The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 17 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Wilkinson: Things creator has 'won' more than Asana founder Dustin Moskovitz
“I am generally much more in the camp of the things guy has won, not Dustin Moskovitz. Dustin Moskovitz is just playing a different game than the things guy.”
Fried: Pure software products only need venture capital for marketing
“Airbnb is a physical product. Uber is a physical product. Basecamp, Monday, Asana, they're available everywhere instantly anyway. I don't know what you need the money for other than marketing.”
Baxter: Google Docs beats Asana by letting irrelevant tasks fade naturally
“My memory of it is that it spent, you spent more time in the meeting grooming a backlog of irrelevant stuff than actually, you know, talking about the proper priorities. So I think it's nice in the Google doc that if something becomes irrelevant, it can kind o…”
Costello: Returning to office benefits mental health and spontaneous collaboration
“I think it's a real thing for mental health. I do think that having social casual relationships as well as more opportunities to talk strategy with people you're not forced into a meeting room with has been super beneficial.”
Wilkinson: Bootstrapping Flow against Asana cost me $10 million
“And I ended up losing ten million dollars trying to compete with venture-backed businesses and bootstrapping. It was all my own money, poured ten million dollars, lit it on fire, trying to compete with Asana because I didn't understand how the business world w…”
Costello: Asana Bypassed Standard Product Process for Rapid LLM Prototyping
“When it came to the massive leap forward in LLMs recently, we staffed a team to really prototype quickly and discover what was possible and just apply hypotheses outside of the typical norms of how we work. So they kind of went straight to prototyping instead …”
Costello: Measuring feature usage instead of customer outcomes is teaching to the test
“Because if you pick your success metrics as using a feature, that's, you're teaching to the test. It's not actually driving the outcome.”
Costello: Genuine confidence comes from openness, not constant assertion
“Real confidence is often conveyed by being willing to ask the question or to say, I don't, Know what you mean by that. Can you say that again?... It's really about being open and that conveys confidence more than being assertive and advocating a hundred percen…”
Costello: Asana caps product reviews at three and meetings at 10 attendees
“So no more than three reviews on a given piece of work where people are blocking one approver. And If a meeting has more than 10 people on it, we ask the person hosting the meeting to kick out the other people and write better decision notes.”
Costello: New PMs should directly observe customers rather than trust summaries
“When you take a new role, become best friends with a researcher and spend time with watching customers use the product firsthand, because what they maybe report on or are trying to do a study about might be very different from what you observe, but you really …”
Kramer: Companies need clear lists of ownership beyond job titles
“Having clear ownership is what this comes down to, but it's one thing to have clear ownership, but it's like quite another tip for other teams to know like who that clear owner is. So I think having a clear list beyond titles and just like who owns what is rea…”
Costello: Asana operates on a three-day in-office hybrid schedule
“Well, we were fully remote during the pandemic, and then we came back to the office in an office-centric hybrid format. So we're in the office Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and then work from home mostly on Wednesdays and Fridays.”
Costello: Asana replaced annual planning with a rolling 12-month horizon
“Before we planned annually primarily, and now we plan every six months, but for a rolling 12 months. And so we have higher confidence in the immediate half, lower confidence in the following half, but we just plan every 12 months, every six months, because it …”
Costello: New Asana employees undergo conscious leadership training
“When cut when employees join Asana, they get a book called The 15 Commitments of a Conscious Leader. It's led by the Conscious Leadership Group. They also get two-day training on some, like, language and tools for how to Effectively work with other people.”
Miller: Trello Power-Ups are underutilized for solving complex workflow needs
“I think the biggest that people probably know about, but are often underutilized are power-ups, which is basically our integrations. And power-ups are folks that are usually doing things that are more complex often. But Trello, you know, when you think about i…”
Kapoor: Figma logs sales feedback into Asana via Slack emoji
“We basically have, we store it in Asana, basically. We create, like, we have this integration which many companies might have, which is, like, a Slack integration where you can, like, react with an Asana emoji, and then, like, any piece of feedback that comes …”
Thrive Digital manages $500M in annual ad spend with 130 staff members
“What started off as this freelancer consultancy that I started running in a walk-in closet in my old apartment became A 130 people, and we manage about five hundred million dollars a year in ad spend for small and large companies, including Uber, Asana, Tempur…”