Power

Asana’s debut shows appetite for its alternative IPO path, even with a crowded market

"I feel great with where we landed," said Asana's CFO Tim Wan.

Co-founder Dustin Moskovitz

Asana, co-founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, closed trading on Wednesday at $28.80 in its public market debut.

Photo: Asana

Asana closed trading on Wednesday at $28.80 in its public market debut, up slightly from where it opened at $27. The company's entrance into the market was a test of how much investors would buy into the direct listing process and also Asana's future in a crowded work management landscape.

So far, there's clearly an appetite for both when it comes to Asana.

"I feel great with where we landed. I think our employees are happy, our new investors are happy," said Asana's CFO Tim Wan. "It's one day in many days of trading and many milestones that we'll have ahead, but I think we all feel good with the outcome and the stock has traded in a pretty tight band."

Asana had taken an alternative route to going public by pursuing a direct listing where it doesn't sell shares, following the path of Slack and Spotify. The company was already well-capitalized so it didn't feel the need to take on alternative dilution, and Wan also viewed it as a "more democratic" path since it allowed existing shareholders and employees ways to participate in the market debut without the traditional six month lockup.

He also wanted a "more efficient" price discovery process to really understand where the market priced it, Wan said.

Recent traditional tech IPOs like Snowflake's have come under criticism for their pricing, which led to massive pops on trading days. In fact, looking at 15 large tech IPOs, all but one had a pop on trading. That's led to another round of fighting over whether tech companies are "leaving money on the table" by going the traditional IPO route. Now, there's a lot of experimentation around IPO paths, from changing up traditional lockup periods to the direct listing to the new surge in SPACs, or special purpose acquisition companies that take companies public through reverse mergers.

But on Wednesday, it was the direct listings' time to shine with both Palantir and Asana going public through the direct listing. Unlike Asana, Palantir's stock fizzled out, as company insiders complained that they couldn't sell because of a software glitch.

Palantir's team was also coming to grips with the new reality of being a publicly traded business. "I'm trying to realize how much of a luxury it really was [being private], of not looking at the stock price on a daily basis," COO Shyam Sankar told Protocol after he was informed of his stock's slip, adding that he would be "maniacally and monastically [focused] on creating long-term value."

"I don't think we were planning to be on the same day, it just so happened that it's really just a coincidence," Wan said.

Despite being a crowded market, it was clear investors were interested in Asana's task management tools. Founded in 2008 by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and early Facebook employee Justin Rosenstein, the San Francisco-based startup had earned the moniker of the "anti-Facebook" for its approach to growth that was the opposite of "move fast and break things."

Twelve years later, companies like Google, Deloitte and NASA all use Asana's software to manage their to-do lists and internal projects.

But it's not without competition, and the newly public company will now have to report on a quarterly basis just where it stacks up. Its closest publicly traded competitors are apps like Atlassian-owned Trello and Smartsheet, whose stocks traded just a smidge down on Wednesday. Then there's the competition from other startups, ranging from Monday.com to Airtable, which just raised another $185 million at a valuation over $2.5 billion.

Going public doesn't change much for Asana in terms of its operations, but Wan thinks being a publicly traded company will hold more weight as it goes after bigger enterprise customers. And he views the competition as a sign of just how much opportunity there is to grow.

"It's a very green field opportunity, and we think we're the leader," Wan said. "A lot of companies view it as, 'Wow, there's 1.3 billion knowledge workers out there,' and the vast majority don't have anything for work management. So this is just a great opportunity, and we have a lot of runway for growth."

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins