What are they doing for a living ? Maybe I'm blind, but I cant find their product/service description, just a list of names that ring a bell, and vague marketing stuff written by a MBA.
Are they just selling hype or doing real stuff? Where can we see it ?
Facebook is all about the flow of information in a personal setting through the use of your social graph. Apply the same thinking to business and collaboration. Sharepoint is microsoft's fasting growing product ever (more than office or windows). It's also a 10 figure revenue stream with 100 million+ users. Like most MSFT products that sell well, it absolutely sucks balls like you could not believe. I spent 2.5 years working on this problem, and it's a pretty big one. I really hope these guys tackle it and succeed to their fullest extent.
Three 30" monitors. Actually, we let you spend up to $10K on your setup, however you think best.
makes you want to take on VC money with those kind of perks. :) we have a small amount of angel money but as founder I took half salary so we could spend a few bucks on decent monitors and task chairs for the developers. they could be better but we had to cheap it this first round.
I wonder how many hours a day Asana expects developers to crunch? My guys aren't addicted to Facebook/Twitter and we don't have office distractions or other 'perks'. We work all day in the zone, and I usually cut them off at 6pm and force them to go home so they stay mentally fresh.
It's surprising how little you need for a truly good setup. Me?
* $1000 - One 30" monitor
* $2200 - One 15" Macbook Pro, fully kitted
* $100 - One DualLink DVI-DisplayPort adapter
* $1000 - One virtual development server running Linux
* $250 - Amortized cost of the build cluster
* $200 - Miscellany (keyboard, sound-dampening headphones)
That's, what, two weeks of salary at retail prices? And the only thing that really needs to be replaced on a regular basis is the Macbook -- two years should be fine.
Considering the potential productivity drop by making someone work on inferior hardware, I cannot understand why you would skimp here. I will tell you that if I ever work someplace that tries to hand me a nineteen inch monitor, or even two of them, I will shell out for my own thirty-incher and bring it to work with me.
ps. regarding the $100 DVI/display port adapter... you should check out MonoPrice. I get all my A/V gear from there and it's certainly comparable to overpriced AAPL and monster cables.
side note: reminded me why I hate office hours, being "forced" (i'm sure you don't literally force them out of the office) would drive me nuts. I find i'm really productive crazy hours. hence why i'm sat in the office at 6PM on a saturday night. on hacker news. i digress.
Asana is a pre-launch VC funded startup: I'd expect they'll trust the employees to work till they feel they're done for the day.
Seems like a killer company to work at. Amazing team. Best VCs in the business. Everyone that is anyone as an advisor. Etc.
I actually like being forced (or forcing myself) to stop working. I've never regretted stopping work to go hang out with family or friends. I have regretted missing some fun life things because something had to be done. Almost always it turns out what I was working on could have easily waited.
I actually do force them out of the office around 6-7pm because the office is my apartment and I live with my girlfriend who gets home around that time. (that doesn't mean work has to stop if they want to continue when they get home)...
I agree with you in principle, once we get office space everyone will have a key and the schedule will be a little more flexible.
I do think there is something to be said for balance however. Working 12 hours one day and only 4 the next because you're burned isn't necessarily more or less productive. The issue I have with this is that it hinges on the assumption that you can operate as a lone-wolf, and often that's just not the case... mobile, web, and product (design) are working together in unison a majority of the time. We don't have the benefit of overlap right now. There's just three of us and were just getting started so there's a lot more collaboration at this junction.
Funny you mention that. When I first read the ad, I couldn't help but feel like this was some kind of reincarnation of the spending during the dotcom boom around 2000.
I'm the co-founder of Workstax (http://www.workstax.com), a service which, from the sounds of their overview, is very similar to what these folks are going to build.
We have taken ideas from Facebook/Twitter, Reddit, and SharePoint, to build our messaging system for teams:
- from FB/Twitter, we took the idea of a Feed, Profile (and explicit support for tagging)
- from Reddit we took the idea of voting up/down to signal to the rest of the team (but we also introduced posting quotas to counter spam, and giving you the ability to use your quota to put posts/documents at the top of the feed)
- from SharePoint we took ideas about teams, documents, discussion threads, and specifically worked on search to make it better than that of SharePoint.
Interesting that they are now public. They are doing pure server-side JS from what I hear. Back in 2007-2008, they had various code reviews and/or rules to enforce completely stateless programming...they may have automated these manual checks via internal modifications to JSLint or something similar by this point.
Are they just selling hype or doing real stuff? Where can we see it ?