No matter how well you're doing, people will tell you you're not and that you're about to fail.
Even when I was leaving in 2008
the narrative was like, “This is a fad.
It's going to be replaced by these other up-and-comers.”
Later Snapchat came around.
And that gave me some armor going into entrepreneurship the second time.
Oh yeah, everyone is finding it terrible. It's never going to work.
And I just have to judge for myself and judge with the co-founder.
Welcome to the Eric Ries Show.
Today I sit down with my longtime friend Dustin Moskovitz,
one of the founders of Facebook and Asana.
Founding Facebook would be enough entrepreneurial success for many of us, but Dustin didn't stop there.
He created the company Asana, maybe the leading project management software tool in the world.
In its own way, both Facebook and Asana defined an entire era of technology startups.
First, the social media era and the SaaS era.
And in addition to a success as entrepreneur Dustin has become a significant philanthropist
working behind the scenes on countless causes, significant and many obscure.
You may not know it, but you owe a lot to Dustin.
In this episode, Dustin and I have a wideranging conversation.
We talk about what he's learned as an entrepreneur,
how he took what he learned from Facebook and applied it to Asana,
how he's built an incredible team-first employee-centric culture
how he manages his own mental health while running a publicly traded company
even what he thinks of Facebook's current state,
how he's built a value-driven culture, what he sees next in AI, and so much more.
I'm really excited to share this conversation with Dustin Moskovitz.
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Dustin, it's great to see you. Thanks for coming on.
Absolutely. It's great to see you, Eric.
Always a fun time.
Mind you start by telling me about you've been doing an interesting creative project with AI recently?
Let's start with that.
Sure. I've actually been doing a number of creative projects with AI
and feel like I have this new access to a bunch of creative tools that weren't available to me before
including things like Midjourney, and Dall-E, that allowed me to actually draw on paint
and a skill I didn't have at all, but especially with writing.
And there are a lot of workload I do day to day where
I take just some ideas and I draw out some bullet points and
then I work with an AI to build it out into a strategy memo or a discussion doc.
and it's particularly good at this more generative creative aspect.
I'm talking about Asana functionality and then I want a customer use case.
You struggle a lot with that. at least I do, partially because
I know some, but maybe I don't have permission to talk about them and
while I know our internal Asana use cases, but you don't want to talk about your own use cases.
You want to talk about somebody else's.
And Claude can just do a better job within those constraints and
give you something, pretty rich and detailed.
Okay, so let me take you back because, frankly there aren't that many people on this planet
that have started a multi-billion dollar company let alone two of them.
And I want to just, first of all
I would like to just give you a chance to reflect on that process, you've been at this long enough.
I don't know what it feels where people are trying to talk to me, especially
AI founders talk to me about the social media era and how it went and
the SaaS era and how it went.
How does it feel to have been kind of a leader of iconic companies now?
I mean that this is long enough that multiple of these companies have become iconic
companies of define an entire era of entrepreneurship.
Yeah, it is really interesting because my story is, people kind of project on this idea that
I've been at Facebook for 20 years and then I recently started Asana.
and the reality is there was Bush in the White House the last time I worked in Facebook.
and that was a much different company than we have now.
It was just at the very beginning of news feed.
But, well before, maybe Instagram acquisition was right as I was leaving,
but before Instagram and WhatsApp and Oculus
and the empire that has since been built is totally after my time.
And even in the last year I was at Facebook, I was working on internal communication tools and not product.
It's a little weird to get credit for building that behemoth when really I built a particular app
that was important and it's honestly not even that important to their strategy anymore.
And then almost my entire career has been building Asana.
And I think of myself as a SaaS CEO first and foremost used to do stuff in consumer.
I got to ask, how do you feel about how the empire is unfolded?
If you think about year of you, the original intention the founders had for Facebook and what it's become?
Yeah, it's interesting.
There are a lot of things I really quite love.
It's no secret. I'm a big fan of Threads, for example.
I think, in some ways I think Threads will do a better job of realizing the real potential
the vision we had at the beginning of a global connected community,
whereas Facebook ended up more in little silos.
I think most of the activity that still exist on Facebook happens in groups.
So it's a lot more like Reddit than people understand.
They go to their news feed and they're, where's all the content?
Well, it's in the groups. And there are a lot of groups are actually quite good and active
but it's not the same thing as the one global conversation like people experienced on Twitter.
and I think that's quite valuable and I have some of the most interesting conversations I've ever had were there.
And now we're seeing that rebuilt of Threads, this is phenomenal.
Thank you Zuck, thank you team for building this.
That's really great. I really love the Quest.
I know there's a lot of strong opinions on it, but I think it's just a quite good device
and I've been able to do valuable things with it, like starting to learn playing piano,
Quest, our stuff, I think it's really cool.
And then, of course, there's been a lot of controversy and it's been tough watching that.
In a lot of cases, I think, Facebook is misunderstood and a lot of cases,
I think they're really just running up against the reality of having something really powerful
that has consequences that are hard to predict and hard to manage,
and that's been tough to watch.
I can see it both ways.
Mostly I think the problems are really big and really hard,
and they do a pretty good job with them, considering.
I've heard you say that because opinion about them is
so polarized, they're in a lot of no-win situations.
Yeah, totally.
A lot of the controversies that were talking about are about content moderation,
and there can be a feeling reading the news of everyone disagrees with Facebook and
therefore it's obvious what Facebook should do, and there's a trick going on
there because actually everyone disagrees with Facebook in different directions.
Some people want more content moderation. Some people want less.
And there's not actually anything they could do that would resolve that.
And right now they're just kind of somewhere in the middle, and it's multi-dimensional,
there can be proto-efficient wins and things that. I think they look for them.
but mostly I think they're caught between a rock and a hard place
and Congress doesn't agree on what they should do because the public doesn't agree either.
and I don't think people appreciate quite how difficult a situation that is as a company.
Yeah. So Asana is, another one of these overnight successes,
10 years in the making, where you've been working on it longer than people realize.
And I wonder if you could take us back to the founding of Asana.
You had the experience of the rocket ship of Facebook and
the lessons that you learned from that and you got your chance to kind of really
start from scratch with a new company, new ethos
new philosophy, all those learnings pile into it.
So, just tell us a little bit about the story of how you started
the company and what in particular you had in mind is your intention for what you wanted the company to become?
Oh, yes, this is a big question. We have to unpack it into a few.
No problem.
The founding of Asana starts with Justin and I solving the problems of collaboration inside our own teams.
And there's a history of him doing that at Google before he came to Facebook.
And then when he came to Facebook, we started collaborating on it to help coordinate, especially the R&D
teams of Facebook, but also teams across the entire company.
And we ended up building a number of internal tools for this,
one of which was effectively a collaborative work management system Asana,
but there were also other things.
So, project management system
discussion and decision-making tool, a suite of ideas.
And we came to feel that what we called the Tasks system was
the most interesting of these and the most novel and that we had implemented it in a different way.
And at the time, there were a couple of competitors.
There was YouTrack, Basecamp, Jira, but they're still pretty new.
I mean, this is 2006-2007.
And vast majority of people just used spreadsheets and documents and whiteboards
and meetings and on email threads.
And this sort of database way of thinking about communication
really changed what was possible, how effective it was,
and how you could align around shared source of truth about who was doing what by when.
So, we eventually decided this was not a Facebook-specific thing.
This was a universal problem and we left Facebook to build it out for real.
We didn't take that internal tool.
We just started it over and thought about the basic vision of trying to make collaboration as effortless as possible.
And that led to the product vision, but it also led us to think a lot about corporate culture
and what makes the softer parts of collaboration effortless as well,
because a lot of it is just the messiness of human communication and conflict.
And we not only sat down and thought about product design or architecture and
things like that, but also things like our values and
investing in communication practices, like non-violent communication from Marshall Rosenberg.
Honestly, we recruited you as an advisor because we wanted to adopt the startup methodology.
We cared a lot.
One of the things that Facebook did really well, I think was a
focus on leverage, which I think comes across in Lean Startup
and that became a big part of how we thought what is the most impactful thing
we could be doing with our time and the product and with our purpose.
and just tried to, start building a culture that was built to last,
because we were trying to engage with all of that stuff, head on.
and then using some of the product principles to reinforce it.
So, for example,
we work with Conscious Leadership Group, they're great.
They have a bunch of practices for how teams collaborate,
and one of them is just really having clarity around decision rights
and clarity which is similar to clarity around ownership
and also the inverse of that is taking responsibility for thanks.
And one of the outcomes you get in Asana is
if you use it this way, you have very clear assignment and you have very clear due dates
and that creates a clear expectation between you and your manager about what's expected.
And a lot of the conflict that happens in those polarized relationships is just as simple as that.
I thought you were going to do this thing by Friday and you didn't.
I thought this was the priority and you did something else instead.
And just by using Asana, you can avoid some of those landmines.
And then if you hit them, then we'll also try and help you with the communication aspect of it.
And only some of that exists in Asana right now, but I have plans to build quite a lot more.
Oh yeah.
What I think characterized that approach was
just a very unusually long-term perspective about what you were trying to do,
which I think reflected a certain confidence that you and Justin had
that these things were not going to be a distraction,
but were going to be the foundation for a really strong company.
And I'm just curious where that confidence came from and if you ever had doubts about it as you were doing it.
Oh, has an entrepreneur ever had doubts?
No, Eric, just have one foot in front of the other.
It's like I read that written in that book or that TV show or in the movie, right?
Because everything just works out.
Yeah, well, I'll answer the question about is it a distraction, second,
but one of the lessons I took away from Facebook is that
no matter how well you're doing, people will tell you you're not and that you're about to fail.
Even when I was leaving in 2008
the narrative was like, “This is a fad.
It's going to be replaced by these other up-and-comers.”
Later Snapchat came around.
I mean, even in 2012 around the IPO it was like this.
There's this huge depth and it's always thinking into Facebook.
And, now they seem, 20 years on, they seem to be seen as a going concern.
And that gave me some armor going into entrepreneurship the second time.
Oh yeah, everyone is finding it terrible. It's never going to work.
And I just have to judge for myself and judge with the co-founder.
but I take for granted that that will not match reality, it's just going to happen regardless.
And, I think a lot of the hard work of entrepreneurship is really managing your own psychology.
This is something Ben Horowitz says, I think.
It's the number one job of CEO and I think that's right.
And, I also think a lot about how you integrate work into your life in healthy ways and
find boundaries and just try and invest a lot of time
into my own physical health and mental health because
it's the easiest way for the company to die.
I burn out or I get discouraged and my psychology gets bitter at me.
That's just really critical.
And then why did we have confidence?
Well, for one, we had seen a prototype system deployed
and we saw it working and we saw how good it was.
And I think that's just something a lot of entrepreneurs don't
get to have, and but it's really nice if you can.
It's we basically we proved product market fit before we started the company.
Poor-related product, again, not the
same code, not the same UI...
To give you a conviction.
Yeah, not to give us conviction.
And then why would it not be distractions?
we had a really important design principle based on our observation of the other tools, which was
this had to be not only the team collaboration product, but also the individual productivity platform.
because what was happening is a system
some of the older systems and some of the systems today, they're
just too high friction to get a piece of work into the system.
And you only do it when you have a big enough piece of work to warrant it
like you're building a house and then you need gantt charts.
And this results in basically having a centralized project management team
that is running those systems and then everyone else has something else.
They've got a, a legal pad on their desk.
They've got sticky notes on their monitor. They've got a vim file, if they're an engineer.
and the PMO is basically trying to
synchronize that status information into the centralized repository.
and then it's always out of date.
They've got it for one minute when they first hear it directly from the engineer
and then they've got to talk to the engineer again to get a status update.
But Asana is built to be your personal command center.
It opens up into my tasks, not into the team page or the project page
and we had a design goal of faster than Notepad, faster than them, which
sounds hard because they're just text boxes, but you can enter
a line into Asana, press enter, enter a new line, press enter
and then something you can't do in those text editors is you can re-order them with keyboard shortcuts.
You can select multiple and do batch actions like adding a follower, changing due data or assignee.
And that's how you get to faster than Notepad for an individual productivity system.
And then as a byproduct, you're collaborating with people, you're able to organize it
into projects and portfolios and goals you get this shared collaborative structure.
