Two years ago, when Dustin Moskovitz announced he was leaving Facebook to start a new company with fellow-Facebooker Justin Rosenstein most people thought one of two things: He’d had a falling out with Mark Zuckerberg or he was just crazy. What could be more exciting than Facebook?
Moskovitz, of course, was Zuckerberg’s college roommate and co-founder of Facebook. If you get your Facebook history from Aaron Sorkin, he was the guy coding away in silence while half-naked girls did bong hits. If you get your Facebook history from, you know, things that actually happened, Moskovitz outlasted any other co-founder and easily played one of the most pivotal roles in the company’s early years. As such, Asana will get more attention and scrutiny and maybe even hype than most business software startups.
But here’s the thing: Asana deserves it. As it turns out neither of the suppositions for Moskovitz’s decision to leave were right. Moskovitz and Rosenstein just had a really big idea: To fix how people collaborate on projects and work in teams. Something that has so far been unfixable despite billions spent on developing an implementing collaboration and communication software. Something that may be so rooted in the idiosyncrasies of human behavior that it may not be fixable.
But Asana’s opening salvo is pretty impressive. There’s a full demo of the software in the video below, from Asana’s recent friends-and-family open house, so I won’t belabor the features here. (Screen shot is below.) Hear the pitch from the founders yourself. The company is still in private-beta, and it has a 1,200-company waiting list to get an invite. It’ll be opening up more over the course of this year. Asana has raised just over $10 million from several angels, Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
For me, Asana is the most exciting company to spin out of the early “Facebook mafia”– despite the runaway hype of Quora and Google’s jaw-dropping $120 million offer to buy Path. Then again, I’m sort of a business software nerd. I’ve been waiting for this “new generation” of enterprise software companies everyone keeps talking about and mostly feel like the open source and software as a service generations were a let down. These companies changed the way software was priced, delivered and implemented, disrupting old giants, and that’s no small feat. But product-wise, the reinvention of these categories wasn’t as dramatic as salesmen-oriented CEOs would have you believe. Yammer certainly got closer than most to delivering on that buzz phrase “the consumerization of enterprise,” but it was mostly by applying what was working for Twitter to a work-safe, secure app.
But Asana is strikingly different than other collaboration software. Part of that is timing. “I think that web technology has developed to a point where you can have a really great experience in the browser, better than you can have in a desktop app,” says Benchmark’s Matt Cohler. “The Asana team spent a fair amount of time investing in the underlying framework and technology to take advantage of what you couldn’t do a few years ago.” And part of it is because Asana is one of the first business software products re-thought from the ground up by twenty-somethings with no background in old-style enterprise sales and frankly, not too much experience using enterprise software in the workplace.
But here’s what jumped out at me watching it: You can tell Asana was co-created by one of the founders of Facebook. There’s that almost hubristic mission: To fix how people work together and make the global work place a better, more efficient, less frustrating place. “It was a precondition to leaving Facebook that I wasn’t going to start something that was just about chasing money,” Moskovitz says. There’s that Facebook-like obsession with efficiency, organizing inherently messy, social things with newsfeeds, updates and clean design. Pragmatism and data-driven decision making rule the company. Frugality is important but not everything. Asana’s engineers– the Gods of the company– get a $10,000 budget to pimp out their desks. Moskovitz shrugs and says he thinks it should be more, but couldn’t come up with anything they’d need that would cost more than $10,000.
And like Facebook’s early obsession with being a “utility,” Asana wants people to live in this app throughout their work day. Like Facebook did away with the clutter and needless page view clicks of the MySpace world, so too is Asana obsessed with speed. They know that if the software is the least bit cumbersome to use, employees won’t use it. Like Facebook, Asana sees its eventual customer base as, well, everyone. They hope people won’t just use Asana for work, but for things like wedding planning. The two wanted to build this product because managing teams at Facebook was such a chore. In a sense, Moskovitz says he’s still working for Facebook, because he’s still trying to solve the problem he was trying to solve there. It just so happens, he’s also trying to solve that problem for every company in the world.
But all that said, this is in no way another “Facebook for the enterprise.” There’s no list of friends, no events, no photosharing. Asana isn’t about making the workplace “fun” or making it social for the sake of social. Its not about organizing your social graph. It’s about helping people work together more efficiently– cutting out reliance on email, cutting down on the need for those endless meetings, easily assigning and tracking tasks in one instance that is always up to date, because unlike those lame corporate wikis, people are living in the app. Moskovitz and Rosenstein are clear: If they don’t accomplish that, they have failed.
Regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency got the message early.
A month before President Obama promised to review all government regulations to remove unnecessary burdens on small business, EPA lawyers asked a federal court for a 16-month delay in implementing a new rule that would limit toxic air pollution from industrial boilers. The rule had been more than a decade in the making, and was issued last June only after the agency had been forced to act by the courts.
The EPA’s initial proposal would have cost companies an estimated $9.5 billion to bring more than 2,000 heat and steam plants across the U.S. into compliance, according to the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), headed by regulation czar and Obama confidante Cass Sunstein.
However, the OIRA analysis also showed that reduced particulate matter, carbon monoxide, chlorine, mercury and dioxin emissions from the rule would prevent about 1,900 to 4,800 premature deaths, 1,300 cases of chronic bronchitis, 3,000 nonfatal heart attacks, 3,200 hospital and emergency room visits and 250,000 lost work days each year. The total health benefits, calculated at $17 billion to $41 billion a year, far outweighed the cost of the proposal, according to OIRA.
Environmentalists feared the EPA’s request was a harbinger of a new administration approach to regulation now that Republicans are in control of the House and the president is focused on creating jobs. “The EPA was running scared because the White House wouldn’t back them,” fumed Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch. “After the election things changed.”
The January 18 executive order and memorandum outlining the administration’s new regulatory policy seemed to confirm that analysis. Again in his State of the Union address Tuesday evening, the president pledged to weed out unnecessary and duplicative rules and promised to halt any rules that stood in the way of small business’ ability to create jobs.
“When we find rules that put an unnecessary burden on businesses, we will fix them,” Obama said. “But I will not hesitate to create or enforce common-sense safeguards to protect the American people.”
The administration has moved quickly to cozy up to business. In the past week, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration withdrew two rules that had angered business lobbyists, one a proposed rule that would reduce noise pollution in workplaces and the other that would make companies keep records on musculoskeletal injuries in the workplace."Hearing loss caused by excessive noise levels remains a serious occupational health problem in this country," said OSHA chief David Michaels, whose agency often bears the brunt of small business antagonism toward government regulation.
During the Bush administration, Michaels, then a professor at George Washington University, frequently criticized OSHA and other regulatory agencies for failing to follow science when setting rules for protecting workers and public health. “It is clear from the concerns raised about this proposal that addressing this problem requires much more public outreach and many more resources than we had originally anticipated,” he said as he withdrew the noise rule.
Regulation has always been at the heart of corporate and Republican concerns about the direction the federal government takes under Democratic control. Long before there was a “job-killing” health care bill, there was the job-killing EPA, the job-killing Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the job-killing Mine Safety and Health Administration and any number of agencies that stand accused of undermining economic growth when they enforce laws designed to protect America’s air and water, food and drugs, and working and housing conditions.
Industry lobbyists invariably play the job-killing theme in public when lobbying against proposed rules, even as they use scientific arguments, which they must, while making their case before regulatory agencies. But that gets industry only so far. Science and economic analysis usually support tighter rules as more becomes known about the health effects of hazards and the cost of pollution-control technology drops.
For instance, the EPA’s clean air scientific advisory committee, a panel of outside experts that evaluates scientific evidence presented by stakeholders, had endorsed the tougher standards contained in the EPA’s original rule on industrial boilers.
The Council of Industrial Boiler Owners fought back. It commissioned a report that claimed the EPA’s June rule would put 338,000 jobs at risk and cost twice as much as the EPA/OMB estimate. “There are so many things that have to be changed (in the rule) to make it economically viable. They need to provide some flexibility,” said Robert D. Bessette, president of the Council, whose membership includes most of the nation’s largest chemical and paper products manufacturers. Their industrial boilers are among the largest stationary sources of air pollution outside the electricity generating and oil refining industries.
Earlier this month, the District of Columbia federal court turned down the EPA’s request for a delay and gave the agency until mid-February to come up with a final rule. “We are working to complete the final rules now,” a spokeswoman said.
“Congress will be closely monitoring the final rules when they are released next month and considering what steps can be taken to protect jobs and prevent reckless regulation,” said Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI). “The EPA will come up with a rule that I’m sure will make no one happy,” predicted Bessette. “Either the enviros or us will petition for a reconsideration.”
The final industrial boiler rule doesn’t just have economic significance, it could signal the future direction of Obama administration policy on major regulatory issues. A number of major decisions coming down the pike will either please or enrage some of most powerful lobbying organizations in Washington, whether on the industry or environmental side. They include administration plans for regulating greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide; coal-burning electricity generating plants whose emissions cross state lines, the so-called clean air transport rule; and the next round of automobile fuel standards, which will go into effect in 2016.
Those major decisions, not skirmishes over minor or duplicative rules, will determine how far the administration is willing to go to please business. “We’re hoping that the agencies and Cass Sunstein will be doing a lot more cost-benefit analysis and offer more regulatory flexibility,” said Susan Eckerly, senior vice president for federal policy at the National Federation of Independent Businesses, a small- business lobbying group. “Those big EPA decisions might not impact small businesses right away, but they will affect our energy costs.”
Environmentalists and other public interest groups are getting ready to push back. “We want 60 miles per gallon by 2025 and a 6 percent decrease in emissions,” said Ann Mesnikoff, director of the green transportation campaign at the Sierra Club. “California shows the technologies are there to get there very cost effectively.”
With unemployment stuck at 9.4 percent, environmentalists recognize the general public is concerned about getting the economy humming again, so they are touting the job-generating potential of green technologies. Much of the intellectual muscle for their new approach is coming out of California, which has taken the lead on regulating greenhouse gases.
Charles Cicchetti of the Pacific Economics Group, a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California and a Republican, recently issued a report that said the coal plant and industrial boiler rules would create one million jobs by generating $150 billion in new capital investment in the nation’s aging energy infrastructure.
“These are real jobs that can be generated right now,” he said. “The technology exists; the capacity to produce it is sitting idle; and the electricity industry can self-finance anything… This is a far more effective way of creating jobs than the stimulus bill since the feds won’t have to borrow money and go further into debt.”
This post originally appeared at The Fiscal Times.
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Two years ago, when Dustin Moskovitz announced he was leaving Facebook to start a new company with fellow-Facebooker Justin Rosenstein most people thought one of two things: He’d had a falling out with Mark Zuckerberg or he was just crazy. What could be more exciting than Facebook?
Moskovitz, of course, was Zuckerberg’s college roommate and co-founder of Facebook. If you get your Facebook history from Aaron Sorkin, he was the guy coding away in silence while half-naked girls did bong hits. If you get your Facebook history from, you know, things that actually happened, Moskovitz outlasted any other co-founder and easily played one of the most pivotal roles in the company’s early years. As such, Asana will get more attention and scrutiny and maybe even hype than most business software startups.
But here’s the thing: Asana deserves it. As it turns out neither of the suppositions for Moskovitz’s decision to leave were right. Moskovitz and Rosenstein just had a really big idea: To fix how people collaborate on projects and work in teams. Something that has so far been unfixable despite billions spent on developing an implementing collaboration and communication software. Something that may be so rooted in the idiosyncrasies of human behavior that it may not be fixable.
But Asana’s opening salvo is pretty impressive. There’s a full demo of the software in the video below, from Asana’s recent friends-and-family open house, so I won’t belabor the features here. (Screen shot is below.) Hear the pitch from the founders yourself. The company is still in private-beta, and it has a 1,200-company waiting list to get an invite. It’ll be opening up more over the course of this year. Asana has raised just over $10 million from several angels, Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
For me, Asana is the most exciting company to spin out of the early “Facebook mafia”– despite the runaway hype of Quora and Google’s jaw-dropping $120 million offer to buy Path. Then again, I’m sort of a business software nerd. I’ve been waiting for this “new generation” of enterprise software companies everyone keeps talking about and mostly feel like the open source and software as a service generations were a let down. These companies changed the way software was priced, delivered and implemented, disrupting old giants, and that’s no small feat. But product-wise, the reinvention of these categories wasn’t as dramatic as salesmen-oriented CEOs would have you believe. Yammer certainly got closer than most to delivering on that buzz phrase “the consumerization of enterprise,” but it was mostly by applying what was working for Twitter to a work-safe, secure app.
But Asana is strikingly different than other collaboration software. Part of that is timing. “I think that web technology has developed to a point where you can have a really great experience in the browser, better than you can have in a desktop app,” says Benchmark’s Matt Cohler. “The Asana team spent a fair amount of time investing in the underlying framework and technology to take advantage of what you couldn’t do a few years ago.” And part of it is because Asana is one of the first business software products re-thought from the ground up by twenty-somethings with no background in old-style enterprise sales and frankly, not too much experience using enterprise software in the workplace.
But here’s what jumped out at me watching it: You can tell Asana was co-created by one of the founders of Facebook. There’s that almost hubristic mission: To fix how people work together and make the global work place a better, more efficient, less frustrating place. “It was a precondition to leaving Facebook that I wasn’t going to start something that was just about chasing money,” Moskovitz says. There’s that Facebook-like obsession with efficiency, organizing inherently messy, social things with newsfeeds, updates and clean design. Pragmatism and data-driven decision making rule the company. Frugality is important but not everything. Asana’s engineers– the Gods of the company– get a $10,000 budget to pimp out their desks. Moskovitz shrugs and says he thinks it should be more, but couldn’t come up with anything they’d need that would cost more than $10,000.
And like Facebook’s early obsession with being a “utility,” Asana wants people to live in this app throughout their work day. Like Facebook did away with the clutter and needless page view clicks of the MySpace world, so too is Asana obsessed with speed. They know that if the software is the least bit cumbersome to use, employees won’t use it. Like Facebook, Asana sees its eventual customer base as, well, everyone. They hope people won’t just use Asana for work, but for things like wedding planning. The two wanted to build this product because managing teams at Facebook was such a chore. In a sense, Moskovitz says he’s still working for Facebook, because he’s still trying to solve the problem he was trying to solve there. It just so happens, he’s also trying to solve that problem for every company in the world.
But all that said, this is in no way another “Facebook for the enterprise.” There’s no list of friends, no events, no photosharing. Asana isn’t about making the workplace “fun” or making it social for the sake of social. Its not about organizing your social graph. It’s about helping people work together more efficiently– cutting out reliance on email, cutting down on the need for those endless meetings, easily assigning and tracking tasks in one instance that is always up to date, because unlike those lame corporate wikis, people are living in the app. Moskovitz and Rosenstein are clear: If they don’t accomplish that, they have failed.
Regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency got the message early.
A month before President Obama promised to review all government regulations to remove unnecessary burdens on small business, EPA lawyers asked a federal court for a 16-month delay in implementing a new rule that would limit toxic air pollution from industrial boilers. The rule had been more than a decade in the making, and was issued last June only after the agency had been forced to act by the courts.
The EPA’s initial proposal would have cost companies an estimated $9.5 billion to bring more than 2,000 heat and steam plants across the U.S. into compliance, according to the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), headed by regulation czar and Obama confidante Cass Sunstein.
However, the OIRA analysis also showed that reduced particulate matter, carbon monoxide, chlorine, mercury and dioxin emissions from the rule would prevent about 1,900 to 4,800 premature deaths, 1,300 cases of chronic bronchitis, 3,000 nonfatal heart attacks, 3,200 hospital and emergency room visits and 250,000 lost work days each year. The total health benefits, calculated at $17 billion to $41 billion a year, far outweighed the cost of the proposal, according to OIRA.
Environmentalists feared the EPA’s request was a harbinger of a new administration approach to regulation now that Republicans are in control of the House and the president is focused on creating jobs. “The EPA was running scared because the White House wouldn’t back them,” fumed Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch. “After the election things changed.”
The January 18 executive order and memorandum outlining the administration’s new regulatory policy seemed to confirm that analysis. Again in his State of the Union address Tuesday evening, the president pledged to weed out unnecessary and duplicative rules and promised to halt any rules that stood in the way of small business’ ability to create jobs.
“When we find rules that put an unnecessary burden on businesses, we will fix them,” Obama said. “But I will not hesitate to create or enforce common-sense safeguards to protect the American people.”
The administration has moved quickly to cozy up to business. In the past week, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration withdrew two rules that had angered business lobbyists, one a proposed rule that would reduce noise pollution in workplaces and the other that would make companies keep records on musculoskeletal injuries in the workplace."Hearing loss caused by excessive noise levels remains a serious occupational health problem in this country," said OSHA chief David Michaels, whose agency often bears the brunt of small business antagonism toward government regulation.
During the Bush administration, Michaels, then a professor at George Washington University, frequently criticized OSHA and other regulatory agencies for failing to follow science when setting rules for protecting workers and public health. “It is clear from the concerns raised about this proposal that addressing this problem requires much more public outreach and many more resources than we had originally anticipated,” he said as he withdrew the noise rule.
Regulation has always been at the heart of corporate and Republican concerns about the direction the federal government takes under Democratic control. Long before there was a “job-killing” health care bill, there was the job-killing EPA, the job-killing Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the job-killing Mine Safety and Health Administration and any number of agencies that stand accused of undermining economic growth when they enforce laws designed to protect America’s air and water, food and drugs, and working and housing conditions.
Industry lobbyists invariably play the job-killing theme in public when lobbying against proposed rules, even as they use scientific arguments, which they must, while making their case before regulatory agencies. But that gets industry only so far. Science and economic analysis usually support tighter rules as more becomes known about the health effects of hazards and the cost of pollution-control technology drops.
For instance, the EPA’s clean air scientific advisory committee, a panel of outside experts that evaluates scientific evidence presented by stakeholders, had endorsed the tougher standards contained in the EPA’s original rule on industrial boilers.
The Council of Industrial Boiler Owners fought back. It commissioned a report that claimed the EPA’s June rule would put 338,000 jobs at risk and cost twice as much as the EPA/OMB estimate. “There are so many things that have to be changed (in the rule) to make it economically viable. They need to provide some flexibility,” said Robert D. Bessette, president of the Council, whose membership includes most of the nation’s largest chemical and paper products manufacturers. Their industrial boilers are among the largest stationary sources of air pollution outside the electricity generating and oil refining industries.
Earlier this month, the District of Columbia federal court turned down the EPA’s request for a delay and gave the agency until mid-February to come up with a final rule. “We are working to complete the final rules now,” a spokeswoman said.
“Congress will be closely monitoring the final rules when they are released next month and considering what steps can be taken to protect jobs and prevent reckless regulation,” said Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI). “The EPA will come up with a rule that I’m sure will make no one happy,” predicted Bessette. “Either the enviros or us will petition for a reconsideration.”
The final industrial boiler rule doesn’t just have economic significance, it could signal the future direction of Obama administration policy on major regulatory issues. A number of major decisions coming down the pike will either please or enrage some of most powerful lobbying organizations in Washington, whether on the industry or environmental side. They include administration plans for regulating greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide; coal-burning electricity generating plants whose emissions cross state lines, the so-called clean air transport rule; and the next round of automobile fuel standards, which will go into effect in 2016.
Those major decisions, not skirmishes over minor or duplicative rules, will determine how far the administration is willing to go to please business. “We’re hoping that the agencies and Cass Sunstein will be doing a lot more cost-benefit analysis and offer more regulatory flexibility,” said Susan Eckerly, senior vice president for federal policy at the National Federation of Independent Businesses, a small- business lobbying group. “Those big EPA decisions might not impact small businesses right away, but they will affect our energy costs.”
Environmentalists and other public interest groups are getting ready to push back. “We want 60 miles per gallon by 2025 and a 6 percent decrease in emissions,” said Ann Mesnikoff, director of the green transportation campaign at the Sierra Club. “California shows the technologies are there to get there very cost effectively.”
With unemployment stuck at 9.4 percent, environmentalists recognize the general public is concerned about getting the economy humming again, so they are touting the job-generating potential of green technologies. Much of the intellectual muscle for their new approach is coming out of California, which has taken the lead on regulating greenhouse gases.
Charles Cicchetti of the Pacific Economics Group, a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California and a Republican, recently issued a report that said the coal plant and industrial boiler rules would create one million jobs by generating $150 billion in new capital investment in the nation’s aging energy infrastructure.
“These are real jobs that can be generated right now,” he said. “The technology exists; the capacity to produce it is sitting idle; and the electricity industry can self-finance anything… This is a far more effective way of creating jobs than the stimulus bill since the feds won’t have to borrow money and go further into debt.”
This post originally appeared at The Fiscal Times.
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Fox <b>News</b> Suggests Bulletstorm Is “Worst Video Game In The World”
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Two years ago, when Dustin Moskovitz announced he was leaving Facebook to start a new company with fellow-Facebooker Justin Rosenstein most people thought one of two things: He’d had a falling out with Mark Zuckerberg or he was just crazy. What could be more exciting than Facebook?
Moskovitz, of course, was Zuckerberg’s college roommate and co-founder of Facebook. If you get your Facebook history from Aaron Sorkin, he was the guy coding away in silence while half-naked girls did bong hits. If you get your Facebook history from, you know, things that actually happened, Moskovitz outlasted any other co-founder and easily played one of the most pivotal roles in the company’s early years. As such, Asana will get more attention and scrutiny and maybe even hype than most business software startups.
But here’s the thing: Asana deserves it. As it turns out neither of the suppositions for Moskovitz’s decision to leave were right. Moskovitz and Rosenstein just had a really big idea: To fix how people collaborate on projects and work in teams. Something that has so far been unfixable despite billions spent on developing an implementing collaboration and communication software. Something that may be so rooted in the idiosyncrasies of human behavior that it may not be fixable.
But Asana’s opening salvo is pretty impressive. There’s a full demo of the software in the video below, from Asana’s recent friends-and-family open house, so I won’t belabor the features here. (Screen shot is below.) Hear the pitch from the founders yourself. The company is still in private-beta, and it has a 1,200-company waiting list to get an invite. It’ll be opening up more over the course of this year. Asana has raised just over $10 million from several angels, Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
For me, Asana is the most exciting company to spin out of the early “Facebook mafia”– despite the runaway hype of Quora and Google’s jaw-dropping $120 million offer to buy Path. Then again, I’m sort of a business software nerd. I’ve been waiting for this “new generation” of enterprise software companies everyone keeps talking about and mostly feel like the open source and software as a service generations were a let down. These companies changed the way software was priced, delivered and implemented, disrupting old giants, and that’s no small feat. But product-wise, the reinvention of these categories wasn’t as dramatic as salesmen-oriented CEOs would have you believe. Yammer certainly got closer than most to delivering on that buzz phrase “the consumerization of enterprise,” but it was mostly by applying what was working for Twitter to a work-safe, secure app.
But Asana is strikingly different than other collaboration software. Part of that is timing. “I think that web technology has developed to a point where you can have a really great experience in the browser, better than you can have in a desktop app,” says Benchmark’s Matt Cohler. “The Asana team spent a fair amount of time investing in the underlying framework and technology to take advantage of what you couldn’t do a few years ago.” And part of it is because Asana is one of the first business software products re-thought from the ground up by twenty-somethings with no background in old-style enterprise sales and frankly, not too much experience using enterprise software in the workplace.
But here’s what jumped out at me watching it: You can tell Asana was co-created by one of the founders of Facebook. There’s that almost hubristic mission: To fix how people work together and make the global work place a better, more efficient, less frustrating place. “It was a precondition to leaving Facebook that I wasn’t going to start something that was just about chasing money,” Moskovitz says. There’s that Facebook-like obsession with efficiency, organizing inherently messy, social things with newsfeeds, updates and clean design. Pragmatism and data-driven decision making rule the company. Frugality is important but not everything. Asana’s engineers– the Gods of the company– get a $10,000 budget to pimp out their desks. Moskovitz shrugs and says he thinks it should be more, but couldn’t come up with anything they’d need that would cost more than $10,000.
And like Facebook’s early obsession with being a “utility,” Asana wants people to live in this app throughout their work day. Like Facebook did away with the clutter and needless page view clicks of the MySpace world, so too is Asana obsessed with speed. They know that if the software is the least bit cumbersome to use, employees won’t use it. Like Facebook, Asana sees its eventual customer base as, well, everyone. They hope people won’t just use Asana for work, but for things like wedding planning. The two wanted to build this product because managing teams at Facebook was such a chore. In a sense, Moskovitz says he’s still working for Facebook, because he’s still trying to solve the problem he was trying to solve there. It just so happens, he’s also trying to solve that problem for every company in the world.
But all that said, this is in no way another “Facebook for the enterprise.” There’s no list of friends, no events, no photosharing. Asana isn’t about making the workplace “fun” or making it social for the sake of social. Its not about organizing your social graph. It’s about helping people work together more efficiently– cutting out reliance on email, cutting down on the need for those endless meetings, easily assigning and tracking tasks in one instance that is always up to date, because unlike those lame corporate wikis, people are living in the app. Moskovitz and Rosenstein are clear: If they don’t accomplish that, they have failed.
Regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency got the message early.
A month before President Obama promised to review all government regulations to remove unnecessary burdens on small business, EPA lawyers asked a federal court for a 16-month delay in implementing a new rule that would limit toxic air pollution from industrial boilers. The rule had been more than a decade in the making, and was issued last June only after the agency had been forced to act by the courts.
The EPA’s initial proposal would have cost companies an estimated $9.5 billion to bring more than 2,000 heat and steam plants across the U.S. into compliance, according to the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), headed by regulation czar and Obama confidante Cass Sunstein.
However, the OIRA analysis also showed that reduced particulate matter, carbon monoxide, chlorine, mercury and dioxin emissions from the rule would prevent about 1,900 to 4,800 premature deaths, 1,300 cases of chronic bronchitis, 3,000 nonfatal heart attacks, 3,200 hospital and emergency room visits and 250,000 lost work days each year. The total health benefits, calculated at $17 billion to $41 billion a year, far outweighed the cost of the proposal, according to OIRA.
Environmentalists feared the EPA’s request was a harbinger of a new administration approach to regulation now that Republicans are in control of the House and the president is focused on creating jobs. “The EPA was running scared because the White House wouldn’t back them,” fumed Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch. “After the election things changed.”
The January 18 executive order and memorandum outlining the administration’s new regulatory policy seemed to confirm that analysis. Again in his State of the Union address Tuesday evening, the president pledged to weed out unnecessary and duplicative rules and promised to halt any rules that stood in the way of small business’ ability to create jobs.
“When we find rules that put an unnecessary burden on businesses, we will fix them,” Obama said. “But I will not hesitate to create or enforce common-sense safeguards to protect the American people.”
The administration has moved quickly to cozy up to business. In the past week, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration withdrew two rules that had angered business lobbyists, one a proposed rule that would reduce noise pollution in workplaces and the other that would make companies keep records on musculoskeletal injuries in the workplace."Hearing loss caused by excessive noise levels remains a serious occupational health problem in this country," said OSHA chief David Michaels, whose agency often bears the brunt of small business antagonism toward government regulation.
During the Bush administration, Michaels, then a professor at George Washington University, frequently criticized OSHA and other regulatory agencies for failing to follow science when setting rules for protecting workers and public health. “It is clear from the concerns raised about this proposal that addressing this problem requires much more public outreach and many more resources than we had originally anticipated,” he said as he withdrew the noise rule.
Regulation has always been at the heart of corporate and Republican concerns about the direction the federal government takes under Democratic control. Long before there was a “job-killing” health care bill, there was the job-killing EPA, the job-killing Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the job-killing Mine Safety and Health Administration and any number of agencies that stand accused of undermining economic growth when they enforce laws designed to protect America’s air and water, food and drugs, and working and housing conditions.
Industry lobbyists invariably play the job-killing theme in public when lobbying against proposed rules, even as they use scientific arguments, which they must, while making their case before regulatory agencies. But that gets industry only so far. Science and economic analysis usually support tighter rules as more becomes known about the health effects of hazards and the cost of pollution-control technology drops.
For instance, the EPA’s clean air scientific advisory committee, a panel of outside experts that evaluates scientific evidence presented by stakeholders, had endorsed the tougher standards contained in the EPA’s original rule on industrial boilers.
The Council of Industrial Boiler Owners fought back. It commissioned a report that claimed the EPA’s June rule would put 338,000 jobs at risk and cost twice as much as the EPA/OMB estimate. “There are so many things that have to be changed (in the rule) to make it economically viable. They need to provide some flexibility,” said Robert D. Bessette, president of the Council, whose membership includes most of the nation’s largest chemical and paper products manufacturers. Their industrial boilers are among the largest stationary sources of air pollution outside the electricity generating and oil refining industries.
Earlier this month, the District of Columbia federal court turned down the EPA’s request for a delay and gave the agency until mid-February to come up with a final rule. “We are working to complete the final rules now,” a spokeswoman said.
“Congress will be closely monitoring the final rules when they are released next month and considering what steps can be taken to protect jobs and prevent reckless regulation,” said Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI). “The EPA will come up with a rule that I’m sure will make no one happy,” predicted Bessette. “Either the enviros or us will petition for a reconsideration.”
The final industrial boiler rule doesn’t just have economic significance, it could signal the future direction of Obama administration policy on major regulatory issues. A number of major decisions coming down the pike will either please or enrage some of most powerful lobbying organizations in Washington, whether on the industry or environmental side. They include administration plans for regulating greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide; coal-burning electricity generating plants whose emissions cross state lines, the so-called clean air transport rule; and the next round of automobile fuel standards, which will go into effect in 2016.
Those major decisions, not skirmishes over minor or duplicative rules, will determine how far the administration is willing to go to please business. “We’re hoping that the agencies and Cass Sunstein will be doing a lot more cost-benefit analysis and offer more regulatory flexibility,” said Susan Eckerly, senior vice president for federal policy at the National Federation of Independent Businesses, a small- business lobbying group. “Those big EPA decisions might not impact small businesses right away, but they will affect our energy costs.”
Environmentalists and other public interest groups are getting ready to push back. “We want 60 miles per gallon by 2025 and a 6 percent decrease in emissions,” said Ann Mesnikoff, director of the green transportation campaign at the Sierra Club. “California shows the technologies are there to get there very cost effectively.”
With unemployment stuck at 9.4 percent, environmentalists recognize the general public is concerned about getting the economy humming again, so they are touting the job-generating potential of green technologies. Much of the intellectual muscle for their new approach is coming out of California, which has taken the lead on regulating greenhouse gases.
Charles Cicchetti of the Pacific Economics Group, a professor emeritus at the University of Southern California and a Republican, recently issued a report that said the coal plant and industrial boiler rules would create one million jobs by generating $150 billion in new capital investment in the nation’s aging energy infrastructure.
“These are real jobs that can be generated right now,” he said. “The technology exists; the capacity to produce it is sitting idle; and the electricity industry can self-finance anything… This is a far more effective way of creating jobs than the stimulus bill since the feds won’t have to borrow money and go further into debt.”
This post originally appeared at The Fiscal Times.
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