- Former Facebook employees are out founding and leading some of the hottest enterprise software and services startups around.
- From Asana to Woven, we spoke to several of the former Facebook employees about their current companies — and what they learned from their time at the social networking giant.
Facebook's legions of employees have built one of the most popular and impactful web services in the world — but their influence doesn't end there.
Over its fifteen-year existence, the Menlo Park, California-based technology giant has seen tens of thousands of workers come through its doors. And when they leave, some end up building on the technologies that underpin the modern web and support some of the world's biggest companies.
From multi-billion-dollar collaboration software companies to popular analytics services and buzzy young tools for soliciting user feedback, some of the hottest startups in the enterprise space are led by former Facebook employees, who have brought them experiences working on the world's most popular app to bear on creating the tools that power the rest of the technology ecosystem behind the scenes.
Business Insider spoke to people throughout the enterprise industry to track down some of the key Facebook alumni who made the jump into entrepreneurship. So, in no particular order, here are 19 former Facebookers now leading buzzy enterprise startups:
Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz cofounded red-hot work management platform Asana with Justin Rosenstein.
For his first act, Dustin Moskovitz cofounded Facebook. Now, he's the CEO and co-founder of Asana, a hot work management platform.
He started Asana with former Facebook engineering manager Justin Rosenstein in 2008, shortly after they left Facebook. Now, the company is valued at $1.5 billion, and in February Asana announced it crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, with over 60,000 paying organizations.
In the coming year, Moskovitz says that Asana plans to focus on growing its international team in a bid to attract more customers outside the United States. To that end, last year it translated its service into Spanish, German, Portuguese, French and Japanese.
"That made it accessible to a huge chunk of the world," Moskovitz told Business Insider.
Moskovitz says that Asnaa seen especially fast growth in Europe, and it recently opened an office in Sydney for a larger presence in Australia and Asia.
Now, it's working on building products that cater to specific industries. Last November, it created a version of Asana for large enterprises. And in February, it launched a tool specifically for marketing teams.
"Marketing and creative teams have highly collaborative work by nature. When they're doing campaigns or working on an editorial roadmap, there's people involved in those processes," Moskovitz said. "It's really important for them that they have Asana to give them clarity about the status of those products."
Asana now has over 450 employees and has raised $213.51 million. With Asana's software, Moskovitz hopes it will help employees and customers become more mindful.
"Mindfulness allows us to be very introspective, reflective and be self-aware of what's going well and what isn't," Moskovitz said. "It's something we do every day, every quarter, every month and every year. Mindfulness is something we bring into every conversation and every meeting to make sure they are as productive as possible."
Charity Majors and Christine Yen lead monitoring startup Honeycomb, with a focus on diversity.
Honeycomb co-founder and CEO Charity Majors first came to Facebook through an acquisition.
Originally, she and co-founder Christine Yen worked for a mobile backend startup called Parse. When Facebook acquired Parse in 2013, Majors, who spent most of her career working for startups, had mixed feelings about coming to such a large company.
"I was more of a startup person, but I loved my startup and I loved my team," Majors told Business Insider. "...I learned a lot of Facebook, but there were things I never wanted to learn, like management and bureaucracy. It was not viable for me. You don't get to do anything interesting. You're a small cog. Your work often gets thrown away or it never gets shipped."
At Facebook, Majors often used a tool called Scuba, which helps with analyzing sets of data.
"The time it took to answer these questions, it dropped like rocks," Majors said. "It went from hours if not days to seconds. It was not an engineering problem. It was a platform problem."
After leaving Facebook, she decided to start a company in 2016 that helps users monitor and understand the inner workings of their systems – an extension of what she appreciated about Scuba. Now, Honeycomb has raised a total of $15.5 million.
Read more: How this startup CEO became a secret weapon for star Valley engineers
Majors makes it a point to hire a diverse team with a variety of work backgrounds, rather than just engineers from companies like Facebook and Google. For example, they also hired bootcamp graduates or other people who may have been overlooked at other companies.
"We very philosophically wanted to believe that the best teams are not always made of the best engineers but people who could learn and become a team together and process their mistakes in a way that's not personal or damaging to people," Majors said. "I'm not going to say the bar was lower, but it was a different bar."
To this day, Majors says it's the best team she's ever been on.
"[Honeycomb employees] support each other and they don't work crazy hours," Majors said. "We have a distributed work culture. They go home at night. They take trips. They're not burning themselves out."
Matin Movassate quit Facebook to create analytics biz Heap — but didn't tell his parents.
When Matin Movassate quit Facebook in 2012 to start his own company, he didn't tell his parents for fear they'd try and talk him out of it.
"When I made the jump, I didn't tell my parents, because I knew if I tried to talk with them they would probably argue with me, 'hey, stay at the job a little longer, see it through the IPO,'" he recalled. "It's a very logical case, but I knew in my gut I wouldn't be happier there."
Movassate is now cofounder and CEO of Heap, an analytics startup. As a product manager at Facebook, he had found it frustrating to manage the social network's user analytics, helping inspire him to find a better way.
"When working on these products, you need to use analytics to understand if your products work," he said of his time at Facebook. "We ship features constantly ... how are users engaging with these features?" But the status quo meant it could take "weeks or months to get answers to even simple questions."
Today, Heap has 120 employees and 7,000 customers, from big businesses to individual developers.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider