in its dozen films that Pixar has a female hero at its center.

It’s about a red-headed Scottish princess named Merida, who insists on being a warrior — complete with rocking bow and arrow.

Finally.

In her second major speech focused on women in the workplace, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told the graduates at Barnard College’s 119th commencement ceremony in New York yesterday not to “leave before you leave.”

Her message–a version of which she also delivered last year to an audience at the TedWomen conference in Washington, D.C., in a speech titled “Why We Have So Few Women Leaders”–should be paid attention to in Silicon Valley, where Sandberg is one of the few high-ranking and high-profile women execs.

Sandberg, a former Google exec before taking the No. 2 spot at the social networking giant, aimed more at women than at men yesterday, urging the students she addressed not to quit too early due to a vexing variety of personal choices.

Said Sandberg:

“So my heartfelt message is: Don’t leave before you leave. Don’t lean back, lean in. Keep your foot on the gas pedal until the day you have to make a decision. That’s the only way to ensure you even have a decision to make.”

And:

“Women shortchange their own contributions from the very start, and this underestimation is expensive for both you and others. Because when you underestimate yourself, you lessen the impact you can have.”

Word.

Here’s the video of the speech, as well as the text of it, below. I also added the video of the TED one:

barnard_commencement_2011_-_facebook_coo_sheryl_sandberg_prepared_remarks

(Photos by Barnard College/Asiya Khaki and Dorothy Hong.)

As it gets ramped up for a wider launch, Asana, the high-profile workplace collaboration start-up founded by top former Facebook execs, has hired former SolarWinds product strategy exec Kenny Van Zant in a “COO-type of role.”

Van Zant, who will be Asana’s first business-side hire, has also worked at a variety of tech companies, including Cisco.

Co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein remain at the top of the leadership at the productivity software company, which–perhaps in keeping with its yoga-style name–does not have official titles.

But Van Zant will essentially fulfill the COO role, focusing on bringing Asana to the enterprise market in a socially-fueled, “bottom-up” approach.

“We now have a great product and are ready for our next phase of bringing it to the market,” said Moskovitz, in an interview this afternoon with BoomTown. “While Justin and I continue to work on product and engineering, Kenny will be the driver of that launch.”

Specifically, in a blog post today, Moskovitz wrote:

“Kenny will be leading functions outside of product and engineering, and serve as a key driver for Asana’s marketing and corporate strategy.”

Asana, which is aimed at helping people work on projects together in groups, is now in private beta.

It tackles the often unexciting, but very large and problematic, workplace collaboration and communications software market.

In Sanskrit, “asana” means “sitting down” and refers to strong but relaxed postures in yoga, which presumably means the product will help frustrated workers achieve a digital form of nirvana.

The San Francisco-based start-up, which has raised $9 million in venture funding from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, now has 15 employees.

Asana had previously garnered just over $1 million in an angel round, which included a spate of Silicon Valley bigwigs.

Still, it has not, thankfully, received the intense hype of other innovative start-ups from former Facebookers–hello, Quora!

That said, many who are using Asana think it will make a huge splash as it is rolled out and attempts to bring consumer-style tools to the workplace.

There are, of course, a range of companies doing this in different ways–from Jive to Yammer to LinkedIn and to a variety of cloud-based enterprise efforts by Google and Microsoft.

In an interview, Van Zant said the time was ripe for big changes in the way enterprise-aimed products were bought and sold.

“I will be focused on selling our enterprise software product from the bottom up, rather than targeting the CIO,” said Van Zant. “It is clear the world of enterprise is being impacted by consumer behavior.”

While he does not start until Monday, Van Zant speculated that Asana’s free product offering will remain, with a premium version to come.

Benchmark’s Matt Cohler, who made the Asana investment for the firm and is on its board, said the time is right for such businesses aimed at enterprise transformation.

“Kenny wrote the book on this at SolarWinds,” he said. “The consumerization of the enterprise isn’t going to happen–it already has.”

Here is a demo video Asana put out in February of an open house, as well as the blog post from Asana on the Van Zant hire:

Asana Open House from Jerry Phillips on Vimeo.

Justin and I are excited to welcome Kenny Van Zant as the newest member of the Asana team. Kenny will be leading functions outside of product and engineering, and serve as a key driver for Asana’s marketing and corporate strategy.

