Asana, which has been in private beta for about a year, is a free, single-shared task list for groups. It helps everybody on a team keep track of what they and others are working on without what the startup has termed "work about work," or unnecessary logistical conversations.
"People ask us, 'Is this a to do list?'" Rosenstein says. "We’re like 'No, this is the to do list.'"
What sets Asana apart from dozens of other task manager programs, he says, is real-time updates, flexibility to fit any project's work flow and simplicity that makes updating Asana quicker than updating a Word document. That, and the fact that Asana wants to be seen more like email than corporate software: a go-to organization method for everything from class projects to small companies.
A tangle of startups have attempted to streamline project communications -- corporate or otherwise -- but haven't breached mainstream adoption. That doesn't seem to faze Moskovitz and Rosenstein.
"The reason there are a million of these out there is the same reason that before Facebook, there were a million social networks and before Google, there were a million search engines," Moskovitz says.
In other words, despite an environment of email overload that demands an efficient group collaboration product, nobody has delivered the right one yet.
For Facebook, the prototype that inspired Asana turned out to be just right. Moskovitz and Rosenstein say the social network is still using the prototype to manage projects.
Since becoming Asana, the same idea that inspired that prototype has become a full product, transformed from something focused on power users to something that anybody can pick up in a few minutes and spawned a complementary mobile site. It's not something that's designed for a large company like Facebook -- though the startup says that such a premium product is on the roadmap.
The second company that Moskovitz co-founded could transform the workspace with a task-oriented product the same way that his first transformed the social space with a people-oriented one.