The Future of Work: Asana Intern Q&A 2016

This past Tuesday, I had a chance to attend a Q&A session hosted for Bay Area interns in the office of Asana, one of the hottest startup in the Valley. For those of you who don’t know, Asana’s product is an internal tool that helps teams collaborate and work together effortlessly. The event itself was extremely well-organized, attracting more than 150 attendees who were treated with delicious dinner and desert. I had a chance to meet and network with fellow interns and Asanas to learn about interesting things happening in the tech world.

The Q&A panel main event comprises some of the biggest names in the tech industry:

· Justin Rosenstein — cofounder of Asana, previously worked at Google and Facebook. He was the primary inventor of the Like Button, Facebook Pages, Gmail Chat, and was the original product lead for Google Drive.

· Tracy Chou — previously software engineer at Quora (employee no.6) and Pinterest (employee no.10). She is well-known for her work pushing diversity in tech. In 2013, she helped kick off the wave of tech company diversity data disclosures with a Github repository collecting numbers on women in engineering. She is now a founding member of Project Include, which focused on driving solutions in the space. She was named Forbes Tech 30 Under 30 in 2014, profiled in Vogue and Wired for her advocacy. She is also an advisor to Homebrew VC and on reserve with the US Digital Service.

· Joe Lonsdale — cofounder of Palantir (defense and finance multi-billion dollar global software company, founder of Addepar (leading wealth management tech platform), and OpenGov (open-source government tech), founding partner at 8VC and Formation 8 — very well-known SF-based VC fund managing over 1.5 billion dollar.

· Ruchi Sangvhi — first female engineer hired by Facebook, where she transitioned to PM and oversaw Facebook Platform and News Feed. She started her own company Cove in 2010, sold it to Dropbox in 2012, then became VP of Operations at Dropbox later.

· Dustin Moskowitz — cofounder of Asana. He is mostly famous for cofounding Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, a key leader within the technical staff, first as CTO and later as VP of Engineering.

The topic of the session is the future of work, meaning how technology will change the workforce in the next decade and how young tech-oriented people like us can take advantage of such opportunities in order to create major impact on our communities, society, and humanity as a whole. Justin is the moderator for the panel and he had a list of questions previously submitted by attendees, curated by a sorting and ranking algorithm in order to pick the best ones. Each of the panelists took turn to give their response to the questions, sharing their knowledge and giving advice for the audience (most of them were very relevant to us interns). The whole Q&A lasted about 90 minutes, and below are some of best questions and paraphrased answers from the panelists, in addition with my comments.

Should I start my career as a generalist or a specialist?

An excellent question to start the evening. Each of the speaker cited out different examples but ultimately, the common theme is that it really depends on the company you work for.

· Dustin mentions that if you work for a startup, you will have to become a generalist no matter what just because there are a lot of things that need to get done. As the company scales and more people are brought in, you can get more specialized in a particular area that you are passionate about.

· Joe suggests that you should look for a startup that experience very significant growth, ideally post-series B/C; so that you can get a hand on a lot of things as a generalist, but also receive substantial mentorship to get specialized.

· Ruchi started her career as a specialist (software engineering) and stresses that the mentorship/training she got at Facebook had been extremely helpful in helping her transitioning into product management(a generalist role).

Contemplating an entry-level role next year, I probably will look at a more generalist role. This is mostly because of the nature of my liberal arts education at Denison, but also because I have had a chance to develop a variety of skills that can be put to use in the last 2 summers.

What are the industries that can benefit a lot from technological innovation?

A very futuristic question that get a lot of attention from the audience, judging how much impact technology can make on our society as a whole based on recent development in machine learning, artificial intelligence, virtual/augmented reality, IoT, robotics… to name a few. It’s also appropriate as the SHAPE expo has just taken a place a few days ago here in San Francisco.

· Government is one of the biggest one. Joe talks about his experience founding and sitting in the board of OpenGov, which are transforming the way government analyze, share, and compute financial and performance intelligence. There are a trillion dollars of money being wasted annually on running at government at both local and national level; therefore, adopting technology is a smart move to improve the broken system. Tracy talks a bit about US Digital Service and Code for America, initiatives that utilize tech talent to solve governmental problems. It is actually kind of a coincidence that I have just watched a lecture the day before of Jennifer Pahlka, founder of both of these organizations, talking about big government problems (excessive spending, inefficient structure, outdated organizational systems) that can be of critical help with technologies.

