Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO)

My belief is that any domain or industry, the more it matters, the more the design matters. What happens is whenever there's a new paradigm, I don't know, it's like the mobile or the web or something, the first iterations of those products existing there, they don't have to be super well designed necessarily because they are the first. But then as you build the hundred thousand different email clients, any email client now has to be pretty good to be even considered. reasonable like an email client. It's like that the bar is so high. So I think like today it's almost like a very basic thing now. Pretty much from the very beginning you need like pretty high level design that people to even like pay attention or consider you seriously.

Today my guest is Kari Särinen. Kari was the founding designer, Coinbase principal designer at Airbnb, co-founder of two previous startups. and most recently is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, which I am fairly confident is the fastest growing and most beloved issue tracking tool in the world, and something that a growing number of product teams are using to build their own product. Kari and his team are building their company and their product in a really unique way, with a huge focus on craft and quality, no AB tests, no metrics-based goals, instead a focus on taste and opinions. Also, no durable cross-functional teams, instead teams assemble around a project and then disperse once it's done. Also, they have just one product manager as a head of product, and that's it. In our conversation, Kari shares how he built a culture around quality and craft, how he makes trade-offs, and how he operationalizes quality and thoughtfulness. Where design can be a differentiator in competing against incumbents. We talk about something called the linear method of building product, which is big on building opinionated software, working in consistent cycles, amongst other principles. We also get into Linear's unique hiring approach, which involves a paid work trial where candidates work alongside the team for a number of days. instead of just having an interview. Also, a glimpse into how Linear got their first 10 customers, found product-market fit, and scaled their growth engine. There is so much gold in this episode, I am very excited for you to hear it. With that, I bring you Kari Saarinen, after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Mercury, who I also happen to use for my business checking account. I've tried a lot of business banks, and there is nothing even close to the experience you get with Mercury. I moved cash over from another bank, and it literally took less than half an hour to set up the account and wire money over at no cost. They kind of make you want to use the site more often, which I've never felt with another banking site. Mercury is banking engineered for the startup journey, a modern solution to help your company become the best version of itself. And Mercury isn't just a place to hold and send money. It's software built to help you scale with safety and stability, whether you're a team of two or a team of a thousand. Mercury also goes beyond banking to provide you with access to the foremost investors, operators, and tools. Visit mercury.com to join over 100,000 startups on Mercury, the powerful and intuitive way for ambitious companies to bank. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank, banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank Trust, members FDIC. This episode is brought to you by Composer, the AI-powered trading platform now with retirement accounts. Algorithmic trading has historically been reserved for the hedge fund elite. Now with Composer, you can automate your trading with a library of over 1,000 strategies. that are easy to understand and tweak using an AI assistant and visual editor. Composer is the first ever algorithmic trading platform where you don't need any coding experience. It includes a full range of trading indicators for you to get creative and a Discord community of 2500 traders to discuss your ideas with. Composer also has a powerful backtester to see the historical performance of your strategies, and you can then invest with a single click. Once you invest, Composer will automatically trade for you based on the logic of your strategy. With $1 billion in trading volume in over 1 million trades executed. Composer already has many big time investors using the platform regularly. Head to composer.trade and use the code Lenny for an extra week of free trial on your Composer membership. That's composer.trade. Kari, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Well, thanks Lenny, it's great to be here.

Maybe to start, set a little context. Could you just explain what is Linear? What does Linear do? And then share maybe a few stats of just the scale of Linear at this point.

So Linear is the project and issue tracking system that software companies and technical teams love to use. We help software companies to build software. We started 2019. Today, some of the top growth companies, Block, Vercel, Ramp, Retool, Mercury, and Substack are building with Linear. We also additionally have lots of other companies, like thousands of other companies using Linear. These companies can be very early stage team, like some companies just graduated from YC or a public company. And just briefly, why we created Linear is that you said, I work with you at the RMP and before that I work at Coinbase and Before that, I had my own startup and all of us founders, there's three of us, we had a similar path where we worked in multiple different companies in different stages. And what we saw often is that the tools available for managing software projects weren't that really cutting it. I think a lot of them felt very clunky or complex or just they had this kind of legacy. way of thinking about software development. And so we just felt like we should do something about it. And that's so with Linear, we set out to do, like build this most frictionless and streamlined system for modern software development. I'm also happy to share that we've been profitable the last two years. And we also have this thing where we actually have this net negative lifetime burn rate, which means that we just have more cash in the bank today than we have raised. I think a lot of startups, usually the normal way is that you raise money and then you need to spend it to build it. But I think since we were able to build a business pretty early on, we've been able to be in this position that actually we haven't spent any money on building the business.

That is insane. I didn't even know that. Okay, so for all those reasons, A lot of founders and a lot of product leaders look up to the way Linear builds product and the way you think about product. And so to kind of frame this conversation, there's three areas I want to dive into. One is just how you approach building product. Two is how you go about building the team and the business in general. And then three is just how you grow Linear. And to start, I want to talk about craft. Clearly one of the biggest reasons that people look up to Linear and use Linear is the quality of the user experience and the product. and I know your team puts a lot of emphasis on craft and user experience. I imagine that also comes at the cost of some trade-offs, like takes probably longer to get stuff out the door, you're probably losing sales because people are waiting for a feature and you're not ready to launch it yet because you want to make it better. What have you learned about creating space for craft and building product that is really, really great?

Yeah, and I think it's interesting that those things that you mentioned, like hiring, building business and building product and craft is like, I think that all of those are somewhat related. to each other. But so what I can say about the product craft per se is like it's definitely like starts with the people that like on the on the hiring front, we always look for people that care about it as a business. Like why we really care about it is that like we see that collaboration only happens if people use the product and like our product, which is supposed to help the collaboration coordination. If there's friction or the experience isn't that great or there's this little paper cuts, I think it gets really annoying for people to use. And so we think for the business to be successful, the quality is in the graph is very important. There's definitely trade-offs sometimes. There can be, for example, timelines. We are about to launch something and then, for example, I or someone else goes to look at it and sees like, oh, this doesn't feel right. And we should fix it, so I don't think we should launch this now. So sometimes it doesn't definitely push that. timeline, but this might be days. It's not like we need to redo everything. The other way we think about it, it's like we are actually very okay pushing things out to ourselves and for a small group of customers if they opt into that. So whenever we build a new feature, one of the things is we don't want to spend tons of time upfront just designing it and polishing it perfectly. because we actually believe that when you start building the thing, you actually start realizing more how it should work and how it should be better. So a lot of times with the teams, we tell them just put it there in the first week, almost like after you have some kind of designs in place or some kind of design ideas, just put it into the app and ship it to production, but only visible to us. So we internally can test it out. And then I think the next stage is we look for a customer that could be interested in this feature or we just ask people to opt in to some kind of better program. And in those stages, the experience can be a little janky or it's not that polished, but we're okay with it because we are saying it's not finished. We just want to get your feedback early so we can make it better. But once we get to the full general release, then we pay more attention to the actual polish or the craft.

That is so interesting. I didn't know you did that. So you actually go ahead and launch things really early to a select group of people that want the early stuff. And then did you say that you find one customer to kind of co-create and help evolve the feature and change with?

Yeah, usually it can be one or it's like three or five or ten. So it's often especially with the larger company, like larger company facing features. We usually do try to find a large company because sometimes it's hard to imagine these things, how they should work. And so it's better if someone is willing to work with us to explain, okay, this is how we do something. And something like, for example, we worked this way with Vercel that there were some changes they wanted to see in the roadmap feature. So we worked with them to to improve it and then they could give us feedback along the way.

That is so interesting because I think people seeing Linear from the outside, it feels like you just take the time you need to build something awesome and then it launches and it's amazing and it's great. But it turns out that isn't exactly how you build. You actually do launch things really early and people don't necessarily see it until it's done, but there's this whole process behind the scenes.

Yeah, I think sometimes people can't think that craft is about perfecting things and perfecting them in a very organized way or very early on. The downside with this perfection mindset is that it can be sometimes hard to put anything out because nothing is ever fully perfect. And so we try to balance this thinking with the fact that we should be always pushing things out very quickly, but then also fixing them, improving them very quickly. So it's almost like the opposite ideas, but then we try to kind of combine that. And I think it's been working well that generally in the company, there is not necessarily a lot of reviews or something that we always review everything that gets shipped this way because we do want people to feel that they can put something in the app and then we can try it out. So it's more like, let's just try it out. But then, yeah, we do need to look at it again before we release it to everyone.

