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

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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