Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO)

Episode Date: October 8, 2023

Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, an issue-tracking tool that has quickly become the fastest-growing and most beloved in the world. Before Linear, Karri was the principal designer and co-creator of design systems at Airbnb and the founding designer at Coinbase. In today’s episode, he shares:• How to prioritize craft in product development• The Linear method for modern software development• How Linear operates with only one PM• Why every product needs good design in 2023• Strategies for staying focused amid distractions• Linear’s unique hiring strategies• Sneak peek of a soon-to-be-released Linear feature—Brought to you by Mercury—the powerful and intuitive way for ambitious companies to bank | Composer—the AI-powered trading platform | Pendo—The all-in-one platform for product-led companies building breakthrough digital experiences—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-linear-building-with-taste—Where to find Karri Saarinen:• X: https://twitter.com/karrisaarinen• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karrisaarinen/• Website: https://karrisaarinen.com/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Karri’s background(04:25) Overview of Linear(06:43) Linear’s design process and its focus on quality(12:25) Building a craft-oriented company(16:41) Product management at Linear(18:37) Strategies for launching a startup without a dedicated PM(21:16) How Linear assists PMs in their roles(23:46) Linear’s potential expansion in PM roles(24:58) The importance of design(29:08) Utilizing design and brand as distinct competitive advantages(30:48) The importance of authenticity in branding and messaging(33:08) How design reviews are conducted at Linear(38:34) The Linear method for modern software development (40:07) Why productivity software should be opinionated(41:23) Why Linear created “cycles” and how it works(43:27) Why Linear doesn’t have metric-based goals(45:07) How a business can thrive without metrics, PMs, and A/B testing(48:04) A customer-focused approach to building product(50:02) Adapting strategies for diverse products and domains(53:05) Three techniques Karri uses to maintain focus(56:47) Linear’s hiring practices (1:02:10) Paid work trials(1:04:31) How to determine a candidate’s “product sense” (1:08:21) Linear’s growth journey and milestones(1:14:18) How pricing strategies were initially introduced at Linear(1:16:18) Linear’s journey to finding product-market fit(1:21:44) The importance of online presence and authenticity in business(1:24:59) Insight into the corporate culture at Linear(1:28:29) Lessons learned during Karri’s transition from IC to CEO(1:30:21) Sneak peek into the upcoming “asks” feature at Linear(1:32:04) Lightning round—Referenced:• Linear: https://linear.app/• Vercel: https://vercel.com/• Nan Yu on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thenanyu/• The Linear method: https://linear.app/method• How Ramp builds product: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-ramp-builds-product• Lessons from scaling Ramp | Sri Batchu (Ramp, Instacart, Opendoor): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/lessons-from-scaling-ramp-sri-batchu-ramp-instacart-opendoor/• Eric Yuan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericsyuan/• The Timeless Way of Building: https://www.amazon.com/Timeless-Way-Building-Christopher-Alexander/dp/0195024028• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Art-Motorcycle-Maintenance-Inquiry/dp/0060839872/• John Wick: Chapter 4: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10366206/• Silo on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/silo/umc.cmc.3yksgc857px0k0rqe5zd4jice• Philips Hue lights: https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us• Finnish salmon soup recipe: https://jernejkitchen.com/recipes/finnish-salmon-soup-lohikeitto—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

My belief is that like any domain or industry, the more it matters, the more the design matters. What happens is like whenever there's like 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 like super well designed necessarily because they are the first. But then like as you built the hundred like thousand like different email clients, any email client now has to be like pretty good to be, be even considered like reasonable like a reasonable. 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 to people to even like pay attention or consider you seriously. Today my guest is Kari Sarnan. 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 tradeoffs, 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 in this episode. I'm very excited for you to hear it. With that, I bring you Kari Saranen, 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 start of 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 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 and 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.

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With $1 billion in trading volume, and 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. Thanks, Lenny. It's great to be here. Maybe to start, set a little context. Can 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 like software companies to build software. We started 2019. Today, some of the top growth companies like Block, Versal, 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 that's graduated from YC or a public company. And just like briefly, why we created linear is that like you said, like we, I work with you at the RP&B 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 like a similar bass where we worked in multiple different companies in different stages. And what we saw often is that like the tools available for managing software projects weren't that like really cut. it. I think a lot of them felt very conky or complex or just like they had this kind of legacy way of thinking about

software development. And so we just felt like we should do something about it. So with linear we set out to do like build this like most frictionless and streamlined system for modern software element.

I'm also happy to share that we 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 back to date than we have raised. I think a lot of startups, like usually the normal way is that like you raise money and then you need to spend it to build it. But I think we, 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

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 a 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 tradeoffs. It takes probably longer to get stuff out the dairy. You're probably losing sales because people are waiting for a feature and you're not ready to launch 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 you mentioned, like hiring building business and building product and craft is like,

I think that all of those are someone's 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 hiring front, we always look for people that care about it. As a business, like why we really care about it is, is that like we see that cooperation 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 is,

that great or there's this little paper cuts. I think it gets really annoying for people to use. And so we think, like, for the business to be successful, the quality is, and the graph is very important. There's definitely, like, tradeoffs sometimes. Like, there can be, like, for example, timelines. Like, we, 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

like feel right. And we just like, should fix it. So I don't think we should launch this now. So sometimes, like, it doesn't definitely push the timelines. but this might be like days. It's not like we need to like redo everything. The other way we think about it's like we are actually very okay like pushing things out to ourselves and into for like a small group of customers.

Like if they opt into that. So whenever we build a new feature, one of the things is like we don't want to spend tons of time upfront just like designing it and polishing it perfectly because we actually believe that when you start building the thing, you actually start realizing more, like, how it could, how it should work and how it should be better. So a lot of times with the teams, we tell them, like, just, just put it there in, like, I don't know, the first week, almost, like, after you have some kind of designs in place or some kind of design ideas, just, like, put it into the app and, like, ship it to production, but only visible to us. So we internally can test it out. And then I think the next stage is, like, we look for, like, a customer that could be interested in this feature or,

or we just like ask people to opt in to like some kind of better program and in those stages the experience can be a little like janky or it's not that like polished but we're okay with it because we are saying it's not finished like we just want to get your feedback early so we can make it better but like once we get to the kind of like it the full general release then we like pay more attention to the actual like polish or the or the craft that is so interesting I didn't know you do that so you actually go ahead and launch things really early to 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 like 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 work this way with Varsal that there was some changes they wanted to see in the roadmap feature. So we worked with them to, to like 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 it need you need to build something awesome. And then it launches and it's amazing. And it's great. but 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 think of that craft is about perfecting things and perfecting them in a very, like,

organized way or like very early on. The downside with this perfection mindset is that it can be sometimes hard to, like, put anything out because nothing is ever like fully perfect. And so we try to like, balance this thinking with the fact that we should be always pushing things out very quickly, but then also fixing them, like, improving them very quickly. So it's almost like the opposite ideas. But then we try to like kind of combine that. And I think it's been it's been working well

that generally in the company, there's not necessarily like a lot of reviews or something that we always like review everything that like gets shipped this way because we do want to. 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 like try it out. But then like, 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? but 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 CEO like Kari? And there's really, it's hard to do otherwise. Yeah, I don't think actually it's not like purely coming from me.

So I think they all of the founders like Jory and Thomas in additionally, their background is engineering. But I would say like 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 like doing the broad strokes designs. Like this is how the UI works and this is how some of the things work. And 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 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 him being about it. And like in their case,

like their founders were coming from different companies. Like maybe this one founder came from an Airbnb and then the other ones came from like Facebook and Amazon. And I think like these, like for example, I think Facebook and Amazon have a very different culture on quality or craft or shipping. And I think like I said to them like you just like, 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 like you should all kind of believe in that and then like 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 like we can talk about more about it. But one of the things I think that happens. happens is like when you build a team and you start creating this very specific roles for everything, where like I think that often the PM can be the one that like figuring things out and like making decisions and guiding the team.

But they're not the ones like building the feature. So they're not there like looking at it like the whole day. It's like how is this where does this button go or how does it work? And I think like a lot of that like 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 this opportunity is 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 click different things. And under that, you have submenus. Like MacOS does this well, where it's like when you 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 kind of like diagonally or like you don't actually have to hit the menu exactly. There's like this kind of safe zone. But like a lot of software like just implements like, hey, let's do this menu. Let's make the submenu. It only works if you exactly hover over the menu. And then like what happens is the user often like misses like with few pixels what they were trying to like do. So what Andres did like which we didn't tell him to do is like, yeah, that just kind of sucks and like we should make this better. And so he figured out the way to

create those like safe areas that are dynamic based on like the sub menu positioning and everything. So it's much easier now. Like you can go diagonally to the actual thing you want to go to. So I think like these kind of things like happen when you give people like more of the ownership of the project and also like the space to do that. And then you also have like leadership or 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 product? Yeah, non-you who 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 like areas of the product. And also like the team is bigger that. It's hard to keep kind of like aligned on all of these things or like even keep track of things.

And like initially we actually had none as a contractor to help us with this like insights data tool. So we have this like data tool feature built in linear. So you can get like data on what's happening in the workspace. And for us like founders, we realize like none of us are like we are not super experienced in data tools. So we need someone to help out. And luckily none was like we knew him. and he actually worked at mode, which is a data tool. And so we initially hired him, like, can you help us figure out, like, 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, like, let's us copy what some other company is doing. But we didn't want to do that. So we wanted to, like, figure out, like, what is actually, like, useful way to use this data or, like, get this data? So he helped us with that. And then we kind of saw, like, yeah, this could be, like, useful in other,

larger areas or overall with the whole product is like we might have this kind of questions like what should we exactly be thinking around here and like why and like how would we like define this direction and then like help the teams to also like align on it so like it to us it's more like he's kind of like the figures out the direction of the product and and like steers the some of the efforts and not like he's there in every meeting and like 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.

Are there over product management? 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, maybe other functions within team. Is that right? Yeah. So I mean, definitely, I think what it means is,

and there is definitely like trade-off. So, like, I think sometimes when companies specialize roles a lot, it's like because of it's more efficient, like if the engineer just spends 100% over their time, like coding something, then it's like they're using their skill set to the max. But then we just think that in order to like 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 like executing. So yes, like for every project, there's a project lead. That lead can be engineer or a designer. It's not like a formal role or it's not based on it, like your whatever level or it's just like you need to be certain title that you can be that. It's more like an assignment that like, okay, now you're responsible like getting the project started and working together with the team, like figuring it out and then like communicating when changes or like communicating how that progress happens. And so it's definitely like it means that the engineers and our designers also have to like do this things and like then do you need to communicate and then do need to think about

like 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 win in the hiring from 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. Is one, 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 hidden 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're around 50. Probably the only thing I would say it's like the hiring front that like you really need to spend more time on it. And like basically you cannot really interview engineers only for the engineering skills.

You also have to interview them for like the product skills. And it's like it's obviously like you cannot, I think, expect that people have some like if you do some kind of PM interview for them, it's, it's not. they're not going to have the same kind of skill set or the same understanding of the concepts or something. But like the way we've done it in the past is like basically I might interview them about the product. I'm not a technical person per se. So I will just like ask them questions about like how did they do something or like how do they think about something? And it's similar to other roles too. It's like we just look for like, do this person have like opinions about about products and how they work and like can they form opinions and can they kind of use their own?

judgment at times and then like 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 it's 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 one BM and very few PMs. Yeah. I mean, I think like in some ways I would say that like with linear, we're trying to help the whole company and like I think engineers is probably like the largest user group of the product. And I think in some ways we want to make the BMs drop easier, or like they have to spend less time or like managing everything or like the day-to-day

because like the engineers are actually using the product and they're like updating the things. It's like for the BMs, it would be much more easier to like get this like what is the state of things and like maybe trust that much more because people actually use the product. So in some ways like I think we're trying to like kind of like make it easier for everyone, easier for the engineers, like they can focus more on their work. And then for VMs, I think like we're trying to make it so that they can also focus on more

on other things than it's like, I don't know, managing the tool that they use. Like, I think that's not the most important job of a PM. I think they should be like thinking more of the, I don't know, bigger picture or like other problems or like figure out like the next like features or something. Just one more question along these lines.

There's other companies like Stripe. I think wait until 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, their kind of plan here? Or is it just kind of see how it goes as you grow?

I think we'll definitely hire more. It's like, I think, like, what I said before is, like, I think we like to see in the PM smarts, 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-collar, and can think about larger scope than what their current role is.

So I think we're just like trying to build this like a smaller units, but more effective units, which I think like where the PMs go and that would be also less of them, like and they are 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 like several VMs that are focusing on or looking at specific areas or specifically. types of things of the product or specific customers or something like that.

Awesome. Okay. That was a tangent because I couldn't 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 and incumbent. Do you have any sense of when design can be enough of a differentiator? And this is coming from like a founder trend aside.

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 though 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 like whenever there's like 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 like super well designed necessarily because they are the first. But then like as you built the hundreds, like thousand like different email clients, any email client now has to be like pretty good to be, even considered like reasonable like an email client. It's like that the bar is so high.

So I think like today, the startup's 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 this like older companies, it's, they were very basic. Like 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 like. pretty high-level design of people to even, like, pay attention or consider you seriously. And I think it's like, it's not necessarily fair because, like, sometimes it's like, maybe the product is really good, but they didn't have a designer or they didn't have, like, time to do it. And then people just kind of like dismiss it because it doesn't seem like something that it interests them. So I think, like, that's the first thing. It's like, I think it is,

and it's going to be more and more important. But I would also say, like, design is never going to be like the reason or like the reason why a company is successful. It's like it's like the company still has to have some other things. So like 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 like a design is just like enabling some of these things like enable. And similar to technology is like if you have good technology, it's like easier to do certain things. And like the product works better in some ways than you having like a bad technology.

or back back infrastructure. So similar to design, I think, like, if you have a good design and, like, people are, or even, like, a good brand, like, people are, like, drawn into it. And then it's, like, makes, like, some, like, user acquisition or user retention or just, like, even people, perception of the product better. I think, like, an example is, like, packaging and products is, like, Apple or a lot of companies spend a lot of time, like, effort into the packaging, because it's kind of, like, 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 like communicating. something to the user and they're setting the expectations.

