Facebook Co-founder’s Startup Asana Goes Public [VIDEO]

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz's new company Asana went public on Wednesday.

Asana is a task manager that helps groups of people to manage work flow. It is free and it helps everybody in a particular group keep track of what others are doing and how projects are progressing.

Asana has been in private beta for approximately a year and is free. It was developed by Moskovitz, 27, who is the world's youngest billionaire, according to Forbes, and his co-founder Justin Rosenstein, who was a Facebook employee. Both left Facebook in 2008.

Moskovitz is a self-taught programmer who was the roommate of Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg. They both dropped out of Harvard to build Facebook, which is now the world's most popular social network.

People ask us, 'Is this a to do list?' Rosenstein said, as reported by Mashable. We're like 'No, this is the to do list.'

He added that the real-time updates and flexibility to fit any project's work flow among other things is what make Asana different from other task manager programs.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Moskovitz saw that as Facebook's vice president of engineering at the time, he was spending too much time trying to stay on top of managing hundreds of new employees. During his time with Facebook Moskovitz created productivity tools that the social network still uses today, the Times reported.

At some point we realized that this was not just a problem for Facebook and tech start-ups, this was a problem that was fundamental to all human behavior: how to keep everyone on the same page, Rosenstein told the Times. There is rich information squirreled away in people's heads and their inboxes. There is nowhere to go to see what people are working on now, what people have done recently and how far a project is from the finish line.

Asana currently has 19 employees in San Francisco's Mission District. In November 2009, the company said it raised approximately $9 million from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.

Asana plans to release more features later.

Watch the introduction to Asana video below to learn more: