I've used Asana in a couple of projects and actually like it for its simplicity and ease of doing things like copy pasting multi line issues from a spreadsheet, text file, or chat; easy editing with multi select; and similar features that make the product feel more similar to a spreadsheet than an annoying issue tracker where every click results in modal dialogs with OK buttons and other cruft. I hate stuff like Jira with a passion and it doesn't do anything for me that I 1) need 2) Asana does not do in a way that is more convenient.
That being said, it's not 1.5B dollars cool and that kind of multi billion valuation creates unrealistic expectations that cannot possibly be fulfilled by staying humble and focusing on just what Asana does best. So, this kind of investment smells like a kiss of death. I fear the worst here in terms of layering on features nobody wanted, and attempts to make the product more appealing for the masses, etc. Is this going to be an actual IPO or a lazy acquihire by some company in need of an issue tracker?
Valuations in the low billions of dollars for a SaaS company with a relatively simple product aren't that unusual. The closest parallel for Asana is Smartsheet, which IPO'd earlier in the year and has a market cap of ~2.6 billion.
There are companies with even simpler products that are worth even more - Docusign is worth 6.5 billion for example.
DocuSign is not even remotely as simple as you think. Notice how there's no one else in the same space. Microsoft tried and failed and ended up with DocuSign integrated inside Outlook ( the only third party integration I believe). The nightmarish regulation of signatures is complex enough, let alone the doc management system.
Trello sold for nearly half a billion with a product that is arguably simpler than Asana and a monetization process that was far less aggressive. So I'd say that the 1.5B valuation isn't too ambitious
Have to be careful comparing mature companies which show consistent and predicatable growth with those that are still early in that cycle.
While the revenue growth the last couple of years for Asana is obviously on an uptick you have to be careful that the growth is really a precentage not an absolute value. If they are growing 50% that's awesome, but if instead they are growing $25MM, from $25MM to $50MM, to $75MM, to $100MM that is a completely different story.
You need another dot on that plot to see which one it is.
Overall the valuations for SaaS companies are definitely well ahead of revenue but early on in a company's history that's ok as there is a lot of future growth potential.
However, listing that graph without a Y-axis label for revenue implies that it is well below $100MM in revenue and most likely that last plot is around the $50-60MM line.
So definitely an aggressive valuation for the time being.
Smartsheet had 74,116 customers in its IPO filing. Asana recently announced that it had hit 50,000 paying customers, and revenue growth had reached 90% year over year.
The maturity difference isn't as large as you'd imagine.
> ... that kind of multi billion valuation creates unrealistic expectations that cannot possibly be fulfilled by staying humble and focusing on just what Asana does best. So, this kind of investment smells like a kiss of death
This!
Exactly what happened to Evernote IMO. Otherwise excellent product almost killed by the expectations by the 1b valuation.
Atlassian's market cap is 19.981B [1], with $874.0 million for fiscal year 2018 [2,3]
Now, Atlassian sells other things beside jira/confluence (the asana comparable?). It also has a github-like comparable and also a CI/CD type thing. There's other small details, but as a rough estimate, make your own conclusions from the numbers.
Without insight into their internal numbers how do we know it's not 1.5B cool. They've been around for 10 years, so I can see it being the case that they've built something profitable
I use it at work and as far as I can tell it's just a web app where you can move cards around.
I do like the fact that it's simple and snappy and doesn't have a shitload of options and features no one wants that cause it to load super slow (Cough cough Jira)
However, some basic workflow enforcement would be nice (Cards marked done when you put them in the "done" column)
In its current state it seems like it could be cloned in a week.
Edit: cloned in a day if you wanted just the functionality and not a cute little UI
It's easy to make a (poor) copy of the product. It's hard to execute the idea, take market share, and capture customer revenue.
Asana blogged this year about 50k organisations, 6 quarters accelerating growth [1].
Back in 2015 they blogged mentioning the heating up 'enterprise collaboration market'. There's countless office tools, diagramming tools, collaboration tools. Even in software there's more CI systems than I can count.
My guess is there's a big market which the VCs think is accessible to Asana in a way it's fundamentally not to a competitor. Combined with big growth it makes sense.
Taiga.io is a pretty good facsimile, but Taiga tries to incorporate too many of JIRA's Agile-related non-features rather than sticking to the basics. There is no good alternative (right now).
