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?
00:26:22 · Dan Rogers
[00:26:22] S0: Yeah. Know. So it's a great question. Question I ask myself quite a bit actually. The way I make peace with it both for myself and then how I kind of... Mainly for myself and then I'll describe for the team. So for myself, it's very much control what you can control. It's very much a be very peaceful about are you doing the right things? Are you following the right processes? Are you building a high performance team? Are you are you building the right products? Is roadmap headed right direction? So you can... Think you can create a great internal story for yourself about whether you're doing the right things. I watch tennis, I don't know if you watch tennis, but I just watched the US Open and a lot of the tennis players that don't break through in the grand slams you know, to still tell themselves a story about are they doing the right things? Are they doing the right motions? If so, that's great. Then that alone is great. And you saw, you know, someone that just haven't haven't won in ten years, just won two grand slimes in the last three months. But because they, you know, had that mental mindset of celebrating the actions, celebrating the journey, and the outcome will follow. If you're, you know, confident and have that self belief and know that you are doing the right things, the outcome will come. So I think that's the internal, you know, maybe talk track. Vis a vis the company, it's about finding those wins that may or may not be in the short term stock related. Over the medium term and long term, I think, you know, stock does become a great barometer. In short term, can be, as you say, very affected by macroeconomic circumstance. So you need another barometer. Stock price alone is not enough, and so you have to create those parameters. What are the things you are going to celebrate this quarter? And so today as an example is a big celebration day for us. It's a big launch day. It's really the launch of moving from what was collaborative work management to agentic work management. That is a major milestone that we are going to be partying a lot around today. It's a big deal for us. And we know that that is a landmark for us doing the right things. And you know, how that gets represented in the stock market, you know, on a given day, who knows? But we know we're doing the right things and we're doing the right things for our customers.