Amir Salihefendic, founder of Todoist. Amir Salihefendic. Amir is the founder and CEO of Doist – makers of Todoist and Twist. Get Ambition & Balance delivered. Email. No fluff. Occasional listicles. Unsubscribe anytime. Todoist Turns 10, Thanks to You! How do your project managers deal with having team members in various time zones? In the first half of 2021, Todoist’s Free plan is going through some changes. These updates will be rolled out gradually to all users. In summary, users of the Free plan will notice two key differences: You now have access to previously-locked features like comments, labels, and filters, that were previously only available on the Premium plan. Amir Salihefendic is the founder and CEO of Doist.io, the makers of Todoist, an online and mobile task management app. He started Todoist in 2007 when he was still a student with two programming jobs on the side. He needed a way to manage his own work. Amir is the CEO of Doist, the company he founded after Todoist evolved from a side-project to a full-time gig. He previously co-founded Plurk, a micro-blogging social network that remains popular.

Amir Todoist

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This week I talk with Amir Salihefendic, Founder of of Doist, which makes Todoist and Twist! Amir and I talk about growing up in Bosnia, being a refugee in Denmark and how that’s influenced his views on building a remote company, along with building multiple products to solve a large problem plus so much more. Enjoy!

Josh Pigford: Amir, how are you doing, man?

Amir S.: Pretty good. Yeah. Awesome to be here.

Josh Pigford: Glad to hop on a call. The way I like to kick these things off is people’s origin stories are pretty interesting to me, especially actual origin from all the way back to when you were a kid, so I’d like to hear about you as a kid. I know a little bit about born in Bosnia, but then you guys had to move to Denmark as refugees. I’d love to hear some of that if you could talk about that.

Amir S.: Sure. I was born in Bosnia. I was a normal kid and I used to play a lot outside. There it was a lot more free. If you have seen some pictures of Bosnia, it’s basically a lot of green, a lot of nature, so basically, I grew up just roaming around.

Amir S.: I did get introduction to technology very early on because my brother studied computer science, and we actually had a computer. I was four years old then or something like that, so I can’t really remember. It wasn’t like some of Commodore or Amiga. It was something older.

Amir S.: That’s basically how I got into it and maybe got even an interest for it, but the thing is then the war came and we had to flee from Bosnia. My family lost basically everything, and we had a pretty good life in Bosnia, so we had to relocate.

Amir S.: As a refugee, if you hear stories from Syria and stuff like that, I don’t really think people can imagine how this is and probably, like the situation in Syria is a lot worse than it was in Bosnia.

Amir S.: Basically, our journey to actually flee from Bosnia was quite chaotic. We had to travel across whole Europe almost to Denmark, and we didn’t really have passports in check and nobody really wanted us, so there was a lot of stress there.

Josh Pigford: You were basically, what, four or five, somewhere around there?

Amir S.: I was probably five or six. I can’t really remember much, but the stories that my brother and sister and family just talks about, it sounds very, very bad.

Josh Pigford: Obviously, those kind of events in life have a major impact on you as a person. Do you feel like those influenced the way that you run your company today or even the business that you started or it’s just sort of this core to who you are kind of thing?

Amir S.: It’s a great question. For some people, having a very dramatic things happening to you, it can be a fuel for, actually, growth and that’s, I think, what has happened to me, so basically, I have never really been a victim of this. I have always tried to just ignore it and do my own thing.

Amir S.: Even maybe Doist itself and just my nature is I’m rootless. I don’t really associate myself with a nationality, and I think that’s a huge advantage if you want to do a remote-first company and want to integrate …

Amir S.: I think, right now, we have 25 different nationalities working for Doist. For me, personally, I think the world should actually move away from nationalism and religions and you’re individual. You’re not an American or a Bosnian or whatever. You’re a person.

Josh Pigford: You were refugees, basically, in Denmark. How did you guys end up in Denmark? Was there any ties there or was that just sort of what worked out?

Amir S.: Well, actually, we wanted to go to Sweden, but Sweden wouldn’t let us in, so we basically picked Denmark and this was just totally random, so there was no planning there. We just went to the place that actually wanted to accept us and that was Denmark, and we are very grateful for that. Right now, I have family spread around the world, a lot of countries. Bosnians, a lot of them actually work and live outside of Bosnia right now.

Josh Pigford: You guys end up in Denmark and you were obviously so really young. What does the next, say, I don’t know, 10 years or so look like for you? It’s just school, I presume?

Amir S.: The thing is, actually, I started very late into school. I started in fourth grade to attend a real school, so I basically lost a lot of the early stuff. I actually didn’t really do well in the primary years, in primary school.

Amir S.: It was very strange. I was actually the only foreigner in the whole school. We lived in a very small town with about 5,000 people, and I was the only foreigner there, so I think I integrated very well into the society. I tried to integrate as well as possible.

Amir S.: I really also had this passion for computers. I would actually go to the library every day and just spend all my time just on the internet because at that time, internet was very expensive, and we didn’t actually have it at home. I would just go there, create websites, and just play Doom as well. That’s basically it.

Josh Pigford: As an elementary age kid, was your interest in computers still stemming from … You had mentioned your brother was into computer science. How did he get into computers?

Amir S.: Well, my brother was very interested in pinball games and games in general, so probably that’s how he got into it, but I’m actually very unsure how … It’s not something that my family is very known for. We’re mostly into businesses and not really into tech or even education itself, so I’m actually unsure. I will ask my brother what the exact motivation was.

Josh Pigford: You mentioned that your family were into businesses, so as in starting their own businesses?

Amir S.: Basically, my dad quit his factory job as 18-year-old to start his own business. It was just insane idea, but he made it work and he dragged my mom into it and my uncle and a lot of other family members, so I think a lot of my inspirations comes from him.

Josh Pigford: Do you feel like you learned some positive things about entrepreneurship or building businesses from him or is it more like things, what not to do or a mix?

Amir S.: I think I learned a bit of both. Basically, I actually never wanted to have my own business because my parents worked a lot. It wasn’t this tech business. It was a supermarket and stuff like that, where we actually had to work a lot to make it work.

Amir S.: I never actually wanted to go in and create my own business because I just had very bad experience as a kid. We wouldn’t really have vacations. I would actually work on my vacations, so it was just a bad environment, but they said, I think, it also gives you some freedom. This drive that you have that you get up in the morning and you work on your stuff and you see it grow. That’s the addicting part of starting something and building it, I think.

Josh Pigford: I think it’s one of those things that probably, as a kid, or at least, things of those with my own children that they don’t necessarily understand, as a child, maybe the positive benefits of it, but maybe when they get older, they’ll look back and at the very least, it will give them some courage or the bravery to start their own thing and not necessarily just do what everybody else is doing. At least, that’s how I look at it.

Amir S.: I think that’s a good point, Josh. I fully agree with that. Yeah.

Josh Pigford: Sure.

Amir S.: As a kid, you’re kind of ignorant of many things.

Josh Pigford: You finished up primary school, and then did you go to college?

Amir S.: Basically, the funny story is they didn’t really want to recommend me for higher education. I can understand that because I never really did my homework. I didn’t really have a good discipline to just do studies.

Amir S.: I did stuff that interest me and that wasn’t really very good for the school work, but actually, I think my parents somehow convinced the teachers that they should give me a chance, and then I went to college and after that, I went to university. Actually, in college, I actually changed a lot. I began to actually take study and learning seriously-

Josh Pigford: What do you think the difference was between primary school and university? Was it just the subject matter? You were able to focus on things that actually interested you or was it a maturity thing?

Amir S.: There was definitely a maturity thing. The thing is my parents also started a business in Denmark as well, and it was much worse than in Bosnia because we had to start from scratch, and there wasn’t economy to actually hire a lot of people, so it was very much worse than what we had in Bosnia.

Amir S.: I also learned, just by working and doing the physical work, that education and being smart was actually very, very important, and I didn’t see that in the primary school. I saw the only way I can actually succeed is investing a lot in educating myself and becoming smart, so that’s, I think, the biggest change.

Josh Pigford: What was the main thing that you studied at the university? Computer science. Okay. Got you.

Amir S.: Computer science. Yeah.

Josh Pigford: We’re putting together the timeline here. What years were you in university?

Amir S.: That’s a good question. I think maybe from 2004 up to 2007 or ’08. Actually, I quit university after the bachelor. I started to work on my master’s, and then I quit.

Josh Pigford: If I’m correct, you started what would’ve become Todoist and then Doist the company around 2007 as well. Is that right?

Amir S.: That is right. Yeah. I basically started Todoist as a student.

Josh Pigford: Was that just a scratching your own itch kind of thing to build some way to organize the things that you were working on?

Amir S.: Exactly. It was basically my own project. Todoist wasn’t my first project. I have done different others. It was basically to solve an issue I had, which was basically how to organize my life and my tasks and days in an efficient way.

Josh Pigford: You mentioned another thing that you had done other stuff too. I remember reading about a thing called Plurk, which I had not heard of, but apparently, it’s still a thing. Can you tell me about Plurk?

Amir S.: Actually, Plurk starts after …

Amir S.: Yeah, I mean, actually Plurk starts after Todoist, because I first launch the Todoist, and then I cannot ran it for a few months. Then I got an offer that I couldn’t really refuse as being cofounder of this social network, and I kind of joined it mostly just to learn. Yeah, and that’s the story of Plurk, and I kind of worked on Plurk for almost three years before I quit and returned back to Todoist. Yeah.

Josh Pigford: I mean, I assume Todoist … It still existed for those three years, right?

Amir S.: Yeah, yeah. I ran it during the night, but I didn’t really do huge features or something like that.

Josh Pigford: Sure. So what was the motivation, I guess, to build, essentially on a really, really basic level, overly simplified basic level, to do software? I mean, what sort of was the impetus for you to do that versus using something else that already existed?

Amir S.: I mean, the truth is I looked at the existing solutions and I didn’t really like any of them, so I thought actually I could build something that was better, and that kind of fitted more how I would work and use the software. Yeah.

Josh Pigford: There’s this three year period or so where you’re working on Plurk during the day and basically Todoist at night. Is Todoist growing in that timeframe?

Amir S.: I mean, honestly, I didn’t have really any metrics. What I would do is I would just look at my SQL table and just sometimes I would just do a query to see how many users there were. Yeah.

Josh Pigford: Right.

Amir Todoist Twitter

Amir S.: So I didn’t really care that much, and I wasn’t very focused on it. Yeah, so basically, it was just a service I provided to people and I didn’t really care much about the growth or the numbers.

Josh Pigford: Sure. Which is, I mean, that’s kind of a nice time. It’s not nearly as stressful. Once you start looking at numbers of things, that introduces a certain level of stress, or it can.

Amir S.: Yeah. I definitely agree with that. I think maybe we are too driven by numbers and the beauty about starting something, especially as ignorant, is that you don’t really care about that. You care about the experience, the product, the features, but you don’t really care that much about numbers. Yeah.

Josh Pigford: Yeah. Totally. Once you finish up the few years at Plurk, did you leave Plurk because you had decided, “Hey, I’m gonna give Todoist a actual shot,” and so that’s when you sort of formed this company around it, or did you just decide you were done with Plurk? Were you just done with Plurk, or was it you were instead drawn away from it by the prospect of what Todoist could become?

Amir S.: I mean, actually, the story gets even more weird, because …

Josh Pigford: Okay.

Amir S.: I mean, basically, I was not into social networks, and the more I worked on it, the more my life kind of become miserable, so I really quit, and I didn’t really have a plan B. So basically, I quit and then I went to Bosnia. My brother still lives there, and I kind of stayed there for a few months, and then somehow I submitted an application for Start-Up Chile in this timeframe. So basically, Plurk was kind of like a hurting and I just want to get away from everything.

Josh Pigford: Yep.

Amir S.: I submit a random application for Start-Up Chile, and then suddenly one day I got a e-mail saying that I got accepted, and that they kind of like await me in Chile.

Josh Pigford: Your application was based on Todoist, I mean, that was your startup.

Amir S.: No, it wasn’t, actually. That’s the weird part, yeah.

Josh Pigford: Oh.

Amir S.: I applied with another idea called Wedoist, which was basically project management software. Yeah, so I go to Chile, and actually, I mean, it’s so random. I didn’t know anything about Chile and I didn’t even know if I wanted to go there.

Josh Pigford: Wait, so how did you even get the idea to submit an application to Start-Up Chile?

Amir S.: Well, I saw it on Hacker News, so I was just bored or something and just applied with an idea and an application, and I got accepted, yeah.

Josh Pigford: The ultimate rabbit hole to go run down. You end up in another country.

Amir S.: Yeah, exactly. So I go to Chile and I work on this idea called Wedoist, and then I work for it for a few months, and I can actually see that it does not really move anywhere, and also the whole design is kind of desktop-centric, and at this point mobile becomes really, really a huge thing, and I can see I actually need to reimplement everything to support mobile, probably. Then I look at Todoist, and I can see actually that Todoist has a lot of users, I think maybe 300,000 sign ups at that point, and there’s also a business model because I didn’t want to pay for the server costs, so basically people had a premium version. So that’s when I actually decide that I’m actually going to try to make this a living and just fully focus on that. Yeah.