It should be pretty obvious to anyone that's used both JIRA and it's competitors that it's a piece of shit. It's missing basic functionality that competitors have like live updates (I guess I'll just telepathically guess when my teammates have made an update and hit F5), it's got basic UX problems that everyone else seems to have solved just fine (opening outbound links in a new tab etc), and their new redesign appears to have done fuck all to make any of it better.
I don't care how many features it's got for BAs/PMs to wank over. If the basic usability isn't there, the devs won't proactively participate, which means they'll either be forced to (incurring a big hit to morale), or they'll use other tools like Trello or physical boards to organise instead, and you end up with multiple sources of truth and synchronisation problems.
How it's ever become so popular is a mystery to me. I wouldn't inflict it on a team of my worst enemies.
Hmmm...I don't really share the same opinions about JIRA. Complex teams with a lot of stake holders and JIRA was light years better than what was used before. Maybe you just have super simple needs? I also don't see at all what's so complicated about using the tool, and my org has some super complicated customized workflows to get a ticket to flow efficiently through all facets of the org. Also, even on our smaller teams, that have simple processes right now, people can open up and create a ticket easily with most of the effort in filling out the description?
Even more concerning is that you state your devs would have negative morale by being forced to use this tool? You must have bigger issues?
Interesting. These seem like relatively minor issues to me. We switched from Asana to JIRA about a year ago. We spent about 2 years using Asana, and I hated working with it daily. JIRA is very far from perfect but like it many times more. We have significantly better understanding of where our team is and our projects now, and we scoured the web for every way to use Asana we possibly could find. To each their own...
One of the things that bothered me the most about Asana was how slow it was (also a UX issue).
> I use it at work and as far as I can tell it's just a web app where you can move cards around.
Are we adding Asana to the HN list “I’m Not Seeing Why This Isn’t Just a Weekend Project?” which includes: Twitter, Facebook, and DropBox among many others.
Valuations in Silicon Valley are not based on some rational price to earnings multiple. It is based on what investors think a large monopoly like SAP, MSFT, GOOG, CRM, etc would pay for it. Even the 8 times revenue is not a good benchmark anymore. The buyer will have umpteen ways to justify the price- new users, complementary products, etc. Just see SAP buying travel expense app for $8B.
I thought dropbox was a really cool idea, well executed both in engineering and marketing... but not 7.1 billion really cool.
A product that straightforwardly saves businesses time/money is easy-to-buy. Company valuation is just a few steps further. Primary danger is competition.
Tried Asana, couldn't stand it. Moved to Airtable, which is vastly superior to Asana and moderately better than Trello. Now I use Notion on recommendation of an HN poster. Far from perfect, but beats Asana out of the park.
All of these services with these massive valuations still somehow struggle to get their core product right, it's like it lacks vision. These products are also mindbogglingly slow-moving. I don't know how Asana can justify a $1.5b valuation though. On paper, maybe, but when we talk about profit or revenue, I'm skeptical to say the least.
What exactly they need $50m for, I'm not quite sure.
> somehow struggle to get their core product right, it's like it lacks vision
My theory here is that todo/work tracking apps are always doomed to end up like this. The problem is that we use the same words to talk about something that varies greatly from person to person, and even more so from organization to organization.
The upshot is that a company will start out with a strong vision, find a narrow segment of users who work perfectly in line with that vision, and make them happy. But then they want to expand, so they start adding features and options that let others groups find a way to work using the tool. Eventually either the tool stops expanding or feature creep and death-of-a-thousand-cuts changes make it an all-things-to-everyone nightmare (hi, Jira!).
Personally, I use Kanban Flow, which is very focused on a Kanban style approach. By the name it's obvious they're targeting a very specific niche. Since I happen to be in that niche, I love it. But I wouldn't recommend it to all comers, because for a lot of people it won't match their tasks or how their brain works.
IMHO, this is what Notion gets right. At heart, it's less of a todo/work tracking app per se and more of a database with user-friendly views, many of which can be tailored to todo/work tracking, and many of which come with reasonable default setups that match common usage patterns.
We're using Notion right now to manage user research, sprint kanban boards, and a wiki for a Code for Canada project. As part of the wiki side, we can embed InVision mocks, RealtimeBoards, Google Drive docs, and many other things directly into our pages, in a way that allows us to interact with (comment, edit, etc.) them. About the only thing I find missing is full-text search across pages; other than that, it's been really quite great as a central place to organize the whole project.
