McDonnell from Asana here. Ed, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Rob. Yeah. Ed is the head of global revenue, and I would argue potentially maybe the most important person within Asana right now, because if you know anything about Asana, you know that they have outstanding products. I think that what we're going to focus on today is trying to understand how to get more people to buy them and how you're doing that. So let me start, first of all, by asking about, you know, your background. You're a Salesforce person by background, so what was it that attracted you to Asana? Yeah, I spent most of my technology time. I started in Eloqua before it got bought by Oracle, and I spent 11 years at Salesforce. So I got to Salesforce at the $2 billion range and was able to ride that to the $35 billion train, and that was a lot of fun. I ran the Marketing Cloud business at Salesforce for the better part of 10 years. So I was in the marketing technology space for a long time, and we built that business up over those 11 years. So the first thing, I wanted to get out of marketing technology, and when I was looking across software categories, I said: "What looks like a great software category?" And the future of work, to me, is maybe one of the best software categories out there, and CWM and collaborative work management is clearly in that space. It's a $45 billion TAM as per IDC. It's growing at 16% CAGR. And when you think about future of work, it's really about the productivity of human capital and how do you bring the productivity of human capital to each organization so that they can build the efficiencies and efficacies within their own workforce? And so that was the space that I wanted to get into, and I thought that there was a lot of growth to happen in the space. And then you look at... I wanted another, I wanted a visionary founder CEO. I had just left one, and I wanted to go to another one, and Dustin is clearly that, and both a visionary and just the, an amazing, CEO, great leadership team, and a great product. So to me, what was important is a product that actually can scale into enterprise companies. The company has, and we have an enterprise philosophy, and that is, that is where we're directing our transformation as we go through where, where we are right now. And this is a-- it's a product that can scale to hundreds of thousands of users in an organization. It's one that can bring cross-department and cross-functional, benefits. So we can sit in any, whether it's a G&A function, a marketing function, a revenue function, or an IT organization, we solve use cases across all of that. So that was really important to me. You smash those things together, and I just really liked the story, and I really liked what's available to us. And now that I'm here three quarters, nine months in, I actually think the opportunity is bigger than when I started. Exciting. One question I want to knock out first before we get to all of those specifics, which you mentioned, Ed, is just around the macro, because clearly in the past, you know, couple weeks, software investors, I think, are rightly concerned around the macro. So to the extent that you can comment, and you guys are an off-quarter report, we just heard from you, your quarter was solid. So just would love to hear kind of what you're seeing out there right now. I mean, you're a veteran of the industry, so any color would be helpful. Yeah, if I look over the past four to six quarters over two different companies, the macro hasn't wildly changed. It's. I think it's stable. I don't see it. It's not worse than it was two quarters ago. It's also not better. What we see is there's continued scrutiny on where money is spent. I believe money is being spent on softwares and technologies. There's just a lot more scrutiny on where and who it's getting spent with. It's why I like the Asana story. A lot of what we see is consolidation of applications, and we sit in a space that has lots of applications. So in those types of conversations, and you see it in some of our results from last week, Rob, that's a good story for us. But the macro in terms of buying environment and elongated sales cycles, like, we don't see anything different than any of the other application companies out there. I just think we're really well positioned inside of that story. Got it. Okay, great. Please don't hesitate to hit me on email. The email is there, and we can put questions in here and make this interactive with Ed, and it's great to have him. So you take the job at Asana, there's some changes that you're going to identify when you get into the seat. Mm-hmm. With the experience that you had at, you know, at Eloqua, Oracle, and Salesforce, you know, and then knowing Asana coming in, what were some of the changes or initial goals that you had set and the kind of where are we now, admittedly, only nine months after- Yeah ... but where are we now relative to kind of what you identified as the things you wanted to do? Yeah. The first thing was: did we have the right team? So do we have the right people? Do we have the right leadership team to go and really make the transformation that Asana is going through? And so I had to assess the leadership team. We both made changes in the leadership team, and we've onboarded some great new talent. I have a full leadership team after nine months, and so we just hired our head of global sales development out of Dublin. That was the last hire that we had to make on the global leadership team. So we have a full stack now across all the areas that you would expect. So we have GMs in place, and we have a healthy mix of tenured Asanas and new folks that have seen scale beyond where we're at today. So if I look at the previous leadership team, it was good for the scale that Asana was at, but it didn't have the scale for where we want to go, and it didn't have the scale or had been through the transformations that we need to partake in. So we've made hires across both regional GMs, specifically North America, brought on a phenomenal global head of channel and alliances, which is an area that's a focus for us. And we've brought on a new head of go-to-market operations and strategy to really help us get the infrastructure required to head to where we have to go. Inside of that, what is that transformation, Rob, is I think your question? It's traditionally been a product-led company, so product-led growth organization. We're making a transition to B2B enterprise sales and enterprise selling motions. We're still early in that transformation, but that's really where the new leadership team and a lot of where we're bringing on board new selling reps, but also new resources across both retention, our channel game. Like, those are areas where we're making investments, too. We've put a focus on new logo acquisition in verticals. We have to speak the language of our customers, and so we have vertical teams in both Europe and the United States, where we're really trying to get closer to our customers and some of the buying centers that we're targeting, and we have to increase our net new logos, which we did in the first quarter. We also have to keep a tight eye on our expansion, so the third part is just expanding our customers. We need to do that both through providing a very good customer success story on implementation, adoption, and getting folks to use Asana to drive some real business outcomes, but then also having the right capacity to help them expand their usage as we go forward. We have an international focus, so we've been making investments, specifically Europe and Japan. We saw that come true in Q1, so if you look at the international growth, it was 14.5%, which actually grew faster than the overall company in Q1. And then, like I said, we just hired a great leader for channel alliances, which we have some catch-up work to do, especially in our space. That could be a big growth lever for us in out years. So the sales, by the way, that's a lot in a short period of time, so congrats. The sales leadership is in place now. Yeah. What about the sales team? Are you at the headcount that you need to be at? And I guess to maybe drill down even further, is it the right mix? Because, you know, the leadership team that you're building, and you mentioned a healthy mix of, you know, Asanas versus people that have seen that scale, where are we in terms of the layout of your go-to-market team right now? Are they the folks that can have those high-level conversations at enterprise, or is there still work to be done there? Oh, there, there, there's always work. That didn't even change in my previous, my previous role at the previous company. We always had work. I'd say we're, like, a third, a third, a third. I feel really good about a third being able to, to have those conversations that to, to really accelerate this transformation. I feel good about the middle third on our ability to help them be productive and, and to have those conversations, and we still have some work to do on the bottom third that we continue to make progress against. We're at the capacity that we need right now, so we've done a really good job of onboarding new capacity. We have more capacity, exiting Q1 this year than we did last year ... at the ramp level, so we feel good about the capacity we have. We've also made investments in folks that also focus on our customers, so our renewals team, our customer success teams, and some of our sales development to help us generate and build pipeline. Got it. Great. I want to focus on the three of the things that you mentioned: international, verticals, and channel and alliances. So let's start with international. It's always been a product that's resonated really well internationally- Yeah ... and it seems to have been a borderless solution as a PLG solution. What are the ways that the answer might be channel and alliances. Maybe we're gonna get to that as an answer. Yeah. But, you know, what are the ways that you sort of drive growth for Asana internationally and do it in a cost-effective way? Yeah. I love the question. I think there's a couple of things. We have focused our investments internationally this year, so we were pretty spread thin before this year, and we were focused everywhere, especially in the PLG motion. We've really dialed that back, and we are focused on the countries that matter. So we're deeply focused on DACH, specifically Germany, lots of investments in France, the UK, obviously, and the more mature markets is really where our focused investments are, specifically from a direct capacity and an outbound marketing perspective. In order to grow, we have to have a... We have to be able to geo-fence, partners and channels into the market as well, both in terms of, geographies that we might not want to put direct capacity, but also just supplementing some segments where we may never have enough capacity to go after. So we're working on those plans right now. We're super early on channel, and I don't want to make it seem like we have a robust or a mature model there. We don't. But I do believe we have both the product, the infrastructure, and now some of the people to do it and to catch up fast, but it's gonna take us a couple of quarters to really build that out. But that is how you do it. You have to have your investment thesis has to be in the markets that matter, that will generate the largest ROI and TAM for where the biggest TAMs are, and then you have to supplement everything else through a partner ecosystem that we are just now developing. And was that, I don't wanna say, well, late, you guys were a little late to the channel thing, or maybe not late, but maybe came to it later. And is that because of the development of the focus on the PLG motion first and foremost, and it not having been important, or is it something that when you came in, you said: "Hey, this is really gonna be a big opportunity for us?" 'Cause it certainly seems like you're accelerating that motion. It's probably somewhere in the middle. Yeah. PLG allowed this company to grow and grow very fast, and part of that is the product itself, and part of it was the investments made through direct marketing and some of the paid media efforts that we had going out there. I think in order to expand and both be relevant in the long tail, but also be able to capture more of the upmarket, you have to have a robust channel strategy. So I don't, I don't want... Yes, we're late, but it's really we're late from a maturity perspective, not from having the infrastructure to go do it. Got it. Okay, great. And then on verticals, the old Keith Block strategy. You know, let's make our product more valuable to customers and enable them to pay more for something that's more relevant to their business processes. How much work needs to go into the vertical strategy? Where are we today? What verticals have you identified? And, and, you know, on the product side, is there anything that needs to happen, you know, light customization overlay, or is it more just a sales approach to understand the needs of those customers? Right now, it's mostly a go-to-market approach, both through sales and marketing efforts, to understand the needs of the customer. We've started a pretty robust feedback loop back into product to help us really drive some of those outcomes. But let me tell you where we're seeing some success. If I look at what we've done in Europe, we've really put a team around the high-end luxury retail, and we've done very well. So we count, you know, LVMH and a couple of other really large retailers as our customers. And what we've learned is store operations, right? So what's the process for store operations, and how do you deliver store operations at scale? There's a large retailer here in the United States where there's a team of about 25 people at headquarters that manages a 10,000-person store operation across the United States. Scheduling, time sheets, like all the things that you would think on store operations. They've adopted Asana to be able to drive that. And now, as we think about how do you layer on some of our workflows, some of our AI capabilities, how can they even go faster doing that? And so what we're learning is, in retail specifically, it's about store operations, it's logistics, doing returns, managing returns. Like, all the things that you would think of that would happen out of headquarters or out of an operations center for a retailer, it's just a prime opportunity for Asana. We've also done a lot of work around healthcare, so that's the other one that we're really leaning into. Specifically, provider and payer, and just some of, again, the operation sets that exist and some of the marketing, that happens in the healthcare provider world here in the United States. There's another area that we're really leaning into. We're HIPAA compliant, which, which gives us a head start, to go into that market, which is why we, we chose to, go a little bit deeper on it. We do really well in local government, both here in the United States as well as internationally. Got it. And what, if any, is the pushback among these customers? I mean, even early on, you guys have had a handful of customers that have scaled tremendously on Asana. So I got to assume that when people take a look, they're gonna understand scalability's there. But what- ... what is, what is? Is it change management? Is it, is it consolidation around different tools, which I want to get to, but what, you know, what is, what is the pushback, if any? Yeah, at the department and functional levels, it's change management. We do it this way today, and whether that way is through smoke signals or spreadsheets or some other way of just the way work happens, you're working an organization through change. I'm talking to a big customer right now, and the opportunity is with their finance and their HR organizations. And it's like: Well, who would we displace? And they're like: "Nobody." You're just displacing the way they do work today. And that takes a lot of work to then go talk to the CHRO, to go talk to the CFO. What would you improve? How do you improve a financial reporting process? How do you make that go smoother? How do you do your 10-Ks much quicker? How do you do your trade processing much faster? Like, how do you bring some of those workflows and some of those business streams more efficacy and efficiencies? Same thing in HR. I mean, we do so well with HR organizations, especially in recruiting. Think about employee onboarding, and again, when I think about what we're bringing to market around Asana Intelligence and AI, how do you make an employee onboarding experience go faster? How do you make it so that you can take employee survey results from something like Qualtrics, have them be part of your employee onboarding experience, but then have the model actually tell you, "Well, here's the three things you have to go do in onboarding to make your employees more successful faster, regardless of where they are in the organization?" So it's all that change management that I believe to be the toughest job that we have right now. And that also flows into consolidation. Like, when you're talking to consolidation opportunities, it's: Well, we do this today. You want us to do something tomorrow. One, how do you help us get the data model over? Which I believe, like, that's our secret strength, is just our common data model. And then, how do you get the employees to adopt and bring forward? We just did that at a really big cybersecurity company, where they went from 6 tools down to just Asana, and it took 7 months. It was not easy. The sales process was a little bit longer 'cause you're convincing somebody to do something different. But now that we've got them there, they are a forever customer. Like, they're not going back because of the work they did on the consolidation, because of the migration of tools and data sets that they did. And now we have them coming, and they're... One of them speaking at our event tomorrow in San Francisco, which will be our largest customer event ever, that we're very excited about. Yeah, I'm bummed I can't be there, but I've got to be here. Yeah, would like to. Good luck with that tomorrow. Yeah, that's really exciting. So one of the things that has stood out to me and that you guys have also kind of referenced a couple times has been sort of the crisper execution and better alignment between the go-to-market team and the marketing efforts. And, you know, you had referenced earlier, I mean, you guys used to spend a lot of money on, you know, going after that PLG motion, and you're doing a lot less of that now, and I think, you know, investors are happy about that. But you brought Shannon Duffy in to be Chief Marketing Officer, also a Salesforce person. Maybe talk about that alignment and how that sort of, you know, creates the space for you to move upmarket. Yeah. One, Shannon's just one of the most incredible software CMOs out there.... and what she's done to help transform our marketing organization has been just stellar. One, you have to have a common language, and luckily, Shannon and I speak a very common language just about what it means to acquire and to drive enterprise buyers. I think the first place of alignment is in order to be an upmarket enterprise player in B2B applications, you have to be focused on the buyer, not the user, and in PLG, you're focused on the user. And by the way, this is where Asana has such a just a wonderful story and a wonderful history, is our users love us. I've actually never met a user of Asana that has come up to me and not said, "I love Asana." And that's like, nine months in, every single person I talk to that's like: "I use Asana. I love Asana." That's great, but now we need the buyers to understand why they love Asana. How do you put a value statement against it? That's really where Shannon and I have spent a lot of time, is: How do we educate buyers to understand the outcomes that are being driven by their end users? We have a customer that presented to our buyer at this customer, and it's a team that runs a last mile of a logistics company. And they came, and they were sharing the value that Asana has brought them to the buyers of ours at this, at this particular company. And they're like: "Listen, we brought our headcount down by 20% because of Asana. We manage 1,000 delivery sites, and we're intaking 1 million more tickets a year because of the way we've set up Asana to go drive last mile for this work stream." And our buyers were just like: "Whoa!" 'Cause it brought everything our buyers cared about. It brought human capital efficiencies, it brought higher throughput to deliver to, you know, to go maintain all those delivery sites, and it was a happy employee that was coming and saying: "Here's what we've done," showcasing how they've thought about leveraging a technology. So that's like, that's just a great story that I love to tell folks. Reminds me a little bit of Tableau, you know, and that, that was the other one where I would hear- Mm ... when I covered Tableau all the time, the users absolutely loved it, but the question was getting to getting IT on board and getting the- Yeah ... the enterprise buyer on board. We've- We've got the user. We have the user, and we are now acquiring buyers at a pretty rapid rate, and I'm excited about that, and I think that's a differentiation of Asana. We love talking about our customers. We love celebrating our customers. I think that's different than some others in our space. Good. That's a good segue just to talk a little bit about the competitive environment. That also has resonated here in the questions that I've gotten, so I'll try to combine them in the interest of time. So, you know, now that you're getting up into enterprise and, you know, from our checks, there's still a lot of consolidation that has to happen, a lot- Oh, yeah ... you know. So I think sometimes people look at the decline in the growth rate for Asana, they say: "Oh, they're being consolidated away." That's not what we're seeing, but as those opportunities happen and, you know, for consolidation, you know, what are you seeing out there among the competitive landscape? Like, who do you see most often? Is it, like in the case of this last mile logistics company, internal solutions that are stale, or is it an actual, "Hey, we've got five different solutions in five different departments, and we need to combine to one," you know, and are different playbooks, I assume, for each of those? In the consolidation world, especially in this space, I think we're still in stage one. It's a lot of companies going from, in some cases, 12, 13 providers down to three. Yeah. Right? In the cybersecurity example, that was one that was very bold. They went top down. They said, "We're gonna go 6 to 1," and they ran, and they ran a cycle, and they really put all of the providers through the RFP hoops to get to the best decision for them. And, you know, Asana was the clear winner on that. But I still think we're in the early phase of, "Hey, how do we go from 12 to 3? How do we go from 6 to 2?" The consolidation down to one will happen over time. I don't think it's a long tail time, but the first thing is, let's get rid of the waste, and there's a lot of waste. We are not losing in the waste. Like, we are, we are clearly one of the top two that's always getting selected, and now we're in some dog fights to go and win to get to the one. And I just like our chances because when I look at companies like Indeed or Morningstar or Navan, or Paramount, like, those are big organizations that are choosing us to go all in on. Got it. Great. And is there still... One last one on competition: Is there still... I mean, I think investor confusion has subsided here, but is there still a sense that you guys go up against Microsoft and Teams as well, or has that been more delineated? In other words, is work management better understood now by the customer as an opportunity that isn't necessarily gonna be subsumed into, like, say, Microsoft Teams? Microsoft Teams is a wonderful chat tool, and it's also a great interface into the Microsoft 365 stack. Right. We are a better together story at Microsoft. We integrate with 365. We're deeply integrated into both the email and the calendaring system. In fact, one of the coolest things you can do is you can have your calendar up in Microsoft Outlook, and you could have an Asana task list right next to it in the same container. You can actually drag the task into your calendar and say, "I'm gonna block off this time for this task," and it could add the... You know, we're working on now adding the collaborators into that task onto the calendar thread. So, like, we have a great better together story. Is Microsoft gonna go all in on collaborative work management? Maybe. I mean, they do a whole lot of software things. I don't believe they'll ever be able to catch up to the robustness and the sophistication that we have around all things CWM, which would be resource planning, strategic portfolio management, and again, our AI investments, like I am just, I have no doubt we're gonna win the category because of that. Yeah, that's. I wanted to jump into that in the time we have remaining because, you know, Dustin's been clear from the beginning that, you know, our structure at Asana gives us a big advantage in generative AI. And, from your perspective as a go-to-market team, how do you see that advantage? How do you help the customers understand that advantage? Yeah. It's again, I'll go back to what I said earlier. I think I'm a little wildly surprised at how much more excited I am now about the opportunity than I was 9 months ago, and it's now because I understand. We call it the Work Graph, and if, as you know, I'm sure I have some astute software investors here. If you think about the biggest software companies in the world, what do they have? They have a common metadata model. Why was Salesforce so successful? And I speak from 11 years. They had a common metadata model. That's why Service Cloud became a $7 billion business, 'cause it stole the same data model as Sales Cloud, and it just added a tab, and we were able to create a secondary business off of it. Asana's Work Graph is the only common data model in collaborative work management. Smartsheet doesn't have one. Monday doesn't have one. We have a common referenceable data model. Every single task, every single project, every single portfolio sits on that data model. When you have a common data model, you can discover it, you can expose it, you can orchestrate it, you can automate it, you can create custom workflows on it, and you can put an AI layer on top of it. And that's why I think we win, because all the foundation models, like we sit on all top, on top of all the foundation models, but now we can actually give clarity, we can give accountability, and we can give structure into that as work happens across an enterprise. That is one of the most customers I talk to still are trying to understand what that means, and we're still in a big education state on what that means. But where we see it showing up, I'll give you an example. We're talking to a couple of companies right now. We have a small beta going, and we're in their marketing organizations. And when you think about content creation and content design, one of the number one things companies do is publish blogs, right? Everybody has a blog, and everybody publishes a blog. We've written an automation and a workflow in Asana using some of the foundation models, but also our own modeling, where you can write a blog and then publish it in as many languages as you want, like that. Hit a button, AI can then generate that, publish it out to all your microsites, all just through a common natural language processing container that we put right on top of it. All, all then captured, right? That then becomes a discoverable piece of work. So your CMO can then look down and say: "Hey, how did we publish it? What were the results on it?" And it all lives in the same container from an exec reporting perspective. That's where I think we're going, and that's the value that we can bring to organizations. Great. You guys reported last week, and it was the second quarter in a row where you called out, you know, that we're kind of getting through this now, you know. This quarter it felt like there was a bit more granularity. You said pipeline was a little bit better. You were starting to see some green shoots, and guidance assumes a bit of a re-acceleration. So maybe talk a little bit about if you can give us a little bit more color around what it is you're seeing that kind of gave you that comfort. I know you're going through the... You know, you guys have been very clear about the kind of renewal cohort that you have- Yeah ... to get through, and that's fine. But in terms of kind of, you know, net new, like, what's out? What do you, what do you see? Yeah. I, we saw stability Q4 to Q1 in, in new ARR, which I've been doing software for a long time. It's hard to do, right? So, our Q4s and our Q1s, lots of similarities to them. We saw pipe, both inbound pipe, so top-of-funnel, creation, but also outbound creation accelerate for us in the, in the first quarter, which both good signals for us, both in the inbound take as well as our ability to go create on the outside. And we, we interrogate our pipeline every day, so we're looking at how we're doing at the top, as well as how that progression flows down almost on a daily basis. I'd say those are two, and then we saw a 19% increase in our $100,000-plus customers in, in Q1. So in those customers that matter most to us and where we're putting our resources, we're starting to see that those growth green shoots as well. Is those customers over $100K a combination of consolidations and kind of new customer, the expansions, new customers? How would you kind of break those out? Yeah, I would say it primarily falls to expansion- Expansion ... 'cause it's where we are going in, and we've- Yep ... proven some value, and we've had an ability to demonstrate how we've provided that business outcome that's relevant to the customer, and most of them are consolidation. So when I do look at where we're winning in that $100,000 space, it's in consolidation. Got it. Got it. Awesome, what's the biggest goal for the next year for you? It's, we have to get through Q2. So our guidance in Q2 is conservative because we still know that we have some work to do here. It's working into the second half to drive the re-acceleration plan and then showing- Yep ... you and everybody in this room that that acceleration plan can take flight in FY 2026. We'll look forward to hopefully seeing that. Yeah. Ed, thank you so much. Please join me in thanking Ed McDonnell from Asana. Catherine Buan is also here in the room. Next up in this room will be Brunswick Corp, and there will be a breakout for those who want to join in Rockefeller-