A lot of founders, a lot of product leaders, a lot of designers definitely want to create space for craft and making products. Really great, something they're really proud of. But in practice, it's really hard. Very few teams and companies do this. Is there anything else you've learned about creating space for this sort of thing and prioritizing it for founders that are listening that are trying to instill more and more of this? Or do you have to be a designer CO like Ari and there's really, it's hard to do otherwise.

Yeah, I don't think actually it's not purely coming from me. So I think they all of us founders, like Jori and Thomas, in additionally their background is engineering, but I would say they actually have almost like, I think they spend even more time on the details than sometimes I do. I think very early on when it was three of us, I would be the one doing the broad strokes designs. This is how the UI works and this is how the some of the things work and that they were the ones that like, oh, there should be animation here and there should be like this kind of thing here. So I think it's kind of like that DNA I think comes from all of us. And I think like with the Craft, it's always starts with like people need to care about it. Like if it's not valued in the company, then it's very hard to do for anyone to do because people don't feel like it's valued. And I gave this advice to some founder, he was asking me about it. And in their case, their founders were coming from different companies. Maybe this one founder came from Airbnb and then the other ones came from Facebook and Amazon. And I think for example, I think Facebook and Amazon have a very different culture on quality or craft or shipping. And I think where I said to them, you need to align on it. It's like you cannot run a company with multiple different kinds of cultures. I think I made some points, like why the quality is important for certain kind of products and you should all kind of believe in that and then instill that with everyone you hire. The other thing I would say that what we like to do is we actually don't have much BMs in a company. We only have one. And we can talk more about it, but one of the things I think that happens is when you build a team and you start creating these very specific roles for everything where I think that often the PM can be the one that figuring things out and making decisions and guiding the team, but they're not the ones building the feature. So they're not there looking at it the whole day. It's like, where does this button go or how does it work? And I think a lot of that, this graph for us happens when we give the project team this like ownership and the project team is just engineering and design. And then when they start building that feature, they start seeing these opportunities that this thing could be better. Like a good example of this is like we, one of our engineers, Andreas, like when we were building this right click menu in the app, so you can right click different things and under that you have sub menus. Like macOS does this well, whereas like when you, menu, open that menu, you hover on the menu and then you want to go to the sub menu. So you hover to the right. You don't have to go exactly horizontally to get into that menu. You can actually go diagonally or you don't actually have to hit the menu exactly. There's this kind of safe zone. But a lot of software just implements, hey, let's do this menu, let's make the sub menu. It only works if you exactly hover over the menu. And then what happens is the user often misses with few pixels what they were trying to do. So what Andreas did, which we didn't tell him to do, is like, yeah, this kind of sucks and we should make this better. And so he figured out a way to create those safe areas that are dynamic based on the sub-menu positioning and everything. So it's much easier now. You can go diagonally to the actual thing you want to go to. So I think these kind of things happen when you give people more of the ownership of the project and also the space to do that. And then you also have leadership or generally the company culture that values the quality or the craft.

All right. Well, I got to follow this thread. There's a couple of questions I want to ask. So you have one product manager. Would you call him the head of products?

Yeah, non- you, who is the, yeah, he is the head of product.

Awesome. So what made you decide to hire him and even have any PMs?

We started to see that, okay, we have enough features and areas of the product and also the team speaker that it's hard to keep kind of like aligned on all of these things or even keep track of things. And initially we actually hired non as a contractor to help us with this insights data tool. So we have this data tool feature built in linear so you can get data on what's happening in the workspace. And for us, like founders, we realized none of us are not super experienced in data tools, so we need someone to help out. And luckily, Nan was like, we knew him and he actually worked at Mode, which is a data tool. And so we initially hired him, can you help us figure out what exactly should this data do a tool and how should it work? Because I think there's different ways of doing that. And I think always the easiest way is let's just copy what some other company is doing. But we didn't want to do that. So we wanted to figure out what is actually a useful way to use this data or get this data. So he helped us with that. And then we kind of saw, yeah, this could be useful in other larger areas or overall with the whole product. We might have these kind of questions, like, what should we exactly be thinking around here and why and how would we define this direction and then help the teams to also align on it. So to us, it's more like he's kind of figures out the direction of the product and steers some of the efforts and not like he's there in every meeting and making every decision or writing every spec or something like that.

Another question along this line, because there's a lot of PMs listening and they're going to be like, oh shit, these guys don't need PMs or PMs is over product management dead? And so just another question along these lines. Somebody needs to do the work that a PM does, basically, right? There's all these things that is on the plate of a product manager when they're at a company. And if they're not there, other people have to do those things. And what I'm hearing is basically you give those responsibilities to the engineer, designer, and maybe other functions within the team. Is that right? Yeah.

So, I mean, definitely, I think what it means is And there is definitely trade-offs. I think sometimes when companies specialize roles a lot, it's because it's more efficient. If the engineer just spends 100% of their time coding something, then they're using their skill set to the max. But then we just think that in order to build quality things or build things in a certain way, it's actually better if people actually also spend some time thinking about things and not just executing. So yes, for every project, there's a project lead. That lead can be engineer or designer. It's not a formal role or it's not based on your whatever level or it's just you need to be a certain title that you can be that. It's more like an assignment that, okay, now you are responsible for getting the project started and working together with the team, figuring it out. and then communicating when changes or communicating how the progress happens. And so it's definitely it means that the engineers or designers also have to do these things and then do you need to communicate and then do you need to think about the scope or things? It's a different way of doing things and also not everyone wants to do that, which is fine. But we in the hiring firm try to hire people that are kind of interested in a broader scope than just like the specific skill set that they have.

Yeah, I think those last two points are really essential. People often don't want to do this work and they kind of are happy to offload it to a potential product manager. So the fact that, say, engineers have to do all these boring PM things like communicate timelines and keep PR specs aligned and make sure timelines are hit and all that stuff and run meetings. A lot of people don't want to do that. A lot of times they do. And I think in this case, people seem to really want to be doing that. The other is I think you need a really high caliber team that's very product minded and the hiring bar needs to be very, very high for, say, engineers and designers to want to do all these things and be good at them. And so I think those are two necessary ingredients for this to work out.

Yeah, sure.

For teams that want to try this sort of approach, especially startups that are kind of starting out and maybe not excited about hiring product managers. Is there anything else that you think is essential or important to functioning well without any product managers? And you're at around 50 people at this point?

Yeah, we are around 50. And probably the only thing I would say is it's like the hiring front that you really need to spend more time on it. And basically you cannot really interview engineers only for the engineering skills. You also have to interview them for the product skills. And it's obviously you cannot I think expect that people have some, like, if you do some kind of PM interview for them, they're not going to have the same kind of skill set or the same understanding of the concepts or something. But the way we've done it in the past is basically I might interview them about the product. I'm not a technical person per se. So I will just ask them questions about how did they do something or how do they think about something. And it's similar to other roles too. We just look for Do this person have opinions about products and how they work and can they form opinions and can they use their own judgment at times? And then can they communicate or articulate those things as well?

Awesome. I was just thinking, it's interesting that a tool that I don't think is designed specifically for product managers, but essentially for building products, like the infrastructure for building product in a team is built by a company that has 1BM. and very few PMs.

Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways I would say that with Linear, we're trying to help the whole company. And I think engineers is probably the largest user group of the product. And I think in some ways we want to make the PMs job easier or that they have to spend less time managing everything or the day to day, because the engineers are actually using the product and they're updating the things. It's okay for the PMs, it would be much more easier to get this, what is the state of things and maybe trust that much more because people actually use the product. So in some ways, I think we're trying to make it easier for everyone, easier for the engineers. They can focus more on their work and then for PMs, I think we're trying to make it so that they can also focus on more on other things than just, I don't know, managing the tool that they use. I think that's not the most important job of a PM. I think they should be thinking more of the, I don't know, bigger picture or other problems or figure out the next features or something.

Just one more question along these lines. There's other companies like Stripe, I think waited till 200 employees to hire, I think their first product manager, Snapchat I think is famous for something around that. Do you have any sense of if you think this might change when you think you might hire more product managers, they're kind of a plan here or is it just kind of see how it goes as you grow?

