What Remote Work Looks Like in 2021 (and Beyond) with Doist CEO Amir Salihefendić
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Well, welcome acquired LPs. I think this will probably be our last LP episode of 2020. Yep. Yeah. Very exciting. I'm excited for 2020 to be over, but we have a great topic and a great guest of looking forward to 2021 and a non-coronavirus world we can all imagine.

keep our fingers crossed. Amir, Sally Offendich from Doist.com and Todoist and Twist, which we're all going to get into. Ben and I have been longtime Todoist users, and Ben has fun to-do list productivity stories from his own history we'll get into. Amir both started an iPhone-based to-do list app before I did and continued far after I did. So...

Here you are being a podcaster and venture capitalist. You could be doing much better if you'd stuck with it. It's true. If only I had kept bootstrapping, but I think we'll get into that. We'll get into that. So Amir has bootstrapped Duist, which we will talk about at the top of the show, but more as setting the stage for the topic we really want to cover, which is you've built a now 90, close to 100 person, totally remote global company. Yeah.

before coronavirus, before that was cool, before GitLab. And we're going to talk about what that looks like. And as all of us start making decisions, hopefully next year, about what our companies are going to look like, where we're going to work, how we're going to work, what

what new companies we might start in the future might look like. We're going to talk to Amir about how to do it right. Welcome to the show and thanks for joining us. Well, folks, thank you for having me. It should be said that I'm a huge fan of the show. I actually found it a few months ago and I was just like, I have been binging ever since. I'm a really huge fan. The depth

that goes into this is really something. Yeah, so I really appreciate the work you folks do. And yeah, I hope, you know, I can contribute and...

get some content and maybe people would not find elsewhere. Well, I'm sure you can. I mean, in our prep call listeners, David and I've had loosely on our agenda for a while to do something about like how to do remote work right. But everyone seems to sort of have like the same things to say. And like, here's the three tools you use. And in just sort of like 15 minutes of talking with Amir, we were like, oh, we've been thinking about this wrong. And we've been thinking about remote work as like a

we're in like the Mesa Zoic era of the tools necessary to make remote good. And I think it's like remote trying to impersonate an in-person world and Amir, I just really like how you guys think about it and really thinking about like, let's forget about the concept of an office and the concept of everybody synchronously being in the same room. And like, how would you work if you never ever had that constraint? And you've been at it now 13 years. Is that right? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Actually, I have never really had a proper job, like office job. So I have only been a student programmer at the university. And other than that, I have never had a proper office job. So I don't actually like... When I slam office work, I do it like with... I can just imagine how bad it is. I have never actually tried it out for real. Yeah.

Oh, that's amazing. You know, I think like this kind of disruption of work and I think like the second and third order effects of this, like will be huge. I think basically like we are into like, my vision of this is quite extreme, but I think it's basically like maybe on the verge of like being another like industry association.

because it's kind of like the first time in human history where you can kind of get an amazing job regardless of where you live. So implication of that is just like very, very significant. You know, people have been saying this, likewise with Ben, I'm so glad we waited to do this because people have been talking about this idea for a long time.

you know, you've been evangelizing it at Duist, but we even had Wade from Zapier on the show in February, right before the pandemic. And we spent like five minutes on remote work. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can get a great job anywhere. It makes sense. But kind of buzzy topic of like working remote organizations, blah, blah, blah. Tell us about Zapier. Yeah.

All right. So before we get into the meat of the topic here, I think to set the right context, we have to tell a little bit of the do is story. So can you take us quickly through this? You, you know, going from student to your time in Chile and starting this as a side project, how did you end up now running this company? And let's talk also about the scale that you're at. Cause I think that's important.

yeah yeah like Ben I also wanted to do like a to-do app and you know a lot of developers they do that you kind of like create a dummy to-do app and I did that as well the thing I did basically after that is like continue like working on it for like 13 years now and you know like that's a very sophisticated hello world exactly yeah and

And honestly, like when I started out like this to do that, like I didn't really do it to do like a business. Like I wasn't like, it wasn't a startup for me. It was just like a side project that I wanted to do for myself. So that's basically the framing of that.

It took me actually four years to make it into a real company. So basically I was working on this on the side, you know, like it survived for four years. When I actually hired a support person, it was because I really didn't want to like answer more support emails.

And especially like some of the early people, like, you know, some of them are still using the software and I actually know some of them. They will send me in like pages of like feedback of stuff that didn't work, that should have been proved. And I was just, oh no, like, yeah. And even right now, like we've actually hired some people that have like sent me feedback and they basically send me like pages. I just reply like, we are not going to do that. Yeah.

Way to listen to your users. I think that's exactly what people are supposed to do. If we have our timelines right, it was 2007 when you started this as a project, but then you started a social media project. And then it was in 2010 when you came back to this and you made your first hire and you thought, yeah, maybe this could be the thing.

Exactly. Yeah. So basically, like I started Todoist and then actually like I had some success and I even had like a business model where it was kind of profitable. But then I kind of got a really good offer to like be a co-founder and CTO of a social network.

And I kind of like jumped into that. And we basically competed early on with Twitter. We lost that battle. What was it called? It's called Plurk. It's actually still running. It has like about, I don't know, 20 people hired in Taiwan. So it's mainly like big, really big in Taiwan still. And also some other like Asian countries, uh,

So that was basically it. And like, I actually burned, almost burned out on doing the social network because it was super stressful. I basically worked all the time and we didn't have a business model. We were kind of like raising money and selling the thing. And, you know, it was just like so much stress. You know, I actually thought like at some point I would be like 20 something and be like a multimillionaire. And those dreams kind of like just unraveled and it never really became real.

Which is why when I came back to start the real company, I was just like, you know, I don't want to stress again. I want to build this on my own pace, build a culture I actually want to work in like for decades. So that's kind of like why like this bootstrap mentality and also like not raising money. Actually, like I could have raised money early on for Todoist as well. I spoke to like a very famous Silicon Valley VC guy.

And one of the first things they wanted to do is like replace me as a CEO. You mentioned, was that actually in the term sheet? He wanted me to meet some potential CEOs that could come in and replace me. Let me guess, friends of the firm. Yeah, exactly. And I was just like, fuck, like, you know, like, I'm not going to sign up for that. Was this early in Duis' life or was this later after you already had revenue and scale?

I mean, it was early on. It was like, I think maybe 2007. It was like before maybe I started on the social network. So it was really early. So it was really early. Yeah. I mean, they were kind of like visionary, but they didn't really believe I could actually be a good CEO. And maybe they were right. Like, you know, like, yeah. So what is the company evolved to today? So give us a sense. I think you're profitable, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, we have actually been profitable every year since we started. And we are about 100 people. Growth has never been a huge thing. We don't actually have milestones that we want to hit and stuff like that. So it's kind of very controlled as well. To be clear, you've never raised any money. There's no outside capital in Duist. Exactly.

It's probably to a bunch of listeners sounds a little crazy to say you don't have milestones or growth target, but like you don't have to, right? Because there's no, you have to operate profitably because there's no capital in the business. As long as that happens, you don't have to be racing ahead to go raise your next round to stay alive, right?

Yeah, exactly. And honestly, I think also like something that's very important for us, a lot of our far competitors, like we have some like Monday is one example, you know, like where you burn like millions per month on ads.

And then you kind of have like this unit economics that doesn't really make sense and stuff like that. And then maybe like also the culture that you have is kind of very, you know, like broken. So if you combine all of that, like we don't think it's worth it. Like, of course, like, you know, we have huge like ambitions. Like we do want to have impact. You know, we do want to have like, we are really, really like,

hard hour on ourselves like in regards to the product to the quality and also maybe to the to our growth but it's not like you know like if we don't hit you know 100 million dollar in revenues like next year we will be very unhappy like it's a different model and i think it's more sustainable and the reason why i kind of optimize for that is like i know i will like

spend decades on this. So for me, there's no exit in mind. And then I don't want to burn out five years into this. Right. And to give further context, to me, the people behind Todoist were a big company because it was software that I had been using for a long time and loved and felt solid.

I don't know how to define the company other than that. So like, how many users do you have? It was a single product company for a long time. When did you decide to become a two product company? Give us some more of the sort of info there. We started with this to do app. And then we found out actually, this is a much, much bigger problem because most of the way that we currently organize ourselves and our teams is completely broken. And I still think like this is today, like even if you have like Asana and stuff like that, it's kind of like very broken tools that we still have for this.

And it's like a really, really deep problem that we have not solved yet either. So we are still working on solving that problem. But then like we were like a fully remote company and then we use actually Slack. But that was kind of a very, very bad experience, especially like if you have many time zones and you have to be connected all the time. And then like also we try to promote like deep work inside a company.

So this means like when you actually do something, like you should be able to focus on it fully. And this idea of like being disrupted all the time, like being like on this chat channel all day long, like it was really not like promoting the type of environment that we wanted to foster. And then we looked on the environment like, and nobody actually had any tool for this to kind of promote like more deep work and like asynchronous communication as the default.

