Pulse News

**The Briefing**

**Moskovitz Should Sell Asana**

By Martin Peers

Mar 11, 2025, 5:00pm PDT

Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Asana. Photo via Flickr/Web Summit

We saw a muted recovery in some tech stocks on Tuesday, but there were a few notable exceptions. One was Asana, which makes a workplace collaboration software tool and is also known as the second act of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. The stock plunged 24% today, the day after the company reported a middling quarter—and, perhaps more surprisingly, announced that Moskovitz is stepping down as CEO.

Moskovitz isn't departing completely—he's staying on as chair and focusing on "AI product vision and strategy," as he told investors. But Wall Street may be worried that given his commitment to the company (he owns half the stock), Asana will suffer. That's a legitimate concern. After all, Asana has never had a good reason to exist. There are plenty of alternative collaboration tools—Atlassian's Trello, Notion, and Google Workspace, to name a few. And you have to imagine new artificial intelligence tools may render software like Asana even less valuable.

The proof is in the pudding: Asana's growth is slowing, and (unlike other mature companies) it hardly makes any money. Forget the "rule of 40"—the idea that enterprise software firms should strive for percentage growth and free cash flow margin adding up to 40 or more. Asana couldn't make the rule of 12! It generated a measly $2.6 million in free cash flow in the year ended January. Revenue grew 11% to $724 million, so the free cash flow translates to a margin of 0.36%. That's unimpressive. (As a comparison, Box, which is growing even more slowly, had a free cash flow margin in the just-ended fiscal year of about 29%).

Even more alarming, Asana projected on Monday that growth would slow to between 8% and 9%. Today's closing stock price is half where the company traded when it went public in late 2020. You can't blame Moskovitz for bailing. He may think a new CEO will bring a fresh perspective and shake things up. But a better idea would be for him to sell Asana.

**More Apple Headwinds**

Apple bears have had plenty of reason to feel smug lately, mostly due to Apple's AI stumbles. We don't want to pile on, but a top Verizon executive dropped a nugget at a Deutsche Bank investor conference today that won't help Apple's case. Frank Boulben, Verizon's chief revenue officer for consumer operations, revealed that ever since Verizon switched to three-year contracts for customers upgrading to a new phone, the company has noticed that people are holding onto phones for an average of more than 41 months.

In contrast, when Verizon had two-year contracts, customers typically upgraded when they could, around the 24-month mark. So by forcing people to hold onto phones a year longer, Verizon has squeezed the upgrade urge out of people. Of course, this is not a new trend: People have been holding onto their phones for an ever-growing length of time in recent years, thanks to improved batteries and fewer dazzling new features that make upgrades necessary. Will new AI features change that dynamic?

**In Other News**

- Anthropic has reached $1.4 billion in annualized revenue as of this month, according to a person with direct knowledge of the company's finances, implying monthly revenue of around $116 million.

- OpenAI on Tuesday released a set of new application programming interfaces and tools to help developers build agents, software that can take actions on behalf of customers, according to a company blog post.

Martin Peers is a columnist and co-executive editor of The Information, where he has worked since 2014. He was managing editor from 2015 through 2021. He previously worked for The Wall Street Journal and Daily Variety, among other publications. He is based in New York and is on Twitter @mvpeers.