Until now we’ve focused primarily on developing the Asana product into the best of class solution for task management and project execution. Encouraged by positive feedback from the early adopters in our beta program, we’re now preparing for the company’s next phase–bringing this technology to the rest of the market–and we can’t imagine a better partner than Kenny to drive this strategy and build a strong organization to support it. At SolarWinds, Kenny helped pioneer the bottom-up distribution model for selling software and SaaS into enterprises and small businesses–a sales approach we plan to develop further at Asana. This experience, together with an almost uncanny overlap of values, made it clear that Kenny is the right fit.

While finding Kenny concludes a long search for the right leader of Asana’s business operations, we are continuing to grow the team, looking for passionate designers and engineers to join us in our common purpose: using software to help groups of people work together more effectively.

–Dustin

Kenny Van Zant is a technology entrepreneur with leadership experience in start-ups and public companies. Kenny was most recently the SVP and Chief Product Strategist for SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI) from 2006-2010, where he was responsible for products, marketing, and corporate strategy. At SolarWinds, Kenny helped pioneer a disruptive business model for selling software and SaaS into the enterprise and SMB segments from the “bottom-up,” using inside sales, online marketing, free products, and a loyal user community. Based on a unique combination of growth and profitability, SolarWinds enjoyed a successful IPO in May of 2009.

Prior to SolarWinds, Kenny was the EVP of Marketing and GM of the Communications BU for Motive (NASD: MOTV) and the co-founder and COO for BroadJump (acquired by Motive), where he managed the company’s growth from start-up in 1999 to over $60M in revenue and 350 global employees within 3 years.

Kenny has a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

BroadVision today announced Clearvale Express, which it describes as a free and streamlined version of Clearvale Enterprise, its cloud-based business collaboration platform. It was created in part at the suggestion of Softbank, the Japanese telecom concern that is a partner on the product and will resell it in Asian markets.

Above, that’s an ad for Clearvale Express evoking the old “Pepsi challenge” ads from the early 1980s. In this case, Chatter is being portrayed as “Coke,” the established player being challenged by the upstart, which is silly because Chatter is a relatively new player in an increasingly crowded social enterprise market, though Salesforce is clearly the biggest among the new entrants.

Bashing Salesforce is suddenly trendy. On Sunday, Yammer and Socialcast were spotted buying text ads on Google using the word “chatter” in hopes of catching the odd Google user responding to the pair of TV ads for Chatter.com that aired during the Super Bowl.

And that followed an attack video put out by Yammer highlighting how Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff loved Yammer at a 2008 TechCrunch event and accusing him of basically copying it. You can see that video below. Then there’s Jive, which used an industry survey to try to make a case that it’s a worthier player in the space than Chatter or anyone else, for that matter.

I’m betting there’s more of this public pile-on ahead, though with luck it will be followed by a round of deal-making. Last year, Gartner estimated the 2011 market opportunity for all these apps at less than $800 million and said that it’s tracking at least 80 vendors, at least 50 of which are based in the cloud. That makes the social enterprise market seem like small potatoes at first until you see Gartner’s prediction that these apps will replace email–Microsoft Outlook and IBM Lotus Notes–as the primary tool for collaboration in businesses for 20 percent of companies within three years.

Combine that with a longer-term shift away from email–by teens, college-age people and younger people entering the workforce–and toward communication via Facebook and things like it, and you’ve got the makings of a fundamental shift in what’s considered normal as workplace technology. No wonder they’re taking swipes at each other. It is, however, already getting old .

In one memorable episode of the famous old short films “The Little Rascals,” after not getting invited to a party, the Our Gang little dudes decided to form their own group, comically called “The He-Man Woman-Haters Club.”

In other words: No girls allowed!

While it was wink-wink cute when Spanky, Alfalfa and Buckwheat huffed and puffed about keeping out Darla–which they never ever could do–back in the last century, it’s not quite as adorkable when it comes to the boards of all the major Web 2.0 hotshots these days.

That would be Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Foursquare, none of which have any women as directors.

As in zero.

What’s most remarkable is that most of these start-ups are run by what I consider enlightened and open-minded entrepreneurs, mostly young enough to be part of a generation more inclined to value equality and diversity in the workplace.

In addition, each of these companies has a massive base of women consumers, in some cases well over 50 percent of its audience.

Thus, it would seem logical that in casting about for those to help guide these companies, one or two women leaders might slip in.

To be fair, it’s not for lack of trying, but of completion, as was the case with Twitter’s recent addition of three new board members.

