00:18:30 · Dan Rogers
And so what we said is instead of having to buy something and imagine the value that you're going to get, why don't we reverse that? Why don't we give them the value? And then eventually they'll buy because they're achieving so much value. So actually, we've actually given all users as of today, so that's why it's a fairly formidable day for us. We're giving all users five requests per user per month so that they become very accustomed to getting the value from these agents. We literally want our millions of users to be working with these agents and not just discover it through some procurement decision that you have to make, but actually get used to working with these agents because this is the new way of working. So I think we've been bold on two fronts both on which meter we've decided, but also how we're going to seed this. And as you suggest, wow, that is a very under the hood, a token consumptive idea. And so, yes, we have this made again the financial decision that that's worth it to do for us. We're being very good at our operating efficiency in the kind of the rest of the business and that allows us to make these kinds of investments. But, yeah, you can think of it as a as a sales and marketing investment. Maybe you think of it as a as a freemium model, which is, you know, get something for free, get using it, and then because you enjoy it so much. And I think it's very different than how everyone else has approached this. So we're pretty proud of that.
00:19:55 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:19:55] S1: Yeah, I think it's really smart and down the line, like the more people see the value, the easier it will be for them to explain why they need to pay for it and how much productivity they're gaining, how much less time they can spend on a task. And also curious because I think you made like a pretty big acquisition and you kept it like with its full brand and as a kind of like separate product. The acquisition, it was like Stack AI, if I remember correctly. So can you walk us through like the strategy you have in mind when it comes to buy versus build? And also like how exactly like, what's your plan for the future in terms of integrations?
00:20:34 · Dan Rogers
[00:20:34] S0: Well, general, as I described, you know, earlier, I'm very customer orientated. And as a leadership team, we're very externally orientated. So we have a strong sense of what we want to build next. We have a very sharp point of view about where the market is going and what we need to build. And so the build versus buy decision is pretty easy. It's against our roadmap because we are very sharp in what we wanna what we wanna build. Can we accelerate that? And so we're not gonna look at, you know, targets that come across our debt. That... That's not really how we do it. We kind of say, we know we wanna build these 20 capabilities because our customers are asking for this, and they will love it. It will solve their problems. Okay. So can we shortcut the timeline from eighteen months to six months, then from twelve months? So wherever we can deliver value to our customers, we're kinda open ears, I think, for, what that could look like. And Stack really fell into that category. We had a workflow capability with AI Studio. What we noticed is our customers wanted to build even more powerful workflows that extended across multisystem and multi agent, and Stack really was a perfect fit for that. Many hundreds of prebuilt integrations, but also the know how and how to interact with agents, how to call upon the right LLMs at the right time, how to scan through and retrieve information from all those databases, and some real expertise in pulling information from documents and PDFs in particular. And so those were all really rich capabilities that we honestly we wanted, and we tried not to let them know how excited we were until after they joined. But now they're part of the Asana family, we're super happy with how that part of the business is trending. It's becoming our workflow engine for really all of our products and our capabilities. And then you mentioned, you know, on keeping their their brand. It's a great brand, sub brand really. It's, know, Stack AI by Asana, but it's, you know, has meaning and I think it's even as a word, it invokes the right idea that a workflow is a stacking up of these processes connecting to these databases, to this information, to these LLMs. So it's super appropriate. It has that builder mindset which is really where we are headed. So that's a little bit on our philosophy there.
00:22:57 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:22:57] S1: Because on our side, we've acquired three different companies from different size. The smallest one had three or four people, and the biggest one maybe 15. I'm curious, like, from your perspective, how exactly do you map out for team integration? Because I feel like sometimes the culture might be a little bit different, and that it's always a struggle, you know, for companies when they went from a team of like tens of people and they jumped into an organization with thousands of people. So how exactly do you make sure that you keep the talent, you keep the same like innovation pace, etcetera, within like the absorption of a company?
00:23:38 · Dan Rogers
[00:23:38] S0: Yeah, and I'll credit, you know, one of our board members for, you know, maybe a little bit of thinking around this. So you can think of it as the biggies and the little e's. Right? So for the biggies, in some sense, they're obvious. It's like, oh, we need to have a joint roadmap. Oh, we need to, you know, make sure that people have the right, you know, organization chart and all those kind of stuff. And a lot of people, I think, start with the biggies and it comes very maybe naturally to, you know, as a... From an intellectual perspective. But the reality of the success of of m and a is it's actually all about the little East. It's all about the, wait, do I have to change my email address? Do I do I need to... You know, but sure. Do my benefits continue? What do you mean? I have two weeks where I don't get my benefits. Like, all of the little ease is what will, I think, catch you if you're not if you're not careful. So imagine a world we actually start with the little ease. And the Littlese is literally what is the daily experience of the employee that is joining and of the, you know, the original Asanas. How will they perceive and experience this? What are the micro frictions that you can get ahead of? And so that's very much how we approach this, and I'm very pleased with how we did it actually. So I'd say, yeah, biggies and little e's, but start with the little e's.
00:24:51 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:24:51] S1: Okay. That's great. I was... There is a question I had when I was looking at Asana's numbers and the growth and everything, like everything is running like smoothly, like I feel like you're adopting AI like really quickly, you've changed a lot, you know, like the roadmap and positioning, like you seem to be like super close to your customers and dedicate a lot of time to understand like what exactly you should build. But if we look at the overall like macroeconomics with what happened with SASBOCALIPS and pretty much like all the valuation for software companies getting like sliced down. As a CEO, yourself managing like a public company, when you have your stock price going down or up and kind of like moving both direction, regardless of how great the company results are? Because obviously like beginning of the year went down when SASBOCALIPS happened, etcetera, and now I feel like it's been going up like since May and it's like super cool like also, but how exactly do you manage like this up and down as a CEO and also like regarding the employees? Because I'm assuming that everyone get pieces of stocks at some point and they understand, you know, like that there are value behind it. So how do you keep like the team really motivated and also not too affected by, you know, like everything that's happening, and that sometimes feels a bit like noise, you know?