Just Say No

Fred Wilson has an interesting guest blog post up.

MBA Mondays: Guest Post From Angela Baldonero

the biggest shift that we made was when we decided to stop trying to be like every other company and to instead actively resist changes that would not make sense for us. We started saying no, regularly and forcefully, to policies, systems and procedures that many companies adopt as they grow..... We don’t tolerate brilliant assholes. ...... we have unlimited vacation and sick time. We have a common sense expense reimbursement philosophy (“spend the money as if it was your own”). ..... we value transparency which means we share the good, the bad and the ugly openly (and often). Our commitment to transparency was dramatically tested when we decided to spin off part of the business and needed to decide if we should alert staff ahead of a formal sale. We did what most companies wouldn’t – we told the staff ..... I’ve seen too many executive teams where personal relationships and politics are the real business drivers behind-the-scenes. Business is done over cocktails, after hours and not in broad daylight. Personal agendas trump team goals. People smile and nod politely in meetings, then leave the meeting and corner the CEO to say what they “really think.” ..... set your people free to focus on important, high impact work and solve challenging business problems

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Asana Just Like Facebook

SAN FRANCISCO - NOVEMBER 15: Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during a special event announcing a new Facebook email messaging system at the St. Regis Hotel on November 15, 2010 in San Francisco, California. Facebook will launch a new messaging system aimed at enhancing it's social media product to its 500 million users. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Asana and Facebook have a few similarities.

For one, they share founders. Some of the early Facebook people are the top people at Asana. That's there.

And both seem to tackle similar problems. Facebook tackled one aspect of our inboxes. Asana is trying to tackle another aspect of our inboxes.

But the most glaring similarity to me is that both missed out on the mobile paradigm, and both will struggle with it.

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Asana's Inbox: Work Email

English: Low-resolution image of the Asana logo. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Announcing Inbox: A Step Towards A Post-Email World

Email is a 40-year-old technology designed to send electronic letters, yet we rely on it to communicate and coordinate nearly everything about our work. ..... Because anyone can add anything to our email inbox, it robs us of our sense of control. ..... Redundant meetings, tedious summary reports, endless streams of status updates, all replaced by the flow of Asana’s shared task list, with all the related thinking and documents right with each task. .... the biggest “work about work” time-sink of all: using email to stay on top of everything that has changed. .... Months later, if a new teammate wants to know how a decision was made, they can just search for that task, without needing to bug you to forward them the email chain. ..... Add yourself as a follower to exactly the set of tasks that you care about. If someone adds you to a thread and it’s no longer relevant, drop off in one click. ..... every read message is archived by default, making “inbox zero” the path of least resistance. ..... Since turning on Inbox for ourselves, we’ve seen over half our email disappear. Many of us have gone from checking email multiple times an hour to a couple times a day. ..... Business is ready to evolve to a post-email world. We believe Asana is the first credible post-email application.

Death to email! And meetings, too. Asana’s new inbox takes aim at “work about work”

fake-work .... a Utopia where email doesn’t exist. ..... “People spend an enormous amount of time in their inboxes, compulsively checking,” he said in an interview yesterday at Asana’s San Francisco HQ. “And it’s slow, distracting, and inefficient. It’s almost a counterproductivity tool.” ..... Asana Inbox is hot. Hot like an assassin who is killing every namby-pamby piece of B.S. in your corporate life and letting you get back to being a creative genius. ..... “It’s incredibly satisfying,” Rosenstein said. “You have a very real sense of clarity on what you’ve done, what everyone else is working on, how to get to your milestones, how far away you are from accomplishing your project… It makes you calmer and faster, and it emboldens you to take on even more ambitious projects in the future.” ..... “Email isn’t going away tomorrow… but it wasn’t designed for the coordination of complex tasks,” he said. “It’s the lowest common denominator, you can do anything poorly in email… ..... “Our meetings are not status meetings. They’re about talking about intellectually meaty design problems or product ideas. It’s stimulating, and it leaves the coordination to the robots.” ..... would transition him from a manager to a leader — inspiring, interacting, and doing the higher-order things that he really does enjoy.”

Asana tries to end email frustration with Inbox

a huge productivity suck: email .... Users subscribe to and unsubscribe from the feeds as they want to see them ..... betting that social networking tools transformed for the enterprise will not fill the bill. It claims big customers, including Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, use the service to minimize extraneous meetings and to cut down on distractions. ..... “We don’t really see things like Yammer, SocialCast and Chatter as competitors but we also don’t see them as particularly useful. They just took something popular in the consumer space and ported them over, but research shows many people don’t see the value in them. We’re about a work graph, not the social graph,” Rosenstein said ..... Asana’s service is free for up to 30 users ..... a central column of new information flowing through, showing you all the activity happening with you and your colleagues ..... So if Peter Ha marked a task you assigned him as complete, you’ll know that he’s finished editing a guest post.

With New “Inbox” Feature, Asana Is Looking More Like That Email Slayer We’re All Longing For
Asana’s answer to email puts ‘inbox zero’ within easy reach

a few email chains, a handful of phone calls, one to two hours of meetings, and a dozen text messages later, you have a better but painful idea of what’s happening. The evolving state of the office and the increasing popularity of remote workers as well as the many, disparate pieces of technology we all use has complicated the matter intensely.

Asana’s Inbox a step towards ridding offices of “work about work”

"Each email is an isolated random string of text without any context" ..... All keystrokes happen in real-time on everybody's computer screen, just like in a Google Doc. ..... In fact, Facebook still manages internal operations using a custom version of Asana that Moskovitz and Rosenstein built while at the company. ..... Asana's Inbox looks like your Facebook News Feed, except without all the pictures, and without all the stuff that isn't deliberately shared with you. Inbox contains updates to tasks, comments, due date changes, and other status updates people would normally reserve for email...... So Asana has built a new communication client with tons of metadata, file storage, and organization tools, but the place most people are increasingly checking for work-related messages is on a smartphone. ..... "Mobile is the weakest part of the experience right now," Rosenstein admitted. "It's our top priority." Asana also isn't yet an email replacement because it's catered to team communication. Random one-to-one emails with cat picture attachments between friends don't yet have much of a place on the service, but Rosenstein says that the long term goal is to kill email entirely. "Email isn't going away tomorrow," he said. "It was originally designed to mimic the way the post office sends messages. We've only gotten by because it's the lowest possible denominator."

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Character Limits In Email

Image via CrunchBase

Imagine an email service where when someone emails you for the first time their message has a character limit of something like 200. If you never open up their emails, they stay put at 200. And their messages don't count against your inbox space.

But if you open up their email, their limit goes up to 300 or 400 characters. But if you don't reply to their email, they stay there. On the other hand you could simply ban them and their privileged 200 characters are also gone.

But if you read and reply, the character limit goes up to 500 or more. Unless you specifically click on a button that allows them limitless space.

At one end are email concepts like on Facebook where you message me because we are connected. At the other end are regular email services where anyone can send you anything.

The inbox has to be like a cellular membrane. It has to protect the cell, but it also has to selectively allow outside stuff.

Beyond this "membrane" there have to be hard core demarcations. Facebook seems to have nailed social communication. Seems like people you know really well are only so many. And I feel like Asana is cracking the code on work communication. I have been reading up on it.

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Marissa Mayer: Towards Products

Yahoo Has Seen Its Future; In One Word, It's Products

the board was unconvinced that Mr. Levinsohn's deal-making and media savvy would be enough to save Yahoo. The economics of content aren't good enough, and Yahoo doesn't have the firepower to pony up, say, the $100 million YouTube is spending on original channels or the hundreds of millions more Netflix is spending to acquire rights to TV and movies..... By all accounts, Ms. Mayer wowed the board in interviews. While Mr. Levinsohn made a case for maximizing what Yahoo is today, Ms. Mayer represented what Yahoo could become, a company that builds products... Yahoo spent 18% of revenue on product development in the first quarter..... "Yahoo's entire value is built around starting points -- the home page and email" ..... "The only reason [Yahoo] can afford all the good content is the scale of the homepage and email." .... Yahoo will have to create new, powerful products in areas such as mobile

When David Filo Gets Excited, I Get Excited

Yahoo! Co-Founder David Filo said, “Marissa is a well-known, visionary leader in user experience and product design and one of Silicon Valley’s most exciting strategists in technology development. I look forward to working with her to enhance Yahoo’s product offerings for our over 700 million unique monthly visitors.” .... for the longest time after Yahoo! IPO’ed and David was a billionaire he continued to drive a beat-up Datsun to work every day ..... He still works every day at the company in a slightly messy cubicle. ..... One former engineer told me a story of how David jumped in and stayed up all night helping pitch in to solve some platform problem the company had several years ago and how he was always available to help with problems on IM. ...... “Why isn’t David on the board?” I asked a Yahoo! executive a few years ago........ “He doesn’t want to. They’ve asked him many times. He goes to most board meetings anyway. Besides, he’s happy to let Jerry be the public face for the two of them.”

Marissa Mayer enters the Yahoo pressure cooker

Make Flickr Free Again

One fine day Yahoo decided it was going to charge for Flickr. When the rest of the industry was going in the other direction. And I remember feeling, Yahoo has lost its way.

Photo is so central to the mobile experience. It has proven to be the central mobile experience. And Yahoo almost shuttered a crown jewel. That was a dysfunctional move by a dysfunctional company.

How Marissa Mayer handles Flickr will tell me a lot about if she has what it takes to bring the sexy back to the Yahoo brand. For one, make it free. People should be able to upload as many pictures as they want. And they should be able to embed the pictures wherever they want. That sharing part is key. And then see if Flickr can be given a mobile version.

