10 standout women who are changing the world with Asana
Today is International Women’s Day. It’s an opportunity to celebrate the success of trailblazing women who have committed to tackling the obstacles that women continue to face within and beyond the workplace.
Female entrepreneurs and founders have made an especially strong mark. From 1972 to 2018, the number of women-owned businesses has swelled by almost 3,000 percent. We couldn’t be prouder that so many female movers and shakers rely on Asana to power their businesses. Today, and every day, we salute them.
Sarah Goodman, Co-founder and COO of VitalSines
More than twenty years ago, Sarah Goodman’s father Dr. Jess Goodman was asked by his Tai Chi instructor, a Taoist monk, to grant him one dying wish: to show people the health benefits of stretching between the heart and kidneys (the region where the aorta is located). Thus began a multi-decade journey dedicated to helping people easily understand how lifestyle choices affect internal health using affordable and easy-to-understand health technology.
Sarah and her father built and commercialized iHeart Internal Age™—a fingertip device that calculates an individual’s internal age based on aortic stiffness. iHeart, which has been shipped all across the world, is able a predict a person’s cardiovascular health and lifespan in a mere 30 seconds.
Asana forms the foundation of the task management process at VitalSines, the company co-founded by Sarah that produces iHeart, in turn ensuring that projects stay on track and task. When you’re helping people live longer and healthier lives, you can’t afford to miss a beat.
Alice Zhang, Co-founder and CEO of Verge Genomics
As a Ph.D. student, Alice Zhang experienced the inefficiencies of the drug discovery process firsthand. It currently takes 12 years, $2.6 billion, and a lot of guesswork to bring a single drug to market. Verge Genomics is Zhang’s answer to the problem.
Using machine learning and artificial intelligence, Verge is revitalizing neuroscience research and catapulting it out of a decade-long slump. Verge has created some of the largest, most comprehensive datasets for ALS and Parkinson’s disease.
Zhang and her team use Asana for everything from meeting agendas to task tracking to keep everyone accountable. When you’re saving lives, accountability is non-negotiable.
Andrea Higuera Araque, Co-founder and CEO of Yask
Living in Chile, Andrea Higuera Araque was personally affected by the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants living in the region. Language barriers prevented these immigrants from integrating with society. Colombia-based Yask is Andrea’s award-winning solution to the problem she experienced on her doorstep.
Yask is an AI-powered language community where anyone can receive writing and pronunciation feedback in minutes, and for free. The app allows users to connect with native speakers across the world to practice and improve their foreign language skills while having fun. It is available in 13 languages, including Spanish, English, French, German, and the Haitian Creole that empowers immigrants to communicate in Latin America.
Andrea and her team rely on Asana to keep track of all tasks and projects, ranging from development to finance. In much the same way that Yask gives its users the freedom to conquer language barriers, Asana helps Andrea preserve the freedom of each of her team members to create and organize their own tasks in alignment with company objectives, while also maintaining complete transparency.
Camilla Olson, Founder and CEO of Savitude
As a schoolchild in the Washington, DC area, Camilla Olson witnessed an impressionable teacher get ousted from her all-girls Catholic school because she freely voiced her opinions. From that point on, Camilla set out to defy all odds and prove that females should not be constrained, but liberated.
Camilla has been part of more than five startups, including two exits and one IPO. Her most recent brainchild, Savitude, is leveraging machine learning and visual recognition to curate retailers’ clothing based on a women’s specific body shape. Savitude is revolutionizing the traditional fashion industry, which caters to the hourglass-shaped women that only account for 20 percent of the population, and, in turn, empowering women to confidently and comfortably present their best selves.
Camilla and her team are power users of Asana’s list view. By prioritizing tasks in Asana, the team is able to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks. For all of its workflow automation capabilities, Camilla is pleasantly surprised that she doesn’t need to pay Asana a well-deserved full salary.
Debra Cleaver, Founder and CEO of Vote.org
As a child, Debra Cleaver didn’t have intentions of dabbling in politics. That changed on U.S. election night in 2000, when a razor-thin margin resulted in Al Gore conceding the presidency to George W. Bush. The realization that a mere 500 voters could determine the course of political history hit Debra hard.
On that shape-shifting night, Debra made a personal commitment to transform voting from habit to hobby. Vote.org uses technology to simplify political engagement, increase voter turnout, and strengthen American democracy. In 2016, Vote.org registered approximately 600,000 individuals and provided voting information to nearly one million people.
The Vote.org team relies on Asana to track ongoing collaboration projects, including partnerships and communications, allowing it to scale its footprint and rapidly mobilize voters.