No idea if that will remain true as they scale up, but for now they seem to have found a way to break the "only works for a specific niche" pattern, and they're carving out a meta-niche of "teams whose work isn't easily captured by previously defined specific niches".
Almost every sentence in this reply seems uninformed. Airtable & Asana are not comparable. Asana clearly has vision but possibly different from yours. A company raising Series E obviously would have positive financials. Founder posted hockey stick graph of revenues on Twitter. $50m is not that big of a Series E raise and will obviously go to engineering and sales & marketing.
I wouldn't say they're not comparable, Airtable is commonly used for the same use cases as Asana, much like Trello and Notion. Airtable can also be used for other purposes, but this doesn't make comparisons unwarranted. It even has a Kanban view.
> "$50m is not that big of a Series E raise and will obviously go to engineering and sales & marketing."
I don't find that the product is good enough to warrant investment, and I don't believe it'll be successful in the long run unless changes are made. There's people who will disagree and love Asana.
I think Notion got it right with the focus on rich text content. The tasks you need to get done and the information about your project can all be in the same project. I think Notion could become a serious contender to overtake Asana.
Just for example, I dislike sorting with Asana. You can't sort in Kanban boards. You can't sort by X and then by Y. This is what their core product is. That doesn't instill me with confidence.
I guess mark-as-dependent functionality is nice though?
I must say I am very surprised by the ARR [0], which is much more than Atlassian's $619m last year. I'll admit I was wrong there. Congratulations to them.
I was not in a aware state of mind when writing this reply, obviously if Asana was pulling in $1b+ a year in revenue they'd be valued at an order of magnitude more than $1.5b.
Their revenue would probably still be pretty good since they have 50k+ organizations paying $20+ per user per month [0].
I think Airtable and Notion are focused on tracking manually-generated data (the former does well for structured data, the latter for unstructured data), whereas Asana is more focused on team collaboration / async communication. As a result, Airtable and Notion are great for personal use, but it's not clear to me that they can excel at the kinds of usecases that Asana meets for collaborative work tracking.
Nope. I'd like to hire their sales/marketing people though, for they seem to have an uncanny ability to solution sell it to execs who will then force it down on their organizations. :P
Anyone here that actually had to use Asana, and somehow found it beneficial/useful? How?
I like the fact that the list view is more like a notepad where you can just keep typing. Many other task list tools make you hit a few extra keys to create tasks and most of the time you just need a simple todo list. It makes it easier to convince others to use it too for the simple stuff.
Beyond that, I don't like how their board view (Kanban style) is hacked on and doesn't coexist with the list view yet, and a lot of the more complex stuff is done better elsewhere.
We tried a LOT of tools and Asana has been by far the best. Even just finding a product that had dependencies, gantt charting, and decent multi-user support was nearly impossible.
I have only found it useful for the most basic of tasks (like a personal priority list) or a single project's sprint tracking. It falls apart terribly when you need to introduce any sort of collaboration and process.
Compare that to something like JIRA. JIRA has a high floor, but can be very useful as long as people don't go crazy.
It looks like a very annoying place to work to me.
Big fan of gravitas in the workplace. Probably because I'm over 40 (thus not qualified for "diversity") but wow, how does any work get done from the photos? Looks like something straight out of my elementary school in the 70's.
Well the Googles of the world are absolutely pulverizing the IBMs of the world so it’s really the people with “gravitas” who are playing House and the “elementary school” students who are getting shit done.
Meh, to be fair I don't want to work at an IBM either. Nor a Microsoft.
Guess truth be told I like working from my couch. No diversity teams blowing soap bubbles. No "Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking". Limited opportunity to play political games over Slack.
Although we will see if Asana lasts as long as IBM. Guessing not. And they seem to be a little further along the social engineering scale than Google is.
Compared to those pictures, my couch is a veritable church pew.
If people enjoy working in that kind of environment, fantastic. But it really looks like it would drive me bonkers and I'd long for a bland cubical with a neckbeard neighbor who didn't really like people.
Tab + backspace to delete those empty tasks that are created when you hit enter.
I love Asana though. I put everything in there and have it hooked up to Alexa. The only downside is that I put everything in there. I haven't had a morning email with less than 30 tasks in over a year.