So that's why we actually did Twist. If you read any books or any strategy, it's basically a very stupid idea because you have something that's growing. And we had two days that was growing over 100% per year when we actually committed to

to twist. And then we start another project with competitors that have like, you know, billions in valuations and like we have trillion dollar like competitors. And the reason for this is basically like we don't really believe the model of the future is synchronous communication. We believe like asynchronous is the default. I think like we're getting maybe proven a bit right. And it's really hard because like, you know, we have been preaching this for like the last five years. And like yesterday, Paul Graham said,

promoted a bit asynchronous first on Twitter and like urged companies like startups to innovate in this field, which is maybe a bit bad for us, but I think that's great for the overall community. Yeah. That's great. So for context, for people who aren't familiar, Todoist is the to-do app and you can use it personally, just yourself, but also in an organization across teams and

which I assume you use internally at Duist, right? As your main project management software. But then was it five years ago that you launched Twist? Yeah, yeah. And basically, you know, like on today's, we kind of have like product market fit on Twist. We didn't and we still like don't have like strong like market pool because it's like a super early. I think like companies that run like asynchronous as default,

It's probably like under maybe 10 that have like more than 50 employees. So it's like a super niche. But the companies that do this like are very special, like GitLab, Basecamp, Buffer. Zapier. Zapier, yeah. So I'm pretty sure like this will be something that will be more common, hopefully, yeah. As like this space matures, but yeah.

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If I'm saying I just took my office tool set with me and now I'm an employee at a remote company and I say, great, I've got my email, I've got my Slack, I've got my Zoom, and then there's some project management system of record, Asana or Smartsheet or Todoist or whatever. What's wrong with that? And how does your vision of the way a remote first company can and should be run, how is it different than what we're all sort of experiencing right now?

Yeah, I mean, that's a very good question, Ben. And honestly, like, I don't think we have reached this stage yet. So I think still we are some years from actually reaching this stage where we have the stack, the new stack. So I can maybe like we can try to draw a parallel to like Git. I'm not sure like if listeners know what Git is, but it's basically like distributed versioning system.

So in the beginning, like when you actually did development and like collaborate with other people, you would actually send like patches over or files even worse. And then you need to merge them manually. And even like you got something like subversion or something like that, that was a bit smarter, but it was still kind of like merging files in. And it was really, really bad model.

And then Git got born and actually Git's history is very interesting because it got born in the Linux kernel. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, like, if you look at the first commits of Git, you know, like Linus, who created Linux, actually created Git. And he did like... I know, it's amazing. Yeah. And he did that like in a few, I think in a weekend or something like that. It's kind of insane. Yeah.

The thing is like Git and GitHub, which is basically like, you know, built on top of Git, has basically changed the development world totally. Like nobody would develop today without like distributed versioning system. Everybody knows. But actually when it started out, like it was freaking hard to use. Like, you know, and the only development team that used it was like Linux developers, which is like,

And to really pile onto that, in my early development days, I was using CVS and then SVN or Subversion, and that was all centralized. So there was only one source of truth, and you would check it out, and you would work on it, and then you'd check it back in, and it was sane. And then when Git came out, or became popular before the advent of GitHub to sort of like re-centralize it in a cloud location...

It was this crazy concept that everybody could have their own version of the code that they could be working from locally, and then from any node could sort of be shared to any other... Like any developer to any other developer. Like, here, clone mine. And it was this crazy...

Yeah.

Yeah, and that's basically where we are stranded with work. I think work is still in the pre-git days. And what we basically need is this new stack that can replace this. And I think you can see this. There's so much inefficiency in how we organize, how we communicate, how we share knowledge. And everybody's just kind of patching it and hoping for the best.

Even if you read about remote work, a lot of it is kind of just like taking the office paradigm and moving in digital. It's not like building a whole stack for the digital world. A lot of innovation needs to happen here, yeah.

I love the, um, Paki McCormick, uh, who of course we just did our collaboration on the Slack episode relevant for this too, with, um, you know, he wrote, uh, this piece the other week on not boring about, I think he called it. We're not going back about why remote is the future now. And he looked at some of the software that's being built right now of like, you know, remote HQ software. And some of it is literally like skeuomorphic, like a, like a little video game version of a, of an office space. And, uh, that doesn't seem right.

Well, it reminds me so much of the early internet where it's like, what's a newspaper look like online? Like basically a scanned in version of the newspaper in a web browser. Or what does a mobile app look like? Well, like we took your desktop app and we like jammed it onto your phone. I think the famous example of this is the first movies were recorded stage performances.

Once you move into a medium, a new medium, it takes some time to figure out what is native to that medium. And, you know, Amir, this is the first time I've sort of thought about remote as a medium and figuring out what is what is native mean to the remote medium versus adapting our previous life.

So you guys have been doing this now for a decade. What does it look like at Duist? I think remote is kind of the spectrum where you have office, real-time, you're everybody. Then you have these hybrid setups. And then on the Verge's Extreme Edition, you have remote first, asynchronous first.

So where we have actually operated at since maybe last five years is kind of like asynchronous first and remote first.

I did like an interview with super organized or super organizers. I think it's called like it's another newsletter where like he titled it like the CEO with an empty calendar. Such a great post. We'll link to it. Yeah. So basically like what it enables is like you don't have that many meetings. There's a lot of deep work that's involved.

You can structure your days as you like. And I think like something that like Not Boring article didn't get correctly is this is not only good for like the life of people. It's also good for work because honestly, like we are doing knowledge work where creativity and like focus is actually like the most central part.

And a lot of office environments and even digital real-time environments are not optimized for the focused and deep work. So I think also remote first, asynchronous first is really also optimized towards designers, writers, coders, even our finance people. Everybody inside the company, people, those people, they are also asynchronous first. They think before...

you know, they say something. And I'll say something else. You know, it's like,

We actually hired a first HR person, like I think last year. Like we have had zero like HR issues or something like that because, you know, like in an asynchronous environment, you don't have like these. Of course you can have them, I think. Like we are all humans. But it's much more common, I think, like in a real-time environment, we can have like people going like in a flame war and like insulting each other. Like the Coinbase Slack that, you know, got out of control. Yeah.

Maybe this is a good place to double click then on like, so, okay, what exactly does operating asynchronously mean? And like, what is, and you do it through twist. What is twist and why is it not Slack or email? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, something to know is like, I think actually the culture is much more important than actually the tools that you use. But the tools are also like important. I think I read somewhere that the tools that we use shape us. And I think that's, you know, very critical as well. Something to know about is kind of like a written experience.

I mean, you know, GitLab is an extreme version of this where they have like the handbook that's like 4,000 pages long and like updated by everybody in some company. But it's kind of like the culture of this. So actually like inside Twist, we have about like 1.5 million like messages online.

everything is kind of like indexed searchable and transparent and even like leadership discussions like most things like actually the only thing that isn't really public is like the salaries of people and also I think we have made a mistake there but everything else is kind of public so I think it's kind of like the written is really like dominant and like great writers are really like the people that get promoted and like get great communicators so it's like

You know, I think like also something like maybe with remote first and asynchronous first is like it will change the dynamics inside of companies because like extroversion, like, you know, being likable will maybe not matter as much as like the stuff that you say, the impact that you have and stuff like that. How is it either in the culture or in the tool set up then that it doesn't devolve into Slack where it's like as people communicate back and forth, it just becomes this chat? Oh, in my...

My email has turned into this where like there's a, especially if somebody responds right away to my email, then you sort of set this expectation that there is, this is now a real time channel until one of us decides to break that contract. And so how do you, yeah, if anything, superhuman is making email more like this. Do you try and design constraints into both your software and your culture to discourage real timeness without an explicit opt in from both sides?

Exactly. So I think like design patterns matter a lot. And so for instance, something that we don't have is like, you can't see when somebody is online, you can't see when they were last online, you can't see what they have seen and what they haven't seen. So this kind of like discouraged, like real time communication between people.

So that's just one pattern. Another pattern is, for instance, in our comments or threads, you have a huge text box. And that kind of does not really say, "Write a one-liner here." It's kind of like, "Write content here." So I think as a product designer, you can do stuff like that to encourage more long form. But then again, I think

the culture matters a lot as well. Of course, like, you know, you can still have people posting like one-liners and I'm pretty sure like some twist users do that. So like if people go in and see like huge strats with a lot of content, you know, they will not go in and slam in and begin like to post one-liners. Yeah. So yeah, I think like expectations and like culture matters a lot as the tools do. And so where does real-time communication have its place in your company?

That's also something we have kind of experimented with. So we have actually tried to do fully only asynchronous first until our head of marketing, Werner, said, guys, I've completely lost touch with people because...

You went really down the rabbit hole on this. Yeah, yeah. So I can tell you like asynchronous only does not really work. So it's kind of great as the default way, but I still think that you kind of need to have meetings with people. For instance, like one-on-ones are synchronous meetings.

Also, most teams have synchronous meetings, like weekly meetings, where you just check in. You can see the people that you're working with. And honestly, I think even for asynchronous first and remote first, meetings in person are really, really critical as well. What we have done from early on is retreats, where we basically gather everybody. And honestly, this has been some of the most rewarding and fun times because basically you work with people for like

a year and then you know you see them and then you know magic happens because I mean we are humans after all so like you know the human connection is very important before the COVID like we also did team retreats so teams could organize their own retreats and like some have done it

And a lot of these retreats, we try to make them fun. So we have been to Iceland and Chile and just flying a lot of people around the world. So I think for remote first and asynchronous first, these are some of the biggest perks as well, is basically creating these retreats. And it probably puts a lot of the heavy lifting on making sure you really are thoughtful about the agenda and sort of the schedule when you're doing these. Because if it's very...

rare that you're actually, you know, if it's only once a year that people actually have an opportunity to be in person, I assume that means you have to be very structured or very thoughtful about how you plan that. Excellent.

Actually, some of the stuff that we do, we don't work a lot. So it's mostly just hanging around with people, get some good food, see some things, do some stuff. So what we have done almost every retreat is a football tourney, which is really great. A lot of people don't play that well, but it's still very fun. Yeah.

There's kind of two things I've been thinking about that we haven't called out in discussing this, but I think are important are the football comment. I think that's soccer for you Americans. Exactly. Which is that you mentioned time zones. How many time zones and how many countries are Duist employees in right now? I think like we are in 35 different countries currently.

And I'm not sure how time zones, but like, yeah, we are all over the world. And something like also to note, like what we have not done and some other like Zapier, they have most like hired in the US, which makes things much easier. Like we have hired all over the world, which is again like a... So you're dealing with taxes and legal issues and employment across 30 countries.

35 countries. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I think most people are not really dealing with that. And neither are we. We are only dealing with that in the US because we are a US-based company. But other than that, it's basically independent contractors and then they figure it out. And we pay them to get accountants and stuff.

Ah, cool. So that is actually the most common way to do that. Of course, there's a lot of work that's being done by remote, for instance, to kind of streamline this. And I think I'm pretty sure we see a lot of innovation in this space. Remote, the company that handles the sort of onboarding, HR, all that, like the technical components of HR for the employment model? Exactly, yeah.

It's kind of amazing to just step back and think about this. Like, so you've got people all over the world speaking all these different languages in all these different countries, all these different time zones. You bring everybody together and it's like, yeah, you're going to play football because that's the global game, you know? And you're going to call it football. This asynchronous culture and way of working, like, I have to imagine it just grew out of that. Like, there's no way you could make

real-time chat work when a significant portion of your colleagues are it's the middle of the night for them at any given moment in time exactly and honestly like i think this time zone issue is just like one aspect of that i think like another aspect and i'm sure you have read paul graham's like manager schedule workers maker schedule

The thing we do is like most are makers. Like we don't actually have any almost pure managers.

I think we only have like one person inside a company, but even like he does like, you know, stuff that is actually more IC work. That's the problem is like, if you're, you know, deep into something, you don't want to get disrupted in like in your day. That's also like a huge component. And then also for me, like as a leader of like this asynchronous first remote first, like using Slack, I would actually need to be connected all the time. If I wasn't connected,

I would get nightmares and look at Slack to see if some discussion is going without me and stuff like that. So it really creates very, very bad habits where you basically can't disconnect. And this is also really bad as well. And so Amir, you're the CEO of a 100% company that's growing 100% year over year. Are you a maker or a manager at this point? And how do you structure your work?

I have kind of like tried to stop development for many years now. And yeah, I also have a coach where, you know, last year we did like 360 review of myself. There was a lot of people that said like, Amir, stop doing coding. Like just, we need a CEO. Yeah.

Yeah. So I have actually tried to kind of like do less of that because honestly, like I love to develop, I love to create stuff. Like I don't love to manage people. This said, like in order for like the company to succeed, like for myself to succeed, I kind of like need to manage people and I need to like stop doing like development. And I've kind of like managed that. And then I saw like Toby from Shopify. He does like two hours of development per day.

what they say and then they kind of aspire that like maybe you know I just like need to figure out like how to do this because honestly for me like if I lose like the creativity part then like it becomes a very dull job and you know like you know regardless of how big this is like if I'm not happy and satisfied

I'm trying to limit it, but yeah, so that's the answer to that. Well, and I guess I was a leading question because I wanted to ask, you know, I think one way I'm going to keep structuring this is I'm going to think of things that I have to do synchronously or in person or on a video call, and then I'm going to ask you how you do them. You know, you're trying to do more management and more be a CEO and code less. How do you interact with your directs? Do you have weekly one-on-ones? Do you do those over video chat? How does that work?

Yeah, I mean, honestly, like something that we really encourage a lot is like one-on-ones and we do them like bi-weekly, but it's actually up to leaders themselves to structure how they want to do it. I do them like bi-weekly and I think they are great tools. Yeah, actually, like when we implemented that, it was probably one of the biggest advancements for like our company. Of course, you can maybe do it.

in like an asynchronous way. But, you know, it's worth like spending an hour on just like meeting with the person that you work with. Yeah.

And how do you deal with that? Like if you've got, let's say there's a product manager, engineer, designer team, and they're each eight hours apart. So on the one hand, it's really good if you're, if it's really humming, because then work can be done 24 hours a day and just shifted across the globe. On the other hand, if there's sort of like a blocker issue, how do you deal with that as a company when the person that you need to ask a question to is no longer working?

Yeah. And something to know is like in an asynchronous environment, you're kind of blocked by default. And you figure out very quickly that you need to have some other stuff on your plate as well if you're blocked until it gets resolved. Because, of course, some stuff moves slower because of that.

But in most of times, like it's not really a problem. This said like something where we can see it's a huge problem is like if you have inexperienced people like junior people coming in,

They need a lot of handholding. They can be blocked almost all the time. So you really like need to have people that are like, like independent and more senior for this to work. So we are still kind of like trying to figure out like how do we make like mentorship and like, you know, junior people work and evolve in this type of environment. And maybe here you actually need to have like some kind of like, you know, synchronized time zones and like more synchronous communication. Yeah.

