Asana Picks Up Google Exec Chris Farinacci To Run Its Business Ops

Asana, a company that provides tools to help teams collaborate, has hired Chris Farinacci, now formerly of Google, to run its business operations.

At Google, Farinacci worked for nearly half a decade on the Google for Work team. That stint came after time in marketing at Oracle and Agile Software for the technology worker.

Given that pedigree, it isn’t hard to see why Asana would hire the exec to be its new head of business. That said, the work that he’ll do now will be different in terms of scale. Google, in case you were slightly behind, is a larger company than Asana.

The younger firm has around 150 employees at the moment.

Growth

The decision to staff up its business team comes at an interesting time for Asana, which has at once grown quickly, but not raised as much capital as other players in its space, and, certainly, in the larger online software market. According to CrunchBase, Asana has raised just over $38.2 million during the course of its life.

At the time of its last round of $28 million in 2012, Asana, according to TechCrunch, was worth $280 million.

Those numbers aside, Asana told TechCrunch that its revenue has grown by 2.3 times over the past year. That growth rate, an implied capital efficiency, put the firm into conversation as a potential IPO looking forward.

Market Chop

Asana has an event scheduled for Wednesday of this week. The tone of that shindig will be interesting to note — how the company tries to describe itself should help us better understand where Asana is on the road to a public offering.

Of course, the markets have been anything but kind in recent weeks. Several technology companies have fallen back under their IPO prices, including Twitter and Alibaba, two firms that were once market darlings.

I have no new information regarding the hard numbers behind Asana’s business, but its leadership must be looking askance at recent market chop.

Hires of this sort that are not made quietly are usually signaling moments. Dropbox’s recent hiring of a new CFO, for example, was a pretty obvious statement. I leave how to properly parse the above to you.

Top Image: Asana co-founder Justin Rosenstein.