They were longtime Silicon Valley exec Peter Currie, Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue and former DoubleClick leader David Rosenblatt.

All are deeply qualified for the Twitter board, which is obviously prepping for its next stage of growth and maturity.

But in its search, the San Francisco microblogging site did not manage to cast the net quite wide enough.

While sources said at least one prominent online woman exec was considered, there were some legitimate issues with her appointment, and it was not completed.

Still, one might imagine Twitter could have tried harder to find other workable choices.

Currently, the Twitter board is made up of the new trio, as well as Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, CEO Dick Costolo and co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey.

Things are not any better over at Facebook, which has several prominent women execs running the show, most especially its high-profile COO Sheryl Sandberg.

But, inexplicably, though she does attend board meetings, she is not yet a director of Facebook, nor is any other woman.

In fact, here is Sandberg on topic at a recent TED event for women, in an eloquent speech titled “Why We Have So Few Women Leaders”:

Instead, the Facebook board is all men, all the time, composed of CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, prominent techie and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, investor Peter Thiel, Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer and Washington Post head Don Graham.

It is no better at three of the most prominent recent Web 2.0 start-ups, which one source attributes to the lack of woman VCs, who are often the first board members after major investment rounds.

At Zynga, the hot social gaming company in San Francisco, it continues, with an all-male board, despite a very heavily female audience for its casual social games.

That would be co-founder and CEO Mark Pincus, COO Owen Van Natta, investor Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins, investor Reid Hoffman and Brad Feld of the Foundry Group.

The same is true at woman-targeted–spas, spas and more spas–social buying site Groupon, which has an unusually large board for a start-up and made up of–as per usual–all men.

The list: Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason, Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy, former AT&T President and COO John Walter, New Enterprise Associates’ Harry Weller and Peter Barris, former AOL exec Ted Leonsis, 37Signals co-founder Jason Fried and early investors Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.

And, much smaller, is Foursquare’s board, which is the trio of co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, co-founder Naveen Selvadurai and Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger.

New investors–Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures’ Bryce Roberts–have observer status and both are, needless to say, dudes.

There is no question it is tough to make sure there is a good balance of qualified women leaders to men in tech–it is an issue we wrestle with every single year for the program of speakers at our own All Things Digital conference, although we are most excellent on this issue on our Web site and conference staff.

But it can be done, especially at public tech companies. Google has two women on its board of nine directors; Yahoo has three of 10; even Oracle has two of a dozen.

But a grand total of zero at the leading companies of Web 2.0 is not just a coincidence.

It’s a shame.

Tomorrow, BoomTown will post a list of great women who would be superb directors for any of these companies, but until then, let’s not follow in Spanky’s steps:

It launches today.

The Cisco (CSCO) deployment is a big win for Aliph, since the networking giant is a dominant player in the arena to provide telephony solutions to businesses, part of its Voice and Unified Communications division.

The idea is to use the Jawbone device and the software that manages it to allow workers to move around an office and have the call move with them, echoing increasingly mobile consumer behavior. That will even include jumping from office phones to mobile devices.

To do this, Cisco will be using Aliph’s technology, which the start-up is calling a “wearable platform.”

The company was formally launched in 2004–in fact, at the D: All Things Digital conference–by Alexander Asseily and Hosain Rahman, who met as Stanford University undergraduates.

It is funded by Silicon Valley venture powerhouses Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital, as well as smaller investors, who put in a total of $43 million.

With the stylish and innovative Jawbone, Aliph has turned a lot of heads in the wireless headset space, aimed directly at high-end consumers.

It is prominently featured, for example, in Apple (AAPL) retail stores.

Now, it is finally in the workplace.

Here is the image of the box for the new Cisco/Aliph partnership:

And here is the official press release:

Jawbone and Cisco Introduce Wireless Headset for Enterprise Collaboration and Beyond

Jawbone Integrates With Cisco Video Endpoints Extending Unified Communications Inside and Out of the Workplace

SAN FRANCISCO and SAN JOSE, Calif. Sept. 30, 2010–Jawbone and Cisco today announced they are closely collaborating to allow employees to easily move from device to device throughout their day. Jawbone ICON for Cisco Bluetooth Headset will intelligently bridge mobile phones and Internet Protocol (IP) phones in a way that is transparent to users and extends unified communications beyond the walls of the workplace.