I think we will definitely hire more. It's like, I think like what I said before, it's like, I think we like to see him, the BM smart, like operating on a higher level. Like the whole company, like I think the way we trying to build it is like we have less people, but people who are more high caliber and can think about larger scope than what their current role is. So I think like it's, we're just like trying to build this like a, smaller units, but more effective units, which I think where the PMs go and there would be also less of them, and they're not there in every level. But I think in the future, as the company grows and the team grows and the product grows, we might have several PMs that are focusing on or looking at specific areas or specific types of things of the product or specific customers or something like that.

Awesome. Okay, that was a tangent because I could not go in that direction. But I want to come back to design again and craft. So it feels like linear. One of the reasons you guys have been successful is design and experience is basically a huge differentiator from other products. And there's always this question of can design be enough of a differentiator in specific markets? Is there always an opportunity to build like a significantly better product experience and have a real shot at disrupting an incumbent? Do you have any sense of when design can be enough of a differentiator? And this is coming from like a founder trying to decide, should we go big on design and experience or should we invest in like distribution or new technology or something along those lines? Any thoughts there?

My belief is that like any domain or industry, the more it matters, the more the design matters. I think like it's kind of like it's fairly easy to see in different, like if even in software or in other industries, it's like, What happens is whenever there's a new paradigm, I don't know, it's like the mobile or the web or something, the first iterations of those products existing there, they don't have to be super well designed necessarily because they are the first. But then as you build the hundreds, like thousand different email clients, any email client now has to be pretty good to be even considered reasonable, like an email client. It's like that the bar is so high. so I think like today the startups, like, I don't know if you look at like the web page Google launched with or like the web page YouTube launched with or some of these like older companies, they were very basic. If you launch that kind of website today, it's no one really pay attention. So I think like the design is always like, it's almost like a.

Very.

Basic thing now that like you from pretty much from the very beginning, you need pretty high level design that people to even pay attention or consider you seriously. And I think it's not honestly fair because sometimes it's like maybe the product is really good, but they didn't have a designer or they didn't have time to do it. And then people just kind of dismiss it because it doesn't seem like something that interests them. So I think that's the first thing is I think it is and it's going to be more and more important. But I would also say design is never going to be the reason or the reason why a company is successful. It's like the company still has to have some other things that the product still needs to be something, it needs to be better in some ways or it needs to be different in some ways. And then a design is just enabling some of these things, similar to technology. if you have good technology, it's easier to do certain things and the product works better in some ways than you having a bad technology or bad infrastructure. So similar to design, I think if you have a good design and people are, or even a good brand, people are drawn into it and then it makes some user acquisition or user retention or just even people perception of the product better. I think an example is packaging and products, like Apple or a lot of companies spend a lot of time, effort into the packaging because it already sets the expectations for the user who is receiving the product. Even before you use the product, you start thinking that this is a high quality product and I'm going to love it. And then when you actually have it, then you actually might feel that way. unless the product is really bad and then you wouldn't feel that way. So I think similar with startups or like SaaS, it's like your landing page or some of the other things, it's like they are already communicating something to the user and they're setting the expectations. And then I think that can be very useful thing, especially early on when no one really knows you or knows the product or cares about you. I think especially, I feel like design can be very good leverage in the beginning.

I think that's such an interesting insight, especially that first thing you said around how the more often and the more crowded the space is, the more opportunity there is for design to be a differentiator. Is that roughly how you think about it?

Yeah. So I mean, just think about, I don't know, any product category. It's like basically people have then lower choices and then they have higher choices. Maybe there's a specific thing they want, but a lot of people don't necessarily know what is the specific feature I want from this software? So it's more like, well, what is the best one? What is the highest quality one? And if you put things side by side and you just, people see things, people are visual. So then the design can be one of those things that stands out. It's like, well, that looks the best or that looks the most quality product to me, so I'm going to use that one. When people have a lot of choices, they probably will pick the one that looks most interesting. And then I think there is the second part is the brand, which is something that you, if you can build a brand, then I think it's like, it doesn't really, even the product almost doesn't matter. Like it's, it's, it becomes this kind of default. Like, I don't know, like, again, like Apple or Nike, it's like, yeah, there's all kinds of shoes you can buy, but there's a reason for someone to buy Nike shoes other than some, some random brand, even if the random brand would be actually a better shoe. they still buy Nike because they, I don't know, like the brand. So then I think both the design of the product, but also the design of the brand can be very strong kind of things that pull people to your company or to the product.

Is there anything you've learned about just building a brand over the course of building Linear, something you find to be really important in actually building that perception that Linear is really great and amazing.

To me, I think the brand should be always authentic and it should kind of like, I think even people, if people can't articulate it, if people start to feel like something is off, I think there can be companies or startups, they think about brands like, oh, brand is the logo or the colors of the website or something, and then they do the same thing and some other company does, and then they think, okay, now we have a brand. but you actually didn't think about what's your brand, what is the message or voice you want to talk about. And it doesn't have also the brand doesn't happen overnight. So it's basically just you start in the beginning and when you start a company, you don't have no brand. And so you have to create it. And you create it over time by the things you do, the things you say, how you say them, and what kind of how do you approach things? How do you treat customers? How do you build the website or the product? All of these things starts to build this idea, what does this company mean to me in people's heads? I know we both worked at Airbnb and I think Brian Chesky is like, I think the brand was probably the most important thing for him. And I don't know how many hours or meetings or conversations there was about the brand. And it's like the brand was always like, It's like part of everything the company does. Because it's true. It's like, yeah, you could book things, places to stay in a lot of places on the web. But when people think about, oh, I want to stay in some cool place, they're going to think about Airbnb. It's like they're not going to think about those other places. So that's the power of the brand. People stop thinking about the other things or they start understanding, okay, this is the thing for this.

That's part of the reason Airbnb's been able to build a direct destination where people aren't like Googling, I want to stay in a home. They're like airbnb.com, which gives Airbnb such a massive advantage not having to run ads on, you know, Facebook and Google or SEO. It's just like people know Airbnb and they just go straight there. There's very few sites where people go, oh, I'm gonna go straight there and look for some, knowing that they can also compare hotels and all these other sites. Coming back to design briefly, just like very practically, how do you guys do design reviews? Just like, how do you actually go about reviewing what's going at? And then to, this might be too big a question, but just whatever you can share is just like, what do you, how do you know when it's done? How do you know when it's ready and approved, Karri sealed, checkbox ready to go?

We've been doing, like exploring different ways of doing this. I think like today, I still run the design team, so I do see some of the designs, like on a weekly basis and and then I am or one of the other co-founders or the head of product, we are basically the sponsors for the projects. So then we are kind of responsible reviewing the work. And so we might just have a meeting where we go through, okay, let's go through the demo and people can explain what's going on and how they think about it and why. And then we might have feedback, okay, this seems like strange or something. And then I might just after that, I might just like go into the product myself and then like try it out. And then what happens sometimes, like it's like in the initial stages, like obviously we're not gonna like start fixing everything. It's more like let's try to get the main concept there and like figure out how it works. But then like before we are launching it, I might just go in and like try it out and like try the different states and click it around. And sometimes I find things like we were building this threading to comments and then when it looked all good in the demos and stuff, and then I went to try it and try different lengths of messages and stuff, and then I started to see, oh, sometimes the animations are kind of janky or it's just off, they don't go the right way, the screen doesn't scroll exactly right. So then I just captured those things and sent it to the team. And so we had to pull back the release a little bit until those things were fixed. That one was like, it's very, I think, a simple concept and it's a very known concept, like, okay, this is how threading comments works. So that was mostly about, okay, what's the execution of this? But then we have projects where we are not sure exactly how this should work. and we can't really try it ourselves. We also have to see how companies use it. So something like we built this feature project updates and it's a common thing companies do. It's like you need to write an update on a project. Is it yellow, green, red? And companies have very different ways of doing this in different tools. And we just thought, well, I think it would be really nice if it's inside Linear and the team, when they work on a project, they can write the update. Linar can also capture some of the stats, like what actually happened. I think with that feature, it's been working well, but then also now we've been exploring, it's like after using it a while, we think, oh, actually there could be more robust way of following these updates. Maybe the leadership could just get these updates over email, or maybe when you have a lot of updates, you should have a search or a filtering system or something. So I think a lot of times we just think, okay, this is the scope of it for now and we are okay launching this and the execution is good, but we know that this is not the fully figured out version and we just need to see people trying it out and see the feedback.

So it sounds like on the decision of whether it goes out or not, it's kind of this intuitive feeling from your actual experience trying it out, feeling gut level, this is ready or this needs a little work.

Yeah, I would say a lot of things that we do is more like that. we don't do AP testing or we don't do specifically go follow certain metrics or something. We might sometimes we do have telemetry or we can look at how people use certain things and we sometimes do that. But that's not usually the goal we have in mind. It's like, yeah, we should move this number this much. So it's more about based on the understanding of the problem we have and based on the what we think is right. Is this the right solution and is this a good enough solution to be released to the customers?

One more question along this thread is how do you actually structure these reviews? It sounds like you go straight to a prototype. Is there like a design review phase? Is it all kind of informal and people just review, here's what we need your feedback on?

Yeah, so there isn't like projects don't necessarily have like specific states to them, but like I would say roughly usually we do start with design. So there's some explorations on the design. Okay, there's different ways that we could approach this or sometimes there's just one way because it's pretty clear. But then what I said before is that we do try to get into the building phase as quickly as possible because then we can also see is this direction actually reasonable and what else does it cause? Is there some problems it causes? how does it just generally feel here? So I think that there isn't specific review stages. It's more like, yeah, let's check on this project every week or every two weeks. And then before releasing, let's also make a review of it and really test it out that is it the quality we want?

Awesome. So that's a good segue to another area I want to spend some time, which is the linear method. you espouse this way of building product that you call the linear method, which you publish online and will link to in the show notes. And I just want to ask a few questions around this way of building product. One is you are big on this idea of building opinionated software. Can you talk about just what does that mean? And then maybe give an example or two of how you actually have done that linear.

So first, like with the linear method, what we why did we create it in the first place? It's like we just believe that there is more of this modern ways of building software and thinking about it and we wanted to share some of our thinking on it. And that's kind of also it relates to how we built Linear as well. So you might understand why we make some choices because this is the way we think about making these choices. So we are trying to share our thinking behind the product and not just like, here's the product. figure it out.

Yeah.

So the opiniated piece, I personally have this belief that productivity software should be, and especially company software should be opiniated. I think that what the productivity software is trying to do is make people productive. And I think what productive means is you actually do something that matters for the company, which is build some new feature or fix something or design something. All of those things are eventually they provide some kind of value for the customer. I think there is this ideas or notions in the world that flexible software is great. I think it can be great sometimes, but what happens is people start spending a lot of time figuring things out. How does this feature work? You can use it in 10 different ways and then every team or everyone figures out the different way of doing it. So our thinking is like, we like to provide this good defaults or good opinions. This is how the feature works and this is how the workflow works. So you as a user or as a team don't have to think about it. And you can focus on the work you do. And the other thing is my design mantra is always design something for someone. It's very hard to design everything for everyone because you just end up with a very generalized solution. So then what we're trying to do with the opionated solution is that that's the best solution or the most optimized solution we think of. And then when you use it, hopefully you agree and you can feel that it's most optimized. So being opionated, I think the value it provides people is you don't have to think too much like, or spend more time on the tool than you do on your actual work.

And then another core element of the linear method is something called cycles. And linear is all around this idea of creating cycles and working in cycles. You talk about what is a cycle and how it works at linear.

So, for example, like the cycles, it's optional. Like not every team has to use it or not the whole company has to use it, but it's there as you can turn it on or off. basically, I think why we created Cycles is that I think any team that works on software or some other products, you always have almost infinite list of things to do and that list gets longer every day. And it can be sometimes very distracting for the individual or for the team to decide, like, what, there's a new thing coming in, like, should we work on that or should we work on this other thing we decided in the past? So the cycles is just a way to say that for the next week or the next two weeks or whatever timeframe, we are going to work on these things and these are the things we think are the priority or the focus for this timeframe. And then the team can kind of try to focus on those things. Now, if something happens, I don't know, we really need to jump on this other thing, at least there was some kind of initial state that we We decided before we want to do these things and then now something else happened. And so now we had to go on this thing. So, so you have like a answer when someone comes to you to ask like, why didn't you do this other thing before? Then you can say, well, we did decide to do that, but then something happened and we had to do this other thing. So the cycles is like, it's very similar to sprints, but we like to call it cycles because we are not really sprinting anywhere. The cycles also run on like automated schedule. So it's like you don't have to think about like which day does it start or, or every time set it up manually. So it's just runs automatically. And so it's just meant to help the team to focus on, let's just focus on these few things and forget about the infinite list of other things that are in the background.

You mentioned earlier that you don't set metrics goals. And so let me dig into that a little bit. Is that true? You don't really have number goals for features, for launches and things like that? And so let me start there and then I have a follow up question.

Yeah, so we might have a company level goal sometimes, for example, weekly active users, that's a metric we want to increase or something. But in terms of specific features, we don't have goals for those. And the reason is that I think product like us or a system that is used by different kinds of companies and kind of, it's like a system made of multiple different parts and it's not necessarily like you want to optimize any specific thing about it. It's like also companies are a little bit different. So their usage of different features can differ because they just operate slightly differently or their team size is different or the setup of the team is different or the culture is different. So there's not like, I think for example, I don't know some like, Instagram or some of these apps, it's like, yeah, we need to drive engagement. And that's the main feature. That's the main metric for every feature. We don't actually have that. We just think that there should be features that help companies. And sometimes we can look at the metrics before we start working on it. Let's see what the state of things are. But we don't necessarily want to set, oh, we need to increase this specific metric by it. by X. It's more like we want to solve this problem and ideally the success way it looks like the problem, like customers agree that the problem is solved or they enjoy the solution. And it's not like that the metrics went up.

So just to summarize so far, you have no metrics, you have no experiments, you have essentially no PMs, just one product leader. You spend a lot of time on design and craft and making things awesome. I'm curious just what you think it takes to make a company work in that way, because this is pretty different from how a lot of other founders think and a lot of other product teams work.

Yeah, we like to talk about this internally, like this mixture of magic and science and how we describe it's like there's always some level of science that we do. And I think some companies are very scientific on their product management that they like to measure everything and they do do a lot of tests and things, but we just decided we don't think that's necessary or that's good for us. So the science for us means that we do talk to users a lot and the whole, any project we start with, we do some level of user research and as founders, different people on the team, we might have weekly calls with customers or users. We also encourage everyone in the team, like go to the customer Slack, they answer people questions. We have shared Slack channels with customers. We go, anyone like I sometimes go answer the questions there. I also see when they complain about something. I think the first part is like the whole team kind of has to be really understanding the product and the customers and the problems people are facing and kind of have that empathy and as well as the understanding, what is the state of things today? And then we talk about that and then sometimes we might pull up stats and see, oh, wonder, is there some kind of patterns we see? Like, okay, these kind of companies are using this thing more and what do we think about it? But usually we have some kind of question we want to answer. It's like, I wonder what is going on and then we look at it versus, let's just pull some metrics and then decide that we should increase this metric. And then the magic part is what happens when you build this understanding. Everyone in the company builds, it's not like everyone has the same understanding, but everyone builds more of that customer and product understanding. Then we have discussions like, what should we be doing? Or what decision we want to make here? Then everyone is much more informed of the actual reality of the the customers or the product. And then we think you can much more use your intuition or thinking to do those decisions. So you don't have to use data or metrics to back those things up. So that's like, I think the main thing is the whole company kind of has to be with the customers or talk to them and then understand where the product might work well or where it might fall short.

That'S what I imagined you were going to say, and I love hearing that. For someone that wants to create a similar culture, is there tactically anything you find to understand if your employees and engineers, designers have enough of that context and really understand the problem?

I mean, I think it's always like a different people, like different people in a company will have different understandings. It's not like you can expect, like, everyone, like, will every day, like, go to see everything and like has this. But like we do sometimes like sessions with the team or we do record videos with the customers, we kind of write notes and we share this with people. I feel like again, it's like fairly apparent, like if people, like if you know your customers or the product, like it's very different way you can talk about it versus like if you don't have any idea, like I think like if you don't have any idea, you probably don't even know what to say. So I think it's kind of apparently people have that. And it's not like every project we need everyone to have this understanding. It's probably usually enough if one or two people have that understanding or have different understanding of different things. So I think it's again, I feel like it's a culture thing. And I think the other thing is you kind of have to have the, you just have to kind of believe in it. I think sometimes people use data a lot or too much because they're worrying or they're afraid that will I make the wrong choice? And I'm using data to make the choice for me, but then you might still feel like this is not the right choice, but the data is telling me it's the right choice. And then turns out maybe it was the right choice or not, but it's more like, again, like a practice thing, you need to be I think the company and you need to be okay that like sometimes we make mistakes and like we made the wrong choice and then we just can fix it. But at least we made that choice and the data didn't make that choice for us.

