Welcome to everyone joining us here out at the ballpark. I will start with the obligatory safe harbor statement. Today's session may include forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that may cause our actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied by forward-looking statements. Please refer to our full forward-looking statement available on the table, and for those of you listening on the audio, it is on your screen as well. I'm gonna invite Neil Boland to join us on stage right now. We couldn't be more excited to welcome Neil Boland, the Senior VP of Technology and CISO of Major League Baseball, here in conversation with our very own Anne Raimondi, our COO and Head of Business. I think most of you here know that baseball is one of the oldest professional sports in America, with roots dating back as far as 1876. When it comes to technology, Major League Baseball is anything but a history lesson. In fact, when it comes to trendsetting technological advancements, no sport does it better than MLB. One of their goals is to ensure that the sport sustains from generation to generation, and technology advancements play a critical role in the long-term health of the game. With 162 games in the regular season, it's also the longest season across all of American sports. They have thousands of people working at MLB, and they host over 70 million fans per year. The business of baseball is an enormous undertaking, and the bar for quality at scale is very high, which makes us even more fortunate to have Neil here because he leads the teams that provide the backbone enabling these technological innovations and initiatives. With that, let me introduce Anne, who will take it from here. Thanks so much, Catherine, and thank you all so much for joining us today. It's so great to see so many familiar faces and meet some new ones. We're so excited to be here at the stadium, thanks to Neil and MLB. It's actually near and dear to me because I'm a Bay Area native and lifelong Giants fan, so I did kind of nerd out getting to see the players' entrance and onto the field. I'm gonna have a great story to tell my kids tonight. Neil, thanks so much for being here with us. As SVP of Technology and CISO for Major League Baseball, you're essentially in charge of all of the information tech for MLB and work directly with Commissioner Rob Manfred and CEO Chris Marinak. You are also on the advisory boards of some pretty innovative, impactful technology companies like Okta, Palo Alto Networks, Carbon Black, PayRay, and Didit. You've been driving a lot of innovation at MLB over the last few years, not only to streamline operations, but what we thought was really interesting is that you're also using technology to improve player performance and elevate the experience for fans. Can you share more with us today about your vision and strategy for technology across MLB? Yeah. I mean, it's the same strategy, whether it's fans or players or back office employees. The goal is to reduce friction for everybody. Technology is obviously one of the best tools and platforms to do that. We're constantly either on the lookout for a technology platform that'll help us to that end, and where we can achieve that, you know, we're building. We've built a lot of solutions over time in-house, but that takes us away from the business of baseball. I mean, I think one that investors might be familiar with is the MLB Advanced Media and building out our streaming platform, which we're, I think, one of the first sports organizations to market with a leading streaming capability for our fans. That ultimately got sold to Disney. BamTech is now Disney+. You know, as we've evolved from that, we're like, Hey, those are great, you know, technological achievements, but they kind of can take us away from the business of baseball. Obviously technology's come a long way over that time, so we pay careful attention to the space and the landscape to understand what partners will help us reduce that friction primarily and help us deliver a, you know, a better experience to our fans, but just as much a more productive experience to our players and our employees. Yeah. Maybe following up on that, you said, you know, traditionally you've looked at both building yourself and buying, as you make buying decisions, what's important to you, and you've also shared with us, like scale is really important, but would love to hear more about that. Yeah. You know, when you look at us, it's really interesting. At baseball, you see, you know, the big brand of MLB, you see the big brand of the clubs, but there are not a lot of people oftentimes behind those brands. There's a great group of people, but, you know, you look at a mid-market club, and there's a few hundred people in that front office, and they have a lot to do to be able to scale out to their fan base, right? They need that type of force multiplier. When we're looking for a partner, you know, we're looking at not only somebody that can help us scale along those lines, but like help us look at all the areas that we engage, like all of our engagement points, and how do we quickly scale those up to the different, you know, different aspects of how we go to market. We are very careful in selecting partners that not only can get us there quickly, but who back us up along the way because the weight is on so few shoulders, right? You know, when I think of scale, I think of like a partnership of a company that, you know, I look at that staff and they might as well have MLB.com email addresses 'cause they're gonna be right there in the trenches with us and help us accomplish that. Scale is much bigger for us than, hey, like, can it handle this much traffic or can it handle, you know, this load? It's more can it handle the way that we need to do business and the way that we're able to do it, and will it be there with us? Yeah. No, I appreciate that. It was also super interesting to hear you talk about how within MLB you're an enterprise organization. You've got mid-market companies, you know, in terms of the teams, and even startups with Minor League. I loved how you talked about technology needs and scale to address all those different needs pretty seamlessly. As you and the Cubs technology leadership decide on, you know, what to put on the roadmap, what's the next innovative technology that you wanna adopt, how do you think about that mandate, and how do you all prioritize across the different choices you could be investing in? Yeah, there's a lot of, you know. I think we see SaaS sprawl. There's a lot of SaaS partners out there, and, you know, for us, everybody is kind of overlapping and kind of saying that they're gonna be effective and relevant in the space. We've devoted a lot more energy to partner management and partner R&D, and that's been really fun for our teams. You know, we look at, you know, who's out there. We always approach it as somebody's gotta be doing this. Somebody's gotta have tackled this. You know, our story when it comes to this particular space has been a bit of a grueling one. You know, we've been kind of like waiting for this gap to be filled in the space. Now, as an employee coming into baseball, I already had a solution. I will admit to everybody here, I'm a longtime Asana user, and it's a funny story going back to, you know, managing my kids at home and, you know, chores and tasks and such as a free user. Coming in, I had that idea that like, Hey, I'm gonna continue to use this platform, this product, 'cause it makes me effective. As I talk to people in the space, in our space, and around the space about like, Hey, what are you doing? I found more and more people kind of on their own because the business