Justin Rosenstein


Justin Michael Rosenstein is an American software programmer and entrepreneur. He is co-founder and head of product at the collaboration software company Asana.

Early life

Rosenstein grew up in San Francisco Bay Area and attended The College Preparatory School in Oakland, CA. He was a successful high school Lincoln–Douglas debater. He matriculated to Stanford University, and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics at age 20. As an undergraduate, he served as a member of the Mayfield Fellows Program.

Career

Rosenstein dropped out of a graduate program in computer science at Stanford in 2004 to join Google as a product manager. At Google, Rosenstein led projects in Google's communication and collaboration division. His projects initially included Google Page Creator, the precursor to Google Sites, and a project internally codenamed “Platypus,” which eventually became Google Drive. He also created and wrote the original prototype for Gmail Chat and many of the features in Google’s rich text editor.
In May 2007, Rosenstein left Google to become an engineering lead at Facebook, working closely with Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz. He was technical lead in charge of Facebook's Pages, the Facebook Like button, and Facebook Beacon. He was compensated with 4,863,335 Class B shares, which he deposited into a trust.
In October 2008, Rosenstein left Facebook to co-found the collaborative software company Asana along with Moskovitz. On its website, Asana states its mission is to “help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly.” Rosenstein leads product and design at Asana. He is a frequent speaker on issues of business and technology. He has published opinions on building effective collaborative software in Wired, leadership strategy and enterprise software design in Fast Company, and entrepreneurship in TechCrunch, and productivity in TIME.

One Project

Rosenstein is the founder of a nonprofit organization called One Project. In 2014, he delivered the keynote address at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York, about using technology for social good as part of “one human project for global thriving.”.

Personal life

Rosenstein lives in a cooperative living space in San Francisco's Mission District, called Agape. He has also committed to giving away most of his wealth to philanthropic causes in his lifetime, inspired by The Giving Pledge. Rosenstein is vegan.