Lessons from co-founding Facebook, and now Asana

Key takeaways

1. Moskovitz says people will tell you you're about to fail no matter how well you're doing, so judge your company for yourself.
2. He calls managing your own psychology a core CEO job and invests in physical and mental health, because burnout or discouragement is the easiest way for the company to die.
3. Asana was built to be faster than Notepad for one person's own tasks, so the team collaboration comes as a byproduct of individual use.
4. Asana's architecture was built wrong at first and had to be rebuilt around 2015 to 2017, which lost customers and first impressions. Moskovitz now invites people who found it slow to try again.
5. Moskovitz says trust is built one ball in a jar at a time and lost by turning the jar over, so contracts, severance and equity promises to employees matter.
6. He dislikes readout meetings. Send the document as a pre-read and use the meeting for discussion, where progress happens.
7. Moskovitz doesn't try to scale culture. He steers it, holds firm on mission and values, treats the rest as scaffolding, and corrects manager exceptions before they set precedent.