It's also a problem, by the way, in a lot of the document systems is
people are reinventing their hierarchy and fighting over it.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I remember even in early days and I wonder if this is still true.
One of the hard things about getting people that try Asana
and I'm sure there's people who are listening who have tried it
because they think they know what a task management system is
and they know it's bad and cumbersome and annoying.
and it's actually very challenging to explain
that once you try something where they fit and finish where the attention to detail is
as it should be where speed and the single player mode is really good.
People don't go back after they've made that switch, but getting them to switch initially is kind of a challenge.
That's totally right.
And in fact, we screwed it up because we missbuilt our architecture
and getting and had to rebuild it and kind of the 2015 to 2017 time frame.
And we were not meeting the design principle for a while and it was very sad.
It was frustrating and we lost some customers then and I'm sure we
lost a lot of first impressions that we made poorly.
And if you used Asana then and it felt slow to you, I definitely encourage you to come back to try again.
I mean, it really is quite an engineering accomplishment
and a UI design accomplishment apart from its other many virtues.
Thank you.
The reason I was asking about the distraction and the commitment to those values from the beginning is
I think there's kind of a narrative floating around in entrepreneurial circles that doing the nice stuff,
the soft values, treating people with respect, being responsible and being a trustworthy counterpart.
It's like almost that's wishy-washy or it's almost that's for nonprofits.
If you were want to really compete and create value, you should be a ruthless exploiter
and there's kind of a macho, I don't know, swash buckling ethos about
so, work as hard as you can, work your people under the ground.
That's how you create value. That's how you make money.
And anyone who's talking about something else, doesn't understand that.
And, you obviously built Asana in a totally different way.
And what's interesting to me is I don't really, I mean, it's a very heart centered
approach to break compassionate approach, but I don't really see it as a weak approach.
In fact, it's been an incredibly value creating approach.
And I don't know that you could have sustained this level of ambition and therefore,
some of the things you're talking about took a really long time to build out and to accomplish.
I don't think it would have been possible if you had gone kind of the conventional way.
I'm curious how you react to this idea that is like
treating people with respect, you taking your responsibility seriously is
a sign of weakness or somehow it takes away from value creation.
Yeah, I mean I think that the right way to think about this.
Is it Simon Sinek that wrote The Infinite Game?
Yup, I'll add a link in the show note story.
Okay. These are repeated interactions
and you can be successful in the short run, but eventually your reputation kick catches up.
I am surprised at how long it can take
but there has been a lot of eventual justice and eventual karma lately.
and I think we can improve on how long it takes to.
I think this is partly a journalism issue. It's partly a governance issue,
but ultimately people eventually see who is a good and trustworthy business partner and who isn't.
So, for example
there was recently a well-known company that went through an acquisition and
post-acquisition, the new owner stopped paying vendors. Just existing legal contracts.
There's no ambiguity about whether they continue to need to be paid by the new owner.
And I saw this as a vendor, and said, well, that's crazy.
Why don't we give advanced terms to a company like that
at least until they show that they're able to operate more normally, which then eventually happened?
And that's a very quick cycle of there are consequences. If you don't honor your contracts.
Another one from the same company is they violated the SEPA agreements of the old employees.
And now if you're a new employee signing, you shouldn't trust those contracts at all.
They don't mean anything.
And, maybe that's fine.
Maybe the company doesn't care about the employee trusting
but I think it has real consequences for them when you're talking about when
you're trying to compensate them with employee equity, especially, because
if it's a private company, for example, and you have constraints on
whether they can sell on secondary markets if they're an alumni versus a current employee,
then I think it is rational for those people to be like, I should just assume this equity doesn't exist.
Only my cash comp exists.
If I get lucky, I'll be able to turn the equity into liquidity.
And I think a lot of companies in the 2010s we're doing this in other ways.
They're just staying private for 15 or 20 years and
had transfer restrictions and all that sort of stuff.
And if you don't meet employees on the other side
with the commitment of, we're restricting you
but we're going to help you get the liquidity that you were promised because this is part of your compensation.
Then eventually it becomes really hard for you
to hire the that next round of people and the pressure is building and
people are discounting their compensation and the way you're going to have to fix that
in the short run is with cash, which will create a burned problem.
And, basically these are all various
stories and how I think it's shortsighted to operate that way.
but the lesson that some people have taken away is it works while it works.
And you can fool some of the people a lot of the time.
and that's very frustrating for me to see that it seems as much as it does.
But I see how the reputation builds,
and how it becomes a problem and how you get into a corner
where all of a sudden you need a $400 million bond and nobody trusts you with that kind of thing.
and it can cause much bigger problems for you and let you know what that reference is about.
But yes I do.
Yes, I know exactly all these stories you're referring to, but I feel we'll let it go...
Or say ten billion to build out your auto company.
No, the karma is real.
But I guess, apart from there's the negative side
of you burn your reputation and I know I've
had plenty of VCs, especially telling me so what as long
as we cash out before the reckoning it's still over. This is model.
I mean, I had somebody, a very prominent VC tell me the other day that their
explicit advice they give to entrepreneurs is squeeze all the value out you
can before you take your company public and let the public have the burned out husk
because once you go public, your ability to innovate and
it's the end which just a very sociopathic antisocial perspective, but also,
I don't think it's really good advice if your goal is to really accomplish something in this world.
Yes, you could make money in the short term.
But I mean, I think funny you mentioned founder mental health as a main
it's a critical responsibility.
I know of sure you do too, quite a lot of people who
have had nominal success with their entrepreneurial career
made you know quite a lot of money and are totally miserable because
of the compromises that they had to make along the way.
So maybe, talk a little bit about the positive side of this.
Like that's the negative side of it.
If you do this, if you behave in this short term way, you're going to regret it.
But talk a little bit about, for Asana and for other companies that you counseled or invested in and
talk about the ways in which trustworthiness is an asset that allows you to accomplish your goals.
Well, let's go there because I just want to understand the VC thing
because you said it's not a good strategy if your goal is to accomplish something, but is the goal that?
No, clearly not.
VCs definitely very much, listen, if I get my money in and out,
I mean this person made a fortune on crypto, you won't be surprised to know
on projects that ultimately delivered no value to the world
but, they got in and got out with good timing and
they're everyday praise in the press for their savvy for pulling off this deception.
