One of Facebook's co-founders left to build software for planning work. Dustin Moskovitz had watched Facebook's own teams lose hours chasing status updates. With engineer Justin Rosenstein he started Asana to fix that. Teams used it to track tasks, projects, and goals in one shared place, and many started on a free plan. By early 2020 more than 82,000 customers were paying. Asana went public by direct listing in September 2020, while offices sat empty and work had moved online.

An Internal Tool Escapes

Moskovitz and Rosenstein founded Asana in December 2008. Rosenstein had worked at Google and Facebook, where he worked on the Like button. Their first version grew from a task tracker they had built inside Facebook. Asana spread from the bottom up. A single team would try it, then the rest of the company would follow and upgrade to a paid plan. Its name comes from the Sanskrit word for a yoga pose.

A Direct Listing at Twenty-One

Asana skipped a traditional IPO and listed its shares directly on the NYSE as ASAN on September 30, 2020. The reference price was $21 a share. Moskovitz bought large blocks of stock in the years that followed. In March 2025 he said he would retire as CEO, and the shares fell 25 percent. Dan Rogers took over on July 21, 2025, with Moskovitz staying on as chairman. Asana still trades on the NYSE as ASAN.

Cover: Balance, Anders Zorn. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a figure in balance (asana, a yoga pose).