· Education and healthcare are two other areas. However, Ruchi shows a concern that all of these industries are heavily regulated, so you must be very careful when thinking about opportunities there.

· Justin thinks that the best way to make the greatest impact is to help other businesses to solve their problems. That’s the core reason why he and Dustin founded Asana, with the goals of improving the productivity of individuals and groups and increasing the potential output of every team’s effort.

How does it feel like being a female software engineer working in tech?

This question is clearly addressed to Tracy and Ruchi. It also implies a broader question of how to address diversity in tech.

· Tracy gives a shout-out to Pinterest, saying that it is the first company in which she was treated as an engineer, not as a female engineer. However, she understands that there’s still a big barrier that prevents women from getting recognition by their male counterparts in terms of technical abilities. It’s probably even harder if you’re not White or Asian, the 2 most dominant racial groups in tech. The advice Tracy gives for the women in the room, inspired by Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In”, is to connect with other women to start movement and leverage the progressive belief that respects women in the tech sector. That’s the main drive for her work with Project Include, a community for building meaningful, enduring diversity and inclusion in tech started by a group of women tech activists.

· Ruchi gives a bit of context on her background, saying that she had always been surrounded in a male-dominant environment, from college to workforce to executive board meetings. Because of that, she takes in a lot of influence from the male personality. At times, she says that she has been portrayed as too aggressive, compared to other women of course. She suggests bringing more and more women into the leadership roles in tech companies so the perception of women in tech can fundamentally change.

When do you think the bubble is going to burst?

This question sort of came out of nowhere, and wasn’t relevant to the audience really. Joe quickly writes it off — The investment in the tech sector has been extremely significant in the past decade, but is still small compared to the billions and trillions spent in other industries and abroad. So it’s not time right now, especially for young grads, to worry about the negative scenario yet.

How do you define a company’s culture?

One of the core questions that should be addressed in any type of business panels, because culture means different practices for each person.

· Dustin believes that culture should be one of the earliest things that founders should address, if not the first thing. He recounted that when founding Asana, he and Justin went straight into coming up with company values, not even writing code or crafting a business plan.

· Tracy says that culture relies on the founders’ behaviors. It is the reflection of the founders’ personality, how they communicate with the teams, and how they respond to change as the company grows. Even as employee no. 5 in Quora, she didn’t have much of an impact on the culture of the company as of its founders.

· Ruchi emphasizes how the company’s value really affect the product development process. She compares Facebook’s “Move Fast and Break Things” with Dropbox’s “Sweat the Details.” At Facebook, the principle is to experiment a lot of things and iterate as quickly as possible; therefore, there might be a lot of features being introduced in a small amount of time. Whereas at Dropbox, the principle is to meticulously go over feature details and optimize the product as much as possible, so the launch can be great.

What are the advice in your career that you’re glad you ignored?

· For Joe — working with the government is challenging as people told him things have to go certain way. But he thinks that’s quite problematic, and so he always neglects conventional practice to break down barriers while working with them.

· For Dustin — many people told him to not drop out of college back in the early days of Facebook. In brief, he’s glad he did.

· For Justin — in school he skipped a lot of fundamental CS classes to take higher-level classes, and so a well-known Stanford professor told him that things always have to go in order in school and in real world. Now he always thinks the opposite direction — to skip as many hurdles as he can to get to the goal as quick as possible.

If you want to go into product management, should you start you as a software engineer then go into PM, or go straight into an entry-level PM role?

This question resonates the most with me, because as an aspiring product manager, I constantly debate whether to improve my coding skill or to practice other relevant PM skills.

· Ruchi has a very strong opinion — definitely going the software engineering route first, because she believes having solid engineering experience makes better product manager, recounting her experience at Facebook.

· Justin thinks either way works fine, and that it really depends on the company’s needs. Asana has both technical and non-technical PMs, and they all play different role in contributing values to the product.

So that’s a brief recap of the event. If you also happened to attend it, please share your experience and thoughts. Otherwise, give your comments on the panelist’ answers and what do you think that means for the future of work.