Asana is the tool we all know even if we don't use it ourselves. With that famous B2C CEO that decided to do SaaS next.

It's crossed $250,000,000 in ARR and is starting to march upmarket

Here are 5 Interesting Learnings from Asana at $250M ARR:

#1. Asana, like Slack, has self-service roots. But now, 40% of its customers are closed by the sales team, trending to 50%.

Asana is now planning to double the size of its sales team in 2020
#2. Asana has 115% NRR overall, but it's the segmentation that's interesting.

140% NRR for $50k+ customers
125% NRR for $5k-$50k customers
100% or so NRR for < $5k customers

Given it still skews 60% SMB, this is consistent with other market leaders like Zendesk, etc
#3. Asana is growing 55% at $250M+ in ARR, which is very impressive and top-tier. But its $50k+ accounts are growing >>100%+<<

We saw with Zendesk and Shopify the SMB growth keep pace with enterprise, and we saw with Slack enterprise be the engine of growth

Asana is in middle
#4. Its crossed 89,000 customers, so the average customer pays ~$2,800 a year. So the average ticket is still quite small.

Asana has the challenge many of you do. The Big Customers are growing fastest (100% YoY), but 40% of its revenue is still from accounts < $5k ACV.
#5. Revenue growth is >far< outpacing new customer growth. This is an important theme for almost all SaaS leaders except Slack.

Asana is growing 55% at $250m+ in ARR!! But new customer growth was ~10% YoY.

So again, lean way, way into your existing customers.
Some bonus learnings:

#6. Churn has returned to pre-Covid levels. So no more blaming Covid here.

#7. Asana added 130+ new features in 2020. How about you? Agile wins in very competitive spaces. Asana is in a very competitive space.
#8. It's late, but as Asana leans into $50k+ deals, it's adding more classic -- and necessary -- enterprise features. Enhanced admin controls & enterprise-wide security especially.

You just have to add admin-level controls if you want to go enterprise. So do it early.
A deeper dive here:

https://t.co/gN4YSINoX6

More from Trading

1/ Feels like a good time to tell the story of how I went from broke to a millionaire to broke again in 2017/18 again...

Yesterday was brutal for some people...

Losing life-changing money sucks, losing any money sucks...you can chase the market or you can change your strategy.

2/ The original thread is gone but you can read it here.

https://t.co/cLLNs75rB0

tl;dr
- Traded $32k to $1.2m
- Thought I was a genius
- Made poor investments
- Didn't conserve capital
- Peaked at 150 BTC
- Lost nearly all of it

2 weeks from losing my house + no income. Oops.

3/ I am going to assume you are in it for the money rather than the tech. Yeah, you might Tweet about the amazing blockchaining of cross-border payments and oracles yadda yadda...really, you are in it to make money.

If you are really in it for the tech, go and build something.

4/ Okay, so if you want to make money, trading is super hard, you are trading against:
- Better traders than you
- People who can move markets
- Unknown information

And if you are trading with leverage you might blow up your account with the volatility.

5/ If you are not trading, you are investing. Okay, so what are you investing in?

I made the decision that the crypto with the best opportunity of existing in 10 years is #Bitcoin:
- Solves a genuine problem
- The right tech
- A proven track record
Many of you have seen the famous Westrum Organizational Typology model, so prominently featured in State of DevOps Research, Accelerate, DevOps Handbook, etc.

This model was created Dr. Ron Westrum, a widely-cited sociologist who studied the impact of culture on safety


Thanks to Dr. @nicolefv, I was able to interview him for an upcoming episode of the Idealcast! 🤯

It was a very heady experience, and while preparing to interview him, I was startled to discover how much work he's done in healthcare, aviation, spaceflight, but also innovation.

I've read 4+ of his papers, so I thought I was familiar with his work. (Here's one paper:
https://t.co/7X00O67VgS)

I was startled to learn he has also studied in depth what enables innovation. He wrote a wonderful book "Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake"


Dr. Westrum writes about China Lake Research Labs: "its design and structure had one purpose: to foster technical creativity. It did; China Lake operated far outside the normal envelope... Sidewinder & others were "impossible" accomplishments,

I love this book because it describes traits of organizations that routinely create and maintain greatness: US space program (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo), US Naval Reactors, Toyota, Team of Teams, Tesla, the tech giants (Amazon, Google, Netflix, Google)

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