Facebook Co-Founder Opens The Curtain On Two-Year Old Asana

Two years ago, when Dustin Moskovitz announced he was leaving Facebook to start a new company with fellow-Facebooker Justin Rosenstein most people thought one of two things: He’d had a falling out with Mark Zuckerberg or he was just crazy. What could be more exciting than Facebook?

Moskovitz was Zuckerberg’s college roommate and co-founder of Facebook. If you get your Facebook history from Aaron Sorkin, he was the guy coding away in silence while half-naked girls did bong hits. If you get your Facebook history from, you know, things that actually happened, Moskovitz outlasted any other co-founder and easily played one of the most pivotal roles in the company’s early years. As such, Asana will get more attention and scrutiny and maybe even hype than most business software startups.

But here’s the thing: Asana deserves it. As it turns out neither of the suppositions for Moskovitz’s decision to leave were right. Moskovitz and Rosenstein just had a really big idea: To fix how people collaborate on projects and work in teams. Something that has so far been unfixable despite billions spent on developing and implementing collaboration and communication software. Something that may be so rooted in the idiosyncrasies of human behavior that it may not be fixable.

But Asana’s opening salvo is pretty impressive. There’s a full demo of the software in the video below, from Asana’s recent friends-and-family open house, so I won’t belabor the features and screen shots here. Hear the pitch from the founders yourself. The company is still in private-beta, and it has a 1,200-company waiting list to get an invite. It’ll be opening up more over the course of this year. Asana has raised just over $10 million from several angels, Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

Asana

Asana builds enterprise-level collaboration software, or a Collaborative Information Manager. It was founded by Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook, and Justin Rosenstein, an alum of both Facebook and Google.

For their software, Asana is developing an in-house programming language called Lunascript for writing rich web applications more efficiently.

Asana has received considerable backing from Andreessen-Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, and a number of angel investors.