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."

 Biz Carson

Biz Carson ( @bizcarson) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol, covering Silicon Valley with a focus on startups and venture capital. Previously, she reported for Forbes and was co-editor of Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. Before that, she worked for Business Insider, Gigaom, and Wired and started her career as a newspaper designer for Gannett.

asana direct listing ipo power
n26
Protocol | Fintech

How European fintech startup N26 is preparing for U.S. regulations

"There's a lot more scrutiny being placed on fintech. We are definitely mindful of it."

In an interview with Protocol, Stephanie Balint, N26's U.S. general manager, discussed the company's approach to regulations in the U.S.

Photo: N26

N26's monster $900 million funding round announced Monday underlined the German startup's momentum in the digital banking market.

Stephanie Balint, N26's U.S. general manager, said the funding will be used for expansion and also to improve "our core offering to make this the most reliable bank that our customers can trust," she told Protocol.

Keep Reading Show less
Benjamin Pimentel

Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Signal at (510)731-8429.

n26 neobank
sponsored content
Sponsored Content

From Home to Hybrid: Asana’s COO Shares Back-to-Office Advice on Productivity

The way we work has fundamentally changed. COVID-19 upended business dealings and office work processes, putting into hyperdrive a move towards digital collaboration platforms that allow teams to streamline processes and communicate from anywhere. According to the International Data Corporation, the revenue for worldwide collaboration applications increased 32.9 percent from 2019 to 2020, reaching $22.6 billion; it's expected to become a $50.7 billion industry by 2025.

"While consumers and early adopter businesses had widely embraced collaborative applications prior to the pandemic, the market saw five years' worth of new users in the first six months of 2020," said Wayne Kurtzman, research director of social and collaboration at IDC. "This has cemented collaboration, at least to some extent, for every business, large and small."

Keep Reading Show less
Kate Silver

Kate Silver is an award-winning reporter and editor with 15-plus years of journalism experience. Based in Chicago, she specializes in feature and business reporting. Kate's reporting has appeared in the Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic's CityLab, Atlas Obscura, The Telegraph and many other outlets.

sponsored content sponsored
apple

Apple’s new MacBooks are the future — and the past

After years of reinventing the wheel, Apple's back to just building really good ones.

Apple brought back the ports.

Photo: Apple

The 2015 Pro was, by most accounts, one of the best laptops Apple ever made. It was fast and functional, and it had a great screen, a MagSafe charger, plenty of ports, a great keyboard and solid battery life. If you walked around practically any office in Silicon Valley, you'd see Pros everywhere.

Many of those users have been holding on to their increasingly old and dusty 2015 Pros, too, because right about when that computer came out was when Apple seemed to lose its way in the laptop market. It released the 12-inch MacBook, an incredibly thin and light computer that made a bunch of changes — a new keyboard and trackpad design chief among them — that eventually made their way around the rest of the MacBook lineup. Then came the Touch Bar, Apple's attempt to build an entirely new user interface into a laptop.

Keep Reading Show less
David Pierce

David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editorial director. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.

apple computer laptop macbook pro
Protocol | Workplace

The asynchronous work revolution is here. Here’s how to join.

Hello, deep work. Goodbye, meetings.

Image: Christopher T. Fong/Protocol

Imagine a company where there are no meetings — just time for deep, focused work punctuated by short conversations on Slack and project updates on Trello.

Now imagine a company where the no-meeting ethos is so ingrained that it's possible to work there for 10 years without ever speaking face-to-face with a single coworker, and for your boss to not even recognize the sound of your voice.

Keep Reading Show less
Michelle Ma
Michelle Ma (@himichellema) is a reporter at Protocol, where she writes about management, leadership and workplace issues in tech. Previously, she was a news editor of live journalism and special coverage for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she worked as a staff writer at Wirecutter. She can be reached at mma@protocol.com.
async meetings slack tools workplace
Protocol | Workplace

#AppleToo activist says Apple fired her for deleting apps from her devices

Janneke Parrish says she was dismissed after deleting Robinhood, Pokemon Go and Google Drive from her work devices during an investigation inside the company.

The Apple Too movement is trying to organize Apple workers into a collective movement.
Photo: Bloomberg via Getty

Unlike most other companies, Apple asks that its employees use their work phones like personal ones — and for five years, Apple program manager Janneke Parrish did as she was told. But last week, when Apple asked Parrish for her devices in an internal investigation, she was afraid Apple would see her personal and private information. She disobeyed orders and deleted apps like Robinhood, Pokemon Go and Google Drive. Then Apple fired her.

Keep Reading Show less
Anna Kramer

Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (Twitter: @ anna_c_kramer, email: akramer@protocol.com), where she writes about labor and workplace issues. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.

apple workers unions
Latest Stories