Josh Pigford: I mean, did it surprise you, the 300,000 number, when you … I assume you ran an SQL query and realized, “Oh, gosh, I’ve got hundreds of thousands of users.”

Amir S.: Yeah, I mean, that kind of surprised me, yeah, because I didn’t really care that much about it, and actually the truth is I didn’t really see it as a company potential or something that could generate a lot of money. Yeah.

Josh Pigford: Yeah. So you decide to start … Did you do essentially a pivot under Start-Up Chile, or you just finished up that whole program and then decided to start up Doist?

Amir S.: I finished up that program, and I decided to start Todoist, and I mean, actually, we didn’t really start Doist at that point. We just started to hire … I started to hire some … I mean, the first mistake was basically I tried to do mobile apps for Todoist, and I hired a outsourcing company in Romania, and basically what they returned was basically crap. I mean, it was just like I was just pulling my hair out because it was just very, very bad, and I kind of tried to push them into the right direction, but it didn’t really work out.

Amir S.: Then somehow, through some contacts inside of Chile, I found some amazing guys in Portugal that we hired on a contract basis to build the native apps for Todoist. This worked a lot better. These people actually cared about the quality and the apps they build.

Josh Pigford: Yeah.

Amir S.: Yeah, so basically a lot of the early hires was basically through Start-Up Chile or people that were in Start-Up Chile.

Josh Pigford: Okay, so you’re not looking at this as a company, but instead you’re looking at it as just like, “Hey, let’s just keep building this thing and see what happens.” So you go the native app route. At that point, did you have some sort of way to make some money off of it, or was it still everything was still free?

Amir S.: Well, I mean, we had this Todoist Premium, and actually, very early on, when I returned back, I learned a lot in the three or four years I was away, so I could actually easily scale the business because I could just go in and optimize stuff. So I think very early on, I kind of scaled the revenues from maybe a few thousand to maybe over 10 thousand or something like that per month, and that actually gave me enough cash to actually go out and hire people.

Amir S.: But, I mean, it’s insane, the quality of people that I actually hired were very, very good, and I don’t really know how I could convince them to start on such a low budget, because I mean, I told them, “I can only probably pay you for a few months, and I can only pay a few thousand dollars,” or something like that for a complete Android app or an iOS app, and today you need to probably spend hundreds of thousands to actually build something.

Josh Pigford: What was sort of the impetus for Todoist to really take off to where you’re able to start hiring more? Or was it just this really slow and steady sort of growth?

Amir S.: I mean, initially, there was a lot of low hanging fruit we could improve, I mean, such as landing pages, like a premium page, and stuff like that, just optimizing the low hanging fruits. Then another thing is also mobile. We went all in on mobile, and built native apps that are really good and that kind of created very amazing distribution channels, because just mobile was growing on a exponential rate, so being part of the whole mobile movement was really great for us, yeah.

Josh Pigford: So at that point was the monetization … has it always been sort of a monthly subscription kind of thing, or did you ever charge for the apps themselves, or … ?

Amir S.: I mean, it was always the subscription thing, and actually the funny part is I think we kind of set the pricing for the whole task management space. I set it based on a gut feeling, and a lot of the others, I think they just copied us, yeah. I mean, yeah, it’s based very random.

Josh Pigford: Sure. Now Doist as a company, I mean, how many people are working there now?

Amir S.: I think we have about 60, maybe a bit more, yeah, spread around 25 countries, a lot of time zones, and we are just working all remotely.

Josh Pigford: Did you set out from the start to go the remote route, or did you just sort of stumble into that?

Amir S.: I stumbled into that, yeah, randomly, but it should be said that Plurk was also a remote-first company, and …

Josh Pigford: So you were comfortable with that idea from the start, too?

Amir S.: Yeah, yeah. The thing is I lived in Chile at that point, and I couldn’t find any talent.

Josh Pigford: Okay.

Amir S.: Local talent.

Josh Pigford: Yeah.

Amir S.: So I had either to relocate to San Francisco or New York or something like that, or I had to actually find people around the world, and I chose the last part.

Josh Pigford: Yeah, yeah. So what for you has been … What’s been the most rewarding part for you of running a remote team at your size?

Amir S.: I think the freedom is definitely a huge part. So, basically, yeah, I’m a new dad, and you know. I think you have five kids or something like that, so you know…

Josh Pigford: It feels like it. I’ve got three. I’ve got two teenagers and a eight year old, so it feels like I’ve got five kids.