That's very interesting. So thinking about these companies that just went remote forever or remote optional forever that are big companies, like I think I may get the company wrong, but I think Microsoft just for their whole engineering or R&D org said, you know, it's okay to never come back to the office. How on earth is that going to work at companies of that scale that have a thousand college new hires that start every week? Yeah, I honestly like that. That's right, maybe a few hundred. Yeah.

I think like a lot of people will have like really, really bad experience with remote work. Yeah, because you need to kind of have the whole setup, the whole culture in place. And if you don't have that, then I think you will basically have bad outcomes. Another thing to note is like,

how you evaluate work also changes. So for us, for instance, like our leaders are experts at what they do. And there's a reason for that because like you can't just have a manager, like pure manager that doesn't really evaluate the work properly. Like they don't really know like what is good design, what is bad design, what is good code, what is bad code, right?

And that also answered this question of how do you know that people are working? If you have an expert that is managing you, they will be able to look at your output and say, okay, this is garbage. I can't believe you have spent one week on this. And it's very easy to do that, but it's very hard to do that

If you're just, you know, you don't really know the subject in a deep way. So I think also like it really changes like the leadership role as well. So there's like a lot of implications that are just like all over the place. Yeah.

How do you set expectations when people come into Doist? I mean, I would imagine almost everybody who comes in has never worked in this mindset or modality before. What do you do to prevent a smaller scale version of this example of like a thousand new college grads are coming into Microsoft and like this is a recipe for disaster?

I mean, I think that is where like something like the handbook comes in play. Like we also have our own handbook. We actually started that only last year, but it has always been a huge game changer. So I definitely understand why GitLab even has like a full time person and maybe even a team working on the handbook.

Because you really need to have a lot of stuff documented, especially in regards to... I mean, for instance, for us, a big shift was core values and really also not...

setting like or selecting some core values that aren't your core values you know just like some aspirational thing that is like in some document somewhere but really like you know what do we really care about and then document that so people that are new to the organization they go in read a document and say okay this is what they care about and then like our core value is like

It touches almost everything else inside a company, including how we compensate people and stuff like that. So it's a kind of a framework that goes through that. And for instance, one of the values that we value a lot is mastery, growth, learning. Another thing is communication and independence,

And these are really, really important stuff. And also communication independence are really also important for the environment that we work in. Because if you're not independent and you get blocked and you can't resolve it, you can basically be blocked for days at a time. Yeah, right. You're not going to succeed in this modality. Yeah, yeah. So I'm assuming...

that your go-to-market strategy is mostly product-led growth, that you're not, you don't have salespeople or you don't, you're not primarily a sales-driven organization. Is that right? Yeah.

We don't have a single sales person. Yeah, that's a problem. This was the biggest thing on my mind too. Not to exaggerate. Again, I'm asking these leading questions. So do you think this works uniquely for you because you have a whole company of makers and you don't really need to be client-facing and you don't really need to do a lot of the things that require...

the most human interaction and everybody can be largely independent and creative. Yeah. I mean, honestly, like I still think like we are learning on this front. So I would actually love us to kind of like bring in like a sales team and maybe like even try to innovate on like the sales function.

If you read like what popular like venture capitalists tell you is like, don't innovate on sales, just hire a CRO. And like, and you're like, why don't we innovate on sales? Like, you know, and like how you compensate for that as well and stuff like that. That's kind of like still something that we need to explore. We would love to become much better at that. It's just like,

At this current stage, we have been way too focused on building great products. Bringing in sales as well, it just feels very overwhelming. But yeah, I hope we can do that soon. I was actually thinking a lot in preparing for this and when Ben asked the question about sales in this modality and...

I've never worked directly in sales, but we do sales and acquired, you know, we get exposed to it, you know, VC sales in its own way. I actually wonder if sales is a perfect candidate for this type of work because it should be a hundred percent output focused. Like that's all that matters is like, did you make the sale? Did you hit your quota? Like if you were able to culturally, uh,

land this, I wonder if it would be a lot more productive as an org, as a sales organization to have it be purely outcome focused versus like, you know, we all probably know and observe and have observed a lot of sales organizations that instantly become political. And you've got all these hyper competitive people looking for attribution on this deal and that deal. And obviously this wouldn't work for every type of sales approach, but, um, uh, but I think it could work for a lot. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. I mean, like this needs to get explored and like challenged. You have three non sales guys sitting around hyperbolizing about how this is great for sales. If you're if you're listening to this, join us in the slack and and let us know like how you made this work at your company. Well, again, like I think it depends on the type of sales, you know, something like do is either either to do is to twist.

