Dustin Moskovitz – Eliminating Work About Work – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 19]

My guest today is Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder and CEO of Asana, a team-centric product management tool used by over 1.3 million users around the world. Dustin started Asana in 2008, 4 years after co-founding Facebook. In this conversation, we dive into Dustin's belief about the diminishing returns of hard work, the shocking amount of productivity lost in doing "work about work", and Dustin's philanthropic investment strategy around leverage and maximizing ROI. I hope you enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with Dustin Moskovitz. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/88012555/moskovitz-eliminating-work-about-work ----- This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus has built the most extensive primary information platform available for investors. With Tegus, you can learn everything you’d want to know about a company in an on-demand digital platform. Investors share their expert calls, allowing others to instantly access more than 10,000 calls on Affirm, Teladoc, Roblox, or almost any company of interest. Visit https://www.tegus.co/patrick to learn more. ----- This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Vanta has built software that makes it easier to both get and maintain your SOC 2 report at a fraction of the normal cost. Founders Field Guide listeners can redeem a $1k off coupon at vanta.com/patrick. ----- Founder's Field Guide is a property of Colossus Inc. For more episodes of Founder's Field Guide, go to https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up at https://www.joincolossus.com/newsletter. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag Follow Colossus on Twitter at @JoinColossus Show Notes [00:03:19] – [First question] – Balancing hard purposeful work and too much work that leads to burn out [00:05:41] – What led to this way of thinking [00:06:54] – Regulating hard work through culture [00:08:25] – False tradeoffs and how Asana represents this [00:09:43] – Origins of Asana [00:13:22] – Organizing the chaos of a project [00:18:09] – Change vs discipline of the mission [00:19:55] – Transferring good ideas from one company to another [00:23:19] – Instilling leverage as a concept in an early company [00:25:21] – New learning curves in building Asana [00:26:52] – Hardest boss battle during his time at Asana [00:28:43] – The role of the work graph [00:31:46] – The proliferation of the work management space and the overall landscape [00:32:56] – The idea of radical inclusiveness [00:36:31] – Best reasons to start a new company [00:37:47] – What will lead to Asana’s continued success [00:38:59] – Lessons building the product [00:41:13] – Work with the Open Philanthropy Project [00:43:44] – Work on pandemics and biosecurity [00:46:11] – Where he sees the future of artificial intelligence [00:50:47] – Kindest thing anyone has done for him