Global Courant
Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder and CEO of Asana.
Asana
The typical playbook for a successful tech founder looks something like this.
Start a wholly owned business. Sell significant chunks to venture capitalists as the business progresses. Eventually become a minority owner. Take the company public. Sell more inventory over time.
Asana’s Dustin Moskovitz took that script and completely rewrote the ending.
Moskovitz, who is still known to many as the co-founder of Facebook, started Asana in 2008 to make work more collaborative through software. By the time he took the company public via a direct listing in 2020, his ownership was about 36%.
Then he went on a bargain hunt. After purchasing 480,000 Asana shares in June, Moskovitz’s ownership grew to 111.4 million shares, representing more than 51% of the outstanding shares. In March Asana revealed that Moskovitz had a trading plan to buy up to an additional 30 million of his Class A shares this year, sending the stock up nearly 19% the next day.
“It’s been a wild two years in the market and there have been some interesting buying opportunities,” Moskovitz said in an interview with CNBC.
Even after rising 66% this year, Asana shares are more than 80% below their all-time high of late 2021.
For Moskovitz, who has a net worth of more than $12 billion — mostly from his early stake in Facebook, now Meta — becoming a majority owner of Asana isn’t about control. Rather, he sees it as the best way to invest to support his philanthropy.
In 2010, Moskovitz signed it Giving promise, a pledge by some of the richest people in the world to donate most of their fortune to charity. Moskovitz and his wife, former journalist Cari Tuna, distribute their money through Good Ventures, based on recommendations from Open Philanthropy.
When it comes to spending that money, Moskovitz is of no greater concern than the future of artificial intelligence.
Good Ventures donated $30 million to launch OpenAI in 2017 over a three-year period, long before generative AI or ChatGPT had entered the public lexicon. OpenAI, now worth about $30 billion, started out as a non-profit organization, and Open Philanthropy said at the time it wanted to “play a role in OpenAI’s approach to security and governance issues.”
One of the 10 focus areas that Open Philanthropy has on its list website is “potential risks of advanced AI.” The organization recommended a $5 million grant to the National Science Foundation to support research into methods to ensure the security of artificial intelligence systems, and $5.56 million to the University of California at Berkeley for “establishing an academic center focused on AI security”. In all, Open Philanthropy says it has given more than $300 million in the area of focus through more than 170 grants.
“I definitely think there’s a big risk there — something I spend a lot of time on,” Moskovitz said.
Moskovitz co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin at Harvard University in 2004. He became a billionaire after Facebook in 2012 IPOwith more shares than any individual other than Zuckerberg.
Even after acquiring additional Asana shares in 2022 and 2023, according to FactSet, his ownership is about $2.6 billion, less than the $4.6 billion in Facebook shares he owns.
“I’m just in a unique position, where I came to the table with an existing source of wealth,” Moskovitz said. “So even things that look like huge purchases, it’s still a relatively normal portion of my net worth compared to other founders.”
Moskovitz has agreed not to buy all of Asana’s outstanding stock or even acquire 90% of the common stock. He will also keep a majority of his directors independent, under New York Stock Exchange rules a declaration.
Moskovitz refused to talk about whether he was buying up stock to prevent activist investors from coming in and trying to force change. Activists have been busy in the cloud software space, particularly on Sales teamwhich responded to the pressure by expanding its buyback program and increasing profits.
Samuel Altman, CEO of OpenAI, will appear before the Washington, DC Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and Law on May 16, 2023.
Win Mcnamee | Getty Images
Recently, Moskovitz’s worlds collided.
OpenAI made a leap from a niche startup to state-of-the-art technology after the release of ChatGPT in November. Before that, Moskovitz toyed with the company’s DALL-E technology for converting text into images. He said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, gave him a “labs account” in April last year.
After the launch of ChatGPT, Moskovitz had some fun asking the chatbot to come up with goals to address California’s housing problem.
Meanwhile, Asana joined the parade of companies announcing improvements to their products with generative AI features that could take human input and present text, images or audio in response. Earlier this month, Asana said it had given some customers access to various generative AI features powered by OpenAI’s models.
“Chat is just one paradigm for how you use these technologies,” Moskovitz told CNBC. “When you integrate them into workflows like work management, do things like optimize automation workflows or help make decisions, you can literally ask the system questions and get a summary and a recommendation.”
Moskovitz said more complicated tasks, such as adding structure to projects, are where “the potential really takes off.” Rather than just asking for specific answers, he said the power is in the technology to take “a bunch of information and sort of a vague target” and then “give you something roughly in the right direction.”
Asana could spend $5 million or more on OpenAI’s technology next year, Moskovitz said, adding that he was “very impressed with GPT-3,” the company’s previous major language model, “and even more so with the impressed with GPT-4,” which was announced in March.
Moskovitz took six minutes of Asana’s 51-minute earnings call in early June to tout the company’s approach to AI. He used the acronym 41 times, compared to 32 AI references through Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on his company’s April earnings call. Microsoft is the main investor of OpenAI.
Asana is “just personally deeply connected to the AI labs leading the way,” Moskovitz said.
The links are, in fact, quite deep. Altman invested in Asana in 2016. During Asana’s earnings call, Moskovitz reminded analysts that his company and OpenAI “share a board member in Adam D’Angelo,” a former Facebook technology chief who later founded online Q-and-A startup Quora.
Moskovitz invested in AI startup Anthropic in 2021, same year he co-invested with Altman in nuclear fusion startup Helium.
Like Altman, Moskovitz is also deeply optimistic about AI and concerned about the damage it can do.
Moskovitz was one of many entrepreneurs who rack in May, saying that “reducing the risk of AI extinction should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” The message came from the non-profit organization Center for AI Safety.
But Moskovitz was not a signatory to the nonprofit Future of Life Institute open letter in March, that called for AI labs to train the most advanced AI models for six months or more. Almost at the top of that list of signatories Tesla CEO Elon Musk, an early backer of OpenAI who has warned that we should be very concerned about advanced AI, called it “a greater risk to society than cars or planes or drugs.”
Moskovitz said Musk’s fears aren’t entirely exaggerated and they both want to “bring this technology out into the world in a safe way.”
“Elon looks at it from multiple angles,” he said. “I think we kind of share the view about potential existential risks, and maybe not so much the view about AI censorship and wakeism and things like that.”
In December, Musk tweeted that “the danger of training AI to wake up – in other words, lie – is deadly.”
Moskovitz helped create one 12 point list of possible policy changes for US lawmakers to consider.
“What I’m most interested in is making sure advanced later generations, like GPT-5, GPT-6, are put through safety evaluations before being released into the world,” he said. “I think regulation is needed to coordinate all players.”
He even made up a word, in a tweet last month, to express his complicated views.
“Excito-nervous for AI!” He wrote.
Correction: This story has been updated to remove an incorrect reference to Anthropic’s founders.
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