Yes, it looks great in theory compared to the other available options, but each time I give a whirl it ends up not sticking and working with my flow. Far better than things like Basecamp for my usecases but yes hasn't been a fit yet either here.
We tried it very early on at our company and it didn't work out. We ended up using Wrike and it has been _much_ better for us. We've been using it for a while now for engineering/project management for our small team of 6 engineers. Unclear if it will scale, but works great so far.
I end up going back to Trello. - Years ago I was using PivotalTracker. But Trello was way better. Every couple of months I try to see if there is anything better, that's when I check out Asana and go back to Trello.
I find pivotal tracker to really be my sweet spot amongst all these offerings. Maybe I just didn't know how to use it but Trello seemed a little too simplistic. What do you like about Trello vs. PT?
Not the OP, but I found that PT has too much friction to create a task. Trello is much easier -- just type and press enter, then type another task and press enter, without even touching the mouse. I found that the friction of PT made me remember things in a mental TODO list, or Google Keep, or Inbox. Maybe it's not rational or "correct" but when tools have friction, we seek out simpler alternatives even if we know we're not supposed to do that.
The other problem with PT is that it promotes a bottom-up view of your project rather than a top-down view. You end up missing the forest for the trees. With Trello, I can create a list for a high-level goal like "Validate that users want the features we're building" and then list sub-tasks within that.
>Specifically, it plans to open an AWS-based data center in Frankfurt in the first half of next year, and it will set down more roots in Asia-Pacific, with offices in Sydney and Tokyo.
Is it normal (in tech journalism, at least) to say "opening an AWS-based data center?" I had to read that a few times over because I thought the article switched to an Amazon article.
This is a wild guess, but mentioning Frankfurt specifically simplifies a lot of the discussions one might have with European customers, especially around GDPR and other regulations. Not sure the value of mentioning AWS though, but it does has a very good presence in Frankfurt.
"AWS-based data center" reminds me of the way the term "data room" is used in business bookkeeping. A bunch of print-outs in a secure part of the building representing your business's books, is a "physical data room." But a bunch of digital files in a secure part of a server, if those are also a representation of your business's books, is referred to as a "virtual data room."
In a similar sense, an AWS VPC is a "virtual data center."
Every time the team has tried to use Asana we’ve given up. It’s slow on my iMac Pro. It’s so slow and there’s no reason why it ought to be. It’s painful to perform any operation with it.
...maybe it’s because I use Firefox, but even then there’s little excuse.
I use Trello, I find it smooth experience. Tried Asana once and I didn't like the feeling of "bloat".
I am shocked by this valuation. I feel like after AirTable's valuation few weeks back here in HN, now every other productivity tool is getting a bubble-valuation effect?
And yet they still can't solve empty tasks getting created for no good reason. Yes, I know you can hit the delete or backspace key, but bloody hell, just don't save the damn thing unless there is some data to actually save.
I'm sure that allocating 0.01% of this funding round to the dev will be more than enough?
Also, how about being able to convert lists to kanban and vice versa?
Ha! Totally agreed. Super annoying when you click somewhere randomly and an empty task is created.
Aside from really petty annoyances, I find Asana does what I want it to. I don't feel very strongly about it either way. If another product showed up that was better, I'd move in a heartbeat.
They may not need those money and agreed to take them only at that high valuation. There have been several pretty similar deals in the last couple of years. It's a win-win for both sides. The company gets a lot of financial power and pushes the sales up, that drives valuation up - in a year or 2 from the current 100M+ ARR they will be doing 300M and either IPO at 4B or 11th hour acquisition at 6-8B.
Yep, it is a weird deal. Any company worth 1,5bn should be able to generate cash or raise debt instead of going for expensive equity. Looks like the valuation is well out of sync with their actual financial health.
I just moved to Asana because I’m joining a team that needs to manage tasks together. There are a lot of things that just seem nonsensical to me.
Very little information exists at the project level - there’s no way to tag, sort, or filter through different projects. It’s almost a useless level of organization.
Custom fields seem to be accessible across teams in an organization, though there is no easy way to carry them across projects. They also seem like they don’t do much - you can’t filter or search based on custom field values.
The UI has a bad sense of hierarchy and important information is easily hidden. Finding the notes associated with a subtask means you need to click a barely visible button that doesn’t change state when information is behind it.
