Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz admits 13 years as CEO left him “exhausted”

According to the Stratechery podcast hosted by Ben Thompson, Dustin Moskovitz admitted that running a company for more than a decade nearly burned him out.

The Meta co-founder said that his 13-year stretch as Asana’s CEO was “exhausting,” and that he never planned to take the top job in the first place.

Dustin, who helped build Facebook in 2004 alongside Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes, and Andrew McCollum, walked away from the social network in 2008 but kept a little over 8% of the company, which made him one of the youngest billionaires on the planet with a net worth around $12 billion.

After leaving Facebook, Dustin co-founded Asana, a work-management software platform meant to make collaboration easier. He became its CEO almost by accident.

Earlier this year, he stepped down after 13 years, becoming the company’s chairman while still holding 53% of Asana’s outstanding shares, split between Class A and Class B stock.

His comments about the experience gave a rare look at what it means to be an introvert running a fast-growing tech company through years of chaos.

Dustin explains why being CEO wore him down

On the podcast, Dustin said, “I don’t like to manage teams, and it wasn’t my intention when we started Asana.” He said he wanted to focus on engineering instead.

“Then one thing led to another and I was CEO for 13 years and I just found it quite exhausting,” said Dustin.

He described being an introvert forced to “put on this face day after day,” expecting it to get easier once the company matured. It never did. “The world just kept getting more chaotic, the first Trump presidency and the pandemic and all the race stuff.”

He said that being CEO eventually felt less like building a company and more like “reacting to problems.”

Dustin’s honesty about introversion and leadership mirrors what many high-profile figures have shared. Zuck, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett have all described themselves as introverts who prefer quiet over crowds.

Meanwhile even as Dustin has stepped back from daily leadership, Meta continues expanding. On October 21, Meta and funds managed by Blue Owl Capital entered a joint venture to develop and own the Hyperion data-center campus.

Meta will handle construction and property management, while Blue Owl will own 80% of the venture. Meta will hold 20%. Both parties agreed to fund their share of roughly $27 billion in total development costs covering power, cooling, and connectivity systems.

As part of the deal, Meta contributed land and construction-in-progress assets tied to the project, which had been classified as held-for-sale. Blue Owl’s managed funds injected $7 billion in cash, while Meta received a one-time $3 billion distribution from the venture.

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