Users will be able to connect to their Cisco® Unified IP phones and mobile phones simultaneously, creating a truly unified, wireless, and hands-free communications experience as they move from in-the-office to on-the-go. While on the same headset, employees can take a call from their desk phone and the next from their cell phone as calls can be handled from both sources at the same time on the same headset. The headset extends Jawbone’s industry-first wearable software platform, with Cisco technology to deliver applications that span enterprise and mobile use. Jawbone’s industry-leading industrial design and superior ergonomics ensures users can wear their unified communications wherever they go.

Shipments of the Jawbone ICON for Cisco Bluetooth Headsets have begun in the U.S. and Canada, bundled with Cisco Unified IP Phones 9951 and 9971. International shipments will begin in October 2010.

Key Facts / Highlights:

• Users no longer need to remain tethered to their desks; their audio and voice follow them wherever they go, leaving their hands free for other tasks.
• Employees can remain connected to both phones at the same time and don’t have to pick up the handset on their ringing phone, then pick up their cell phone when it rings because both calls from both sources can be handled at the same time on the same headset.
• Users will be able to make and receive calls from their Bluetooth-enabled mobile, Cisco Unified IP Phone, Cisco Unified Wireless IP Phone or Cisco Cius and can switch among the endpoints as they change location.
• Jawbone ICON for Cisco delivers built-in intelligence that allows the headset to be dynamically enhanced through new software applications and functional updates via the Jawbone MyTALK platform.
• As rich new features and functionality are available, the headset can be easily updated either by the IT manager or user themselves.

“We live in an increasingly connected world where the lines between work and play are blurring fast, if not completely gone. People want integrated solutions that are valuable to them all the time regardless of where they are or what they are doing–these need to be lifestyle solutions with the best functionality in a form that is appealing,” said Hosain Rahman, CEO of Jawbone. “No one is willing to make tradeoffs anymore and we are extremely fortunate to be collaborating with a company like Cisco that is committed to leading this vision of new user experiences around the best of both worlds: enhanced productivity through innovative enterprise-grade technology with an equal emphasis on user-centric design.”

“Cisco understands the changing nature of work,” said Steve Slattery, vice president and general manager IP Communications business unit, Cisco. “The Jawbone ICON for Cisco Bluetooth Headset is the type of next-generation device that will allow workers to collaborate regardless of where their work lives. This first wearable and updateable platform is the only one that enables enterprises to get more value out of the device over its lifetime through functional updates as Cisco enhances its UC offering.”

About Jawbone

Jawbone, also known as Aliph, is committed to creating wearable and personal technology products that deliver an unsurpassed user experience. The company’s flagship product, the award-winning Jawbone Bluetooth headset, first disrupted the industry in 2006 with its military-grade NoiseAssassin technology and instantly became recognized as the best Bluetooth headset available. In 2010, Jawbone ICON became the company’s most innovative Jawbone yet; introducing unmatched ease of use, personalization, sound quality and design to the market. Jawbone ICON is currently available in 23 countries across North America, Europe, Middle East and Asia.

The winner of numerous consumer awards, Jawbone features a uniquely stylish design and is part of the permanent collection at various museums including New York MOMA.

Jawbone is a privately-held company headquartered in San Francisco.

About Cisco Collaboration

From award-winning IP communications to mobility, customer care, Web conferencing, messaging, enterprise social software, and interoperable telepresence experiences, Cisco brings together integrated network-based collaboration solutions based on open standards. These solutions, as well as services from Cisco and our partners, are designed to help promote business growth, innovation, and productivity. They also designed to help accelerate team performance, protect investments, and simplify the process of finding the right people and information.

About Cisco Systems

Cisco, (NASDAQ: CSCO), the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate, this year celebrates 25 years of technology innovation, operational excellence and corporate social responsibility. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

In my ongoing quest to follow the money, BoomTown showed up at the Palo Alto, Calif., offices of Jive Software last week to talk about its recent $30 million funding from Kleiner Perkins.

Its existing venture investor, Sequoia Capital, was also in the round, which brings the grand total of dough to $57 million, all dedicated to making Jive the leader in bringing social tools to the enterprise.

It’s probably too lazy to say Jive’s goal is to be the Facebook for businesses, but that just about sums it up–offering software for social collaboration in the workplace.

That includes communications, blogging, polls, sharing and other typical kinds of social networking features, trying to give workers what they already have easy access to in their personal lives.

That includes tapping outside sources people use–including a recent integration of LinkedIn profiles and Twitter tweets.