But I guess the founders that they're counseling, I think generally have different goals.
I mean, I'm sure you have the occasional scam,
true scam aren't as to the entrepreneurial fold, but most founders that I meet
have some kind of sincere desire to accomplish something with their life
and they've started a company not just to make money or maybe not even primarily to make money,
but because as you did, they see,
there's a problem with the way that work is done by human beings and have a vision that could be better.
And for them to sacrifice that vision on the altar of a quick buck
is actually kind of painful to watch, and lead to a lot of regret.
Yeah, totally. You just have to keep in mind that they have misaligned in sentence with these VCs
because the VCs only care about what happens up to the IPO.
These VCs. That's not to all VCs.
Certainly not.
And as an entrepreneur, you should not take what they're saying at face value.
It's not necessarily good advice for you.
And I also think there's a problem where you don't necessarily know
how your VC is going to act until you are a public company.
And in the meantime, they've raised four funds, and four new generations of companies.
And again, there's this reputational issue of the facts don't come out until very late.
And it's kind of too late for it to feed back into self-cracking the system.
and I hope it eventually does, but I don't know for sure.
And again, I think that there is a role for the legal system here.
I mean, crypto is almost like a,
what's the word for a comical drawing?
Character?
Crypto is a caricature of the sociopathic behavior, just totally attractive.
I heard there was like a new crypto offering where they literally said
they were going to rug pull at the beginning and it spiked by 40%
and they're great we want to be in on that red rug pull
and it's nobody's trying to do anything here, create value.
We reckon such practices. I mean, there's one obviously in the news at the moment where
its prospectus is just we intend to defraud our investors and let's lease them for their money.
and it's like somehow we've lost the thread
because this scam is being disclosed. It's okay?
It's really, I think we've actually gotten really confused in
our governance of our society about what are we trying to accomplish with these businesses?
And I think this is a legal issue.
I think most reasonable people would be, this is predatory behavior
and it should be illegal, just like certain kind of telemarketing
and that will happen.
and there may be a lot more of that legal nuance that
we should be exploring with bucks.
and I'm hopeful, but it won't happen quickly.
but crypto is like the most perverse version of this.
And I'm two minds on the psychology part because
I do worry that some of these people are sort of genuinely sociopaths in the psychological sense
in which case they don't actually feel guilt or remorse. That's the definition.
And I'm not convinced they retire, and lament how they wasted their career
or anything like that and feel bad about it. Maybe they're just sociopaths.
but if you're not a sociopath, that is going to happen. You're going to feel guilty.
and you should be careful not to use sociopaths as role models
because they may actually be a different kind of human than you.
And if you're, a more normal human,
there are many positive mental health aspects to doing things with purpose.
In fact, I have felt this even in the past few weeks
where I was sort of unsure about Asana vision
I directionally knew where were going and I was excited about it and trying things.
but then in the past few weeks, it just all crystallized, and became super clear what was important.
And that has been so useful for me because now I'm going into meetings
I'm just like, this is not the important thing. I'm going to leave. I delegate more.
Roadmap ideas come up and I'm just like, that's a good idea,
but it's not as good as this other idea and we're not going to do it.
and it's just become a lot easier and a lot easier for my health.
I'm just not second guessing everything.
That's great, you have it that clear.
Yeah, it's a great feeling when you have it.
and then actually having the collaboration be effortless is also a great feeling because
the work about work is part of what makes work miserable.
And a big part of our vision was improving the
individual subjective experiences of knowledge workers at work.
And I think we're really living up to it and have a lot more that we can do.
and I think that will have positive mental health aspects for people.
Hope it doesn't make it easier for the sociopaths to cooperate.
We can talk about how to address that as well.
But, there's a lot of personal benefits to clarity of purpose.
There's also obviously a lot of personal and interpersonal benefits
to being able to communicate well and resolve conflict, and not have that sort of a thing
that's between you, and it's an energy vampire in every conversation.
And honestly, we work with Conscious Leadership Group at Asana
also, basically I work with it in my marriage.
Cari is quite trained on it and it's just our natural language. We're working through conflict.
You know about the line, below the line, you on the geometry angle right now.
And our marriage is never better. It's great.
Yeah, so just a lot of positive benefits, I think, from being well grounded and
having coherence to your culture and values and integrity.
I think part of what happens psychologically is anxiety comes from that decoherence,
like something in my brain isn't fitting well with something else in my brain.
and individual practices are meant to restore coherence from the individual
and our team practices are meant to restore coherence for the team,
and Asana, the system is meant to try and do it for the entire organization.
It's really interesting you pick those two words coherence and integrity
because when I've been, developing this new theory of corporal government we talked about it many times
to really put human flourishing at the center of the purpose of a corporation.
And one of the things I've noticed is that people are really confused about what the purpose of governance is.
What are we trying to accomplish when a company is well governed and
there's even people who think governance and operations are two separate and separable disciplines.
And so you get these really incoherent outcomes.
So, to me, the two critical dimensions at that organization level, a well-functioning culture
and a well-designed governance system is that coherence.
We have alignment of the stakeholders, alignment between employees and
customers, our business model is aligned with our customers' best interests.
The economics are aligned with what our investors seek
and we find our own little bubble of utopia that we're trying to grow and expand.
I think about the bubble of utopia.
It's when the company is successful, we literally transmute more of the world into utopia.
Like we actually make the world better, not in some abstract activist way,
but like in the way of we literally transform it into a different form of human embracions.
An integrity is simply the dimension to which we can be influenced or
not knocked off course by outside factors in this thinking about structural integrity as well as, personal integrity.
The promises we make are kept.
And even if you had to take an extended absence, if you were ill,
or something, God forbid, the company would preserve its purpose and mission.
It wouldn't just, fall apart at the first sign of adversity.
And I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about the steps you've taken as
a leader to structure the company such
that it has both coherence and integrity.
One thing is we have the Asana map for the work.
And this literal thing you're talking about of someone leaves or perhaps someone joins,
would normally happens if you're not using a system Asana is
that they go through an onboarding process, and go to lectures
and then they have a manager or mentor that's showing them the work.
And it's easy to just have a lot of things lost in translation
there and you onboard materials go out of date and things like that.
