Leading Big Visions From the Heart [Entire Talk]

**Justin Rosenstein** (0:08)
I'm super excited to be here. I think I took 472 like seven times, both because it was a good, easy credit, but mostly because it was really great to just see like so many people who had gone through, had so much experience and to get to share in that.
Throughout this, I really encourage or really invite all of us to stay present and engaged, if you can, in the sense of like, if you're bored, look bored. If you're excited by what I'm saying, look excited, because I have hours and hours of stuff I could share with you and that will help me calibrate to making sure you're getting the most out of this that you can be. In fact, before we get started, you guys have probably had classes all day and have been doing things all day. I invite you to just take one moment and just maybe exhale and then take a collective inhale and exhale, just come into the space together.
I feel very privileged and grateful for the fact that I feel like I have a deep, deep sense of calling and purpose and passion. I'm working on technology and helping to build this product and this company and it feels like, it almost feels like I'm not building it but like there is something that's coming through me that wants to be expressed in the world. Something that will help potentially make the, make human beings happier, reduce suffering, make the world a more, not only a happier but a more interesting place.
And it comes from a place of really understanding sort of the connectedness of the world and the ways in which I see the possibility for us to come together and really do great things together in this big collaborative endeavor. So I want to, I want to talk today first of all about, about my, my own journey in coming to that, in coming to this place in my life. Talk about a, a big vision for humanity that I hope, hope will be very inspiring to all you and that sort of can encompass a lot of other visions as well as how we're manifesting some of that specifically in Asana. And then in the second half, we'll look at some, some values, some leadership tactics and some ways of managing your own psychology that I have found invaluable in leading teams that have these big ambitious missions at all the different companies that, that Tina mentioned. So, practical advice for you as you execute on your own big visions or, or join other people's big visions.
So starting with my journey, I'll start where I was ten, I got my first computer and I was immediately fascinated by this, this magical box. It was so incredible to me that I could, I started writing little games that I could give to friends on floppy disks. And it occurred to me even really early on that I was writing code once, but then all of these different people throughout, throughout the, my middle school were getting to enjoy the benefits of that and get to play this game. I didn't have the word leverage at the time, but that was a really great taste of that experience. And as I grew up, I wanted to give bigger gifts to more people with even more leverage.
Eventually, I ended up at Stanford where, yeah, I was in the Mayfield Fellows Program, which honestly that and this course like really were quite life changing for me. I came into Stanford very much a not particularly socialized, very nerdy, heady person. And being at Stanford and especially these courses really helped me understand that the benefits of being able to work in the much more, in some ways, complex, juicy space of individual human interactions and how to think about teams and how to lead teams. A little sad at how little of my job these days involves coding and engineering, but on the plus side, I get to enjoy this rich, fruitful life of helping people who are doing that come together and do really big things in the world, things much bigger than I'd be able to do as an individual.
After that, I went to Google. I left Stanford a little early, which I have some mixed feelings about, but Google was really taking off, and it was a really exciting place to be. Interestingly, most of the bigger projects that I worked on were total abject failures, and one didn't even see the light of day. But I managed to, I realized in hindsight, make a bunch of little steps along the way. So one, for example, was at some point, Google was working on a standalone IM client for people, those like AOL and Instant Messenger, and I asked at some point, well, why don't we just put that inside of Gmail, because people are already doing communication inside of Gmail. Why don't we just add a real-time component? And my boss at the time said, oh, yeah, we thought of that, and it's impossible. I was like, really? It's impossible to do chat inside of a browser? And he's like, yeah, we looked into it. Totally impossible. He's like, in fact, I'll bet you that it'll never be done inside a browser. And so I went home that night, wrote it, or wrote a very simple version of chat, showed it to him the next morning, and the chat inside of Gmail Project started. So the lesson there, of course, is when people tell you something's impossible, be very skeptical.