That’s no small business, but it is also one that is rife with all kinds of competitors, big and small, all trying to solve the problem in different ways.

It’s a big marketplace to win, of course, which is why Jive brought in CEO Tony Zingale earlier this year, part of a move toward an IPO.

He is a longtime tech exec, most recently as head of Mercury Interactive, which sold to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) for $4.5 billion.

Zingale, who has moved Jive’s HQ from Portland, Ore., to Silicon Valley, has been trying to juice business, which is now 3,000 customers and 15 million users, and is aiming for $100 million in revenue run rate this year.

Zingale talked about all this and more in the video interview below, along with Kleiner partner Ted Schlein, who has joined the Jive board.

Here it is:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100820/jive-ceo-and-kleiner-moneybags-talk-about-socializing-business/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20091222/the-boomtown-movin-on-up-tour-of-twitters-new-san-francisco-hq/ http://allthingsd.com/20091222/the-boomtown-movin-on-up-tour-of-twitters-new-san-francisco-hq/#comments Tue, 22 Dec 2009 09:54:38 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=22200

Why Twitter invited BoomTown back for another visit to its latest HQ after my last one, I will never know.

But the masters of microblogging did and here is my video of the lovely new digs in San Francisco.

Designed by CEO Evan Williams’s wife, Sara, it is an understated, classy and very hip–but definitely luxe–affair, with cream, celadon, lemongrass and azure, among the soothing colors.

It also broadcasts green living, as long as there is also a pricey espresso machine present and accounted for.

Well, Twitter has raised $155 million in funding, so it is probably good for it.

A little over 100 employees toil–although it’s pretty pleasant toiling, with room for about 200 more–in offices most recently occupied by the now-banished Bebo social networking site, owned by AOL (AOL).

Well, the karma of that Web 2.0 stumble seems to have been feng-shuied out completely, as you will see below.

In fact, Twitter seems to be giving Google (GOOG) a run for its money in workplaces that treat their workforces well, which include Facebook, whose new HQ I toured this summer.

Some Twitter highlights include the same freaky pair of green deer from the company’s smaller previous HQ nearby, a Twitter employee I dubbed “Snuggie Boy,” a tricked-out DJ booth, too many giant “war rooms” to count, more bird images than that, a spate of comfy couches and a very odd but compelling stool made of wood dowels.

And, of course, a free and tasty organic lunch, which is de rigeur for Internet companies.

Oh, before I forget, also Twitter employees.

The person who drew the short straw to be my tour guide was Jenna Sampson, Twitter PR–oops, communications–staffer.

She used to work for Flickr at Yahoo (YHOO), by the way, so Sampson is definitely moving on up to a deluxe HQ in the sky.

Here is a link to video interview I did with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone too.

And here’s the office tour video:

Finally, here is my favorite version of the classic television theme song, “Movin’ on Up,” from “The Jeffersons,” appropriately done by Rhett and Link with an Apple (AAPL) iPhone Leaf Trombone app:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091222/the-boomtown-movin-on-up-tour-of-twitters-new-san-francisco-hq/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20091124/asana-gets-9-million-no-its-not-yoga-stance-its-a-new-start-up-from-former-facebookers/ http://allthingsd.com/20091124/asana-gets-9-million-no-its-not-yoga-stance-its-a-new-start-up-from-former-facebookers/#comments Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:00:07 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=21017

Yet another goofy Silicon Valley name did not prevent Asana–the workplace productivity software start-up founded by former Facebookers Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein–from nabbing $9 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

The round, which was announced today, will be used to turbocharge Asana and its small team, who are aiming at the very dull and unexciting but very large and problematic workplace collaboration and communications software market.

In Sanskrit, “asana” means “sitting down” and refers to strong but relaxed postures in yoga–so presumably, Moskovitz and Rosenstein are trying to help frustrated workers achieve a digital form of nirvana.

Former Facebooker Matt Cohler, now at Benchmark, will have a seat on the Asana board. Asana had previously raised just over $1 million in an angel round, which included a spate of Silicon Valley bigwigs.

In an interview today, Rosenstein said that solving the “friction of communications” in the workplace by innovating via “information transparency” was Asana’s goal.

But, said Rosenstein, “We are not taking existing tools and porting it over the to Web…but rethinking how people can productively work together.”

He added: “We want to change the way you manage information and how you keep everyone on the same page…there are tons of misses here everyday in the workplace and it is death by 1,000 cuts.”