hadn't really sorted a direction here in this particular area. We found people on credit cards or kind of like, you know, individual business units doing their own thing. Lucky for me, like, many had come to the same conclusion that I had around the product that they had selected, so it made things a bit easier. For us it's much more about finding the right partners in the space that have the right attributes and the right capabilities to go forward together and really be effective at the end of the day. No, I appreciate that, and especially how your personal story. A few of us are talking about kids, so those of you who are trying to manage children, Asana is a great platform for it. But it can also scale to your enterprise. No, I love hearing that. Neil also has some pro tips on how to block your children from assigning you tasks, but making sure you can assign them tasks. Love that. Maybe diving deeper on, you know, as MLB has been adopting Asana, you are using it across so many workflows across the organization, operations, marketing, distribution, legal, finance, compliance. Can you share a little bit more about some of these workflows that you know, really rely on collaboration across teams? I think there's often a lot of interest in, like, what are these, like, complex cross-functional workflows that our best customers are using Asana on? Would love for you to share that. Yeah. I think that goes back a bit to your comment, or your question around scale, right? Here we have this like great platform. I love it. My direct teams love it. But how do we scale that out across these more complex workflows that we have in the business of baseball? They are pretty complex, you know. We talk for hours about behind the scenes. But from that perspective, we needed a platform that was gonna be intuitive and easy for people to, like, apply to those complex work processes. That was a, you know, just going back to your question about scale, that comes back to mind as I think about enabling those complex processes. We are so dependent on our supply chain right now, and it's just gonna increase that dependency. For those that follow baseball, you see us with our World Baseball Classic right now, you know, there are 28 countries in competition, and we don't have the staff to put around the world. We rely on folks in those markets, and that might be the baseball federation in that market. It might be the promoter in that market. It might be the facility of the stadium in that market that we have to convert to be a ballpark. You see all that kind of in play. It's a lot has to come together for that. If anybody's seen kind of like us do like the Field of Dreams event in Iowa or an opening day in, like, in Australia, where they convert the cricket grounds to be a ballpark, all that requires so many teams, so many logistics. Forget about like the back end of baseball operations or getting players there. The World Baseball Classic is a logistics nightmare as teams fall out of competition and do advance, don't advance, and all this is happening real time with so many people involved. Platforms like this are, you know, crucial to us, especially when you look at where you've come from. Like this was being done on like, you know, sheets and, you know, task lists and, you know, email and other collaboration tools that just weren't as effective. This is kind of, like, game changing for us to have the proper tooling to do it right, and do it better. Yeah. I think a couple things that Neil Boland just need to add. One is just MLB is a global organization, and that you're coordinating all these different sort of complex events, you know, around the world. I think one of the things you shared that we, you know, just really loved hearing is that once you've built it and built these templates, you can use it again. All the workflows that you've created, all the automations can be replicated the next year for a next event. That level of, again, being able to innovate and move faster, we love seeing. Yeah, we're excited about that part. I think it's one of the reasons that I got traction in standardizing on a platform is the reusability aspect of it, because there are a lot of similarities even on the complex task front. Yeah. You know, in terms of holding like an international event. There's other people that do international events that aren't the World Baseball Classic that are gonna benefit from those playbooks, right? Everybody likes to be self-sufficient, right? You know, you wanna be smart, and you don't wanna, like, call people up and be that person. If you can pull up, like, those templates from that history, you're off to the races and you're doing good out the gate. We really like that part. The most difficult aspect of that, though, was convincing people that, like, we had a platform in place that everybody could collaborate on that would meet all of their needs, and it's hard sometimes for people to let go. This is an area that was super interesting. It took me a couple of years to get to that place just because of some preexisting notions and even like factions with folks, but we got there, and it's, like, been a really good spot. Yeah. Were there some keys in your mind to, like, unlock that and sort of get some of the factions off of maybe how they were working onto a shared platform? Yeah. I mean, I guess I have to credit some folks on your team for that because I certainly didn't have the bandwidth to showcase the art of the possible on the platform. You guys definitely have some passionate folks on the team that are there for you even after, like, you know, the sale and you're moving forward. I think they're, you know, they learned our business and I could leave them alone with downstream internal business customers or even the clubs to represent around the platform. It was really that level of engagement education that was necessary. Also, like, not to disservice the product. I mean, the product is very flexible and it can shape to the way that we do business. I feel like I had to assess every one of these products just to show that, like, we considered everybody's opinion. I think that was another part of it, was demonstrating that you went through the process with everybody's needs in mind, but even where they came from in mind. By doing that and showing them there was a safe place to go. Here's the benefit of all of us actually all being on the same platform, allowed a lot of people to let go and realize the value of the platform. Great. No, we appreciate hearing that. You're also adopting a lot of other technology, just given the complexity of MLB. Can you share a little bit more? Often we get the question of like, okay, well how important are integrations? How important is making sure it connects to the rest of your tech stack? Yeah. We'd love to hear. I think we have, like, a pretty, you know, forward-thinking tech stack, I would say. We certainly are looking to use the best technologies in each of the areas. I think you all know how it is these days. There's a lot of products that, again, overlap or say they can do all these things, and they tout the simplicity of that. We've had to find that middle ground, like, what's the best products that we can use in this area, and does it have the integrations with the other products that we've invested in? You know that we use all of the big brands, but there was this missing ingredient in this area, and that's what we had to solve for. I've been shocked over the years that nobody's really done well other than, you know, the relationship that we have. I feel like, hey, I was the forward thinker on the team, like, yay. The integrations, to your question, are pretty critical, and they can't just be like cosmetic integrations or tangential integrations. They have to be meaningful integrations that allow people who are like living in Slack or living in Office 365 to like, you know, to make this happen and to make sure that like these types of activities are in the right place and that they feel confident that, well, on the other platform, no, it's gonna, that's going into Asana. Easy to get it in there, easy to like keep it up to date and people are really happy about that. I like hearing that people are happy. Yeah. Now I know one thing you've shared with us that you're really excited about is something you call work kits. Can you share more about that and how you're using them? I'm trying to think. I'm sorry, I was thinking about something. What was the question? You were talking about kind of how you've created what you call sort of work kits, things that then are much more extendable and can be rolled out, and how you use Asana to do that, so. Got it. Just, we have this, we call like work kits because we have a lot of like interns and other folks that we're bringing into the business to learn baseball- Yeah. which is a different mixture than I would You're thinking like, well, where are we running interns for real? Yeah. It's gonna be great. On the workload side, yeah. You know, we want people to hit the ground running, and we wanna make sure that like they are properly instrumented with the right tools to get their job done. There's like a certain amount of you know I think definition with how roles are structured and what people need to do in those roles. We have like a very seasonal kind of like hiring cycle. You might see like a club that has like 400 people in the regular in the off-season in the front office 400 people scale to like 2,500 people, and you have all these folks that need to come up to speed. That's kind of like what we're thinking about here is like as they come in the door, you know, and they're smart people, like how do we enable them? They're not always the same people. Like, and so how do we keep that consistency in what we deliver, you know, for the sport despite like a changing resource audience and such? I mean, to summarize, that's kind of, you know, how I look at that. Yeah. Yeah, just that description of needing to be able to like onboard and train pretty quickly, seasonal groups of employees sort of across the country or across the world, and being able to do that in a scaled manner. The bar is high because these folks need to deal with like little kids and, you know, exception circumstances and all sorts of things like when you have a mass gathering event of tens of thousands of people in a facility, that's important. That's where you're seeing that uptick in the seasonal staff. Yeah. No. At the same time, you're also using Asana to roll out some pretty complex technology initiatives. You showed us the instant replay room when we visited in New York. Can you share more about how you think about those initiatives that are transformative to the MLB experience and how you're using Asana for those? Absolutely. Super excited, you know, as we continue to evolve our technology footprint, and as I mentioned, we're partnering a lot. There are some things that we do ourselves or internally that are complex, and we're very focused. Instant replay looks good on the screen, but there's lots that goes on behind the scenes to make that effective. It's a real-time deliverable. You know, you can't have an issue with that. You've gotta be mapped out on all the different paths you might head in. There's a lot of those during the regular season going on at the same time. Building that out and making that effective and making sure that we have alternative paths and such, that whole development pro-project was huge. We're working on things in the ballpark, you know, coming in here, like how do we do things like frictionless entry and, you know, have people just like, you know, better than the Clear line at the airport, like how do folks just come straight in, and what has to come together to pull that off? Not only is it technology, but there's like regulatory stuff that you have to pay attention to. There's all these exceptions. There's how do you handle minors. There's all those things that we're looking at. The end game for that is a kind of like the be all and end all fan experience that's fully grounded in technology and allows us to do some new things in the sport, like we can rescind the no reentry rule and you know potentially let people leave the ballpark during the game and still come back in, which in a city like this is an amazing concept, right? So as we're working that project, which is you know super fun, amazing pro-project that we hope to see come to fruition next season, that's all being done on Asana and on this platform. I couldn't really fathom bringing that team together in the way that we brought it together, just getting all the folks like inside the organization, outside the organization, our partners with outside counsel, with all these like folks that are very invested in the end product. Just one more question, and then we'll turn to the audience. Yeah. I was just gonna say, one, I'm super excited about that, especially when you talked about the frictionless entry and like knowing what people's favorites are at the concession stand because then I know my garlic fries are gonna be there when I come to the stadium. I'm looking forward to that. As you look forward to, you know, where you are taking the technology platform at the MLB, what are some of the things like you're most excited about or you and your team are spending the most time sort of investing in going forward? Yeah. Going back to, you know, there's obviously improving the fan experience on the field here at the ballpark, but we also see that, you know, fans want that corresponding digital experience. We continue to like reinvest in what we're delivering from a personalization standpoint. Really understanding things like where those two merge, so the digital experience meets the physical experience. Like, we have a group for that, the digital group. It's kind of cool. They're looking at those points of like re-engagement. We're doing a lot of R&D and a lot of delivery and testing and piloting in those areas. That I think is gonna be really cool, and people will continue to see that intersection grow and grow and grow. On field is another area that we're investing a lot of energy in, and I think you've seen kind of like a lot of the changes that baseball's announced to make the game, you know, more manageable for the fan. You know, we like I think others wanna make sure that the length of the game is, you know, reasonable and that there aren't unnecessary delays. We wanna make sure that we keep the integrity of the game high too. You see things like PitchC om, and you see things like we're looking at automatic balls and strikes, and technologies like that which are transformational and amazing. Those are being tested kind of in the majors and the Minor League system. You know, we get real feedback from passionate fans, but also players that are either down from the majors or going up to the majors, and that really helps us course correct. The kind of commonality across all these projects is that we have, like, a really great technology team inside and outside of baseball. Back to the theme of this event, you know, we're using really good foundational tooling to keep them, you know, all marching towards the same end game there. Why don't I take some questions from the audience? We'll start in the back with Andrew. Okay. Oh, and can you please say your name because we have an audience on the audio. Name