Amir Salihefendic

Who is Amir Salihefendic?

Amir Salihefendic is the founder and CEO of Doist, the company behind the productivity app Todoist and the team-communication tool Twist. He is one of the more distinctive voices in SaaS because he has built a global, fully distributed business around a single conviction: that the way teams communicate matters as much as what they build. In his SaaStock talk he joined from Santiago, Chile, and opened by tracing his own roots, recalling that he was born in Tuzla, a small town in Bosnia known for a striking old quarter, a castle perched at the top of the town, and a large waterfall running through its center. That international, peripatetic background runs through both his personal story and the way he has chosen to run his company from no single fixed office.

Salihefendic founded Doist in 2007 and grew it without the venture-backed playbook that dominates most SaaS narratives, building a profitable, product-led business serving millions of users who rely on Todoist to organize their work and personal lives. Rather than concentrate talent in one headquarters, he assembled a team spread across dozens of countries and time zones, which forced him to confront remote work and its tradeoffs years before the rest of the industry did.

His SaaStock session, "How asynchronous communication will transform your remote work," reflects that hard-won experience. This page collects Amir Salihefendic's recorded SaaStock talks with transcripts, so founders and operators can hear his thinking on remote work, async communication, and building a durable productivity company in his own words.

About Doist

Doist is a productivity software company best known for Todoist, one of the most widely used task-management apps in the world, and Twist, a team-communication tool built deliberately around asynchronous, threaded conversation rather than always-on real-time chat. The two products express a single worldview: that helping people and teams stay organized requires reducing noise and protecting deep, focused work.

What sets Doist apart is not only its products but how the company itself operates. From early on, Salihefendic ran Doist as a fully remote, globally distributed organization, with team members working across many countries and time zones. That structure made asynchronous communication a necessity rather than a preference, and it became central to both the company's internal culture and the design philosophy behind Twist. Operating this way long before remote work went mainstream gave Doist a head start in understanding what genuinely sustainable distributed work looks like.

In his SaaStock talk, Salihefendic argues that asynchronous communication is the key to making remote work effective, allowing teams to collaborate across geographies without the constant interruptions and meeting overhead that erode productivity. The themes that recur across his work, deliberate communication, respect for focus time, and building a company that can thrive without a shared physical office, all flow directly from the way Doist has been built and run.

Key lessons from Amir Salihefendic's talks

Asynchronous communication is the foundation of effective remote work. Salihefendic's central argument is that distributed teams do not fail because of distance, they fail when they try to recreate the synchronous, always-on rhythm of an office across time zones. Embracing async as the default unlocks the real advantages of remote work.

Design your tools and culture around protecting deep work. Doist built Twist around threaded, asynchronous conversation precisely because constant real-time chat fragments attention. The lesson for founders is that the communication tools and norms you adopt directly shape whether your team can do focused, meaningful work.

A global, distributed team is a strategic choice, not a compromise. By building Doist as a fully remote company spanning many countries and time zones, Salihefendic turned what many treat as a constraint into a competitive advantage, accessing talent everywhere and forcing the discipline that makes async work.

Build the company you actually want to run. Salihefendic's path with Doist, profitable, product-led, and remote-first by conviction rather than circumstance, shows that founders can reject the default Silicon Valley template and still build a durable, widely loved product business on their own terms.