Amir S.: Okay, so I mean three or five, it’s probably the same complexity, I can imagine.

Josh Pigford: It feels the same, yes.

Amir S.: Yeah, so basically, I’m a new dad and I mean, for me, the flexibility of just not having to go into work at a specific time, not having to leave work at a specific time, it’s just a gift.

Josh Pigford: Sure.

Amir S.: So I think also my son will take advantage of that, because I can spend a lot more quality time with him, and I think if I had a office environment it would be much harder to pull that off.

Josh Pigford: For sure. How has being a parent, I mean, even though … How old’s your son now? I mean, well, a few months?

Amir S.: Seven months, yeah.

Josh Pigford: Seven months.

Amir S.: Yeah.

Josh Pigford: So how has being a parent even just for seven months changed how you run your company?

Amir S.: That’s very hard to answer, because I mean personally I don’t think it has changed much, but I think it has … I think maybe I value much more the work-life balance right now, and also just not trying to, I mean, to just want everything and want growth and stuff like that. I think I’m probably much happier right now just building something sustainably and enjoying the growth of my son and enjoying that aspect. Before, I think I was a lot more focused on just building the company and a lot of the energy was spent on the products or the company or just myself.

Josh Pigford: Yeah.

Amir S.: So maybe becoming less selfish as well.

Josh Pigford: Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative). I think it adds some perspective just to sort of life in general, that in the grand scheme of things …

Josh Pigford: … roll, that in the grand scheme of things, some random AB test or whatever growth rate … I mean, it matters in the context of the company, but in the grand scheme of things, it just doesn’t matter, you know?

Amir S.: I fully agree with that. Yeah.

Josh Pigford: It’s probably been close to a year now, but you guys started working on and then launched a second product called Twist, right?

Amir S.: Yeah, yeah.

Josh Pigford: So what was the impetus to make a totally separate product?

Amir S.: Yeah. I mean, the truth is, we used Slack for, I think, maybe two years and we didn’t really see how it could solve the issues that we faced as a remote-first team. So basically, it’s a synchronized communication tool, and what you want in a remote-first companies, is synchronized communication.

Josh Pigford: Right.

Amir S.: And then we look at the market and everybody was focusing on realtime chat. And we thought, this is insane. This isn’t actually going to be the future, and there was no solutions that could actually solve our problem, so that’s when we actually decided to do our own product. And basically, we were building it for ourselves.

Amir S.: So that’s basically the origin story. And we actually started Twist before anybody actually cared about mindful communication or addictive apps or something like that.

Josh Pigford: Right.

Amir S.: And I still think the majority of people don’t really care that much about it, but I think they will very soon.

Josh Pigford: When you guys started building Twist, was the plan to turn it into another product or was it just to make it this internal tool to solve your own problem?

Amir S.: I think it was always the plan to actually launch this as a new product, but I mean, if you actually think about this, if you read any books, they will actually not recommend to do this strategy that we did, which is basically start a new product without having finished your old product.

Josh Pigford: Right.

Amir S.: So because it’s just spending all our resources, spreading your focus to things and stuff like that, but we felt so attached to this idea and we really needed a solution that we basically wanted to develop this.

Josh Pigford: If it wasn’t Twist, was it going to be another product, too? I mean, I think of you guys, you’ve had Doist as the company, almost like this umbrella for what has just been one product, Todoist, but you had set yourself up anyways, to be able to spit out other products, too. Had you had that in the back of your head early on?

Amir S.: No, definitely. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, we don’t actually want to be a one product company.

Josh Pigford: Right.

Amir S.: Because, I mean our ultimate goal is basically to solve the problem of organization, both personal and team, and then the problem of communication, so the scope is very, very broad. And we also think that we can solve this by using a first principle thinking, so basically, designing stuff from the ground up. I mean, if you look actually at Twist, a lot of the things is basically not found in many other products, or maybe any other product.

Amir S.: So that’s at least how we think. And even right now, we are doing some experiments on how to actually organize our teams, and maybe we will have another product that’s related to this, or basically a team organization, team planning and stuff like that.

Josh Pigford: You’ve got a team of 60 plus people. How do you split or figure out how to prioritize how many resources to put towards Todoist versus Twist versus other things?

Amir S.: I mean, the thing is, Twist has been developed by maybe five people, six people, for two years before the launch.

Josh Pigford: Okay.

Amir S.: So basically it was a small SWAT team inside the company that did this, so that’s how we did it. And right now, we’re struggling a bit because we need to scale both Todoist and Twist and that creates some issues.