and company, and then the question, and I'll repeat the question. Thanks. Andrew DeGasperi from Berenberg. Maybe, Neil Boland, I thought it was interesting when you mentioned how you're a longtime user and you wanted to adopt the platform more broadly. You said it took a few years to get people to learn it and sort of get over the learning curve and to get the broader adoption. I was just wondering, maybe first of all, like was this a top-down effort from your perspective, or was it from the ground up, where the team sort of organically tried to work closer together? Then maybe, for Anne Raimondi, you know, I guess, do those timelines shrink? Does it take a few years for people to really get more comfortable using it? Yeah. I'll let Neil start. For me, my role started to shift a bit from the CISO work more to CIO work, and I took more and more responsibility for that part of the organization. The central entity that is MLB is intended to be a shared service organization for the clubs, and even internally for all the different groups. You know, we have Tickets.com, we have MLB Network, we have all these different businesses. You know, I thought the best way to go about this was to create something that people could relate to. I already had it in terms of my use of these tools, this platform. But I also didn't wanna be prescriptive either. That's why I took my time. I mean, it could've been. It was easy to pull a lever and be like, Hey, this is the new standard. This is all the help desk is gonna support you with. Anything else, you're off the reservation. I really wanted to understand, like, how people were doing their work. Like, I didn't wanna make a mistake of like, you know, Hey, I happen to love this platform, but is it the right platform for what they need to do? I went through a thoughtful process with them, and I think the cool thing about going through that process was I learned how they did business. We had, like, really good conversations, my team and I, with those stakeholders. We started to, like, go one by one against the reference platform and say like, All right, well, will this meet your needs? And here's why, if we're all on the same platform, it'll be better for you because you'll do more collaboration. Stuff that these guys create over here that's usable by you don't have to do that. That's how we pitched it. I probably took a bit of a slower path because I also wanted to, like, still be popular at the end of the day and, like, not have people hating on me. We got to a good place by going through that methodical approach. Yeah. Andrew, I'll answer your question in terms of, you know, across other larger companies, where do we see can we accelerate that? I think some of the things, both product investments we're making and then team investments and customer success, we are seeing in larger accounts when we do a combination of things. We've been running large internal trainings at some of our largest accounts, where several hundred, sometimes several thousand employees will join. They're actually both learning about Asana, the platform, but seeing how their colleagues are running cross-team collaboration use cases on Asana. Those have really accelerated adoption in a lot of our larger accounts. Then some of the product innovation that Alex and team are doing is even sort of like custom help within the enterprise tier. Really, as new employees come onto the platform, they're not just learning how to use Asana, but they're learning how their organization wants them to collaborate, so whether it's through templates, sort of custom training, a custom path. Those in combination products and people for our enterprise accounts, we are seeing can accelerate what sometimes is an organic, you know, in the past, an organic growth. Awesome. Next question. Let's go right here, and then we'll do Brent next. Jackson Ader at MoffettNathanson. Thanks for doing this, Neil. The question is really about the difference in your use of Asana between discrete events and, like, a bigger picture, right? 'Cause if you think about baseball with, like, these thousands of discrete games, season, international thing, they're discrete. Then, you know, how do you make sure that you also zoom out and think, Well, in a couple years, this is where we would like to be, whether it's from a technology stack or collaboration stack? How does your use of Asana differ between those two things? Yeah. I think, if anything, we wanna see more consistency on the regular season games and such. I think, you know, when you look at it through the lens of like an Asana, you're like, Hey, like, we can create greater efficiency here 'cause I see like this step is being partially done by two different groups, and one should be, you know, taking this and running with it, yada, yada. When you get into like things, for example, this. We've changed the playoff format to have more teams in the playoffs. You know, there was one shot taken at like, you know, wild card, right? In terms of like thinking that through. I think it worked out really well. The learnings from that will evolve like that template, and I think that'll be relevant for the next cycle, and we'll just continue to improve and such and add to it. We see ideas popping in there, like people will comment about like, Hey, like, we could have done this. That kind of is there, but then that moves into like a consideration for the next season. On the international side, you're right. Like, all those can be like unique, but there are a lot of common themes there. Sometimes you'll have different teams participating depending on which country that event is sitting in. Do we have an office in that country? Like, what's our set up? The cool thing is if you have a template for it, at least people who might not have done that before or doing it a different way because that country doesn't have an office in it and they're like with the federation, like you now know that like there's a playbook for that, right? We also use the platform for our idea structure in terms of like, Hey, let's take that. Let's elevate it, move it over here. Then in the off-season, not that there's that much of an off-season anymore, but in the in-between, we can evaluate that and see if it's something that we could or should be doing differently. I think it's a better repository to put these things in by far than, you know, email or Slack. You know, no disservice to those platforms. You need somewhere structured to, like, put this. As I said, it's been like a bit of a missing ingredient for us. We've used other platforms, like we've used like, let's say Jira, which is great when you're doing technology, but not really great when you're trying to get business people oriented around it, you know, so. Awesome. We have Brent, and after Brent, Steve. Good afternoon. Brent Bracelin with Piper Sandler. Neil, thank you for opening up your ballpark to us this afternoon. It's been great in sharing your views. First question, if you could just maybe expand on the size and scope of the deployment of Asana today. It sounds like it's been an effort to standardize the last couple of years. Maybe just frame the size and scope of it today. Is it standardized on one department or standardized on multiple departments, one. And then two, you talked about SaaS sprawl, and I think of Asana more as a productivity tool, not necessarily a consolidation tool. Maybe talk a little bit about how Asana has helped you address some of the SaaS sprawl that you've seen out there. Great questions, Brent. They actually intersect nicely. I would say at MLB there was definitely individual bias and department bias and some of it was reasonable, right? There's a product that's like, you know, in the space that's marketing, works with the marketing folks out there. They're like, Hey, we come to the table with these templates that we've already built for marketing folks. Like, marketing folks sold hook, line, and sinker, like, helps them, and they feel great. You know, there's a big credit card charge going through finance every month, and they're off to the races. I had to go department by department and be like, Hey, I get it. Like, they built this for you. That's amazing. Like, your life is easier. You're doing this. You're doing that. I went through it with them. I took the time to be like, Hey, would you mind if like, if I stole some of this and set it up on, you know, Asana, so I could like just see if we could replicate it to your satisfaction? 