Dustin Moskovitz – Eliminating Work About Work – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 19]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. You can find more episodes at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:21)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:46)
My guest today is Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder and CEO of Asana, a team-centric product management tool used by over 1.3 million users around the world. Dustin started Asana in 2008, four years after co-founding Facebook. In this conversation, we dive into Dustin's belief about the diminishing returns of hard work, the shocking amount of productivity lost in doing quote-unquote work about work, and Dustin's philanthropic investment strategy around leverage and maximizing ROI. I hope you enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with Dustin Moskovitz.
I was thinking about the most interesting place to begin this, and sometimes I think of these episodes and try to come up with the title ahead of time.
One idea I had for this title was the diminishing returns of hard work. Reading through Asana's history and your history, I'm really intrigued by the balance that Asana as a culture tries to create between purposeful hard work and what we'll call like too much or burnout. Can you walk me through that part of the business? I know it's kind of a strange place to start, but it really stood out in my research and would love to hear what you've learned that you could share with us all.

**Dustin Moskovitz** (3:53)
First of all, thanks for having me on the show. A lot of my thinking is just based on my own story of basically working too hard at Facebook and seeing the repercussions of that.
I think you see a lot of narratives that you should work as hard as possible. That's the way to maximize success. You see a lot of people competing about how many hours per week they're working.
And I think it just turns out to be a fallacy, both based on my own empirical observations and any sort of rigorous study that I've seen on it. That's always hard to quantify output, but there have been a few studies on this. Not only do you get diminishing returns as you go beyond, call it 50 or 60 hours per week, but you can actually get to negative returns quite quickly, where you're actually making all of your hours less productive, such that the sum is just less than if you had worked less. And there are some softer issues, too, of when you're burnt out state, you're just not as good of a teammate. It's easier to get into conflict. It's harder to work through disagreement and just make productive progress with the team. I've really just tried to impress that on our team that the goal is not to maximize your hours, it's to maximize your output, and in particular, over the long run. It's easy to kind of sprint and can be fast in the short run, can kind of burn the candle at both ends for a limited amount of time, maybe three or four weeks of sprinting, but you'll basically have to pay for that after in the form of a week or two of degraded productivity. So you want to be really careful about when you do that and not just try to be pressing on the gas all the time. The basic axiom that you'll hear about this is it's a marathon, not a sprint. And it's just really true. I've been at Asana for more than 10 years now. If I had burnt myself out, then we just couldn't have possibly gotten as far with me as the leader. And we have quite a number of employees that have actually been with the company for a long time, some of them more than 10 years as well.