What's interesting about this is if you've heard the episode on Ramp and how Ramp builds product with Jeff Charles, there's such different ways of building product. Ramp is all about velocity, shipping all the time, metrics, measuring everything. and your approach is almost the opposite. And I think what's interesting there is, as a takeaway, is just there's many ways to do it. You just have to do it almost fully and you have to have really specific people. It feels like the people want to work in a certain way and a lot of it, I think also is the founder has to be like natural to the way the founder operates and thinks about building and building a company.

Yeah, and for sure. And then, like, if you look at, like, successful companies and, like, Amazon is very different than Apple. and how they operate, and I think both of them are successful, but not in the same way. So I think it's again, it's like a, yeah, it's a decision you make as a company or as a founder, like what kind of company you want to build. I do think there is some aspects of the domain that you're in, like what does that domain and the problem space require from the company? And for us, I think it's like we are in the, I think we are in the retention business. It's like, and the trust business kind of that ideally we have a company starting use linear very early on and then they stay with us forever. And I think the only way we can do that is we need to continuously deliver them good quality product and maintain that trust that we are, that we don't fail them or somehow otherwise mistreat them. And I think some businesses are much more transactional. where it's like, yeah, we just need to make this e-commerce sale. And then once it's done, we don't care what happens. So in our case, it's more like we really need to build this relationship over time. And then that's why I think some of the choices we make are also kind of more about respecting the customer versus we're just wanting to drive the revenue of the company.

Awesome. Such an important point. this episode is brought to you by Pendo, the all-in-one platform for product-led companies building breakthrough digital experiences. With all the tools you need, all in one simple to use platform, Pendo makes it easy to answer critical questions about how users are engaging with your product and then turn those insights into action. With product analytics, low-code in-app guides, user feedback and session replay, customizable roadmaps, and AI generated insights and campaigns, Pendo is the only solution you need to build, ship, and optimize a successful product-led motion. But don't take my word for it. Create your free Pendo account today and start building better experiences across every corner of your product. P.S. Want to take your product-led know-how a step further? Check out Pendo's lineup of certification courses, led by top PLG experts and designed to help you grow and advance in your career. Learn more and experience the power of the Pendo platform today. @pendo.io/lenny that's pendo.io/lenny Something you're really good at personally is focus. I find that just trying to get you on this podcast was a lot of like, Hey, Kyrie, hey, have you thought about this yet? And I know that a lot of VCs are just like reaching out to you all the time, all these really fancy VCs that are just like trying to talk to you and get close to you. And I just know you're really good at avoiding shiny objects and staying really focused and really heads down. And I've always wanted to just ask you, how do you do that? Do you have any tricks, systems, processes, approaches to staying focused other than just ignore the inbox mostly?

Yeah, I don't think there's any complicated processes. And so I think one of the things, I was in YC in 2012 and one of the main thing they say there is what you should be focusing on when you build a startup is talk to customers, build the product, exercise. And if you find yourself doing something else than those three things, it's probably the wrong thing to do.

And the third one you said exercise or?

Yeah. And the exercise is that it's important for you to be healthy or not just burn yourself out. So I think there is like, it was like a balance advice to that.

I love it.

So I'm doing those three things. And so I think the thinking there is like, I think we often as a company also talk about this and very early on and I use this the same way. And I think the company can use it the same way. I think there's always things that you're supposed to do or it sounds like a good idea to do. And it could be like, yeah, come to this podcast. And I actually think before it wasn't like, or like, I always have this question, is this important to do now or is it important to maybe do later? So I think like, for example, the question on this podcast is like, I didn't feel like it was important to do it earlier because we weren't at the stage or a scale or something that it, I think would be like as interesting or something. So I think like it was a better timing to do it later. Similarly, like when we built the product, initially we were just very like, focused on is this really important thing to do? There's always like, yeah, you could get SOC 2 security kind of certificate, and we know that eventually we need to get it, but we don't need it today. So we just say no to that. And if customer asks for it, we say we don't have it, and we will have it one day, but not now. And a lot of times people are like, okay, that's fine. And then internally we also talk about this, you know, in RPG games, you have the main quest lines and then you have the side quest lines. And we often talk about the companies, avoid the side quests. There's always ideas people have. And it's a good thing. It's like people have ideas, but then it might be like, yeah, let's make this t-shirt. So let's make this thing. And then we're like, well, does it help the customers? Does it help the product? This sounds like a side quest to me. and basically means we shouldn't do it. This doesn't progress the main quest line, which is building this product and making it awesome for these customers. So similar to me, it's like I operate this way personally too, that I think about, is this important for the main quest line in building this company for me? Or is this something that I can ignore for now or something that I can do later? and it makes more sense then.

That is such incredibly good advice. Basically, ask yourself how important is this to do now? And is this the main quest or is this a side quest? Amazing. Okay, so let's talk about hiring. As with most areas, you're very, very, very deliberate about hiring. The bar is so insanely high at Linear and you also hire very few people. So just a few questions along these lines. Just one is when you're hiring people, what do you look for that you think maybe other people are not looking for enough? And where do you spend a lot of time?

I think one of the things we, all of us founders kind of saw in this high growth companies that sometimes like the high growth is like, especially on the employee side is not that great. It can create a lot of kind of chaos or just messiness or, or just generally like in my past on working in companies, it's almost never, it was always easier to work with a smaller team, very high quality people than with a very large team of more average people. It's almost like it's always faster and better output when you have a much more smaller team. So that was kind of like the thing with Linear too is we just believe that you can actually build better with less people. than you can with more people. So that's like the basic belief we have. So then when it goes to hiring, we've been taking very slow steps on it that in almost the first year we didn't hire anyone. Then the second year we hired a couple of people. And then the second year we hired a few more. We never more than doubled in a year. And that's kind of been our guideline that we shouldn't more than double. And this might be something we change in the future that we actually might do less than that. But like when we look into hiring, it's like a couple of things. One is also that it obviously depends on the role. But basically I would say like every role we often talk about like the, there needs to be some taste or some like this kind of understanding of the, like how things are done or how, what's the, like people have more like a broader perspective than like whatever their role is. so we talked about the engineering before that they do need to do some of this BM type of stuff. And so what we look for in them is that they have some of this skill set or product thinking or they can articulate why some choices are better than some others or in their past, did they disagree with some of the company's choices or the team's choices? So we want to have this, obviously they need to be good developers, but also do they have this like a product sensibility or do they have a judgment around that? And this goes similar to for example, a marketing hire. We think about, yeah, we do need the marketing skill sets, but then we also want to see that this person also maybe is a good storyteller or they have this kind of appreciation for for writing or stories or they have a taste of what's interesting and what's not. So I think when we hire operations person, we also like to see that they maybe have understanding on HR and maybe it's not their role, but they understand it. And what happens is when you have these people that are a little bit more than their title, it's like the company is, I think, much more easier to manage because it's like people can pick up things more easily or they can work together more easily because everyone has more like a shared area. So it's not like, you rarely get to the point where people say, it's not my job. It's more like people understand, okay, yeah, I'm kind of in operations, but today I kind of need to help on this HR thing, which is okay. And so, That's kind of like what we look for people. They are more than their, they can take more scope than their skill set would assume or what normally is expected from them.

So essentially you're looking for kind of these Venn diagram overlappings across different functions and teammates.

Yeah. And then I think it's the other thing is, like I said before, it's like we want to build much, I think, like us, company that has less employees, which means that it's like, like I said before, we don't want that many specialized roles or two specific areas of ownership or something. We just think that we could build this, we could have less people and those people can take on more scope and they can own more scope. I think traditionally, I feel like in companies, how do you get more scope? Is that you advance in the levels of the company because there's a lot of different teams and different levels. And then to get any kind of scope, you need to rise into these higher levels. And what we try to do is you don't actually have to have that many levels, but people can just already when they start, they can start owning more areas. And I think that can be much more interesting, not to everyone, but I think interesting to many people. And it's kind of like how I also always felt about as being a designer is like I didn't feel like my job is purely just looking at the designs. I also thought I actually need to be helping this business or helping this other area as well. So I think it's just kind of also natural to me.

Awesome. So one thing you didn't mention is you have a really unique way of interviewing, which is a paid work trial. Can you just talk about what that is? And also just while you're in that area, you talked about testing for product sensibility. So whatever you can share how you actually do that would be awesome.

