We are a team of engineering, business and thought leaders who value the quality of our peers as much as the power of our mission. We are backed by Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz, and an experienced team of advisors.
Asanas
Dustin Moskovitz is the co-founder of Facebook and was a key leader within the technical staff, first in the position of CTO and then later as VP of Engineering. Dustin attended Harvard University as an Economics major for two years before moving to Palo Alto, California to work full-time at Facebook.
Justin Rosenstein last worked at Facebook as a tech lead and engineering manager on projects from presence solutions for businesses to back-end site-performance to front-end abstractions. Prior to that, he was a product manager at Google for three years, leading projects in Google’s communication and collaboration division. Before that, he majored in math and got part way through a master’s in computer science at Stanford.
Malcolm Handley worked at Google on Android, focusing on its support for syncing data with the Internet, after working on Google Earth and Mobile Maps. Prior to that he studied computer science in New Zealand and then worked at There.com.
Greg Slovacek worked at Google on vertical search experiences within Calendar and Maps, in addition to working on Flu Trends and the accounts system. He was previously an engineer at There.com and studied computer science at Brown University.
Jerry Phillips is Asana’s first non-technical hire. She began as Coordinator for Asana and then moved on to User Operations. Jerry has a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Stanford University.
Jack Stahl worked on the Data Team at Yelp, where his favorite project was Review Highlights. He’s one of Asana’s many math majors and handful of Stanford alums. Jack’s ♥ for organizations extends beyond the Asana family to his Asana-powered co-op household and Burning Man camp.
Kris Rasmussen most recently was the chief architect at Aptana where he led engineering and product efforts on a new set of developer services. He is also the co-founder of Rivalmap, an enterprise collaboration company, and has worked for a number of other software companies in leadership and engineering roles including Microsoft. Kris studied computer science and math at UCLA.
Stephanie Hornung has almost 10 years experience in User Experience Design in freelance and startup environments, with expertise in user interface, graphic design and illustration. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and a Master of Information from UC Berkeley.
Theresa Singh joined Asana as the first in-house recruiter. As a talent strategist for early stage tech startups, she ran her own recruiting firm for several years before joining Asana. Previously, she worked for the Science & Innovation Network of the UK Government and Institute of International Education on programs ranging from climate change policy to computer literacy for women in the Middle East. She holds a BA in Post Colonial Literature from Mills College.
Donnie Thompson is Asana’s chef who has a passion for food and strives to use organic, local, and seasonal ingredients whenever cooking. He has spent time honing his culinary skills at luxury restaurants and resorts in San Diego, Alaska and most recently in Lake Tahoe. He is a classically trained chef earning his degree in culinary arts from the International Culinary Institute of California, San Diego.
S. Alex Smith came to Asana from Facebook, where he was on the Data Science team and worked primarily on machine learning. Alex holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from UCLA.
Jackie Bavaro is Asana’s product manager. Most recently she worked to improve local searches on Google. Before that she was at Microsoft on the SharePoint team where she worked on collaboration features. Jackie double majored in computer science and economics at Cornell.
David Braginsky joins Asana from Facebook, where he worked on a variety of projects including newsfeed infrastructure, large scale machine learning, and mobile. Prior to Facebook, he worked as a software engineer and tech-lead at Google, as well as numerous startups. He studied computer science at UCLA and Stanford.
Kenny Van Zant was the SVP and Chief Product Strategist for SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI), where he helped pioneer the bottom-up model for selling software and SaaS into enterprises and SMBs. Previously, Kenny was EVP of Marketing and GM of Communications for Motive (NASD: MOTV), and the co-founder of BroadJump. Kenny has a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas.
Andrew Watterson worked at Meebo, making personality-ful products that let people stay close to the people they’re close to. His superpowers are wireframing, prototyping, making things look cool in CSS3, and holding three-hour design reviews debating margin sizes and button wording. On paper, Andrew went to college for Digital Media Design at UPenn; in life, he can be plied with a slinky, a crossword, and a rousing discussion about philosophy.
Jerold A. Blain returned to San Francisco after leaving the Bay Area for a stint in graduate school at UC Davis. His current incarnation is as the Coordinator for Asana and his other passions include the performing arts. He has a master of arts degree from the University of California, Davis and a bachelor of arts degree from Stanford University.
Tim Bavaro came to Asana from Palantir, where he was an engineering team lead and focused on data retrieval, platform development, and scalability on the finance product. Tim studied computer science and operations research at Cornell.
Bella Kazwell came to Asana from Google, where she was a tech lead on the Gmail team focusing on Google+ integration. Bella holds a bachelors degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Konstantin Azarov joined Asana from Google Europe, where he was a Site Reliability Engineer for Google's geo and search products. Prior to Google, Konstantin lived in Moscow, working on flight simulators.
Ryan Pittington managed the mobile and privacy teams in User Operations at Facebook. He spent a year traveling, writing, and meditating before becoming the second member of Asana's User Operations team. Ryan has a B.A. in Creative Writing from UC Santa Cruz.
Michael Tauraso came to Asana from OnLive, where he was working on build tools and real time video streaming. Michael has a bachelor's degree in computer science from Harvey Mudd College and spends much of his free time social dancing and rock climbing.
