Founder’s Field Guide
Episode 19 Eliminating Work About Work
Founder’s Field Guide

Episode 19: Eliminating Work About Work

Eliminating Work About Work

Dustin is the co-founder and CEO of Asana, the team-centric work management tool he started after co-founding Facebook. We cover Dustin's belief about the diminishing returns of hard work, Asana's quest to eliminate "work about work", and Dustin's investment strategy.

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[00:03:19] – [First question] – Balancing hard purposeful work and too much work that leads to burn out

[00:05:41] – What led to this way of thinking

[00:06:54] – Regulating hard work through culture

[00:08:25] – False tradeoffs and how Asana represents this

[00:09:43] – Origins of Asana

[00:13:22] – Organizing the chaos of a project

[00:18:09] – Change vs discipline of the mission

[00:19:55] – Transferring good ideas from one company to another

[00:23:19] – Instilling leverage as a concept in an early company

[00:25:21] – New learning curves in building Asana

[00:26:52] – Hardest boss battle during his time at Asana

[00:28:43] – The role of the work graph

[00:31:46] – The proliferation of the work management space and the overall landscape

[00:32:56] – The idea of radical inclusiveness

[00:36:31] – Best reasons to start a new company

[00:37:47] – What will lead to Asana’s continued success

[00:38:59] – Lessons building the product

[00:41:13] – Work with the Open Philanthropy Project

[00:43:44] – Work on pandemics and biosecurity

[00:46:11] – Where he sees the future of artificial intelligence

[00:50:47] – Kindest thing anyone has done for him

Eliminating Work About Work

Introduction

Patrick
My guest today is Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder and CEO of Asana, a team-centric product management tool used by more than 100,000 companies and organizations today. Dustin started Asana in 2008, four years after co-founding Facebook. In this conversation, we dive into Dustin's belief about the diminishing returns of hard work, the shocking amount of productivity lost in doing "work about work", and Dustin's philanthropic investment strategy around leverage and maximizing return on investment. I hope you enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with Dustin Moskovitz.

The Diminishing Returns of Hard Work

I was thinking about the most interesting place to begin this and sometimes I think of these episodes and try to come up with the title ahead of time. One idea I had for this title was the diminishing returns of hard work. Reading through Asana's history and your history, I'm really intrigued by the balance that Asana as a culture tries to create between purposeful hard work, and what we'll call too much or burnout. Can you walk me through that part of the business? I know it's a strange place to start, but it really stood out in my research and would love to hear what you've learned that you could share with us all.

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