I can totally imagine like this is an individual person selling this. You know, I don't know that you would need a whole wide team. And of course, you would have to collaborate across sales and marketing. And so if you can have reps in

In every country in the world, and not just physical location, but of every set of networks and type of target companies that they have networks that are backgrounds in, and they can just be focused on that and not worry about all the other stuff. I don't know. That sounds pretty good to me.

Well, I'm inspired. I think the problem for me is sales isn't really the strong suit. So what I think is maybe a good idea isn't really a great one. But the thing I think a lot about is trying it out. I think maybe if you just follow the standard playbook, maybe you'll actually not really succeed because everybody else is doing that.

So like trying something out of the ordinary could maybe be a good strategy. Amir, I'm curious, how do you acquire customers and how has that changed over time?

I mean, something we have been very lucky with is basically tapping in some very powerful distribution channels which are free. So like CEO, if you search for to-do list, we are going to be a top on all the search engines, the app stores as well. So we actually don't do any paid marketing. Everything is organic. To what do you attribute having that really good SEO?

The name. Yeah. I think like, I mean, honestly, like, I think like, you know, I picked the name randomly, but the thing is like to do list and to do list are very, very similar. And it should not surprise me if like the, the engines actually think like we are to do list.com and not to do list.com. Uh,

Oh man, that could have gone either way. They could have thought it was a typo. I will tell you, I am frustrated on a multiple time per week basis because I will tell...

everybody's phones are going to go off, but I'll say, Hey Siri. And, uh, I'll say, remind me to blah, blah, blah into do list. And, you know, Siri thinks, and then Siri comes back and says, great. I added it to reminders. And it'll literally say like into do list in my thing that I just accidentally put into reminders. So even Siri does not really like parse that word. Well, yeah, yeah. But you know, there's some like disadvantage, some advantages. Uh, yeah. So, uh,

But honestly, I think a lot of stuff is helpful here. It's basically being early, like in 2007, building and then the mobile apps as well. And honestly, maybe I was just sticking around for 10 plus years. A lot of our competitors didn't do that. So that also helps a lot. If you want to talk about it, I'm curious. What was Wunderlist competing with them? Because without knowing a ton of details on their history, they almost seem like

The what would have happened otherwise, you know, to the different path you could have taken with Todoist in that, you know, started in Berlin, got wide adoption, was doing great. And then Sequoia came in, led an A, then they ended up getting acquired by Microsoft. Then the product died within Microsoft.

It was like a hundred million dollar deal too. Yeah, I think it was like somewhere between one and 200 million. One of the reasons it's a great comparison is because from a product perspective, it's quite similar. It's the most pure play to-do list. Like you're not, it's if all you want is a simple list that really, really reliably you put stuff in and it syncs across your devices, like to-do list is your best option today. And Wunderlist was an amazing option when it was around. So with all that context, I'll turn back to David's question. Like what was that like when they came on the scene?

The thing to know is like initially I was not really very aware of them. It's only like after they got like a lot of scale that I kind of became aware of them. Of course, like the problem with like the Silicon Valley models is

There's no business model. They didn't have a business model. They gave everything away for free. They did have a pro, but you didn't really have to pay. Yeah, I mean, it was kind of ridiculous limits. You would really need to be an extreme user to pay for it.

So for us, competing, we need to build a profitable business. They don't. They basically had also like 30 million or whatever. They couldn't just burn. And of course, that can generate a lot of growth. But the thing to know is it's also maybe not very sustainable. So our strategy of surviving them

was pretty good, you know, like maybe would have lost if they have kept raising more money, kept like pushing the boundaries and gone for that model. But I think like something to know as well about like this productivity space is like the retention is really, really brutal. Like it's basically like starting a gym, like the app version of gym. And also like the competition is also brutal, uh,

so that's also like you know that most VCs that they were they look at the numbers they're saying you know this this is like very very bad your turn is way too high like yeah exactly so like it's a brutal space as well and I think that's also maybe one of the reasons why we haven't seen like 100 million like maybe we have like with Asana and Monday but that's more like enterprise play and not like with this to-do app that on the list occupied yeah

It's interesting to see now that Christian was the CEO, I believe. Yeah, now the CEO of Pitch. Exactly. I was going to say left Microsoft and started Pitch now. I wonder if perhaps specifically like taking some of those lessons and thinking, I'm just projecting, but thinking like, hey, this needs to be collaborative productivity, you know, enterprise wide from the get go if you're going to raise all that money.

Yeah, yeah. That's maybe like also today's like opportunities like we have sold like one of the like not really sold fully, but like sold partially maybe the in a good way, the single player mode, and we still kind of need to layer on the multiplayer mode.

I'm quite excited about that because in these spaces, single player is the brutal way of building a business. You also don't really have this expansion, you don't have these intra-network effects. LTV is also really low because you're just acquiring one user at a time. So a lot of stuff doesn't really make sense.

