{"id":376,"date":"2018-01-03T02:20:53","date_gmt":"2018-01-03T02:20:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/danielvlopes238992071.wordpress.com\/2018\/01\/03\/top-13-leadership-lessons-learned-from-the-watercooler-ama-%f0%9f%92%ac-with-amir-salihefendic-ceo-founder\/"},"modified":"2025-04-21T10:29:59","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T17:29:59","slug":"top-13-leadership-lessons-learned-from-the-watercooler-ama-%f0%9f%92%ac-with-amir-salihefendic-ceo-founder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canopy.is\/blog\/2018\/01\/03\/top-13-leadership-lessons-learned-from-the-watercooler-ama-%f0%9f%92%ac-with-amir-salihefendic-ceo-founder\/","title":{"rendered":"Top 13 Leadership Lessons from AMA with Amir Salihefendic, CEO of Doist"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As the CEO and founder of a bootstrapped, remote company with over 13 million customers, Amir shared his leadership lessons learned with our online community.<\/a><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Every few weeks, we invite one of our 1,000+ members from all over the world in Canopy<\/a>\u00a0to participate in an \u201cAsk Me Anything\u201d (AMA) session. It\u2019s an opportunity for us fellow managers, executives, and business owners (including me!) to gain in-depth insights on how to be an effective leader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last month, we were honored to host Amir Salihefendic<\/a>, CEO and founder of Doist<\/a>\u200a\u2014\u200athe software company responsible for Todoist<\/a>, a productivity tool used by over 13 million people. Amir\u2019s company is a remote-first, bootstrapped and independent company with ~50 team members from 20 different countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Originally from Bosnia, Amir grew up in Denmark, studying Computer Science. Prior to Doist, Amir was part of the founding team of Plurk<\/a>, a Twitter precursor used by millions of people that to this day, continues to be one of the most popular social networking sites in Asia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I learned a lot<\/em> following Amir\u2019s AMA. Here were the top 13 questions and answers\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Question #1<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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How do your project managers deal with having team members in various time zones? Specifically when it comes to project meetings, sprint planning, demos, client meetings, etc\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Amir: <\/strong>Most of our work happens asynchronously. We used Slack for about two years before we figured out that real-time communication wasn\u2019t a great solution, especially for a remote-first company like ours (we have people in 23 countries, spanning most time zones).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But even for non-remote companies, asynchronous communication can be a great deal. For example, I recently became a new dad, and it\u2019s a huge advantage that I don\u2019t have to be working at any specific times, so I can spend a few hours in the morning with Samuel without worrying about not being at work or affecting work of others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We do use synchronous communication at times (e.g. Hangout meetings), but our default mode of operation is asynchronous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would recommend reading our article that goes much more in depth: Why we\u2019re betting against real-time team messaging<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Question #2<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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I\u2019ve heard companies with remote teams say that remote only works if everyone is remote. Do you share this philosophy?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Amir: <\/strong>I share this philosophy. Remote work (especially as we do it) is an entirely new way of working. For example, we don\u2019t have work hours, we value a lot the written communication, we do very few meetings, and most of the stuff inside the company is transparent and available to everyone (including most numbers such a revenues, daily actives or whatever else).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Question #3<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Any advice or thoughts on how to build that team culture and shared sense of purpose from your experience with\u00a0Doist?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Amir: <\/strong>Great question, Jeremey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of open-source communities (for example, Python or Linux developers) have incredible cultures, even if most of the work is being done in a remote setting. So I am very unsure if an office environment is needed to build cultures or to build innovation (e.g., Linux has changed the world, and most things run on it).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For us, our culture centers around critical missions that unite us (this is remote-work, productivity, and mindful team communication). There\u2019s also a general feeling that the work we do is relevant and useful to a lot of people. We are also super picky to hire people that have a passion for the stuff we do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apart from this, we do have random meetings around the world and a company-wide yearly retreat (which we usually do in some exotic places), but I do think our missions are much more critical than anything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It should also be stated that our 5-year employee retention rate is 93% (only three persons have left voluntarily in the last 5 years), so I think it\u2019s possible to build healthy cultures even in entirely remote environments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Question #4<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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I know Todoist is bootstrapped and profitable but did you use some of your personal money from Plurk to fund Todoist and build a team or did you go back to full-solo developer mode and slowly got the company into the profitability path?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Amir: <\/strong>I spent very little of my own money. When I went to work full-time on Todoist, it was making a few thousand dollars in revenues per month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I increased the revenues, I hired people. The first people that joined had very small salaries (I have no idea of how I convinced them to join :-)).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Question #5<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Was it hard to get the product to a point where you were at the same level of quality of tools like Wunderlist, Trello, and Basecamp?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Amir: <\/strong>Competition never drove me. I didn\u2019t know about Wunderlist until very late. I was very ignorant about a lot of things (e.g., I never did market research). This strategy isn\u2019t something I would recommend with my current knowledge \ud83d\ude0a<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I did lose a ton of time making Plurk, but I also learned a lot of stuff I could use. For example, that I should not raise VC funding and that I should do this in an entirely bootstrapped way. I also became a much better designer and developer, which was also super useful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What hurt most was that Todoist was built for the web and not mobile. It took us a long time to create super robust mobile apps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Question #6<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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How was the decision to work on Todoist after\u00a0Plurk?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Amir: <\/strong>Todoist was a hobby for me and something I truly cared about. It wasn\u2019t tough to switch to it full time or to imagine working on it for ten years (who doesn\u2019t want to work on their hobby!?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This said it took me many years to see the real potential of Todoist. I never imagined it would be multi-million dollar business\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Question #7<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Are you still involved with engineering and development these days or do you focus all your energy on business and management? And, if you are not so involved anymore, was it hard for you to make the transition?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Amir: <\/strong>I still spend 25% of my time doing development, and I plan to continue to do this. Here\u2019s how I spend my time:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We don\u2019t have any pure managers inside Doist\u200a\u2014\u200awe expect all of our managers to be doers as well. This works, since we try to hire people that are self-managed and that don\u2019t need a lot of micromanagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Development and creating stuff is something I have done since I was 12 years old and I can\u2019t imagine stopping doing this because the general practice is that leaders just need to manage others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hope this helped!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Question #8<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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With a turn-over so small like you mentioned, I imagine that Doist probably figured that out already. I would love to hear what are your thoughts on that and how do keep your individual contributors engaged for so\u00a0long?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Amir: <\/strong>Like mentioned before in this AMA we don\u2019t have people that just manage other people. This choice is rooted in that we believe that our people should be self-managed and we should do as little micromanagement as possible. We also highly value individual contributors, and the salaries are similar between a fantastic individual contributor and a team leader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Question #9<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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How many levels of managers\/leaders do you have and how are your departments and teams organized? Do you structure the teams around different products, features, or something else?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Amir: <\/strong>Here\u2019s how our structure looks like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n