Moskovitz said he was always trying to solve such issues at Facebook, the social networking site he co-founded and where he once was CTO.

Ticking off a variety of workplace collaboration tools he employed, including some newer Web-based ones such as Yammer, Moskovitz said, “We could not find any easy solution, because there is not any one that answers all your issues.”

The pair said they had working product that was being used internally at the company, but would not say when one would be released publicly.

Finding one would obviously be a magic bullet, said Benchmark’s Cohler.

“This is a really big existing problem that no one has solved,” he said.

Here’s the press release:

Asana Announces $9 Million in Funding from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz

11/24/2009

The challenge of groups of people working together effectively is fundamental to human endeavor, but the state of the art falls far short of real efficiency. Despite advances like email and wikis, the friction and overhead of communication remain acutely painful to organizations large and small. Group leaders spend an enormous portion of their time trying to keep everyone on the same page, and knowledge workers struggle daily with inadequate, disparate tools to wrangle the information they need to do their jobs.

The technical hurdles to building the right system to address these problems are immense, and the design challenges subtle and complex. The Asana team has thought deeply about these problems for many years, in leadership roles at some of the world’s best software companies. We are undertaking an ambitious project to tackle them with a vision that reimagines the way people manage information, to speed up knowledge work and communication by an order of magnitude. This is not another enterprise application suite, nor is it an ajaxification of existing desktop software concepts; it is a new kind of software product, built for the Web from the ground up, with a focus on speed, collaboration, and ease of use.

To help us build the company, we’re bringing in Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz. The partners at these firms bring a tremendous amount of experience building companies and helping entrepreneurs reach their goals. Benchmark is leading the $9 million round of funding, and Matt Cohler, with whom we already have a close, trusting relationship, will have a seat on the board. Andreessen-Horowitz is the only other VC firm participating, and we’ve already started enjoying the benefits of Marc’s and Ben’s great wisdom.

We plan to use the funding most immediately for growing our team. We’re currently mobilizing a group of world-class peers, and looking for passionate engineers and UI designers to join us. We need people to help us tackle some of the hardest software engineering and computer science problems, including developing a ground-breaking programming system that decimates the time required to build a web application end-to-end.

“When you look at the sheer talent, vision and ability to execute that Dustin and Justin demonstrated at Facebook and Google, you know something big can happen here. In addition to being two of the world’s best engineers in their own right, they have an extraordinary ability to rally teams around a vision like very few people can, and they are putting together a world-class team of people at Asana. This is a company with limitless potential.” –Matt Cohler, general partner, Benchmark Capital

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091124/asana-gets-9-million-no-its-not-yoga-stance-its-a-new-start-up-from-former-facebookers/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090504/new-york-times-we-wont-have-to-shutter-the-boston-globe-after-all/ http://allthingsd.com/20090504/new-york-times-we-wont-have-to-shutter-the-boston-globe-after-all/#comments Mon, 04 May 2009 16:10:25 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=6920 The New York Times, which had threatened to shut down the Boston Globe unless that paper’s unions agreed to major concessions, says it got what it needed from the Globe’s workers after all.

One exception: The Globe’s unionized editorial employees, who have yet to come to terms with the paper’s owner. The Times makes ominous sounds about what might happen–“evaluating our alternatives”–but nothing specific.

Last night, the Times said it was ready to file a so-called WARN Act announcing that it would shutter the Globe in 60 days unless it got the concessions it was looking for. At the outset of negotiations with the unions, the New York Times Co. (NYT) said it needed $20 million worth of cuts to keep the paper afloat; it claims the Globe, which it purchased for $1.1 billion in 1993, is on track to lost $85 million this year.

Here’s the release:

We are very pleased to have reached agreements with six of the seven unions that were involved in recent negotiations. This includes agreements with the drivers, mailers, pressmen, the electricians, machinists, and technical services group. As a result of these agreements, which are subject to ratification by union members, we expect to achieve both the workplace flexibility and the financial savings that we sought from these unions. We are not, therefore, making a filing today under the Workers Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act. We appreciate the productive and cooperative approach demonstrated by the leadership of these unions throughout these difficult negotiations.

We are disappointed, however, that we have not yet been able to reach an agreement with the Guild. Because of that, we are evaluating our alternatives under both the Guild contract and applicable law to achieve as quickly as possible the workplace flexibility and remaining cost savings we need to help put The Globe on a sound financial footing.

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