And in the Asana world, you come into the team workspace
and you can see just here are the goals.
Here's the next milestone. Here's what my teammates are working on.
And it's much easier to jump in without say
having to create some new starter project on the sides.
You have your own little sandbox to learn in.
And then similarly when somebody leaves
hopefully it's a mutual conversation and, and they hand off work,
but inevitably they're going to hand off work and the former just reassigning tasks.
and then all that history of the prior conversations
and the assets and how decisions were made is all right there.
And it's there not only for the stuff they're working on, but anything in the company.
And you can be a new employee in Asana, and you can just go spunk in 2014 conversations
and see how our values came to be and exactly like these six of them.
What was the B.2. and reconstruct any decision you warrant.
And then of course, we also have Google Doc and discussion culture
and same thing, just less structured.
And that's part of what we do, too, is in recruiting you want people to really rock the company
not because they need to homogeneously fit into it, but they need to be compatible.
and then, there will be some self-, what's the word?
Yeah, self-selection,
into trying to make the company a bit more like itself because people are joining who are like it.
But it's not going to really be like that because there's still going to be heterogeneity
and people coming from different cultures and bringing in their own practices.
And we're always evolving but we want to be continuing to evolve
in a continuously apparent way to as much as we can.
And I also have a pretty strong point of view that a lot of companies try and resist.
I often get the question, how do you scale your culture?
I'm just like, I'm not trying to scale this culture. I just want to actively steer it.
but we should embrace the change.
In fact, we recently hired some new gold market executives from Salesforce
and there's been a lot of fear internally about that. Are we becoming more like Salesforce?
And I'm like, yeah, that was the point they know the things we don't.
and it's just a different mindset to evolve in culture, but you have to be very grounded
in what is most important to preserve while your mission, your values
everything else I think is scaffolding this way.
How do you preserve those things?
Well, I know it's the same things we've been talking about.
It's the slow boring parts, right?
And it's a lot of storytelling and a lot of correcting and maybe you have to correct about hires
or, manager director makes an exception somewhere
that was out of line with the values and you got to not let that cut scar.
It's easy for things to set precedent.
And then all of a sudden, one manager made an exception
here to or values or a policy and other
managers see that's a thing you can do.
You got to pick your battles, but some of those battles are very much worth fighting.
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I'm going to make sure I give credit to the right person.
I can't remember now who I originally heard this concept for, but
there's this idea called the Culture Bank, basically when I create a strong culture.
You have to adopt a very simple rule, which is there's going to be these moments in the company's life
when somebody has to make a decision that's for the customer's benefit at the expense of the company or
has some short term pain and some sacrifice in defense of value.
And whenever you do that, that's you're making a deposit in the culture bank.
You do the reverse, it's you're making a withdrawal a simple
advice that he gave me was only make deposits, never make withdrawals.
You're going to say just have a surplus, but
if you just have that rule that's never appropriate to do that, just don't do it.
Of course, people still make mistakes, but it's just as an intention
you say, look, that's how you build a strong culture.
Does that resonate with you?
Yeah, actually, I often tell a very similar story with respect to trust
which is like you build trust by putting one ball in the jar at a time
but whenever you lose trust, you just turn the jar over and throw out.
And there is like offense defense and balance here for sure.
I've been likening it to the flow state.
You can get into it as an individual, extremely difficult to get into easy to get out of.
And there's an organizational version of that.
Just tell me what it's to work in a company that's in that flow state.
Most people have never experienced it. You've gotten to live it for many years now.
Well, it's interesting because I think
my subjective experience is
I'm like constantly battling in between.
and we're living it, but it's only some of the time.
And, I don't even have the good sense of how consistent it is.
When some things happen in a meeting that I'm in and
I'm like oh wow, this was not the flow state I wanted.
I'm like, this was with the CEO.
Like people don't even understand that they need to do it a certain way with me,
what's happening in all the meetings I'm not in...
That's very wise.
Yeah, so I don't want to be too pessimistic, but the thing I have in mind here
that I think is really works against flow is readout meetings.
They know what a readout meeting is, because at most companies it's all kind of meeting they have.
Yeah, it's the only kind of meeting you have.
If somebody comes with a slide deck or a document and they're basically reading a bunch of facts to you.
and the most perverse version, they're literally reading what is on the slide verbatim.
It's the worst way to run a meeting.
and I think the right way to run a meeting is you just send that as a pre-read.
Everybody reads it on their own.
and then you have a discussion in the meeting and
the discussion is where flow happens and where progress happens.
And I have been surprised how often I find myself in a readout meeting,
no matter how hard I push on it.
I'm just going to keep pushing on it because I think it's important.
And it's a big unlock because I also think they're slow
and not having value and there's a better way.
There's a smart way as one saying in our corporate marketing.
and I'm still motivated to fix it,
and also just, it's a lot.
and then, when I'm in flow, it's with the people who have been here the longest, they know me the best.
They know my modes of working and how to talk to me
and when to come to me with certain kinds of requests.
and, it's like being in a great relationship or a friendship
or as I just say in a band or something, where you're just really in harmony with people
and, it feels really good.
It feels like co-creation.
There's been this whole this conversation about so-called stakeholder capitalism and ESG and a lot of this is like
I think it's well-intentioned, but very vague,
almost you just kind of compromised between the stakeholders or
I just feel you're, oh, a little food, a little poison, you don't want too much of one or the other.
And it's, nah, that doesn't make sense.
Whereas I feel like when you started the company, even from the very beginning,
had almost a fanatical devotion to your employees and their experience and just its idea
that if you made that commitment to them, if you were a trustworthy employer they would return that.
They would reward the company with a lot of benefits.
So can you just talk a little bit about,
I know Asana showing up on Best Places to Work lists
way earlier the most startups are even in there, where I could ever conceivably qualify for such a thing.
It's just you got a long track record of being very employees-centric,
and I always got the sense it was, yes, it's part of your personal approach and how you would people to be treated,
but it's also a critical part of the company strategy. So, just you talk about that?
Yeah, I think you said it earlier of, I think it's good business.
And, so, when employees feel well taken care of, and also,
we were talking earlier about when they have clarity of expectations from the manager, things like that,
they have higher engagements, which means they have lower attrition.
