Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder and CEO of Asana.
Asanas
A typical textbook for a successful tech founder looks something like this.
Arrange a completely owned company. Sell significant portions to enterprise capitalists as business grows. Eventually turn into a minority owner. List the company on the stock exchange. Sell more stocks over time.
Dustin Moskovitz of Asana took this rulebook and completely rewrote the ending.
Moskovitz, who is still known by many as the co-founder of Facebook, founded Asana in 2008 to make work more collaborative through software. By the time the company went public in 2020, its ownership was around 36%.
Then he went shopping. Following the purchase of 480,000 Asana shares in June, Moskovitz’s ownership increased to 111.4 million shares, representing greater than 51% of the shares outstanding. Asanas in March revealed that Moskovitz had a trading plan to purchase as much as 30 million more of its Class A shares this 12 months, driving the refill nearly 19% the next day.
“It has been a crazy two years in the market and there have been some interesting buying opportunities,” Moskovitz told CNBC.
Even after rising 66% this 12 months, Asana’s stock is greater than 80% below its record high at the end of 2021.
For Moskovitz, whose fortune is price greater than $12 billion – mostly from his early holdings in Facebook, now Meta – becoming a majority owner of Asana doesn’t mean control. Somewhat, he considers it the best strategy to invest to support his philanthropy.
In 2010, Moskovitz signed the so-called Giving a Promise, the promise of a few of the world’s richest people to donate most of their wealth to charity. Moskovitz and his wife, former journalist Cari Tuna, distribute their funds through Good Ventures, based on recommendations from Open Philanthropy.
In relation to spending that cash, Moskovitz is no more frightened than the way forward for AI.
Good projects donated $30 million to launch OpenAI inside three years in 2017, long before generative AI or ChatGPT entered the public lexicon. OpenAI, which is now price about $30 billion, was founded as a non-profit organization, and Open Philanthropy said at the time that it desired to “help play a job in OpenAI’s approach to security and governance.”
Considered one of the 10 thematic areas which are on the Open Philanthropy list website is “potential risks related to advanced artificial intelligence.” The organization beneficial a grant of $5 million to the National Science Foundation to support research on methods to ensure the security of artificial intelligence systems and $5.56 million to the University of California at Berkeley to “create a tutorial center coping with the security of artificial intelligence.” In total, Open Philanthropy claims to have provided greater than $300 million in the area of focus through greater than 170 grants.
“I definitely think there’s a giant risk – something I feel about quite a lot of the time,” said Moskovitz.
Moskovitz co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Eduardo Saverin at Harvard University in 2004. He became a billionaire after Facebook in 2012. initial public offeringowning more shares than any person apart from Zuckerberg.
In accordance with FactSet, even after buying up additional Asana shares in 2022 and 2023, his ownership is about $2.6 billion, which is lower than the $4.6 billion Facebook shares he owns.
“I’m just in a novel situation where I got here to the table with an existing source of wealth,” said Moskovitz. “So even things that appear like giant purchases are still a comparatively normal a part of my net price in comparison with other founders.”
Moskovitz agreed not to purchase all of Asana’s outstanding shares, and even to amass ownership of 90% of the common stock. It’ll also maintain the independence of most of its directors under the rules of the Latest York Stock Exchange registration.
Moskovitz declined to speak about whether he was buying shares to stop activists from getting into and attempting to force change. Activists have been busy with the cloud software space, particularly in Sales forcewhich responded to the pressure by expanding its buyout program and increasing profits.
Samuel Altman, CEO of OpenAI, testifies before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and Law in Washington, D.C., May 16, 2023.
Win McName | Getty Images
Recently, Moskovitz’s worlds collided.
OpenAI has jumped from a distinct segment startup to the hottest thing in tech after the release of ChatGPT in November. Previously, Moskovitz had toyed with the company’s DALL-E technology for converting text to photographs. He said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman arrange a “lab account” for him last April.
After running ChatGPT, Moskovitz I enjoyed myself asking a chatbot to provide you with goals to assist solve California’s housing problem.
Meanwhile, Asana has joined a parade of corporations announcing improvements to their products with generative AI capabilities that may take human input and present text, images, or audio in response. Earlier this month, Asana he said gave some customers access to several generative AI features based on OpenAI models.
“Chat is only one paradigm for using these technologies,” Moskovitz told CNBC. “Once you integrate them into workflows reminiscent of work management, optimizing automation workflows, or helping with decision making – you may literally ask inquiries to the system and it offers you a summary and advice.”
More complex tasks, reminiscent of adding structure to designs, are where it “really has quite a lot of potential,” Moskovitz said. Somewhat than simply asking for specific answers, he said the power is in technology to take “a bunch of knowledge and form of a vague goal” after which “provide you with something roughly in the right direction.”
Asana could spend $5 million or more on OpenAI technology next 12 months, Moskovitz said, adding that he was “very impressed with GPT-3,” the company’s prior major language model, “and was much more impressed with GPT-4,” which was announced in March.
Moskovitz took six minutes from Asana’s 51-minute call in early June to advertise the company’s approach to AI. He used the acronym 41 times, in comparison with 32 AI references by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talking about her company’s earnings in April. Microsoft is a serious investor in OpenAI.
Asana is “just personally deeply connected to the AI labs which are at the forefront,” said Moskovitz.
The links are literally quite deep. Altman invested in Asana in 2016, during an Asana earnings call, Moskovitz reminded analysts that his company and OpenAI “share a board member in common with Adam D’Angelo,” Facebook’s former head of tech who later founded web start-up Q-and-A Quora.
Considered one of OpenAI’s first board members was Holden Karnofsky, co-CEO of Open Philanthropy. Kanofsky later co-founded AI startup Anthropic together with his wife Daniela Amodei. Moskovitz invested in Anthropic in 2021, the same 12 months he and Altman invested in a fusion launch Helion.
Like Altman, Moskovitz is also very optimistic about AI and worries about the damage it may possibly cause.
Moskovitz was one in all the many entrepreneurs who signed the so-called statement in May, saying that “reducing the risk of extinction by artificial intelligence must be a worldwide priority alongside other societal threats reminiscent of pandemics and nuclear war.” The news comes from the non-profit Center for AI Safety.
But Moskovitz was not one in all the signatories of the nonprofit Way forward for Life Institute open letter in March, artificial intelligence labs were urged to halt training of the most advanced AI models for six months or more. At the top of this list of signers was Tesla CEO Elon Musk, an early supporter of OpenAI, warned that we must always be very concerned about advanced AI, calling it “a greater threat to society than cars, planes or medicine.”
Moskovitz said Musk’s concerns will not be entirely exaggerated and that the two wish to “bring this technology to the world in a protected way.”
“Elon approaches this from multiple angles,” he said. “I feel we type of share the view on potential existential risk issues and perhaps we do not share the view on AI censorship, awakening and stuff like that.”
Musk in December tweeted that “the danger of coaching an AI to get up – in other words, a lie – is mortal.”
Moskovitz helped create 12 point list possible policy changes that US lawmakers should consider.
“I’m most inquisitive about ensuring that the state-of-the-art later generations like GPT-5, GPT-6 are safety assessed before being released into the world,” he said. “I feel it can require regulation to coordinate all the players.”
He even made up the word in a tweet last month to precise his abstruse views.
“Exciting-nervous for the AI!” he wrote.
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