'Cause the goal would be that you and I can collaborate on projects that are not those projects, but enterprise-wide projects I need your help on. You know, so that was the value prop that I went to them with. You know, so the question about how much time it took, I took extra time because I wanted to know the answer legitimately, and also I wanted to show them that I went through a day in their life together. On the rinse and repeat department by department. Then in terms of sprawl, I can't tell you how many products in this space that like some of you know of, but if you go look at like G2 or Forrester, or the folks that are really starting to track this, and I hope the Gartner people do too, 'cause I think it's an important area. I had sprawl in this area. The way I found out about it was crawling into our finance people's business and saying like, Hey, I need like the Concur data on like people that are like charging to the technology line on their cards. I gotta know what's going on here. So that gave me visibility into like what tooling was used. Where in the old days, it was a lot easier. We're all in physical offices, and everybody's on your network. You could see where they're going, right? In the new days, where we're trying to reduce friction and, you know, you gotta balance security with friction. There's much more flexibility in people using platforms without the full knowledge and understanding of technology. So that's been educational as I've talked to these people. I'm like, Whoa, hey, like, tap the brakes here. The beauty for me is like I cover security and technology, so I can show up on the security side and be like, Hey, do you have like terms with these guys? like, Do you know, like they have full rights to your data? Like, you know, it's like eight guys in a garage, and like, you know, all that. We were able to have like a really healthy conversation to like reduce that sprawl. All these deals. I even found some deals that were done, you know, that were signed off on, that were legitimate, that went through the legal process and such. You know, but at the end of the day, employees want the tools that are gonna make them the most effective in their job. The trick is employees are not experts in understanding this area, and they don't have the time to do the R&D in this area, so they're gonna grab the first thing that they hear, you know, about. They're gonna, like, hear what their colleague over at Pepsi or here or there is using, a friend, former, you know, colleague, and they're gonna go with it. You know, my mission has been to get ahead of that, do the legwork, do it thoughtfully, and show like the benefits of like us all being on the same platform. The last part I'll just say is now getting that out to the clubs. It's like the clubs like, Hey, here's what we spent all this time and energy at MLB figuring out, and this is what we use with you when we're doing all these joint projects. You know Asana, right? They're like, Yeah. I'm like, Hey, like, well, we have like a framework, and the framework is you can have all these centralized processes done, but you as a club, you have processes that are unique to a club. If you invest that time and energy and create like a work kit template, like whatever it's gonna be, that most likely is immediately relevant to 29 other clubs. That's the power of being on the same platform. Fantastic. Okay, next question with Steve. After Steve. Great. Steve Enders with Citi. Thank you for taking the time today. I just wanna follow up on that last point you made there about spreading this out to other clubs and then third parties. I guess how much is that happening today where you are pushing those processes out and spreading Asana adoption into other areas? Then as a follow-up, you mentioned that there's a lot of complex workflows that you're managing within Asana. How much were they there in partnership with you to help you kind of build those out versus this being something that was really, you know, IT driven and that you were really pushing out there? Those are two great questions. Thanks. On the first one, going out to clubs, there's two parts to it. The first part is the you have no choice part, which is, and the business model of Asana really helps you with that. Like, it's like, hey, I just added you to a task or a project, like come on in and get this visibility, and like this is greater interaction you've ever had before with us, and it's actually in writing and you don't have to go search for it in your email. It's like right there. It keeps people accountable and engaged and all that. That part kind of greased the skids to then the club being like, Hey, like, all right, so we changed these people to like full members 'cause now they're like banging on my door. They wanna use this for their projects, build a structure in place for us to do that. What I'm trying to do at the Major League Baseball level is buy on behalf of the clubs 'cause that helps like for efficiency and procurement and also kind of driving this. That's been kind of like the evolution. It's had like a certain like grassroots aspect to that. Just so I get the second question right, could you just repeat that one more time? Yeah. Just on the, you mentioned complex workflows and that, you know, you use Asana for that. How much was that being in support or supported by Asana and like a partnership there to drive that versus something that you were pushing and building out yourself? Cool. That's, again, a great question. On that one, I would say two things. Asana was there, so I have to give them credit certainly for being a good partner in that regard. Put that aside for one second. The only way I was gonna be successful at scale is for the product that we picked to be super intuitive. Like I'm talking like iPhone intuitive 'cause I got people in all shapes and sizes. In fact, like, you know, when you come into a ballpark and you see like some of the people that are like greeting you at the perimeter, a lot of those people are like retirees and like other folks or you might get like we have former law enforcement folks, we have like the umpires who are like, you know, awesome at what they do, but like they're not like immersed in technology every day, right? So I like platforms that enable those audiences and then all of a sudden you see those guys or the umpires coming back and they're like, Hey, this is really cool. Like, I did this. I'm like, You did that? I was like, Hey, man, that's like pretty neat. They're like, Hey, I saw this feature like, you know, I'm just wondering how to use it. You know, if it's something we've already worked with before and have something to show, we do. If not, we might ask the Asana team for some help. I have found, and it's one of the things that drew me to the platform a long time ago and like hit my kids up with it, that like it's an intuitive platform. If you have that type of like, you know, kind of grassroots engagement, I think you get the natural curiosity of people to take it to the next level. 'Cause now they just like, All right, I'm comfortable here, but I have this like more complex stuff, like how do I get it done? I'd say half of them figure it out because it's like there's a really good help capability there. The other half of them like are coming to us, but like within that, like we've already solved it for somebody before, and then we might lean on Asana for some of the others. Awesome. I'll turn it back to Anne for last question. I think there's one more question. Oh, do you wanna do one more? Sure. Okay, last question. Hi, it's Pat Walravens from JMP. Hey, Pat. Have you thought about your budget for next year? Have you guys started to do that? Yeah. Up, down, or flat? How much and where, what are you gonna spend more on? Where are you gonna save money? Yeah. You know, we're in the thick of that season right now. I think that the theme that resonates with everybody when we talk about the budget is the you know the kind of new way that we're doing business and how we're leaning more and more on like a you know kind of a disparate engagement model. I would probably tell you that during the pandemic, I started to work with our other offices, other MLB proper offices, more than ever before. I think it was just because, like, you know, we needed everybody hands on deck to pull off those pandemic seasons. With that change in, like, how we work and trying to be more efficient and send less people on the road, I would never have thought, but, like, our amount of people that are on the road for the major events like the World Series and the World Baseball Classic have got way down. The only way that we've been able to do that is with tooling like this. I would say we're up in this area in terms of, like, the tooling because it's a force multiplier for us in how we wanna do business. We've got people back in the office. It's great. Love that part. Like, some things are not gonna change back to the way they were, as you guys probably hear about and talk about all the time. Part of that is, you know, if we can get subject matter expertise to participate from wherever they are and not have to put them on scene, that's a good outcome. It's an even better outcome if they can be more effective than they were before. I think the only way you really do that well is to have, like, a place for them to collaborate and be able to go back to, so we're not constantly reinventing the wheel. That's how I make the case here for this investment, with the same, you know, points of consideration, and it goes over really well. Okay. I'm gonna end on force multiplier. Thought that was a great ending to this Q&A session. Thank you so much, Neil. Thank you, Anne. Thanks for letting me help. Yeah. Yeah. Very much. Thank you for joining us. Before you get up, let me introduce Dustin Moskovitz, our Co-Founder and CEO, to the stage for a Q&A session. Thank you so much, Neil. Thanks, guys. Hello, everyone. All right. Who's gonna be first? Just wanna raise your hand, and Pat Walravens, if you wanna introduce yourself, and we'll give you the microphone. Great. Thanks. Pat Walravens again. Dustin, I'm sure you just heard that, right? I thought, let me get these words right. Neil said that Jira is great when you're doing technology, but not really great when you're trying to get business people oriented around it. You know, there's this whole Atlassian Jira Work Management thing. I'm sure you're quite familiar. We're getting a ton of questions about it, and I would just love to hear from a competitive point of view what your perspective is on it. Sure. Well, just to give everyone a bit of background, I know you know Atlassian, the company, but you know much deeper into their sort of product portfolios than you know, I'd expect your average investor to be. I think Neil was talking about Jira Software, so it's really the thing that's built for software teams. Great product. We see it in a lot of our customers, and we've built some really strong integrations with both their server and cloud products. Really see that as coexisting. I think of Jira Software as sort of a specialized form of work management in the same way that, like, Salesforce CRM is a specialized form of work management. If you have a very lightweight version of those use cases, something like Asana might work well for you. Even we use, you know, Salesforce for managing our sales force. You often need to sort of graduate to those advanced products. Atlassian also has a bunch of other products, including what they literally call Jira Work Management is the name of one of their products, that's meant to be more appealing to business users and non-software users. It's also a much simpler product than Jira Software and a much, much simpler product than Asana, really targeted at SMBs and VSBs. In fact, I was looking at the Atlassian website the other day, and if you go to their enterprise product section, they don't even list it. They do list Trello, which I thought was a little surprising, but I think that's sort of a strong signal of how they feel it's positioned. Yeah, really, we see Jira Software as a very sophisticated, specialized form of work management. They've been out in the market a very long time, launched, I think, in 2006. That's somebody that we see as a very strong partner. They have a few other products that are more targeted at the SMB space. I think we've made it pretty clear in our earnings calls over the past year, we're very focused on moving upmarket, reaching larger enterprises. I think that's where Asana is really differentiated and where we can be a force multiplier for organizations like MLB. That's you know very much how our product roadmap and go-to-market is focused right now. Thank you. Sounds good. All right. We'll go to Brent, and then we'll go to the back of the room next. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. One of the comments that Neil made was this idea of being an internal advocate, but really from a CIO perspective. It sounded like a typical organization might have lots of work management tools and specialized tools. But he felt the need to have control, visibility across the whole organization. Is the mindset and how you're go-to-market shifting where you can see more advocacy at the CIO level for Asana? If so, how is the go-to-market approach changing there? Maybe a question for Anne and Dustin. Thank you. Yeah, sure. I'll start there. We're definitely seeing that, CIOs, especially in like upper mid-market enterprise, are part of our conversation. Depends on the organization and the vertical. Sometimes they have somebody on their team that's in charge of all, employee productivity or collaboration apps that really is the day-to-day owner, but the CIO is involved in that. I would say in terms of, kind of what Neil shared, we are starting to see some trends where it's not kind of fully owning it. Again, it depends on the culture of the company. It's really paying attention to what teams are using, and adoption and complex cross-functional workflows and being able to do those at scale are two kind of critical factors we see that certainly like CIOs and ops of employee engagement care about when they're thinking about planning ahead, if we are going to pick a platform of choice, what matters to them. We're early on that, I think, in terms of this, call it like consolidation. We are excited in the conversations that we're in, that the factors that they care the most about are ones that we've been investing in. Yeah. I'll just add, you know, I think Neil is a phenomenal CIO, and I think pretty advanced in