Josh Pigford: Sure. So what’s the next year look like for, I guess, Doist as a company, but also the products as well?

Amir S.: The thing is, we want to make Twist even better and really launch it properly, because we have still iterated on it and we have, I think, about a thousand teams using it right now. So we have more feedback and we know where we need to focus. So hopefully we will make it even better.

Amir S.: And for Todoist, we are doing something called Todoist foundations, which is basically rethinking some of the core stuff inside Todoist. So I mean, the thing is, Todoist is a 10 year old product, or maybe even more, 11 years, so it has a lot of garbage that we want to remove and replace. So that’s basically it for Todoist.

Amir S.: And then we also have Todoist Business, which is basically task management for teams, and we want to improve that. And for Doist itself, I mean, we want to promote the remote-fist thinking and spread it around the world, and we hope to see more companies join us.

Josh Pigford: Can you venture that Todoist has been around, in some form or fashion, for basically 10 years. I mean, that’s pretty rare for a company or product or anything to still exist 10 years after its inception. Why do you think that’s the case?

Josh Pigford: I mean, I think a lot of times, founders, either they get burned out so they decide to sell their company, or they get some big offer and decide, “Hey, I’ll go try something else with all this money,” or whatever. What’s kept you focused for a decade on this same product or goal?

Amir S.: That’s a great question. And I mean, I have written an article called, Why We Don’t Have an Exit Strategy. So basically, I have never done this with an exit strategy mind. I don’t actually want to exit this, so I think this makes it much easier to actually focus on the long-term. And I hope it will be around in 10, 20 or maybe even 50 years, or even more.

Amir S.: So that’s my way of thinking. I think a lot of founders are way too short-term focused-

Josh Pigford: Yep.

Amir S.: … and just personal gain focused, and they don’t really look at the big picture. So I mean, I think it’s a huge advantage that we can actually think about things and think, “What can we actually achieve in 10 years from now,” instead of thinking, “How can we sell this company in 10 years from now?”

Josh Pigford: Yeah. Well you had mentioned that you guys, when we talking about multiple products, that you’re wanting to solve this higher-level problem of personal or team organization and communication and all that stuff.

Josh Pigford: So I mean, I think having this guiding light or this, at least, a mission that can help keep you focused on things probably helps with staying focused.

Amir S.: Definitely, Josh. I think the problems that we are solving are really, really hard to solve, so it’s not possible to solve it very fast.

Josh Pigford: Right.

Amir S.: And I have actually never been very bored about this because the scope is just so big.

Josh Pigford: Yeah. So to start wrapping it up here, so a question I like to talk to people about, or ask them about is, what’s a topic that when somebody asks you about it, gets you really excited? In fact, for me, it’s autonomous cars. When we start talking about the future of autonomous cars, I can start freaking out in a good way.

Josh Pigford: So I’m curious, what for you is this topic, whether it’s technology, whether it’s business, whether it’s anything else, what gets you super excited at the moment?

Amir S.: That’s a good question. I think in general, my interests are very broad, so a lot of stuff excites me. But probably the most exciting thing is, if I can actually learn something new, and especially something that can help me grow as a person.

Amir S.: So I mean, this can be technology-focused, it can be economy-focused or just thinking-focused. I mean, for instance, it could be an interesting book. Recently, I got recommended the new book by Steven Pinker, which I’m really looking forward to read. So stuff like that.

Josh Pigford: I think it’s really interesting that probably most founders that I talk to, a common attribute is loving to learn new things. I mean, you kind of have to be that way anyways to be in the position because you’re always wearing lots of different hats, so you have to be able to learn lots of different things. Yeah, that’s a pretty common thing across the board.

Amir S.: I fully agree. And I hope this won’t only be a founder thing, but I think most people should actually just focus on that aspect because, I think actually one of the things that has really helped me in life is basically the ability to learn and read stuff and get smarter.

Josh Pigford: Yeah. To me that’s probably a core thing that I want my kids to learn is to be good at learning, or to know how to, when you’ve got some random thing that you might be interested in learning, that you can go and figure out how to teach yourself how to do it. To me, that’s a pretty crucial thing as a parent, but also even when hiring. I want to hire people who are really great at just learning and love to learn new things.

Amir S.: I fully agree with that, Josh. I also hope my son will have a huge passion for learning.

Josh Pigford: Yep. Well cool. Well, how can people get in touch?

Amir S.: I think probably Twitter is the best way. So I’m at Amix, A-M-I-X, 3K. And you can follow me and also message me.