They do better work.
One of the things Asana does is it helps you see which work is most important
it's not just that they're doing more work or working harder,
but they're working in a more focused directed way when you pointed at the right goals.
and you get into the flow state more often.
Whereas if you're in a high conflict relationship
with your employees, you're in flow state less often.
And you have lower engagement and higher attrition.
and these things have business consequences.
One thing I've found talking to a lot of people kind of steeped in conventional business culture is
when I talk to them about it, and I've pitched them the Asana way of working on many occasions
because it's a touchdown for me in how to run a company.
People often look at me and they're like, “Oh man, business is already so hard.
And now you want me to do extra, and that sounds it's even more. I got to do conscious communication.
I got to treat my employees well, and I got to be good to my customers
and create products that are actually at high quality.
It seems so hard. Business is already too hard.”
And I often tell them, look, maybe if you consider the possibility
that maybe the reason you find business hard is because nobody trusts you.
If they trusted you, maybe you wouldn't have to over-communicate 92,000 times
the strategy that your employees don't even understand
let alone doesn't resonate with them in a deep level, would you be willing to try it?
And they hear and I tell them stories about companies like Asana and others
that I feel like do have a totally different experience of being in the company
not to say that it's easy to build a company.
I know it's been quite a challenge at many times, but the problems
that you experience are different than what other people experience.
You swim in that water. You may not even appreciate how rough it is out there.
I'm just wondering if that resonates with you.
That idea that in some ways kind of counter-intuitively harder is easier.
You hold yourself to a higher standard, you make the investment to do things right
and you actually get these counter-intuitive benefits
that then make life easier when you're trying to accomplish something important.
I mean, I think you made the whole pitch, but...
Well, thank you.
No, I think that's right. And I guess I just want to start by saying the time trade-off.
That was real. That's hard for us too. That's hard for me day to day.
and you have to...
It's hard to invest in it until you've reaped some of the rewards and
you're like, okay, your mind learns.
If I do this thing, this conversation's going to go better.
If I ground in goals with the team and build some buy in, the project's going to execute better.
Well just like the marbles in the jar, right?
Like it's just you keep emptying it all the time.
You never find out what it's to have a full jar.
Totally. And I think this is, again, I to relate the team psychology and the personal psychology.
This is really at the root of a lot of anxiety and actually lower back pain too.
I don't know if you know the Arno stuff, but basically a lot of anxiety and back pain
comes from people not feeling their feelings and repressing emotion.
And the Arno theory is basically your your body is trying to express this thing.
And it's doing it by constricting your oxygen flow on your lower back.
And the way that I solved my back pain, well, I did multiple things,
but one of the bottom and the way I've heard from a lot of other people,
is basically just by doing the inner work and processing my emotions,
and feeling my feelings all the way through.
and I was actually having this experience a few weeks ago
where some stuff was happening in the world, my life, and I was just in a really bad place.
I kind of burnt out and just spent a weekend
just fully dedicated to, I did like a long meditation and I haven't meditated in six months,
but I did like a 40 minute meditation, did some yoga, and
I did some emotional work, which I won't get into and just felt so much better after.
I just needed to lean into it rather than
try and work around it or compartmentalize.
And I think the same is true for teams.
They are compartmentalizing their conflict and that's causing our back pain.
Yeah, the organizational equivalent of those pains is very severe,
you get used to it, you don't even realize that it's there anymore.
I appreciate you being honest and you always have been, in
your leadership style, just about the spiritual dimension, the interpersonal dimension of work.
And I'll be just really honest.
When I first encountered these ideas and that idea that they're going to somehow make my life better,
I was extremely skeptical and I hadn't experienced it myself. I would be...
Isn't your wife a coach?
Yeah, I mean, I got a long, long exposure to them
and I have found it well, worth my time.
But I think it's important.
I still meet people all the time for whom these ideas are new.
And it just sounds like you go to a typical MBA program and they teach them
corporate finance and they teach them, modern portfolio theory and
theory of merges and acquisitions and there's a missing interpersonal dimension,
except by the way, at the very best school.
And I just wonder for those that are experiencing this with skepticism for the first time
do you have a go-to resource that you recommend or how people want to start learning about that?
is there an accessible place that you're telling to begin?
Well, I really like “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership.”
I think it's a very easy read.
I'm only a third of the way through it, but Tim Ferriss's answer is this book “Awareness.”
it's a pretty short read, but it's certainly more spiritual, but it's also very funny
and there's a live audience that's responding to it on the Audible version. That's really good.
I like Brené Brown's work, like “Dare to Lead”?
It would be a particularly good one or her Netflix special, which
I think of it as a comedy special that is also very accessible.
That's probably the best answer.
If you want to do laugh and have a good time, and learn some really deep things,
watch Brené Brown's Netflix special or her TED Talk kind of started at all.
Let me switch gears a little bit because, you're well known
because of your work at Facebook and your work at Asana,
but you've also been a really important philanthropist
and one who doesn't seek the public limelight, which I think is really interesting
and for that I mean, most people don't know this,
but I've gotten to witness the work you've done behind the scenes is helping so many.
I could do you a whole episode just on all the people that you have helped
get their things started or made it a critical investment or back them.
And unlike almost anybody else, never demanded the credit for it
don't feel the need to impose your will on the thing
you really have supported them and allowed them to flourish.
I think it's an awesome way to use the privilege and the power that you have.
I was called the other day by a journalist who were doing a profile of you.
We chatted about it, but I tryied to get him to use this quote, he didn't use it in the piece.
I'll tell it to you and see what you think.
It didn't occur to me until I was talking to him about it.
He was just asking me to kind of make sweeping generalizations
about your life, as these as these folks do.
And one of the things I realized was that you've been right about a lot of stuff,
big important issues that, talk about being a contrarian,
you were the first person to ever talk to me about the importance of preparing for pandemics
long before COVID, that was before, I think even SARS COV-1, let alone the one we just left through.
You were totally right about what was going to happen in AI.
You were the person who gave me the heads-up at this massive society level changes,
happening. I could do it all day.