Yeah. So we do with all of the employees, we've done like a bait work trial and depends on the role, what it looks like, how long it is, and depends on also sometimes on the person. But basically, we do fairly standard interview loops where where we test, like we have some hiring manager interviews and then like skill interviews and or tests. And then the last step of the process is the work trial. And basically, yeah, they basically come as a mini contractor to the company and we give them a very, usually fairly vague problem statements. If your engineer is like, Hey, there's this feature that needs to be built, how would you build it and go build it. And so basically they need to first understand the problem, then they need to just scope it down to something that they can do in the time frame that they have. And then they actually get the access to a code base. They can actually go and build a version of it. And then at the end they can present the work they did. And why we do this is that we just seeing that it's a very good way to see for both of us, both for the company and the candidates, to see how we work together. And I think for the candidate, what they can see is that what kind of company are joining, what is it like to work here, and what is my ownership or how do I approach this? I think a lot of engineers also like that they see the code base and they're like, oh wow, this is really clean and it's not like some kind of spaghetti code type of thing situation. So I think it helps the candidates as well understand what are they signing up for, which I think can be very risky sometimes, especially with startups. It's really hard to tell how the startup is operating just from the interviews. And in a large companies, I think things are more standardized. So it's like, I think they are more similar on It's easier to make that choice, but with startups, it can be very different how companies operate.

Yeah, that is so unique and I rarely hear of a company being able to hire that way. I imagine one of the reasons you can get away with that where people are like, don't have a full-time job for a while while we're all doing a pay trial is because Linear is such an enticing place to work. I imagine for a lot of companies, they can't really do that, but I guess any thoughts on just maybe more companies can actually pull this off?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's always like, if you don't ask, you don't know. I think in our case, we, that's just been the standard. And we, we try to work with the candidate, like, let's figure out maybe we do it on the weekend or maybe we do it some other, like a vacation holiday or something. So there can be ways we can, like, schedule it so that it causes as little kind of problems to the, the candidate as possible. And I think we only had, like, only a few people probably have ever declined it. Like, it's, it's not like, I think everyone else has been. at least after the fact, they've been happy that they did it because they felt like they had a much better sense of the company they're joining. And then also like during that workshop, they can actually join our meetings. They get access to our Slack and Notion and they also have one-on-one chats with the rest of the, like some of the other people on the team. So they already get to know people. So it's a good way for them to like evaluate us as well. And then for us, it's obviously we can see what is important for us to see is how does this person operate in this kind of environment and how do they approach problems? How do they think? And are they able to make progress in a very short timeframe, which I always think is very important for startups. Large companies, you have maybe all time in the world to do stuff, but I think any kind of startup, even with us when we take our time doing things, sometimes it's still important. We can do things quickly if we have to.

Super cool. Just to close the thread on product sensibilities, is there anything you could share of just how you actually help understand someone's strength and ability there?

Yeah, I wouldn't say we have some kind of very scientific or some special way figure it out for this. So I think it's a lot of it's like a discussion of, and I often think of like ask, people that asked about their projects and I tried to go deeper. It's like, why was this decision made? Why do you think the decision was made? And I might ask, do you think it was the right decision? Or did you agree on it?

Or.

Ask them, what do you think you would have done differently?

Or something.

So I think it's more like, I'm trying to see if they do they have thoughts. in this area and what their answers is. And people's answers can be very different levels. Some people might be, yeah, I didn't like it, which I don't like, yeah, it's an opinion, but it's not based on anything. It's just you didn't like it. You should be able to expand on it saying, well, I didn't like it because in this case, it would not work well for these kind of users or in this kind of context or for these kind of purposes. So they have more of this reasoning or some kind of rational why they think this way and they can articulate that. So I think that's kind of what I'm often testing for is can they do this and how well they can do it. And it's going to be very, yeah, there can be very wide ranges of how people do it. And when you see someone who really thinks about this stuff, it's very clear to see that they can just talk about it forever and they can go deeper and deeper. And then some people that maybe haven't had the experience or don't think this way, they're like, yeah, I don't really know. I just build it and then seem fine.

Let's transition to the third area I wanted to spend some time on, which is growth. And basically I'd love to just understand how linear growth and what you figured out around growth, especially in B2B. SAS. So, first question here is just how long did it take from starting to work on linear to launching, say, V1, something that a number of people can use?

So, we started, like, officially in 2019, some, I think, months before that we were already exploring and prototyping the product. So, it wasn't... So, I think we prototyped different kinds of designs a little bit, and then we also One of the things we really wanted to solve is we wanted to make the application really fast. And the way we figured out we'd do that is we have more of this local based data structure where all the data lives in the client and then it gets synced on the backends with this delta packets. And back then we were just exploring different off-the-shelf solutions and systems, but there was nothing really there. So we ended up building our own. And so we spent some time prototyping that. And then once we officially, I think, started working on the company in April 2019, and then we announced the company roughly mid-April, and we had this little website up with the waitlist. And then I think by May we could use it ourselves, and then.

We.

Started inviting some friends to try it out. But then I think in June, I think we started more like inviting people from the waitlist. And around June, July, I think we had about, I don't know, 100, 200 users on it and maybe like about 10 companies or something. And then we were in this private beta stage for almost a year. And the way we did it was just like we had this waitlist of people on the waitlist. There was like, few survey questions, like what kind of tools you use today and then why do you want to use Linear and then be it just, and what's the company size? And we invited people based on like we invited more like smaller companies using the tools we currently support it. And then also like I was trying to see like who is more like interested versus this, I don't know, I just want to try it out type of purple. And then a year later in June we launched it. publicly. And back then, maybe we already had, I don't know, several hundreds of companies using it. And then we also launched the pricing and I think almost all of them, maybe one company didn't subscribe, but everyone else subscribed to that paid plan.

Okay, there's a number of really interesting things here. So one is you're in private beta for a year and then a year later you launched How long was that period between starting to incubate and starting to build to that private beta milestone?

Yeah, I think just a few months.

Just a few months of building the V1.

Yeah.

Wow. Okay. I thought it was a lot longer. That is so interesting. Okay. What a team you've got over there. Okay. And then this survey piece is really interesting. I've heard a little bit about this story. So essentially you launched it on Twitter. You had kind of a following. Your founders had a bit of a following, so I think that helped. build up the initial waitlist. But what you did there wasn't just like, hey, go sign up for a waitlist and then you just add email addresses. It's a survey asking them what tools to use, like whether it's GitHub or something else, and then also the size of the company and their interest. And that helped you basically prioritize who to go after and who to onboard. Is that right? Yeah.

And the reason we did it, because we know that we didn't support everything. And what do I said before in the focus is we want to also be focused on let's just build a version that can work for some people or some companies. We don't have to try to address everyone in the world in the first months of the business and even before after that. So it was very selective process. And I think we were fortunate that we were able to get people sign up on the waitlist. And I think after a month or so we had maybe 4,000 people on the waitlist. And then we had this internal, I think initially it was just a very manual process, but eventually we built this invite tool that we could just send invites. But in the beginning, I would go read the actual surveys in a spreadsheet, then I copy that email and then I emailed them the invite link from my personal email. And then I would just email them after a few days or a week and it's like, Hey, what do you think? and the reason we, and so we would invite only, like in the beginning we maybe invited like 10 people a week and like eventually we increased those amounts, but the reason we did it that way was that we thought that like if you just invite everyone at once or a lot of people at once, all of those people are gonna probably hit the same problems in this kind of software that is very early stage. So like, I don't know, they hit the same bug or the same problem in the software. So then they will all send us feedback like, hey, there's this problem. And then we felt like it was kind of like wasted effort. So we would just do these cohorts, like, let's invite these people. And then they say like, hey, this is a problem. Like, I don't, this doesn't work or something. Then we go fix that. Then after we fix that, we invite the next cohort of people. Then they say like, well, there's this thing that is needed or this doesn't work. Then we fix that. So for that year, we did this cohorts and then always get the feedback from the cohort saying this is wrong or this doesn't work, and then we will fix that. So eventually I think it was much more like a, I think like an effective way of doing the initial development than just inviting or letting everyone to use the product right at the beginning.

There's so many interesting lessons from this. I wanted to ask how you got your first 10 customers and what I'm hearing essentially was, from this waitlist. You launched it on Twitter, people signed up, you picked people to let onboard, you worked with them over the course of a year to make it what they needed, and then eventually you started charging.