For how long they’ve been at it, these seem like simple problems to not have solved.
The main thing I think when I read this is "I wonder how much Basecamp is 'worth.'" A far superior product, presumably a comparable number of customers, although I don't know, and I would guess far more profitable per customer.
I have tried using Asana multiple times but always find that I need desktop app to fully utilize a quick editing and task management. Without an app it's always multiple clicks away from adding a todo item, it's quite annoying to go to the website, login, select project and only then you can actually do something.
I've recently stumbled upon Notion [1], and it's just so much better and more convenient for me, they have desktop and mobile app as well, which helps a lot. And their unusual free editing based on templates has been super convenient for me so far.
In march of 2016, Asana also raised $50 million. Sam Altman led that round, at a valuation of $550 million. Crunchbase wrongfully states that YC led it.
If Sam Altman's investment exits add such amounts to his bank reserve that the reserve gets bigger than $10 million, he spends the surplus above that $10 million on 'improving humanity,' which I read as charity. (1)
What I find most fascinating about this company is that something that sounds relatively unsexy - work management for enterprise - can be so well aligned with a truly unique mission. Enabling teams to collaborate effortlessly. For anyone who's worked at a dysfunctional company - politics, low morale, low transparency - it makes a huge difference when you have tools that help you collaborate and get on the same page.
By the same token, good tools do not solve politics, low morale or low transparency. I saw Justin Rosenstein and Dustin Moskovitz's talk when Asana was announced (2010? 2011?) and was converted. The idea of ditching email, bringing down barriers between silos and giving a greater vision between layers was inspiring and I immediately tried to implement Asana into all areas of my life.
It didn't really work for me as a personal organiser. Paper was just too damn handy, didn't require a log in and I didn't need any of the collaboration features. It didn't work for my dad and his business because he didn't quite 'get' the task oriented nature of the beast and ended up with a weird mish mash of orders, inquiries etc which ended up being unmanageable and he abandoned it quietly.
I tried setting it up for the production pipeline at the video society at my uni. I thought it would help lower the barrier to entry so that people could more easily get involved, see what was in the works, see tasks that were available to contribute to. But no, nobody logged in. The motivated people were just motivated and didn't require any task management and the disengaged people were too disengaged and uncurious to find it a useful resource.
I tried setting one up at my internship - a small data shop where surely things could be easily captured as tasks. We could assign things, hand things over, track bugs in code, split up larger assignments into smaller ones. But again, after some initial curiosity and a lot of patience from the teams, it didn't quite take either.
It feels a bit like the slow rise of corporate instant messaging generally or slack more specifically. Tools can enable a massive improvement to an organisation's ability to keep in touch, react to change, collaborate and all that usual stuff, but unless the company embraces that change or has a mindset/culture that allows those benefits to come to fruition then even with something like Asana you won't be able to turn things around with tools alone.
You're absolutely right. A mindset needs to accompany any tool in order for it to be successful - or direct relationship to how successful
There's a great book on this topic from the first dot com age. Necessary but not Sufficient (https://www.amazon.com/Necessary-But-Sufficient-Eliyahu-Gold...). The idea being you can adopt a tool but if you don't understand the mental models that go along with that tool then you won't fully reap the benefits.
As a company, this is still our responsibility. The best products educate as well as enable.
Your comment sums up what a lot of the comments here state.
> The motivated people were just motivated and didn't require any task management and the disengaged people were too disengaged and uncurious to find it a useful resource.
What makes it so hard to target the plurality of the middle, I wonder?
Sounds like the exact narrative from my time at Atlassian; I often wonder if these types of ideas are a natural byproduct of companies working in the same space.
As an employee, do you have an equity package? If so, are you worried at all that these new unicorn-status investors will have priority pay-out over your equity if the company doesn't have a $1.5B exit?
Not worried at all. Our value of transparency internally extends to this raise as well.
Yes employees have equity packages and we're well informed of what the terms of this raise are, the dilution and our leadership team has worked hard to get employee-friendly terms. We believe in this because our team members are the main function for Asana to grow and hit these expectations so it must be a trusting and win-win partnership in order for it to last.
If Asana values transparency internally, then why are employees not told their pay bands as well as given a level such as senior engineer? I know engineers who have left because they could not tell if they had room to grow salary wise. The only way they could find their market rate was by interviewing at other companies.