Kim Pak enjoys every aspect of the culinary spectrum. From making cocktails to creating culinary delights, her love for food and passion to create something new is endless. She has her AA in Culinary Management and BS Degree in Culinary Management from the International Culinary School Art of California, San Diego.
Michael Spradlin came to Asana from Google, where he worked as a Product Strategist on Google Apps and focused on sales engineering, deployment and user onboarding. Michael has a BS in Psychology from Michigan State University.Advisors
Aditya Agarwal is a former Director of Engineering at Facebook, where he helped oversee the engineering team, new product design, and architecture. As an early Facebook engineer, he wrote the initial Facebook Search Engine and co-authored popular open-source RPC framework Thrift. Prior to Facebook, Aditya worked on self-healing databases at Oracle. Aditya holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Marc Andreessen is one of the few to pioneer a software category used by over a billion people, and one of the few to co-found two billion-dollar companies. Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic Internet Browser, co-founded Netscape, served as AOL’s Chief Technology Officer, and co-founded Opsware (formerly Loudcloud). Marc currently co-chairs the board of Ning and sits on the boards of Facebook and eBay.
Matt Cohler is a General Partner at Benchmark. Matt was one of Facebook’s first five employees and served most recently as VP of Product Management, helping drive strategy, organizational growth and product direction. Before that, Matt served as VP, general manager, and founding-team member at LinkedIn; was a consultant at McKinsey; and worked in Beijing for AsiaInfo,the telecom provider that built China’s Internet infrastructure.
Ronald Conway was recently named #6 in the Forbes Magazine Midas List of top deal-makers. He founded the Angel Investors LP funds whose investments included: Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Good Technology, and Opsware. Ron co-founded Altos Computer Systems and took it public in 1982. Ron has served/serves on Boards/Advisory Boards including: Plaxo, Photobucket, Digg, Ask Jeeves, Facebook, Zappos, and StumbleUpon.
Adam D'Angelo was previously VP Engineering & CTO at Facebook, and is now a founder of Quora. He has a BS in Computer Science from Caltech.
Peter Deng is a Director of Product at Facebook, where he is currently responsible for Facebook’s messaging and communication products. Peter joined Facebook in 2007 and has since led a variety of user-facing product teams including News Feed, Home Page, Profile, Pages, Chat, and Groups. Peter holds a Bachelor’s degree in Symbolic Systems with an emphasis in Human Computer Interaction and a Master’s degree in Communication from Stanford University.
Joe Green is the co-founder and president of Causes, the largest online platform for activism, with over 70 million users on Facebook and MySpace. Previously, Joe founded Essembly, and served as a grassroots political organizer for federal, state, and local campaigns. Joe graduated from Harvard in 2006 with a degree in Social Studies.
Ben Horowitz is best known for co-founding and running, as its President and Chief Executive Officer, Opsware Inc. In 2007, he sold Opsware to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in cash. Following Opsware, Horowitz spent one year at Hewlett-Packard as Vice President and General Manager in HP Software. Prior to Opsware, he was one of Netscape’s first product managers and served as Vice President of AOL’s eCommerce Division.
David Jeske is formerly an Engineering Director at Google and co-founder of email support CRM startup Neotonic, acquired by Google in 2004. David has managed two top-100 websites, Yahoo Groups and orkut.com, focusing on Internet scalability, reliability, and performance. He has 15 years experience in software engineering, management, and technical direction.
Mitch Kapor is the founder of Lotus and designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer app” often credited with making the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world. Mitch has also been involved in the EFF (co-founder), Real Networks (founding investor), the Mozilla Foundation (founding Chair), Linden Research (founding investor, Board Chair), and UUNET (founding investor), the first successful independent commercial ISP.
Sean Parker is a partner at Founders Fund and an entrepreneur with a record of launching genre-defining companies. At age 19, Sean co-founded Napster and changed how people think about and share music. In 2001, Sean co-founded Plaxo and served as president until 2004. Sean helped Mark Zuckerberg launch Facebook and served as founding president from 2004-2005. Sean’s latest success is Causes.
Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology and the author of the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honored with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership. He serves on the advisory board of a number of technology startups, and has worked as a consultant to a number of startups, companies, and venture capital firms.
Jed Stremel was previously the Director of Mobile at Facebook, where he joined in 2005 as the founding member of the mobile team. Today, Facebook now approaches 100M active users on mobile. His ten years of operating experience also includes mobile roles at Yahoo and Tellme. He is now an investor in early stage companies.
Peter Thiel is a partner at Founders Fund, through which he helps launch many new ventures. He is also president of Clarium, a global macro hedge fund, the founder and chairman of Palantir Technologies, a national security software firm, and a founding investor and board member of Facebook, which serves more than 250 million active users. Previously, he was founder and CEO of PayPal, which manages more than 175 million financial accounts.
Owen Van Natta is the former CEO of MySpace, CEO of Project Playlist, a music sharing website, Chief Revenue Officer and VP of Operations at Facebook, Vice President of Worldwide Business and Corporate Development at Amazon.com, and was a founding member of the A9.com team. Owen holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz.