Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has said being a CEO was exhausting and that he had never intended to manage people, despite leading Asana for 13 years and taking the project management company public.
Moskovitz, who co-founded Facebook with his Harvard roommate Mark Zuckerberg, became the social media company’s first chief technology officer before leaving in 2008 to establish Asana with Justin Rosenstein.
He led Asana as chief executive until stepping down last year. The company went public in September 2020 and grew into a business valued at $3 billion.
“I just found it quite exhausting,” Moskovitz said in a 2025 interview with Stratechery, describing himself as an introvert.
He said he had expected to work as an independent contributor or lead engineering, rather than take responsibility for managing teams.
“I don’t like to manage teams,” Moskovitz said. “I’d intended to be more of an independent or head of engineering… Then one thing led to another and I was CEO for 13 years.”
The role required him to maintain a public persona that did not come naturally. Moskovitz said he had to “put on this face day after day” while carrying out the duties of chief executive.
He had hoped the pressure would ease as Asana expanded and he was able to delegate more work, allowing him to concentrate on running the company from behind the scenes. Instead, he said the demands intensified.
“The world just kept getting more chaotic—the first Trump presidency and the pandemic and all the race stuff—it made it just a lot less of the company building,” he said.
Being a CEO, he added, had become “a lot more reacting to problems and doing this sort of thing”.
Why accidental management is putting pressure on bosses
Moskovitz’s experience reflects a wider pattern in which people are promoted into management because they are highly capable in a technical or functional role, rather than because they want to lead teams.
Research cited in the discussion suggests that as many as 82% of bosses are “accidental” managers who received no formal training before being placed in charge. About a quarter of them go on to reach senior leadership positions.
The result can be a lack of confidence among managers and difficulty handling the demands of leading employees. Those pressures can contribute to both managers and staff choosing to resign.
Gerrit Bouckaert, chief executive of recruitment firm Robert Walters, said accidental management had become more pronounced in recent years as the responsibilities of the job had expanded.
“In the past, a manager’s primary role was to keep employees motivated and productive,” he said. “In today’s world, they are required to drive the culture and inclusion in the team, lead on digital adoption, possess an innate ability to know if a member of their team is struggling mentally, and also be the bearer of bad news—be it delayed promotions, or muted pay rises.”
