Asana, Inc. (ASAN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to everyone joining us here at the Oracle Park. I'll start with the obligatory safe harbor statements. 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 statements available on the table. And for those of you listening on the audio, it is on your screen as well. So I'm going to 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. So 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. But when it comes to technology, Major League Baseball is anything but a history lesson. In fact, when it comes to trend setting technological advancements, no sport does it better than MLB. One of the goals is to ensure that the sports sustains from generation to generation and technology advancements play a critical role in the long-term health of the game. And 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. So 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. So 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 [indiscernible] native and lifelong fan. So I did kind of nerd out getting to see the players' entrance onto the field. So I'm going to have a great story to tell my kids tonight. But Neil, thanks so much for being here with us. So as SVP of Technology and CISO for Major League Baseball, you're essentially in charge of all of the information stack for MLB and work directly with Commissioner, Rob Manfred, and CEO, Chris Marinac. You are also on the Advisory Board of some pretty innovative, impactful technology companies like Okta, Palo Alto Networks, Carbon Black, Payray and DidIt. And 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 you're also using technology to improve player performance and elevate the experience for fans. So can you share more with us today about your vision and strategy for technology across MLB?

Yes. 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. And technology is obviously one of the best tools and platforms to do that. So we're constantly either on the lookout for a technology platform that will help us to that end and where we can achieve that we're building. And so we've built a lot of solutions over time in-house, but that takes us away from the business of baseball. So I mean, I think one that investors might be familiar with is the advanced media organization 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 and that ultimately got sold to Disney as what is now Disney Plus. And so as we've evolved from that, we're like, hey, those are great technological achievements, but they kind of can take us away from the business of baseball. So obviously, technology has 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 better experience to our fans, but just as much a more productive experience to our players and our employees.

Yes. So maybe following up on that. You said 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 I would love to hear more about that.

Yes. So when you look at us, it's really interesting at baseball you see is the big brand of MLB, 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 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? And so they need that type of force multiplier. So we're looking for a partner. 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 aspects of how we go to market. And so we are very careful in selecting partners that not only can get us there quickly, but will back us up along the way. Because the weight is on so few shoulders, right? And we're not seeing scale, I think of like a partnership of a company that I look at that staff, they might as well have mlb.com e-mail addresses because they're going to be right there in the trenches with us and help us accomplish that. So scale is much bigger for us than, hey, like can it handle this much traffic or can it handle this load. It's more, can it handle the way that we need to do business and in the way that we're able to do it and will they be there with us.

Yes. No, I appreciate that. I was also super interesting to hear you talk about how within MLB, you're an enterprise organization, you've got mid-market companies in terms of the teams and even start-ups with minor league. So I learned how you talked about technology and needs of scale to address all those different needs pretty seamlessly. So as you and the clubs technology leadership decide on what to put on the road map, what's the next innovative technologies you want to adopt, how do you think about that mandate and how do you all prioritize across the different choices you could be investing in?

Yes, there's a lot of -- I think we see SaaS sprawl. There's a lot of SaaS partners out there. And for us, everybody is kind of overlapping and kind of saying that they're going to be effective and relevant in the space. So we've devoted a lot more energy to partner management and to partner R&D. And that's been really fun for our teams. We look at who's out there. We always approach it as somebody is ought to be doing this. Somebody's got to have tackled this. And our story when it comes to this particular space has been a bit of a grueling one. 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 have a solution. I will admit to everybody here, I am a long-time Asana user and it's a funny story going back to managing my kids at home and tours and tasks and such as a free user. But coming in, I have that idea that like, hey, I'm going to continue to use this platform, this product because it makes me effective. And 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 hasn't really sorted a direction here in this particular area. And we found people on credit cards or kind of like individual business units doing their own thing. And lucky for me, like they -- many have come to the same conclusion that I had around the product that they had selected. So it made things a bit easier. But 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, especially how your personal story, a few of us were 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. So I love hearing. Neil also has some pro tips on how to block your children from assigning you tasks, but making sure you can assign them tasks. So love that. So maybe looking -- diving deeper on 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 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. So I would love to hear that.

Yes, I think that goes back a bit to your comment -- your question around scale, right? So here, we have this like great platform. I love it. My direct teams love it. And -- but how do we scale that out across these more complex workflows that we have in the business of baseball, and they are pretty complex. We can talk for hours about behind the scenes. But from that perspective, we needed a platform that was going to be intuitive and easy for people to like apply to those complex [ four ] processes. And that was -- 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 going to increase that dependency. For those that follow baseball, you see us with our World Baseball Classic right now, and we're -- there are 28 countries in competition. And we don't have the staff to put around the world. And so 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. So you see all that kind of in play. And it's a lot has to come together for that. If anybody seem kind of like us to like the Field of Dreams event in Iowa where on opening day when we did in Australia way to convert the Cricket grounds to be a ballpark. All that requires so many teams, so many logistics and then forget about like the back end of baseball operations or getting players there, it will be so classic because of 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. So platforms like this are crucial to us, especially when you look at where you've come from, like this was being done on like sheets and task lists and e-mail and other collaboration tools that just weren't as effective. And so this is kind of like game changing for us to have the proper tooling to do it, do it right and do it better.

And I think a couple of things that are so interesting to us, one is just MLB is a global organization and that you're coordinating all these different sort of complex events around the world. And I think one of the things you shared that we just really want hearing is that once you've built it and built these templates, you can use it again. So all the workflows that you've created, all the automation can be replicated the next year for next event. And so that level of, again, being able to innovate and move faster, we love seeing.

Yes, we're excited about that for. And I think it's 1 of the reasons that I got traction in standardizing on a platform. And it's the reusability aspect of it, because there are a lot of similarity even on the complex task front in terms of holding like international events. And there's other people in that too international events that aren't the world baseball classics that are going to benefit from those playbooks, right? And everybody likes to be self-sufficient, right? So you want to be smart and you don't want to call people up and be that person. And if you can pull up like those templates in that history, you're off to the races and you're doing good out the gate. So we really like that part. The most difficult aspect of that, though, was convincing people that like we have a platform in place that everybody can collaborate on. That would meet all of their needs and it's hard sometimes for people to let go. And this is an area that was super interesting. It took me a couple of years to get to that place just because of some pre-existing notions and even like factions of folks but we got there. And it's like we're in a really good spot.

Yes. Were there some keys in your mind to like unlock that and sort of get some of the fractions off of maybe how they were working on to a shared platform.

Yes. 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. But you guys definitely have some passionate folks on the team that are there for you even after like the sale and you're moving forward. And I think they're -- they learned our business and I could leave them alone with downstream internal business customers or even the clubs to represent around the platform. So it was really that level of engagement and 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. And I feel like I had to assess every one of these products just to show that, like we considered everybody's opinion. And I think that was another part of it. It was demonstrating that you went through the process with everybody's needs in mind, but even where they came from in mind. And by doing that and showing them there is a safe place to go. And here's the benefit of all of us actually all being on the same platform, a lot of people will let go and realize the value of the platform.

Great. Now I really 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 that like, okay, well, how important are integration? How important is making sure it connects to the rest of your tech stack? So we'd love to hear.

I think we have like a pretty forward-thinking tech stack, I would say. And we certainly are looking to use the best technologies in each of the areas. And 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. And 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. So know that we use all of the big brands but there is this missing ingredient in this area and that's what we had to solve for. And I've been shocked over the years that nobody has really done well other than the relationship that we have. And so I feel like, hey, I was the forward thinker on the team like, yah. But 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 O365 to like to make this happen. And to make sure that like these types of activities are in the right place and that they feel confident along the platform, no, it's going to -- 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'd like hearing that people are happy. 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 that?

So -- I'm trying to think -- I'm sorry, I was thinking about something else. What was the question?

About -- you were talking about kind of how you've -- how you've created what you call sort of work kits, thing that then are much more extendable and can be rolled out and how you use Asana to do that?

Got it. So just we have this, we call it work kits because we have a lot of interns and other folks that we're bringing into the business to learn baseball, which is a different initiation. On the work kits side, yes, so we want people to hit the ground running. And we want to make sure that like they are properly instrumented with the right tools to get their job done. And there's like a certain amount of, I think, definition with how roles are structured and what people need to do in those roles. And as we're -- we have like a very seasonal kind of like hiring cycle. So you might see like a club that has like 400 people in the regular -- in the off-season, in the front office, the core people scale to like 2,500 people, and you have all these folks that need to come up to speed. And so that's kind of like what we're thinking about here is like as they come in the door and they're smart people, like how do we enable them. They're not always the same people. And like -- and so how do we keep that consistency in what we deliver for the sport despite like a changing resource audience and such. So I mean, to summarize, that's kind of how I look at that.

Yes. No, just that description of you need to be a little bit 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?

And the bar is high because these folks need to deal with like little kids and 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. And that's where you're seeing that uptick in the seasonal stand.

Yes. No, that's on. And then 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. So super excited as we continue to evolve our technology footprint. And as I mentioned, we're partnering a lot. But there are some things that we do ourselves and internally, they're complex, and we're very focused. So instant replay, looks good on the screen, but there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes to make that effective. It's a real-time deliverable. You can't have an issue with that. You've got to 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. So building that out and making that effective and making sure that we have alternative paths and such, that whole development project was huge. We're working on things in the ballpark. Coming in here, like how do we do things like frictionless entry and have people just like 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. And 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. But the end game for that is a kind of like a be-all, end-all fan experience that's fully grounded in technology and allows us to do some new things in the sport, like we can resume the no-reentry rule and potentially that people leave the ballpark during the game and still come back in, which in a city like this is an amazing concept, right? And so as we're working that project, which is super fun, amazing project that we hope to see come to fruition next season. That's all being done on Asana and on this platform. And I couldn't really fathom bringing that team together in the way that we've brought it together, just given all the folks like inside the organization, outside the organization or our partners with outside counsel with all these like folks are very invested in the end product.

Just one more question, and then we'll turn to the audience.

Yes. One, I'm very excited about that, especially when you talked about the frictionless entry and like knowing what people's favorites are as the concession stand, because then I know my [indiscernible] are going to be there when I come to the stadium. So looking forward to that. As you look forward, maybe I'll just end with -- as you look forward to 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?

Yes. So going back to -- there's obviously improving the fan experience on the field here at the ballpark. But we also see that fans want that corresponding digital experience. And so we continue to like reinvest in what we're delivering from a personalization standpoint. So really understanding things like where those 2 merge. So the digital experience needs the physical experience. Like we have a group for that, the digital group, it is kind of cool. And so they're looking at those points of like reengagement. And so we're doing a lot of R&D and a lot of delivery and testing and piloting in those areas. So that, I think, is going to be really cool and people will continue to see that intersection grow and grow and grow. And then on field is another area that we're investing a lot of energy in and think you've seen kind of like a lot of the changes that Baseball's announced to make the game more manageable for the fan. So we, like I think others, want to make sure that the length of the game is reasonable and that there aren't unnecessary delays. And we want to make sure we keep the integrity of the game high, too. So you see things like PitchCom and you see things like we're looking at automatic balls and strikes and technologies like that, which are transformational and amazing. So those are being tested kind of out of the majors and the kind of the minor league system and where 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. But the kind of the commonality across all these projects is that we have like a really great technology team inside and outside of baseball and back to the team of this event. We're using really good foundational tooling to keep them 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. 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.

Andrew DeGasperi from Berenberg. Maybe, Neil, I thought it was interesting when you mentioned how you were a long-time user and you wanted to adopt the platform more broadly, basically, it took a few years to get people over to learn and get over the learning curve and to get to broader adoption. I was just wondering maybe, first of all, was this a top-down effort from your perspective? Or was it from the ground up for the teams sort of organically trying to work closer together? And then maybe for Anne, how did -- I guess, did those time line shrink? Are they -- does it take a few years for people to really get more comfortable using it?

Yes, I'll let Neil start.

Yes. So for me, my role started to shift a bit from the CISO work more to the CIO work and I took more and more responsibility for that part of the organization. And 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, we have tickets.com, we have MLB network. We have all these different businesses. And I thought the best way to go about this was to create something that people could relate to, and I already had it, in terms of my use of these tools, this platform. But I also didn't want to be prescriptive either. So that's why I took my time. I mean it could have been -- it would be easy to pull the lever and be like, hey, this is the new standard. This is all the health staff is going to support you with anything else you're off the reservation. But I really want to understand like how people were doing their work and like I don't want to make a mistake of like, hey, I happen to love this platform, but is it the right platform for what they need to do. So 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. And then we had like really good conversations, my team and I, with those stakeholders. And then we started to like go one-by-one against the reference platform and say like, all right, well, this meets your needs. And here's why we're all on the same platform, it will be better for you because you'll do more collaboration stuff that these guys create over here that's usable by you. You don't have to do that. And so that's how we pitched it. So I probably took a bit of a slower path because I also want to like still be popular at the end of the day and like not have people hating on me, but we got to a good place by going through that methodical approach.

And Andrew, I'll answer your question in terms of across other larger companies, what 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 hundreds, sometimes several thousand employees will join. And they're actually both learning about Asana, the platform, but seeing how their colleagues are running cross-team collaboration, use cases on Asana. And those have really accelerated adoption in a lot of our larger accounts. And then some of the product innovation that Alex and team are doing is even sort of like custom help within the enterprise tier. And so really as new employees come on to 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 template, sort of custom training, a custom path. And so those in combination product and people for our enterprise accounts, we are seeing can accelerate what sometimes is an organic in the past, in organic growth.

Next question. Let's go right here, and then we'll do Brent next.

Jackson Ader, 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? Because if you think about baseball like these thousands of discrete games, season, international things, discrete, discrete, discrete. And then how do you make sure that you also zoom out and think, well, in a couple of years, this is where we would like to be, whether it's from a technology stack or a collaboration stack. How does your use of Asana differ between those 2 things?

Yes. So I think, if anything, we want to see more consistency on the regular season games and such. And I think when you look at it through the lens of like Asana like, hey, like we can create greater efficiency here, because I see like this step is being partially done by 2 different groups. And 1 should be taking this and running with it, yada, yada, yada. When you get into like things, for example, this -- we just changed the playoff format to have more teams in the playoffs. And so there was 1 shot taken at like a wild card, right, in terms of like thinking after we don't think it worked out really well. And then the learnings from that will evolve like that template. And I think that will be relevant for the next cycle, and we'll just continue to improve and such and add to it. And we see ideas popping in there, like people will comment about like, hey, we could have done this. And that kind of is there, but then that moves into 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. And 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 setup? But the cool thing is, if you have a template for it, at least people who might not have done that before, or were 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 is a playbook for that, right? But 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 and then in the off season, not that there is 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 e-mail, know the service to those platforms. But you need some more structure to like put this. And as I said, it's been like a bit of a missing ingredient for us. And we've used other platforms like we've used like -- got stage here which is great when you're doing technology, but not really great when you're trying to get business people oriented around it.

Awesome. We have Brent and after Brent.

Good afternoon. Brent Bracelin with Piper Sandler. Neil, thank you for opening up your ballpark to us this afternoon. It's been great on 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 1 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. So 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. And they actually intersect nicely. I would say at Central baseball, there was definitely individual bias and department bias. And some of it was reasonable, right? So there's a product that's like in the space that's marketing, watches the marketing folks out there. And we're like, hey, we come to the table with the templates that we've already built for marketing folks and like marketing folks sold [ hook line and sinker ], like helps them, and they feel great. And there's a big credit card charge going through finance home 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've built this for you. That's amazing. Like your life is easier. You're doing this, you're doing that. And I went through it with them. And so then I took the time to be like, hey, would you mind like if I stole some of this and send it up on Asana. So I could like just see if we can replicate it to your satisfaction. Because the goal would be that you and I can collaborate on projects that are not those projects, but enterprise-wide products that need our help on. And so that was the value prop that I went to them with. And 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 -- and went to repeat department by department. And then in terms of sprawl, I can tell you how many products in this space that like some of you know of, if you go look at like G2 or Forrester, the folks that are really starting to track this. And I hope the Gartner people do it too because I think it's an important area. And -- but I had sprawl in this area. And the way I found out about it was crawling into our finance, people's business and saying, hey, I need like to concur data on like people that are like charging to the technology line on their cards. I got to know what's going on here. And so that gave me visibility until like what tooling was used. Where in the old days, it was a lot easier. We're all in physical offices. And everybody is on your network, you can see where they're going, right? And the new days, where we're trying to reduce friction. And not -- we had a balanced 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 talked to these people like, well, hey, like tap the brakes here like. And the beauty for me is like I cover security and technology. So you can show up on the security side and be like, hey, do you have like terms with these guys? And like -- like do you know like they have full rights to your data, like -- it's like 8 guys in the garage and like all that. And so we were able to have like a really healthy conversation to like reduce that sprawl. And all these deals, I haven't found some deals that were done that were signed off on, that were legitimate that went through the legal process and such. So -- but at the end of the day, employees want the tools that are going to make them the most effective in their job. But 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 going to grab the first thing that they hear about. The thing I like hear with their colleague over a Pepsi or here or there is using, a friend, former colleague and they're going to go with it. And so my mission has been to get ahead of that, do the leg work, do it thoughtfully and show like the benefits of like us all being on the same platform. And the last part to say is now getting that out to the clubs. So it's like the club is like, hey, here's what we spent all this time and energy at a central baseball figuring out. And this is what we use with you when we're doing all these joint projects. You know what Asana is, right? And they're like, yes, 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 working template, like whatever it's going to be, that most likely is immediately relevant to 29 other clubs, and that's the power of being on the same platform.