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▶ 71:12 · Developer Tools · CLI renaissance driven by agents; full-codebase context reviews beat diff-only tools
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Todoist: medio millón de clientes, 30M ARR y cero inversión | #423

2026-04-13 · 8 company · 5 thematic
sentiment
3 bull1 bear4 neu
speakers
amir salihefendić

Amir Salihefendić founded Todoist in 2007 as a university side project. He grew it to 500k paying users, ~$30M ARR, and 100 employees without any outside funding. He retains ~80% ownership with 20% allocated to employees via buybacks. Born in Bosnia, raised in Denmark, lived in Taiwan, Chile, Portugal, now Barcelona. Advocates bootstrapping, remote/async work, hands-on leadership, and founder independence over VC-driven growth.

now playing · Developer Tools
Venture Capitalheadwindscore 7/10amir salihefendić
European employee equity undervaluation vs US incentives creates structural disadvantage
Amir argues European employees don't value equity like US counterparts, making recruitment harder. He criticizes Basecamp's no-equity model as unfair. Todoist's 20% employee pool + buybacks…
SaaS Business Modelstailwindscore 9/10amir salihefendić
Bootstrapped $30M ARR compounder rejects VC, optimizes for founder freedom and craft
Amir explicitly rejects VC terms that demand unicorn trajectories, preferring independence, profitable growth (23% YoY, targeting 25%), and a 20-year compounding journey. Employee wealth vi…
Enterprise AI Adoptiontailwindscore 8/10amir salihefendić
Building for human-agent collaboration via MCP, CLI, and decision-extraction AI
Todoist invests heavily in Model Context Protocol (MCP), command-line clients, and APIs so agents can operate as first-class users — assigning tasks, querying state, communicating. New Comm…
AI Coding Agentstailwindscore 8/10amir salihefendić
Multi-model code review bot cuts human review load; agents now write most code
Todoist built 'Dubot' using Opus, GPT-4, and Gemini to review every PR with full codebase context, synthesizing the best feedback. AI now handles first-pass reviews (10-30 min each, ~$1-2),…
Developer Toolstailwindscore 7/10amir salihefendić
CLI renaissance driven by agents; full-codebase context reviews beat diff-only tools
Todoist's CLI client is 'very popular' because agents (Claude Code) use it natively. Their review bot ingests the entire codebase, not just diffs, without quality degradation — more context…