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Trying to replace 鈥榮oul-sucking鈥 e-mail
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DUSTIN Moskovitz is plotting an escape from e-mail.
The 30-year-old entrepreneur has learned a lot about communication since he teamed up with his college roommate Mark Zuckerberg to create Facebook a decade ago, and this wisdom is fueling an audacious attempt to change the way people connect at work, where the incessant drumbeat of e-mail has become an excruciating annoyance.
Moskovitz is trying to turn that chronic headache into an afterthought with Asana, a San Francisco startup he runs with former Facebook and Google product manager, Justin Rosenstein.
Asana peddles software combining elements of a communal notebook, social network, instant messaging application and online calendar to enable teams of employees to share information and not rely on e-mail.
“We are trying to make all the soul-sucking work that comes with e-mail go away,” Rosenstein said. “This came out of a deep, heartfelt pain that Dustin and I were experiencing, along with just about everyone around us.”
The inconvenience keeps mounting in the corporate world, which remains an e-mail haven. This year, each worker using a business e-mail account will send and receive a daily average of 121 mail messages, a 15 percent increase from 105 per day in 2011, according to The Radicati Group, which tracks e-mail use.
In contrast, consumers have been weaning themselves from electronic inboxes and turning to social media and mobile messaging.
More e-mail translates to less productivity as workers spend time weeding their inboxes. Vital pieces of information is often corralled in an inbox instead of in a database that can be searched by anyone working on the same project.
If companies set up communications channels that work more like social networks, the amount of time workers could devote to other things would increase by about 8 percent each week, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. Another 6 percent of the workweek would be freed up if the shift away from e-mail could unlock more of the so-called “dark matter” hidden in individual inboxes, McKinsey estimates.
Asana is trying to solve these problems. Its bare-bones system, free to use for teams of up to 15 workers, is set up so information can be seen by anyone authorized by the company. Asana hopes to make money by selling subscriptions to more sophisticated versions that can accommodate larger groups of workers.
Moskovitz began working on what became an early prototype for Asana while he was still at Facebook in 2007. He had become frustrated with e-mail’s shortcomings and wanted a better alternative.
Leaving Facebook in 2008, Moskovitz remains a major shareholder for the company, with stock worth about US$7 billion, affording him the luxury to gamble on a startup that may be fighting a Sisyphean battle.
“I am not sure what anyone thinks they will be accomplishing by getting rid of e-mail,” said Sara Radicati, editor of the Radicati Group. “If we didn’t have e-mail, people would be spending all their time on the phone and other channels of communication. Is that really any better?”
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