thinking about this. When we first met, you told us about, you know, how you'd really gone deep in a lot of different products, and even all the way back to Lotus, and like maybe the whole history of the category. I'd love if every CIO was as sophisticated as that. I think when they're not like Neil, they're still coming at it from, you know, standardization perspective. They've got to deploy it. They've got to train the workforce. So it's better for them if they've got one tool instead of multiple. I think they discover over time, and more importantly, the department needs and the division needs discover the value of having one tool that's used cross-functionally, which is really where Asana is differentiated. When you have, you know, multiple, you know, horizontal work management tools, not the specialized ones I was talking about earlier, but, you know, tools like Asana, you still end up with your teams working in silos, duplicating work, not being able to really get on the same page without resorting back to email, spreadsheets or meetings, because those are the lowest common denominator tools again, across them. When we do see consolidation, and it's still not that often because most knowledge workers don't use any of the tools, but when we do see it, that's where we really shine in the process because you might have, you know, the marketing team really likes the marketing specialized product and the IT team really likes the IT specialized product, but Asana can work across all of them. When they talk about their cross-functional initiatives, that's where they're like, Yeah, only Asana is really gonna work for that. Great. In the back over there. Yeah. Hi. ConOr Cole on behalf of Pinjalim Bora at JP Morgan. Dustin, in the past, you've talked about some of the separations that exist in the market between content creation, collaboration, and coordination. I'm curious how you see the market evolving as companies like Monday expand into content creation and collaboration through digital whiteboarding or companies like Box expand into task and project management. Do you see Asana kind of following the path to expand these adjacent market categories? Sorry. What was the one that wasn't monday.com? What was the second? Box, in task management and project management, just building new capabilities over there. I think I'm a little less familiar with the Box suite in that respect, so I'll check it out after. The way we really think about the collaboration ecosystem overall is three big runways. There's the content tools, which is where I normally would put Box, but also specialized products like Adobe or Canva or Figma. Communication, which will be, you know, Slack, your email clients, Zoom. Coordination is really what we think of as our category. Coordination's all about answering who's doing what by when. We still see that any given customer wants best-of-breed solutions in each of those categories. You know, content communication is very complex. There's probably multiple, you know, a video conferencing product and an email product and a chat product might be different products themselves or, over time, maybe that'll be from one vendor. Across the three, they really want to not leave anything on the table. We really haven't seen the fact that single vendors are offering services across them really change the competitive landscape yet. Yeah. I'll just add on, especially not with enterprise customers. We don't find that any of our enterprise customers are looking for sort of like one vendor to do all those. Great. Next question, Andrew. Andrew from Berenberg again. Just one for you, Dustin. In terms of what Neil said earlier, I thought it was very interesting when he was talking about the different functional areas he's using Asana for. I thought it was a little bit outside what's normal in terms of what we hear. I was just wondering, have you gotten a wish list from those type of heavy users about additional integrations and maybe more specialized software products, maybe outside of the typical, typically what you see in the three Cs, you know, the content and communication in particular? Can you be a little more specific on what was not normal? Well, more like, for example, finance functions, things like that, you know, I don't usually hear that. I mean, obviously back office in terms of software, there's a lot of specialized software products that maybe could be integrated within Asana. Yeah. Maybe just expanding on that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think that some of that is more common for us, but we do think that the larger, more sophisticated deployments like MLB, they're really the bleeding edge of product market fit. When we're trying to figure out our product roadmap, by the way, our head of product, Alex, is in the room here and will be at the cocktail hour. You know, that's who we're talking to because they're trying to pull functionality out of our hands. Sometimes that is additional flexibility or customization or power in the product itself, and sometimes it's specialized integrations. But usually those customers still also very much value the sort of broad-based adopted tools in those other categories. Over time, we've been getting into more specialized like the Tableau integration, Salesforce integrations. I think that comes from a lot of those conversations, and we're very keen on opening up the space of those. I think we've got kind of an exciting roadmap over the next few quarters just in terms of the sheer volume of integrations that we're able to support, especially with our new workflow automation tools and the Workflow Builder. A lot of the way we're thinking about the product right now is really handing off control flow in these workflows from Asana to the other tools in your toolset in a really seamless way. We know as we get into these more sophisticated deployments, we're gonna need to be able to handle the long tail. Did my audio drop out? Oh, okay. RF. I'll just put it here. All right, next question, John. Then we'll do Jackson. Is it better now? Okay. Can you hear me? Hi, it's John Byun from Jefferies. As we all know, you know, there seems to be a lot of use cases, potential to really go cross-functional, cross-department, a lot of room for product expansion. A lot of opportunities, but as well as investor needs. The question is, you know, how you think about balancing growth versus, you know, profits and, you know, what are the best places where you could also see leverage? Thank you. Yeah. Well, obviously big topic for all companies right now, and something we're thinking a lot about. Definitely been managing the company in a pretty different way this year, to be candid. We talked about it on some of the earnings calls, but starting, you know, really in Q1 just started to really moderate our plans, moderate our spend. I think your question was more oriented around product and R&D, but you know, a lot of our cost center is really in sales and marketing. Really moderated head count across the board, but also moderated programmatic spend in those areas. We're already kind of, you know, I think we're very fortunate to be in an exploding category like work management because in spite of all the headwinds, it's still growing. We're able to grow into our OpEx envelope at a pretty good pace. Not like maybe we had hoped for at the very beginning of the year, but still growing very well. A lot of it for me is making sure that we've still got the resources in the right places where we're still getting the most efficient return on investments. We're looking a lot more on, you know, on a per channel basis with go to market on a regional basis. On the product roadmap, you know, where