There've been many things like that, where you've done the work to find out the thing that needs to be done
and gotten serious about it at a time when nobody else was interested in that was a niche weird topic
and now it's something that everyone's going around taking credit for how smart they were.
and I was saying to this journalist, if you were a different person in your position
who spent a lot more time on your own publicity,
there'd be a hundred you'd be lauded as a super genius. I've been right about all this stuff
because there's plenty of people who've been half right about one thing
and they milked it for 10 years that's the thing that they've become famous for,
and I wanted to get into what's your process for getting into these topics
and going deep on them before it's a consensus thing that's something that's interesting
because I feel like it reflects a level of intellectual curiosity, and rigor that is frankly unusual.
I'm curious if you're willing to talk about that.
Yeah, unfortunately, I may have to depedestal myself a bit here
because I don't actually think I came up with any of that.
I think it was entirely Open Philanthropy
and it's because it's their strategy to just try and
almost find the alpha in knowledge or find the alpha in doing good opportunities.
The pandemic thing is really depressing from our point of view because this was no secret.
It wasn't for, SARS one, there had been plenty of pandemics.
Ebola virus, the Obama administration was on this before COVID-19.
And just the problem was the rationality
not only of the government, but I think of the public.
I think Congress defunded that stuff because they were representing the American view,
which is you don't plan ahead for disasters. You just provide relief for them.
and you just see the disaster is an act of God that can't be mitigated.
And that is the real insight, which just seems very obvious to me
and applies across all of our global catastrophic risk work.
and then once you have that pattern you just apply the pattern over and over.
And AI risk for me was a long journey.
I sound like a Cassandra now, but
it's because everyone else sounded like a Cassandra to me 10 years ago
and I just kept engaging with the conversation and trying to really understand it,
and really understand what they were saying.
And I came up with a bunch of what I think of as the strawman rebuttals to AI,
we'll keep it in an air gaps location
like we won't hook it up the critical clinic infrastructure.
Like all these things that I now see is just totally nonsensical and not viable at the slightest.
and I was the guy advancing them and having my team just very patiently explained why they wouldn't work
until I kind of was left with nothing except for their arguments that were really compelling
and then observing the sort of progress of AI, which is I pacing my expectations.
And, I think the process is much more about
holding my own stories lightly enough to change them,
to be able to update on new evidence and new reasoning.
And I do think that goes back to the inner work because for most people, that is an ego issue.
The opinion is tied to their identity.
And to change the opinion would mean also changing their identity.
And then you put up all kinds of walls and
yeah, very good at resisting that.
And I think that inner work was important for being receptive to the dialogue that
lets me align with the very good advice of the Open Philanthropy teams.
Talk about the origin of Open Philanthropy if you're willing.
Yeah, there's a few steps to it and I apologize in advance.
It's a confusing family of brands and people.
But Cari and I have been on a philanthropic journey for a while,
and we founded a foundation Good Ventures about 10 years ago.
And, basically started with the principle of leverage.
We wanted to try and find the most important marks that we could do
and had some trouble finding other people who could collaborate with us with that mindset.
Until we met Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld, who were the GiveWell founders
because that's exactly what they were trying to do with global health and well-being with GiveWells,
not just like really great charities, like Charity Navigator might do, or GuideStar, but the very best.
And they only recommend a handful every year that they think just have unusually large
ability to create great health outcomes.
And we started working with them in 2011
and we've basically abandoned the prime supporter of people at Percent.
I think that may have changed in recent years, because they want to diversify their funding.
And they also have a very large number of individual investors that are not foundation.
It's just people giving as part of their paycheck. So, that's GiveWell.
And then, their MO is proven cost effective, neglected.
And that's really great for global health because there's often a lot of great research that can tell you,
say what is the lifesaving value of deploying an additional bednet on the margin.
But it doesn't work as well in other areas like pandemics
because you don't know if there's going to be a pandemic
or you might be advocating for a piece of legislation and it's just probabilistic whether you'll succeed
and probabilistic whether you influence the outcome at all.
And that's not a good candidate for the GiveWell donor base.
And we decided to start a new organization that
became Open Philanthropy that is basically the same principle
of trying to find the most important work we can do, but without the constraint of proving it.
It's much more about expected values
and probabilistic math and reasoning
than it is about, the GiveWell side
randomized control trials and scaling up things that work.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, the reason I asked is because although I do enjoy putting you on a pedestal,
I think you're right that what I think is actually special about your story is
not much that you had some unique insight by living in a cave,
but you've set up these systems to help you follow the evidence wherever it goes
and to attract yourself really deep system thinkers with a long-term view to help you figure out what's right.
And you've had the, as you say, because you've done the inner work,
you're able to not get too attached to your own opinions,
but really to learn from a wide range of people.
So that, I think very clearly guided you into your thoughts about AI.
I'm curious where you think this is all headed, like
those are the things you were learning about 10 years ago that now the rest of us are all learning about now.
What are the things that are on your radar, future now?
What are the things that you're thinking about that maybe are not as well known?
I in FIP?
What's that? In general.
Well, in philanthropy,
one of the things I'm really excited about right now is less inventing of new institutions.
I described three effectively new institutions, Good Ventures, Open Philanthropy, and GiveWells.
Good Ventures actually doesn't have any staff.
There are some contractors that work for us basically, but mostly they're taking recommendations
from the Open Philanthropy staff and just writing checks. Good Ventures is pretty thin.
But even Open Philanthropy, we would rather have not created.
We'd rather just existed and we became an additional funder on the margin for it
and we are starting to get there now.
We are partnering more with other large funders.
I think by the time that this goes out, we'll announce we're doing a elimination project
that we're co-funding with another very large foundation.
and then additionally we've started regranting program.
So, we're giving grants to other existing organizations that we think are really good.
We just did $45 million to USAID.
We actually did a 50 million grant, I think it was 50 million to the Gates Foundation,
which is crazy, right? They have plenty of money.
But they actually think quite a lot like us, especially in global health.
And often it's like, we think this program should exist,
but actually the Gates Foundation is already equipped to do it better than we could.
We'd rather just help motivate them to do it and co-fund it
rather than create a bunch more bureaucracy unnecessarily.
I'm hopeful that's where Open Philanthropy is going
and that there will be more funders working together rather than carving out unique visions.
And I admit we're on poor moral ground there, having carved out a unique vision and
a trap we often get into with people.