Rachel McCrickard, Founder and CEO of Motivo
After spending her early years working with the homeless community in Los Angeles, Rachel McCrickard returned to her hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee to work at a community mental health agency. In order to become licensed in the region, Rachel needed to withstand a three-hour commute to Atlanta where she completed the required clinical supervision hours.
That experience gave her a front-seat view into the geographic boundaries that prevent mental health professionals from serving rural areas. Rachel was galvanized to take action. Motivo is the first HIPAA-compliant video platform that connects pre-licensed mental health professionals to clinical supervisors. Thanks to developments in telehealth, Motivo has created an easier and more efficient path towards licensure.
Rachel and her team use Asana to organize all epics, user stories, and sprints and bring their product visions to life. With transparency of targets, milestones, and product statuses, Rachel is able to avoid micromanaging her team and devote more of her time to saving lives.
Jess Ladd, Founder and CEO of Callisto
When reporting her sexual assault in college, Jess saw firsthand how disempowering the process could be. With a newfound understanding of why less than 10% of sexual abuse cases on college campuses are reported, Jess wasted no time in coming up with a solution. She founded Callisto, a nonprofit that creates technology to combat sexual assault, support survivors, and detect repeat sexual assailants by enabling survivors of the same perpetrator to connect with one another. Callisto’s website currently enables 162,000 college students across 13 campuses report incidences of sexual assault and coercion.
Jess and her team use Asana to plan and manage their quarterly projects, track progress against company metrics, manage their campus partnerships. Ultimately, Asana allows the team to free up time to focus on growing Callisto’s footprint as quickly as possible to support all survivors and empower people affected by harm to take control of their healing process and re-establish their agency.
Pae Natwilai, Founder of Trik
Working as an inspection and maintenance engineer in the oil and gas sector in her native Thailand, Pae Natwilai saw an opportunity to harness the potential of drones to improve structural inspection. UK-based Trik provides an immediate 3D mapping and reporting system for executing structural inspections using drones. By quickly transforming drone photos into interactive 3D models, Trik is an efficient and cost-saving solution for inspecting structures such as oil rigs, bridges, and multi-story buildings for damage and defects.
Pae and her team use Asana to organize their day-to-day work. The enhanced workflow visibility ensures the team is able to remain lean and effectively revitalize the construction industry with lean improvements.
Daniela Perdomo, Co-founder and CEO of goTenna
In 2012, Daniela Perdomo was living in New York when Hurricane Sandy ravaged the area’s communications infrastructure. Amidst the storm’s destruction, she watched in despair as both civilians and emergency responders struggled to communicate.
Compelled to take action, Daniela co-founded goTenna, a mobile mesh networking company that allows users to communicate on a peer-to-peer network, without a cell phone or internet connection. goTenna’s consumer devices have allowed more than 100,000 people in 49 countries create people-powered, resilient communication networks during emergencies and other off-grid scenarios. Public safety, defense, and other professional organizations have used GoTenna’s devices to communicate effectively during disasters such as the Camp Fire in California and Hurricane Michael in Florida.
In much the same way that goTenna has afforded people and their communities a powerful backbone that shields them from collapse in times of disaster, Asana is a backbone for the team, enabling them to seamlessly communicate, create more transparent workstreams, and remain productive.
Falon Fatemi, Founder and CEO of Node
At the ripe age of 19, Falon Fatemi was the youngest person Google had ever hired. At Google, Falon realized she had a unique knack for developing strong, strategic relationships. After working as a strategic consultant for startups and VCs, she realized that by pinpointing how to effectively route deal opportunities to the people in her network, she had been responsible for millions of dollars in investments, a number of acquisitions, and several sales and marketing partnerships.
That insight led to the founding of, Node, which uses artificial intelligence to replicate Falon’s networking skills at scale. Node’s relationship graph, which includes half-a-billion detailed profiles of individuals and companies, helps people and businesses connect with the right opportunities at the right time.
By using Asana to streamline work management and product development, Falon and her team are bringing artificial intuition to the masses more quickly.
Celebrating women today, and every day
These standout females are inspiring embodiments of Asana’s mission—to help humanity thrive. They join many other female standouts that rely on Asana to power their ventures. These ten visionaries and their companies have created tens of thousands of tasks and thousands of projects in Asana. One Asana task at a time, they’re shattering ceilings and rewriting the history books. As they look to scribe their next chapters, we’re cheering them on.
At Asana, we strive to build a radically inclusive workplace where women can bring their whole selves and thrive. Read more about our diversity and inclusion efforts.