we're gonna get the most bang for our buck by improving things on the margin. I think the beauty of the Asana Work Graph® and the way we conceptualize the product is we really have built these really powerful building blocks that can then be put together in ways that specialize into those different use cases and different, you know, vertical segments without a ton more R&D on our side. It's really taking these powerful constructs we've built in terms of the ability to customize the schema, customize the workflow, customize the UI, and then creating workflow automation to put them together in the right ways. Some of that doesn't even require R&D. It's really our customer success or sales solutions or sales engineering going in with customers and helping them figure out how to put together those building blocks in the right way. I feel pretty comfortable that we don't need to make major investments in order to really tackle the broad market in that way. We still have, you know, very sizable R&D teams. We're gonna be able to get quite a lot out of the existing OpEx envelope on that part of the business. Awesome. Jackson Ader at MoffettNathanson again. Okay. Just kind of following up, I guess, on that, but a little bit more specific to your actual investment from last month. What is it about, you know, what are some of the specific things that you feel like are mission critical to the story of this company? You know, like the long-term future of this company that you said, like, I need to make this investment, right? Like we need the cash infusion in order to do these things for the future. The flip side of that is, you know, is there any worry about creating? You know, I realize it's odd because it's like it's your company, it's your money, but creating some sort of like moral hazard where maybe the market was signaling that some of the things you were doing are not worth doing, and because of the investment, now you might still end up doing those things that might not be worth it. Okay. Multi-part question. You know, I think from the company's perspective, sorry, my own perspective as the investor, but from the company's perspective, what we really wanted was to extend runway. The company decided this was the deal that was most favorable to do that, while also considering other options. We didn't think of it as we're going to extend runway and also, you know, step on the gas and increase our investments and increase burn. We just wanted to make sure that we had a good cushion, good cushion as we were going into this adverse situation and that we weren't getting too close to the sort of bottom of the bank balance. You know, I definitely take your point that maybe from the employee perspective it looks like, you know, maybe like everything's fine, we're pouring in money. I don't think that's really what's happening inside the company. People pay attention to news. They frankly read what y'all say about us. They know we have to watch our burn. We're talking about it quite a bit. We've pulled back in a lot of areas. We haven't added anything to the roadmap in the middle of this crazy, you know, economic situation. Definitely something to be mindful of, and I think of that as more a cultural thing, and like how we manage the company, how we message it. We're talking about focusing on fewer things right now and making sure that we're getting return on investment as best as we can in every area. We've done a lot of regrouping. I talked about the region thing, for example. You know, demand has generally been resilient for the category, but not everywhere. You know, we've needed to redirect some of our resources from one country into another where we're seeing more strength. Nobody's getting additional budget as part of any of those conversations, and a lot of people are getting less budget. All right, I get to ask the last question. The last question of the day. It's about time. Dustin, how do you see the work management industry evolving over the next five years, and what could drive increasing enterprise adoption? Great. You know, just thinking about the long arc. I've been in Asana a long time. The long arc, if we were sitting here five years ago, you know, I'm not even sure work management was a main category yet. We were still sort of talking about, is this gonna be a thing, or are people just gonna keep doing emails and maybe, you know, Google Sheets is getting good enough. It's got comments now. I think that's like all in the past. You know, sitting here in 2022, it's clear it's an established category. From my perspective, it feels like IDC believe that, you know, 10 years from now, every knowledge worker is gonna have one of these products. We're still in a place where people are still thinking about it as a better version of Sheets and emails and meetings. They're still basically doing the same kind of workflows and behaviors that they were doing with those products, but now in, you know, better tooling. To Neil's point, I think what more customers are now realizing is the art of the possible with Asana, partially 'cause we go in and tell them about it, but partially because the tools have been in the ecosystem a lot longer. Even if you're new to Asana, maybe you've used one of the other work management products, and so you've got the sort of one-on-one on what I'm gonna do with, you know, a Kanban board or a collaborative calendar. Now you're getting into, well, what do I do when I have the task connected to higher-level portfolios and levels of portfolios and all the way up to higher-level goals? How can I automate status update reporting and build these really rich dashboards that cut across all these projects and cut across teams? You know, how can we make smarter decisions once we have that map of the work across the entire organization? Again, I'm, you know, I'm speaking to the Asana differentiators here because this is how we really think about the category and how we've thought about it the whole time. Five years from now, I'm hoping that sophistication continues to build. We have more CIOs like Neil that really get it. Analysts, investors, customers are understanding, you know, what's really possible when you've got work management that has thought about this from the ground up to really integrate what has historically been separate categories and, you know, OKRs and project portfolio management and reporting, and then, you know, task and project management. What happens when you really have that Work Graph across the entire company? That's what I think the next five years will look like, and we're gonna go build it and prove it. I love it. What a powerful way to end the day. Okay, so a couple things before we go to cocktail hour. First, I wanna thank the Asana events team, our AV team in the back, and for Eva Leung and Jane Randolph for producing this using Asana, of course. Also a couple more introductions. Some of you already know a lot of our management team, but we have Tim Wan, our Chief Financial Officer, in the back, who will be available at the reception. Also, Alex Hood and Saket Srivastava, who is our CIO, who we'd love to introduce you to because he just started a few months ago. Srivastava. Srivastava. I think we have a couple of special guests too. We have Lou Seal from the Giants and our very own Asana mascot, Yeti. Yay. Oh, that's a good seal. I would invite you to the stage, but I don't want you to knock anything down. Can you make it? All right. Well, we'll just have Anne and Dustin come out, Neil come down. We should do a photo shoot with everybody and the mascot. We'll come to you, Yeti. Okay. Get down there. Thank you so much, everybody, for coming. Please join us for cocktails. Thank you.