Asana, Peter Thiel, and Founders Fund

We’re excited to welcome Peter Thiel and Founders Fund as the newest investors in Asana, and Peter as the newest member of our Board of Directors. We’ve admired and respected Founders Fund for a long time, especially for their commitment to investing in mission-oriented teams working to improve the human condition.

We honestly can’t imagine better people to have on board as we enter Asana’s next phase of our mission, to make effortless the coordination of collective human action. The more we talked with them, the more excited we became about what we can build together. We share a worldview, we share a vision for the future of technology, and we share a commitment to solving the world’s most pressing challenges. Plus, it’s kinda fun to watch Peter stump Justin when they debate philosophy.

Peter and Founders Fund — along with Benchmark, Andreessen-Horowitz, and Mitch Kapor, three of our existing investors and invaluable advisors — have invested $28 million in Asana. We plan to use the capital primarily to grow our team: hiring the world’s best designers, engineers, and other contributors is by far the most important thing we do.

When we asked Peter to comment on the investment, he had this to say:

I’m thrilled to be working with Asana, and can’t wait to get involved with the company. Asana is the most interesting re-imagination of collaboration since email itself, and Founders Fund is excited to be a part of the company as they radically overhaul the way teams work together. They have a clear vision and a missionary zeal that makes us confident they are building something that can change the world.”

Incredibly, it’s been only nine months since we launched Asana. We are delighted every day by the impact Asana is having on teams around the world. Some specifics:

• Since November, we’ve grown from a handful of teams to tens of thousands of teams trusting Asana to coordinate their efforts. They come from all over the world, and very diverse industries, including medical research, mobile networks, professional sports, political campaigns and of course, software and web development.

• In April, we added Premium Workspaces, so larger teams could more easily expand their adoption of Asana, and in less than 90 days, hundreds of companies have already upgraded.

• Most recently, we announced Inbox, our most ambitious product addition since launching. Inbox is an effort to re-imagine how teams communicate about their work, and reduces the time spent in email, the most notorious example of “work about work”. The response to this new capability has been really incredible.

• We are happy to see trends that point to Asana becoming the center of people’s work – over a quarter of weekly users use Asana every single work day, Monday through Friday. And in the past 4 months alone, the number of tasks tracked in Asana had doubled from 9M to 18M.

We believe that if Asana can increase an organization’s capacity to achieve its potential by only 1%, let alone double or 10x it, that’s a really leveraged opportunity to help the world. It’s still early, but we’re encouraged by the progress we’re seeing — adding Founders Fund and Peter to our team is another great step in helping us achieve our goal.