AI Startup Pivots to AGI After Failing to Build Working To-Do List App
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Citing “a more achievable timeline,” the four-person team announced it would solve general intelligence by Q3.
By Crash Windward
SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Following 11 months of failed attempts to ship a functioning to-do list application, the four-person team at productivity startup Tasklr announced Tuesday that it would be pivoting directly to artificial general intelligence, citing “a more achievable timeline.”
“The checkbox feature kept un-checking itself, and honestly, debugging that was a nightmare,” said co-founder and CEO Trevor Aldous, 26, who has not slept indoors since March. “But AGI? That’s just one big model. You point it at the internet and it figures everything out. There’s way less front-end work.”
The pivot, which the company is describing internally as “going back to fundamentals,” came after Tasklr burned through its $4.1 million seed round building a product that two beta users described as “worse than a Post-it note” and “actively hostile to deadlines.”
According to a leaked deck, the company’s revised roadmap includes:
- Q3 2026: Achieve general intelligence
- Q4 2026: Achieve superintelligence
- Q1 2027: Re-attempt to-do list app, this time with AGI doing it
- Q2 2027: Series A
“We were thinking too small,” said Aldous, gesturing at a whiteboard that read ‘ALIGNMENT = LATER’ in dry-erase marker. “Why compete in the crowded task-management space when you can compete with God?”
Investors have responded enthusiastically. “A to-do list is a $30 million outcome on a good day,” explained one Sand Hill Road partner who had previously passed on the checkbox product. “AGI is a, uh — it’s a bigger number. I don’t have the number. The number doesn’t exist yet. That’s how big it is.”
The company’s lone engineer, who asked not to be named, said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the new direction. “I couldn’t get the date picker to work,” he said. “But sure, let’s do consciousness.”
At press time, Tasklr had raised an additional $60 million on the strength of a one-page memo titled “What If Smart But More,” and Aldous had already begun planning the company’s eventual safety team, which he confirmed would consist of “whoever’s free.”