So, critics have said, called your position on AI doomerism and I know you have pushed back on that.
And I also know there have been moments when you have felt the opposite position
is really bordering on irresponsible in a way that
we're counseling this next generation of founders who are working on this, they do technologies.
and especially because there's so many AI founders
who are actively seeking guidance for how to build their companies in a responsible way.
So, what's the advice that you're giving to the builders of these new systems
who often, who would like to hear from you on how you think that should be done?
First of all, reject the false trade-off.
Our opponents are deliberately creating a polarized frame that does not exist.
There's the doomers who think everything is awful and they ban math and ban AI
and then there's the libertarians who think AI is going to be amazing
and why would you ever want to get it away of it?
and it is purposely rejecting the third frame, which
almost in the entire safety community actually exists at
which is AI is going to be great and we need to mitigate some very real problems.
and there are some unknowable risks.
I'm not going to say there're probabilistic risks because that gets you into your own kind of language trap.
but there are risks that I think are non-trivial.
It's very plausible they could manifest.
and there are very good reasons to think if you don't change anything,
the thing that is likely to happen will be that they manifest.
Of course, it is a dynamic system and people are in conversation, and they're identifying the risks and they're trying to battle down.
And so for me, my personal view is all the concern lies in
how quickly that might play out, and whether there is a race to the bottom on ethics and safety
because everyone's just scrambling to be out on the frontier.
And the types of things that I think are good solutions are
things that can align those organizations and get them out of the game theoretic traps
that they can cooperate and lead to the better outcomes for them and for the world.
And that means slowing down a little bit, being a little more deliberative, having,
at this point I feel pretty confident we need some regulatory enforcement
of the red teaming that happens before a new model is released
because otherwise it's just clear as day that you're going to have a lab on the frontier
that just doesn't do it or cuts the corners or certifies something safe that they haven't really tested.
And I think that is the highest purpose of government
is to look out for those kinds of negative externalities and
do the things that cause the companies to do what needs to be done.
However, government is slow.
And a lot of my concern is maybe the danger is playing out
in the next few years, while we're all arguing about the governance.
So, what happens in the meantime and my advice for AI entrepreneurs
is “Be ethical in the meantime” because we need you to be.
And we don't have any other defenses other than Anthropic approach,
which is to try and create a race to the top culture we need drammatically,
and more power to them, but I don't want like rest, hang my hat on that.
And I would much rather have every single lab leader saying this is important
and ideally tying their own hands through things responsible scaling policies
so that you don't get to a place where you're always making a judgment.
Do we go forward from here or not based on the evidence?
You've agreed ahead of the time where the danger lies and where the red lines are.
And so, that I think is really important.
I think we're very fortunate that many of the lab leaders, not just Anthropic, do think this way,
but they also live inside corporate environments and have investors and, various contracts.
And it's just very easy to get up and caught in outcomes.
Well, from the philosophical point of view, conventional thinking about this when we talk about regulation,
in any technology, but certainly with AI,
there's kind of this idea that it's the government's job to say what is allowed to be done
and then our expectation is that businesses will be as exploitative as they possibly can within the boundaries of the law
up to it including lobbying to have the laws change to allow more exploitative behavior.
and I feel that skips over a really important question that I spent a lot of time with founders
who are asking these questions now, which is like, Okay, the law says that I can do these things,
but what should I want to do as a founder? what should my goal be?
And I wonder if you can just talk about that, not as a natty state restrictive, oh, you shouldn't be ambitious.
Oh, we can't develop the technology, but rather as a source of strength
to be the trustworthy vendor who's actually developing the technology in a responsible way.
Maybe I misunderstand the question is the question about
how do you know when you want to go beyond the law with ethics?
Or is the question how that benefit you?
Well, my question is more like, what should companies want to do?
Well, I was very philosophical. At some level, my answer is
they should want to be built to last and they should be pretty long sighted about that,
but it can be difficult.
I had a conversation.
We haven't talked about this recently and this is another sort of dangerous topic area,
but there's this idea of which customers should you support and should you have any red lines around that?
Cloudflare engaged very heavily with us a few years ago.
and I had a conversation with one of our investors Generation, and we were talking about oil companies as an example.
And they were like, well, you shouldn't want oil companies as customers because their business is dying.
And your LTV calculations basically are wrong for those customers,
but it really depends on timelines, right?
maybe our LTV calculations are wrong in a 15 year time scale
but are not wrong in a ten year time scale and kind of doesn't matter because the future is discounted.
And then they're also depends on what they do
because in some cases, they're trying to convert into renewable energy companies.
And we got into all these weird discussions around like
I guess we like to support this part of shelf, but not this part of shelf.
We don't actually have agency to implement those kind of roles
and it creates a really weird relationship with the customer.
Having a light touch on that kind of thing.
But I think it's a good principle to bring to other ideas.
Again, so your relationship with your employees.
Maybe you can do something exploitative in the short run and maybe you'll get away with it.
But if you're not a sociopath, you're going to feel bad about it later.
And also those people are going to tell the next generation of employees
and they're not going to trust you and that'll cause problems for you in the end of the game.
And just really encourage people to play that out.
And I think we're seeing this a bit with
some of the companies on the public market who I think are running into
the borders of regulation and causing a big outcry
and they may really not like what comes for them after that
like with TikTok where they messaged all of America with push notification.
And people are like, well, that's legal, but I probably should not have done that.
and now it won't be legal anymore,
and there's a calculated risk that I think businesses and entrepreneurs take there
and some of it is always, will I get caught will I get found out?
And I think that will happen more often than you think, but you'll always know.
And I think, again, if you're not a sociopath, you have to pay that tax.
Yeah. To me, the canonical example is SVB lobbying
Congress during in the Trump administration to have the rules relaxed
that would have prevented them from...
Yeah, so creazy.
That's seen as good governance.
Everyone applauding them, of course, be as exploitative as you can and then
They were like crypto, right?
all of these non-securities shouldn't be securities.
And they could have played that very differently.
Great Wall lasted and now I think it'll be a different world.
That's really terrific.
Dustin, how much I want to say thanks again, for all your leadership.
Congratulations again on the stage you're having with Asana. I'm very excited to see what happens next.
And thanks for taking time to have this conversation.
Yeah, of course. Will always do.
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