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Marissa Mayer: Google News Item

I think I just created a section called Marissa Mayer on my Google News page. This is the first time I have done so for a tech CEO. I think I am going to watch the moves she makes as she makes them.

Mayer's Products

It is interesting that people are making it sound like Steve Jobs just came back to Apple, a dying company!

Marissa Mayer Has a Secret Weapon

For the past decade, she has been the doyen of a collection of some of the most talented young engineers and product managers in all of technology. These are the hand-selected prime talents of an accelerated leadership program at Google called Associate Product Manager (APM)...... Consider the first APM, a fresh Stanford grad named Brian Rakowski. He became a key leader of the team that built the Chrome browser and now is the VP of the Chrome operation. The second was Wesley Chan, who made Google Toolbar a success, then launched Google Analytics and Google Voice. He’s now picking winners for Google Ventures. Another early APM was Bret Taylor, who earned his bones by launching Google Maps. He left Google and co-founded Friendfeed, then become the Chief Technical Officer of Facebook..... there are over 300 who have been through the program. .... And the glue to the whole shebang was Marissa Mayer, who was the APM boss, mentor, den mother and role model. ..... Mayer thought up the program in early 2002. Google had been struggling to find PMs who could work within the peculiar company culture — team leaders who would not be bosses but work consensually with the wizards who produce code. Ideally, a Google product manger would understand the technical issues and sway the team to his or her viewpoint by strong data-backed arguments, and more than a bit of canny psychology. But experienced PMs from places like Microsoft, or those with MBAs, didn’t understand the Google way, and tried to force their views on teams..... The ideal applicants must have technical talent, but not be total programming geeks — APMs had to have social finesse and business sense. ..... They would undergo a multi-interview hiring process that made the Harvard admissions regimen look like community college. The chosen ones were thrown into deep water, heading real, important product teams. (As the first APM, Rakowski was asked to launch a nascent project called Gmail. By the way, I hear Rakowski is taking over the program now that Mayer is gone.) “We give them way too much responsibility,” Mayer once told me, “to see if they can handle it.” Also, Google had APMs perform tasks for top management, like note-taking at high-level executive meetings or drawing up white papers on ambitious potential products. ..... The program has been so successful that Google has created a variation for leaders of non-product teams. These are called Marketing APMs. ..... Kevin Systrom was an MAPM — before he left Google and founded Instagram. ..... You didn’t get to be an APM unless you connected with her; she was the last interview in a long series, and she’d typically make ultimate decision. (“Tell me about a product you love,” she’d ask candidates. There was no right answer. But not describing the choice with passion was the wrong answer.).... a high percentage of APMs go elsewhere. APMs are chosen for their ambition and independence. Those traits are often at odds with working at a big company...... Naturally, one of the first e-mails that Mayer sent after accepting her new job was a blast to the entire APM network, informing them of her move and assuring them that she will still be in touch.

One Week of Mayer at Yahoo: Whither Ross? New Old Yahoos? More Search? Product Side “Elated!”

“Let’s be clear, she is our last hope,” said one board member to me, a sentiment that I also heard from another; and so, too, from a lot of execs and rank-and-file around the company. ...... former Googler Shashi Seth, who has been in charge of a number of product areas at Yahoo for a while now ... “Shashi has been smiling from ear to ear since Marissa arrived — he can’t contain his glee,” said one person. ...... “I think we have a ballgame now! It’s amazing how fast the sentiment changed internally,” said one person in the product org, in what has been a common refrain. “Everyone [is] ELATED. People I know that were close to leaving (including myself) are now giving it another shot.” ..... She has appeared getting her own lunch in the cafeteria, which has delighted more employees than you might imagine at Yahoo. ..... In what appears to be a whirlwind of fact-finding meetings with Yahoo employees since right after she started last Monday — no all-hands for her off the bat — Mayer has been asking questions and taking in information. ..... “curt,” “whip smart,” “suffers no fools,” and “a sponge.” ..... Mayer’s most critical ally in her early stages appears to be the quiet and retiring Yahoo co-founder David Filo, who emerged to be a vocal supporter of her from the start. That he gave a quote in a press release and did interviews — my nickname for him has long been “Silent Bob” — should say a lot to anyone paying mind..... the heart of the company is still with both Filo and also Jerry Yang. ..... all about building up tech again at Yahoo. ..... Some big initiatives on the burner at Yahoo that she must mull: A wide-ranging integration with Twitter, which would be similar to Yahoo’s efforts with Facebook ..... many think a halving of the company’s workforce is in order ..... What about a new kind of commerce hookup with retail giant Walmart, for example, where Mayer serves on the board? Why not become a video Switzerland for all the competing content makers out there? What about really committing to content all-in, a la AOL and its Huffington Post Hail Mary? Could she make a startling purchase of something big, such as Hulu or Zynga?

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