Ex-Asana here. Asana has written about the lack of leveled titles in the past[0]. I believe the use of titles is a separate issue to pay transparency. At around the same time, there was an effort to improve the transparency in pay bands. I have since left (for unrelated reasons), and so I cannot definitively speak to whether that was successful.
Was an employee (and am a happy equity-owner in Asana as a result), and I wouldn't be worried about that - I trust the Asana leadership to ensure clean terms with the investment.
If anything, I'd worry about the anchoring effect - e.g. if the SaaS valuations decline a year from now so that a prospective Asana IPO wouldn't be worth much more than $1.5B, would that result in them being more reluctant to IPO?
But that's the effect that is plaguing unicorn startups - the ones that have to go IPO or get acquired at less than valuation see the employees getting pennies on the dollar for their equity, while the investors that gave the startup the unicorn status take the bulk of the pay out.
Do you know the terms of this latest round of funding? Has senior management confirmed the class of equity?
I'm not a current employee, and even if I were, I'm not sure that would be something I could disclose. But I can tell you that in the past Asana leadership has been very good about insisting on clean-sheet terms for investor funding.
I haven't tried Asana again recently, but my early impressions were that they were trying to target the space between project management and a todo list in a very awkward way that could only succeed if all the stakeholders buy in to its use. I guess that is what enterprise sales is for, but given the fact that they just publish growth graphs with no numbers, and that I don't know a single person in SV that both uses and likes Asana, I'm very skeptical about their future.
A tool should either be simple and flexible enough that it invites creative uses (Trello, Slack) or have a very clear commonly understood purpose that has widely (if perhaps grudgingly) acknowledged value (JIRA, Salesforce). Asana is in this uncanny valley like Google Wave where some people are impressed but then ultimately no one knows what to do with it.
Ah Asana. The product we try and make work like Jira, but really just end up putting in a bunch of hacks to emulate epics, tagging, and all the other useful features.
Sorry. I just really like VSTS or Azure DevOps or whatever they call it these days.
Just the fact that there’s a little button baked right into Visual Studio where I can see all my work items, and the fact that I can literally assign a commit to a work item as I push it makes VSTS the best IMHO
I haven't used assana since the earliest days. Just looked over their marketing website, wow it looks completely different! I may take another look but at the moment, I have no issues with pivotal tracker.
A few years back there were about 5 of these products competing, and I think all the others closed down. Somehow Asana has managed to stay alive. Are they just buying time?
So. This company raised $75 million less than a year ago. It just raised another $50 million for "growth" now, 10 years after it was founded...for a grand total of $213 million in venture capital.
What the heck will these guys do now with $125 million that they couldn't do in the past 10 years with $88 million?
If you can get capital for cheap (i.e. minimal dilution), then having a bit of cushion for any macroeconomic rollercoasters ain't such a bad idea. They can also use it for M&A, early employee liquidity, and a whole host of other useful functions.
Oh they'll use it...I have no doubt about that. If I led this company, I'd be foolish to turn it down (without knowing anything else). I'm less sure what's going through heads of their investors.
Why are you making all these bold statements without mention or discussion of any business metrics?
Without knowing things like yearly revenue growth, LTV of customers, churn, operational costs, etc. how could you make any claims about if the valuation or capital raised is or isn't justified?
I believe it is referring to things like stock option buybacks, so that early employees can reap some of the rewards from their equity compensation.
It may not directly help investors, who are buying into the company as a whole. It may just be an important tool to holding quality talent, to help Asana be as valuable as it can be in the long run.
However, from a monetary perspective, the investors are willing to buy in today at $1.5B. Option buybacks are usually at less than full valuation. Employees are trading value for a sure payout today. Therefore, using the money to buy back those options from early employees reduces outstanding shares and options and improves the value of remaining investors' ownership.
Exactly. In theory, if the investors can get equity they want at a discount, and employees can get long-awaited cash they want — even not at "full price", because who knows what or when that might be - then everybody wins.
That being said, it's not 1.5B dollars cool and that kind of multi billion valuation creates unrealistic expectations that cannot possibly be fulfilled by staying humble and focusing on just what Asana does best. So, this kind of investment smells like a kiss of death. I fear the worst here in terms of layering on features nobody wanted, and attempts to make the product more appealing for the masses, etc. Is this going to be an actual IPO or a lazy acquihire by some company in need of an issue tracker?