In late 2008, news broke that Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz was leaving the company to launch a new startup of his own, joined by early Facebook engineer Justin Rosenstein. It was a move that led to plenty of raised eyebrows — Facebook’s growth was (and still is) explosive, and there were clearly lots of exciting things going on at the company.
The duo later revealed that they were working on a productivity app called Asana, raising a total of $10.2 million to fund the company. And yesterday, after two years in production and lengthy beta testing, the site held its public launch (you can find our full rundown on the launch right here).
So why did Moskovitz and Rosenstein start Asana? Yesterday the founders stepped away from their launch-day battle stations for an interview on TechCrunch TV, where they outlined their motivations for starting the company, and what makes Asana different from the slew of productivity apps that are already out there. Check out the video above for their answers.