00:00:00 · Dan Rogers, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:00:00] S0: Now about net new ARR is coming from our AI products. What we decided to do, I think, is very bold and maybe a first in the industry. The modern team is no longer just humans. For an AI agent to be useful in the enterprise, they need first and foremost [00:00:15] S1: Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Dan Rogers, CEO of Asana. Thirteen months ago, Dan took over a company with $800,000,000 in revenue, eighteen years of history. Since then, he's pushed the operating margin to a company record, spent $75,000,000 on an acquisition, rebuilt the leadership team, and also opened The US government market. Dan, thanks a lot for coming on the show. [00:00:39] S0: Great to be here. Nice to see you, Guillaume. [00:00:41] S1: Yeah. I'm quite excited to understand. So about a year and a half ago, I stepped down from the CEO and became chairman. On your side, it's the other way around, like you're coming into a mature company and taking the lead. So how exactly like do you approach this new role, this new function, especially in a world where everything has been driven by AI?
00:01:04 · Dan Rogers
[00:01:04] S0: Yeah, so, you know, this is not my first rodeo. It turns out my last two companies, I was, you know, had the fortune of working with great founders who'd, you know, brought in as a president at Rubrik and then as the CEO of LaunchDarkly, both founder driven companies. So it's something I'm very used to. So I'd say, you know, the... I guess the the playbook or the framework is you have two ears and one mouth, so you should be listening twice as much as you talk, trying to figure out exactly what's what. And, you know, sometimes I I think of it like, you know, in Harry Potter, they have this sorting hat. And I think you kinda have to do that with all of the the norms, the procedures, the decisions. You try to put them in one of the hats. Maybe one of the hats is, you know, this is a great idea. I fully understand why we do this. Another hat might be you know I need to learn a lot more about this, you know there's something in this that I need to understand more, I just don't know enough. And then you know maybe the final hat might be I'm not sure this thing is gonna serve us anymore. Maybe it's something that we can cast aside and isn't fit for the next wave of what we're trying to do. So some intensity of trying to figure out, you know, which things go into which hats I think is, you know, part of this thing that you need to be doing. And then soaking yourselves with customers. And so you know when I arrive, I definitely I like to do like a customer tour. Know, had 100 customers in one hundred days would be my ideal idea. But that's really again getting as much external context as you can because after a couple of months, you can become very internally orientated. You can become very steeped in the culture and the decisions that have already been made. But as you know, if you do what you've always done, you get what you've always got. So you need to be very mindful of the context, how things are changing, what customers are saying, what language they're using, and how that matches up to everything you have. So when you do all of that, I think you get really the best of both worlds, which is taking all the brilliance that the founders have, all the decisions that they've made, and building on the shoulder of of giants, really, but bringing your own unique twist that's very customer informed.
00:03:17 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:03:17] S1: And to your point, I I don't remember who was saying that to Jeff Bezos, but it's like, you have enough good ideas to ruin the business or something like this. Sometimes you need to focus and... Yeah.
00:03:29 · Dan Rogers
[00:03:29] S0: So I think the enemy of great in this example would be coming in with a with a playbook and coming in with answers. I think it's much healthier to come in with questions. And then as you have hypothesis, you should be very skeptical of yourself as well, of the hypothesis that it... You know, if you jump to something too soon that maybe you need to be a lot more precise, maybe you need to be a lot more sharp before you you go live with it. In McKinsey, they call it iterative porpoising, which I I do like as an idea, which is the idea. You know a porpoise, it's like a dolphin. It goes in and out the water. I think you know you have to take these kind of... Maybe you have an idea about how AI is gonna transform the world. It's great that you have a big macro level view and then you need to come in and kind of say, will this really work? How should we shape this? I'm thinking of doing it this way, and then you get some more feedback and you come out and in. But that's definitely the process that you have to go through, very fluid in your kind of your thought process. And you have to control your mind, I think, very well because you may have been successful, you know, for the past decade and that is, you know, as you say that that can be... Those great ideas can ruin something that's already great. So you have to be very self controlled on what your inputs are and how you're formulating those outputs.
00:04:49 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:04:49] S1: And you mentioned the the 100 customers in one hundred days. When you join a company and you have to line up, let's say, these 100 meetings, how exactly do you, like, decide which customers you're gonna meet? Do you actually, like, put them in some sort of buckets? Let's say, the one that have the largest lifetime value, the one that are just brand new, but are like massive accounts, like how exactly do you decide who you're gonna meet and how do you structure like each interview?
00:05:20 · Dan Rogers
[00:05:20] S0: Yeah, exactly. So I think having a diversity is very important. A diversity of of roles as well because obviously naturally as a as, you know, a CEO, the account teams want you to meet very senior people in the accounts. But if you do that, they may not actually be close to the work. And so you have to, again, over index on creating the right sample that is representative of today and the right sample of where you think you might want to head as well. So a lot of new customers can be very interesting as an example. And then yes, I do tend to ask very similar questions as part of the formula, which is how are we doing and what problems are we solving for you today? You know, on the scorecard, how would you evaluate us? And against what we solve for you today, how could we better solve that? And then what are some of the emerging problems that you see, and how could we dive into those more fully? And do we have a right to solve those? And if we did, what uniquely could we bring to the party that's not already being solved? So something like that, but they tend to... You know, that's the controlled piece, but after about five minutes, they tend they tend to go they tend to go their own direction as well. But I love it when, you know, customers open up their screens and kinda show me what they're doing, show me what they're seeing, show me what other tools they're using. So the more I can get into the work, the better it is for me. Let's kinda back to this iterative porpoising idea. I love going deep. And so as deep as we can go, the better.