Asana: Dustin and Justin's Quest for Flow

In the early days of Facebook, when it was still run out of a dorm at Harvard, Dustin Moskovitz was the guy who kept the site functioning smoothly. An economics major with only an intro to computer science class under his belt, Moskovitz taught himself programming on the fly. After he and his roommate Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of school and relocated to Silicon Valley, Facebook grew into a full-fledged business, with layers of management and hundreds of new recruits. For two weeks, Moskovitz would have one-on-one meetings with his direct reports, who would then spend two weeks meeting with their reports. “I had this very visceral experience where at the end of a four-week cycle, I would know what was going on the previous month,” he says.

Moskovitz started commiserating with a colleague named Justin Rosenstein, a programming prodigy who led the team that built Facebook’s Like button, among other projects. The two have very different personalities. Moskovitz is sedate, matter-of-fact, and speaks as little as possible. Rosenstein is a free spirit who dyes his hair for the annual Burning Man festival (red this year), goes on weeklong trips into the woods to meditate, and is given to extended digressions on the nature of work. “In the Industrial Revolution, the manufacturing processes weren’t designed with humans in mind,” begins one answer to a question about software.