Yeah, I think the first 10 companies using it, I think maybe a little over half, maybe there was three friends that have startups and they used it, and then I think the majority of them were just from this waitlist, but They didn't pay us anything. We didn't have pricing in the beginning or during the private beta. At some point we started building the payment function, so we just added a page in the settings that you can optionally pay and then we just give you a slider that how much do you want to pay per seat? And then we just see if, I don't know, some people paid $28 per seat and some people paid one dollar. So, so we, but like it didn't really matter. We just wanted to test the functionality and see like what people, people think. And then like, yeah, like after a year when we launched, we already had like in the, I don't know, first week of launching, like we, we have probably like some hundreds of customers.

I've never heard of the approach to pricing as just an actual, sliding scale where people can slide the scale themselves on how much they want to pay. Did that help you figure out what to charge or is it mostly just an experiment?

I don't think it gave us enough data to decide, but I think it was good to see that there were some people that went, I think the 20 was probably the maximum that people could pay. So I think there were some people that went to it and they felt like, actually, yeah, I really love the product. I'm happy to pay $28. So I think at least it gave us some confidence that if we charge for this and it's like something under $20, there's gonna be market for it.

I want to hear about the story of how you've started to feel product market fit, whatever that means to you. When did you start to feel like, oh wow, this is actually gonna work and maybe this is gonna be a real business?

Yeah, I think we always been kind of, I don't know, some like paranoid or skipped, like, yeah, I guess maybe a paranoid discrete way about the product market fit. I think it's like a, baronoid in a way, we're always wondering, do we really have it? And with who do we have it? And I think it's true in our kind of business that I think we started feeling it very early on. And when people first started using it, we could see, oh, now the whole company is using it and they seem happier using it and the feedback is good and they might have some additional asks. for them, for us. But we started feeling there was definitely a product market fit with certain kind of customer. And these were more like smaller, early stage companies, maybe where still the founder is still running the product and they care about the speed of the shipping or they kind of have a certain values in a way. So it was like a good fit with them. And then I think we always know that we want to address the whole market and not just these early stage customers. But we knew that if a Fortune 500 company came to us then or even today, we might not be like, I don't think we can provide them the solution today that works for them. So I don't think the fit is there. So for us, the way we think about is do we have that do we have the fit in this specific segments and how strong that fit is? And so in the company's journey, I think the first year we just focused on can we get the fit in the first two years we focused on can we get the fit in the early stages startup segment. And basically the goal was we want to be the default for startups, the default tool that the startups pick. And I think we were able to accomplish that, but we just purely focused on that segment and getting the product market fit there. And then after or at the same time, we started getting some larger companies and we saw, yeah, it's not really great for you right now, but let's work on it making it better. And so I think the last two years we've been focusing on that. It's like, how do we make the software work better? How do we get the product market fit better? stronger in this larger company segments that are thousands of people or hundreds of people or a thousand people.

I think this is such a good way and smart way of thinking about product market fit. A lot of people see product market fit as this binary, I have it or I don't. And when am I going to really feel product market fit? And what you're describing is what I often hear is it's more of this spectrum of more and more confidence that there is product market fit and even more specifically, it's like product market fit with segments of the market. It's kind of like this map of the world and you're just like slowly acquiring territory in the market with specific elements. And then over time it grows and grows.

Yeah, I think like a spectrum is a good way to think about it too. I think it's, I feel like there is this blog post in the, like written in the past where it's like, you know, when you have product market fit and I think it's probably, like, it's like that for some, I don't know, social consumer apps, like, you know, like if it's taking off or not, then you don't really have a lot of different segments or you don't really think about it. You just have users and you have millions of users. And then you see it's taking off and so you have a product market fit. But then I think in a more like a B2B world, I think there's always like, you can have different sizes of customers, you can have different domains the customers are in, or there's different kind of like categories where it's like you might be doing really well in one category and then not that well in another. And I think maybe the counterintuitive things is that actually if you're doing really well in some category, it just kind of double down on that. This is something I talked to the Zoom founder Eric at some point in the company's life cycle and this is also what he said. When they were building Zoom in the early days, they would get this one type of customer, I don't know, maybe it's a university and then it worked really well for them. then they're like, well, how do we get more of the universities? So they would always focus on a certain kind of customer rather than, let's just try to get everyone. Let's focus on everything, which is not possible. So again, it's about the focus is like, if you have some, you see that something is working really well, then it's almost like you should focus on doing that more until you hit some kind of point. It's like, okay, now we do have that category. captured or handled as much as we want, and we should expand to new area.

Essentially look for pull and just follow that and pay attention to that.

Yeah, and I think there's like, for us it's often there can be sometimes, for example now, most of the AI companies are using us. So I think it's always, and before that it was a crypto company. So I think when we see these kind of things happening, then we start to think, oh, could we do something differently or should we get more of these AI companies on board?

Such a great lesson. Just a few more questions. You mentioned that you launched on Twitter and that led to a large waitlist and a growing waitlist. Is there anything you did before that to kind of build this following? That sounds really amazing. Cool. We just announced it on Twitter and we have this large waitlist and then we grow and we get all these customers. Is there anything you did ahead of time in anticipation of this launch? Would you recommend people work on building some kind of following online before they were going to start it? Was it just like, hey, we happen to have this kind of following and it worked out? Anything along those lines you would recommend to founders these days?

Yeah, I mean, I think definitely if you have a following and, and like, open is the best, what kind of following, but I think like my, my background as a designer, I was like at Airbnb and Coinbase and other places and I did some like talks in conferences and write some blog posts. So I was definitely out there and then had some of that following, which was helpful. But it wasn't like I have hundreds of thousands of followers or millions or something. I had maybe like 10,000 or something, which is a significant number. But then I think the other thing is, I think with the announcement, one of the things we did, I think, well, it's like, I think sometimes startups do try to emulate successful large companies too much. And you kind of do this fancy announcements where it's like, okay, now we're doing this fancy thing. And then it sounds very corporate or something. And I think with our announcement, we try to wrote it more like, direct or authentic to us. Like, this is like what are we gonna do and this is why and like this, these are some of the things we're gonna do. Then on the Twitter, we did the same thing. Like all of us founders, we wrote our own reasons why we're doing this. And I think it was like just much more like, and I think like people could dress and people like us could resonate more with it. So we were kind of writing to the right audience. And like, I think that's the probably the first thing, like when you're announcing your company is like you think about like, who is my first audience, who would be the best users, early users for this product, and where are they? And then how do they think about things and what kind of language they use? So for us, it came very naturally because we are these people. We've been building software in these companies and we've seen other people have seen similar things we have seen. So I think that the way we announced it resonated with a lot of people. And then I think we did have some friends and I said we did like an angel round where we got some friends involved. And the main reason we did it was that we just felt like in the early days it's good to have you feel like a real company in a way that you have someone to answer for in a way, even though the investors don't really run your company or they don't have that much power. It's more like, oh, I took someone's money, so I now need to make it worth it, kind of. But then I think with the announcement again, we could use some of those people to spread the message as well.

To close out our conversation, just a couple more broad questions. You have a pretty unique culture at Linear, and I know one fun thing that you do is you have this kind of baking competition. can you talk about that and what it is you do there? Yeah.

So since we are a fully remote and distributed company, so we have people in Europe and US, a lot of group gatherings are kind of challenging. Remote group sessions are kind of challenging because the time zones are so different. So some of the basic things like happy hours, it's not really like, it doesn't really work that well. And also like, Zoom happy hours is probably not that fun anyway. So, so what we, I think a lot of people in the company watch the Great British Baking Show and so we decided like maybe we do something like that, like where basically we would just pick a recipe. Firstly, it was like baking. Now we expanded to cooking recipes too. And so we just pick a recipe that is like somewhat reasonable to do in in a, like, in a few hours, in a couple hours, and it doesn't, like, require, like, tons of equipment or skill or something. And, and then we, we just tell people, I go buy the ingredients, use the company card. Everyone has a company card. And then, then, like, hop on Zoom on this day. And, and for me, it's usually, like, since I'm in California, it's like 8 A.M. in the morning, so. So we start, like, the baking or cooking then, so. So we've made things like roll cake and lemon meringue pie and we made some like pastel de nata, which is like Portuguese pastry and then we just hop on the Zoom, everyone's doing their thing, following the recipe and then sometimes people have questions like, Hey, I don't know, stuck with this or my dough looks weird. Does your do look like this and people can kind of like help each other and then also like chit chat about whatever random things at the same time. And then like we do the thing and then we, everyone takes pictures and post this on this Slack channel and it's like what they achieved. And I think we have like kind of friendly competitions like who did it better and like, or who did it best. So people sometimes put a lot of effort into the decorations and visuals. So in a way it's again like a craft thing that we do. It's like, I think baking and cooking and these kind of things is also a craft. So we liked it that way. And yeah, we've been basically doing it quarterly since the beginning of the company. And yeah, the latest thing, we were a little bit like, I think didn't have that much time. So we decided to do like easier thing, which is like a summer drink recipe. So I think It was like people made like matcha drinks and some like coconut drinks or white iced tea or something. So even that was kind of interesting to do.

Have you ever won one of these competitions yourself?

We don't, I don't know if we clearly declare winners that much, but I do think, since I'm a designer, I do have some advantages on the visual presentation. So I think that I, generally do well on that. And obviously that's like with this remote competition, that's the only thing you can really look for. It's not necessarily about the taste or the texture because you can't really taste it through the Zoom.

Maybe as a last question, just again broadly, you've gone from being an IC designer or manager of designers to the CEO of a very fast-growing company. What's something that you've learned about leadership? over the journey of Linear that maybe you didn't expect?

For some reason it was surprising to me, I think that being a CEO or some of this leadership roles is that you end up doing so many different things. And I think when I was a designer, even if I would be some high level designer in some company, it's still you're mostly focusing on the design and that's your job. But then when you're a CEO, then it's every week or every day there's some different thing going on. It's not like There's sometimes there can be problems, but a lot of times it's like, hey, we need to figure out how are we going to do this? How are we going to do this compensation or how are we going to do this marketing plan or how are we going to do this offsite thing? And so it's just like, to me, what is definitely challenging for me is handling that different kinds of things that that come to you and staying somewhat focused still on something. So I think I haven't necessarily fully figured it out, but I also learned figure it out that hiring and delegation helps with this. That if you can find other leaders that can take on certain areas, that's helpful. That's the main thing that what is the It's like a very wide range of things that you maybe didn't have experience before. But also I think it's interesting for me to learn about these things and like you learn about financials and you learn about legal things and then you start to feel like, oh, actually I know something about these things over time.

For the actual final question before we get to a very exciting lightning round, what's just the future linear? What's coming? What's happening in the future? Anything you can share?

Yeah, I think there's always things we're working on and improving. One, like a newer thing we're working on is this feature called asks. and basically what it is is that we see it as in a company, there can be a lot of different people that needs to interact with the product team or different people that needs to interact with this team, but they are not necessarily in-line or part of this team. So we've been building this like an Ask feature, which is like an integration to Slack where you can very easily go to a Slack channel and then ask your question, like you need something from this team, like maybe it's an IT team that you need, like a laptop or maybe it's like the infrastructure team and you need help them, you need something from them. Then the team that is handling the request, they can very easily send it to Linar into this triage that we have, and then they can start doing stuff with it. And if they have questions or additional questions to the actual person who requested it, we can send those messages back to the person through Slack so they don't actually have to go to linear or they don't have to be a linear user to use it. So we think this is just a good way for the company or the whole company to be more potentially involved in the company, like the product operations without having to be a power user of linear or because not every function really uses it or needs to use it.

Awesome. What a cool peek at something coming out soon or maybe out by the time this comes out. And with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got a bunch of questions for you. Are you ready?

Yeah, I'm ready.

All right. Well, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander. He's this, like, he wasn't really an architect, but he, I think, thought in Berkeley and I think he has this interesting thoughts about building things and he focuses on buildings and towns and these kind of spaces, but I think there's a lot of things that are also interesting for building software. The other book that I like is the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance because it also talks about the quality of things. And I think that's one of the main themes of the book. And the thing is also that quality is so hard to define. It is like, if you actually start thinking about it, it's like, how do you define it? It's kind of like it's really hard to pin down, but it's kind of like when you try something or see it, then you kind of know if it's quality or not.

What are some recent movies or TV shows they've really enjoyed?

I think that the movie is like probably the John Wick 4. I think it's like kind of feels like, I mean obviously it's like there's no story in that movie, but it's like, I think it's very true to its nature. So I like that fact. And then also recently I started watching the Silo on Apple TV and I think I kind of like it. It's like a cute mystery. And then also it kind of reminds me of the Fallout. games. So, so I kind of like it that way, too.

I actually read the Silo books, and I was really excited for the show to come out, but I mentioned this on a previous podcast. The show has, like, so little to do with actual books. Like, the core ideas are the same, but there's all these stories that they're just making up on the show. So I kind of stopped watching because I was just, like, that's not what.

I was hoping for. But, okay, interesting. Maybe I, I need to check the.

Books later, like, once I watch the, watch the show. Definitely read the books, but there's three of them, and only the first one is actually good. The other ones are not actually very good. And I should not have read them because it just went off the rails a little bit. Anyway, next question. What is a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates when you're interviewing them?

I think usually I like to ask like, what is the candidate most proud of and why? Like what on their professional life or otherwise, like what they're most proud of and why. And then I think we can go deeper on that, but I think it's kind of like gives you a little bit indication like what the person values and how they think about things. And also I think it's always nice that people can share something like they think they did really well and we can spend time on it versus just asking something more like negative things.

What are some favorite products you've recently discovered that you really, really like?

Not sure if I discovered them recently, but I've recently been in this home office, I've been installing some of these Hue lights and I really like them because throughout the day I can have more kind of harsh lighting because it's time, I'm in meetings or something. And then like in the evening, I can kind of like change the temperature. Like I make it much more like red or orange or something. So it's just like, I think it's nice that like you can kind of like transition to space. It's like, okay, now I'm working and now I'm like doing something else and you can use the lights to kind.

Of like indicate that. That is so cool. Do you like automate the schedule or.

You manually change the color? Yeah, I just manually change it. So I have like, Like on my home app, I have scenes that like, so there's the night scene and then there's the day scene, like the morning scene. And so I just like click that button and then it changes the lights.

That is extremely cool. I'm gonna try that myself. What is a favorite life motto that you like to repeat yourself or share with people, something you kind of come back to a lot?

Go slow to go fast. is, I think for me, it's about that sometimes people have tendency to rush into things and especially in, I think in startups but other places too, that you kind of have this like, I think urgency is important, but then sometimes you have like too much urgency and you are rushing things and what happens is that you rushed it and then now you need to come back to fix it. So I think sometimes we I like to think that you should take some time to actually think about it and what are you going to do and then do it, because then in the end it's going to be faster that way than going back and forth and fixing things.

What is the most valuable lesson that your mom or your dad taught you?

I think it's respecting people and things. I think the people respect us is pretty obvious, but I think with the the things you have also, I think you should take good care of them. When you use them, you should, I don't know, clean them or put them away and then they're ready for the next time. So I think I like that, rather than you treating things that they are trash or not that valuable, you should treat things that they are valuable.

Final question. You were born in Finland. I think you grew up in Finland. What is A finished food that people should definitely try to get as soon as they can.

One is like this salmon soup and it might sound weird, like a fish soup, but maybe it's not going to be that interesting, but it is like a, it's like a creamy soup with some like potatoes, carrots and, and other things. And it's kind of like almost like a sweet, a little bit like sweet flavor to it. So that's one thing like you can, you can make it yourself at home or, or you can like, if you go to Finland, there's probably like always a few restaurants that offer it.

Amazing. Is that something we could get here or you have to go to Finland to get it?

I don't think I've ever seen it here in the US in any restaurant, but it's not very hard to make it yourself. You can probably Google a recipe. It's basically you just need some salmon and some basic spices and some cream and some root vegetables.

All right, next episode we're going to do a cooking show with Kari. Kari, thank you so much for being here. You're building a very special company in a really unique way, and I think many founders and many product builders can learn a ton from watching you operate in the business that you're building. So again, thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and maybe ask you some more questions? And how can listeners be useful to you?

Yeah, so I'm on Twitter, my name, Kari Sarno, and we also have the Liner account, which I think is interesting. So that's @liner. And then Yeah, I think I hope everyone can check out Linear and see if it could work for them in their company and figure out if there's a pilot. I think we're always happy to assist on those things that if you just want to try it out and try it with the team, we can help you to set it up and help you to understand how to use the product.

Awesome. It's just Linear.app, right? Is that the URL?

Yes.

Awesome. Okay, easy peasy. Amazing. Kari, again, thank you so much for being here.

Bye everyone.

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