Maybe it does make sense if you actually nailed that because then you have a lot of nodes that you can basically build at least a variety, but maybe also networks effects from. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I'll say like every time I've tried Asana, um, since I mostly do these days fully operate in single player mode, it's just like the single player mode is garbage on. Well, I won't talk about the multiplayer mode from a product person, but certainly the single player mode on some of the, on these, you know, enterprise wide, uh, systems are terrible. If you're able to have both great and single and multiplayer modes like that, uh,

Nailing that single player mode is something that nobody else has really done. I mean, I think like we will see some of these new tools. I think like Notion is probably a great example of like really having a great single player mode and multiplayer mode. But you know, like creating these tools, like the complexity goes way up because, you know, there's a reason like why Asana aren't good at single player. It's really hard to be good at both. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, Amir, I'm curious, what are you excited about for the future of Duist? And what's the long-term vision? Ben, that's a great question. And honestly, something to note is I'm really long-term thinking. I'm thinking about investing all my life into this. So there's no exit in mind. I don't want to sell. I just want to have a great company I love to work at.

So that's one aspect. Another aspect is I really feel like the way that we work and live is totally broken. So I really think we need a new stack. And I would love to work on building the new stack.

So that's something that I'm really excited about and really challenging the status quo. So for instance, trying to make asynchronous as default more widespread than it is. But also I think a lot of the other stuff that we do is knowledge sharing as well. If you actually compare how we collaborate in code

And then how we collaborate on text in general is really, really broken. Why can't we have version documentation? Actually, in this, we use GitHub to manage our handbook. GitLab, they also do that. It still sucks because it requires you to be a developer to do that.

But the reason we do that is basically it's such a powerful aspect. You get peer reviews. You can see a history of everything, log of everything.

And then you see like something like Notion or whatever, like the latest like Coda. It's basically wild, wild west, like, you know, and in a collaborative environment, especially if you have like maybe a hundred people working on something, like you actually want to have like a pretty structured handbook or like documentation or knowledge base of your team or your company.

So honestly, there's a lot of stuff that we need to solve and work on. And I don't think this will be alone, but at least I hope we can kind of be on the front lines of this. Playbooks are a thing that we do on the main show episodes, but it's worth talking here. There is this interesting playbook that you've keyed into here that is taking...

very advanced developer tools and figuring out how to bring that model of working away from just developers. And like David and I struggle with us all the time where like Notion doesn't even have suggesting right now. So David will write up an outline and I'll go in to make some comments. But like what I really want to do is edit it and then have him approve my changes. But like I can't do that. So I make him orange.

So Google Docs is more advanced than that. But like... And now we're like, that's a workaround that works for us because we're two people. But like if we were 100 people, no way that would work. But even at PSL, like I'm frequently collaborating with my coworkers and our model is like, we've sort of...

bastardized suggestions in order to do the sort of non-developer version of pull requests, right? Like, I want to go in, I want to make these changes. I know I'm not the final decision maker on this, someone else is, or vice versa. And like, there's not a great non-developer workflow for like,

pull requests in prose effectively. That's totally essential in a remote first world where you can't grab someone and go, hey, come look over this, you know, over my shoulder for the next three minutes and make sure you're cool with all these changes. Like that just... We need to bring the developer model which has worked for...

a distributed workforce, frankly, because of the open source movement and figure out how to make that work for companies where engineers aren't the only people who get tools like that.

I'm just thinking in my mind this whole time as we're talking about this. I have Rahul at the pizza shop with Conrad convincing him to join. Making the pitch of to join Superhuman as his co-founder about developers. We have these amazing, powerful tools he was talking about, about text editors. If we bring that to everyone else, how powerful is that? And like this, this is the same thing.

I mean, there's a lot of stuff on that front. And I think we're just touching the tip of the iceberg. So honestly, something that I think is also like we are paying such a big price as a society to have these bad tools and bad processes. And maybe we're not really reaching our potential as a species because we are still kind of stuck in Word documents. So yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's a great, great place to leave it. Amir, if people want to learn more about what you're doing or ever want to reach out to you, where's the best place?

It is Twitter. So I'm like actively tweeting on Amix 3K. So you can just like follow me and tag me and I will try to respond. You got to give us the story behind your Twitter handle. Is it 3K like Mystery Science Theater? Like where's the 3K come from? Is it like Andre 3000? Yeah, it's basically Andre 3000. And I just like, and it's also like futuristic, you know? So like, yeah, let's, I,

I don't know. I probably had some drinks when I created that. Fantastic. Fantastic. We'll put a link in the show notes so folks can follow you. That's great. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, folks. And keep up the great work on the podcast. Yeah, I'm looking forward for this every time you release something new. So, yeah. Thanks.

Appreciate it. LPs, we'll see you next time. And actually, we'll see you in the new year. That's right.