And then I think that that can be like very useful thing, especially early on when no one really knows you or knows the product or cares about you. So I think like especially I feel like design can be very good leverage in the beginning. I think that's such an interesting insight, especially that the first thing you said around how the more often and the more crowded the spaces, the more opportunity there is for design to be a differentiator. Is that roughly how you think about it? Yeah.

So I mean, like, just think about, like, I don't know, any product category. It's like basically people have then, like, lower choices and then they, like, how do you make choices? Like, maybe there's a specific thing they want, but, like, 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? Like, 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 like the design can be one of those things is like stands out. It's like well that looks the best or that looks the most like quality product to me so I'm going to use that one. Like when people have a lot of choices they probably will pick the one that like 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 becomes this kind of default of like, I don't know, like, again, like Apple or Nike is 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 random brand. Even if the random brand would be actually a better shoe, they still buy Nike because they like, I don't know, like the brand. So then I think like both the design of the

product, but also the design of the brand can be like very strong, like 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 and actually building that perception that linear is really great and amazing? To me, I think the brand should be always like authentic and like it should kind of like, I think even people, if people can't articulate it, if people start to feel like something is off.

Like I think there can be like companies or startups. they like think about brand is like oh brand is the local or the colors of the website or something and then they like do the same thing and some some other company does and then they like think like okay now we have a brand but like you actually didn't like think about like what's your brand like what is the message or voice you you want to talk about and it doesn't have also like the brand doesn't happen overnight so it's basically just you start in the beginning like and like when you start a company you don't have no brand and so you have to create it so and you you create it over time by the things you do, the things you say, like how you say them and

like what, what kind of, how do you approach things? How do you treat customers? How do you build the website or the product? Like, all of these things starts to like build this idea. Like, what does this company mean to me in people's heads? I know, like, we both worked at their and like I think Franceschi is like, I think the brand was probably like the most important thing for him. And I don't know how many hours or meetings or going to. 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 can, you could book things like places to stay in a lot of places on the web. But when people think about like, oh, I want to like stay in some cool place, they're going to think about Airbnb. It's like they're not going to like think about those other places. So that's like the power of the of the brand. Like people stop thinking about the other things or they start understanding like, 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 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.

Now I'm going to go straight there and look for someone, knowing that they can also compare hotels on all these other sites. Coming back to design briefly, just very practically, how do you guys do design reviews? Just like, how do you actually go about reviewing what's going at? And then it's maybe too big a question, but just whatever you can share here is just like, how do you know when it's done? How do you know when it's ready and approved?

Carrey 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 then like I or one of the other co-founders or one of the or the head of product we are basically the sponsors for the projects so then like we we are kind of like responsible like reviewing the reviewing the work and so we might just have a meeting where we go through okay let's let's go through the demo and like people can explain what's going on and like how they think about it and why and then we might have like feedback okay this seems

like strange or or something and then I might just after that I might just like go into the product myself and like try it out and then what happens sometimes like it's like in the initial stages like obviously we're not going to like start fixing everything it's more like let's try to get the like 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 click it around and sometimes I find things like we were building this threading to comments and and then like when it looked all good in the demos and stuff and then I went to try it and like try different lengths of messages and stuff and then I started to see like oh sometimes the animations

are kind of janky or it's just like off like they don't go the right way the on the screen doesn't scroll exactly right so then I it's like I kind of like captured those things and like send it to the team. And so we had to like kind of pull back the release a little bit until those things were fixed. That one was like, it's very like, I think like a simple concept and it's like very known concept. Like, okay, this is how threading comments works. So that that was mostly about like, okay, what's the execution of this? But then we have projects where we are like not sure exactly how this should work. And like we can't really like, like we can try it ourselves. We also have to see how companies use it.

So something like, we built this feature, project updates, and it's like a common thing companies do. It's like you need to write an update on a project. Is it yellow, green, red? And like companies have very different ways of doing this in different tools. And we just thought like, well, I think it would be like really cool, really nice. If it's like inside linear and you can, the team, when they work on a project, they can write the update.

Linear can also capture some of the stats, like what actually happened. I think with that feature, it's like, it's been, working well, but then also now it'll be like exploring. It's like after using it a while, we think like, oh, actually there could be like more robust way of following these updates. Maybe people could, maybe the leadership could just like get this updates over email or like maybe when you have a lot of updates, you should have a search or like a filtering system or something.

So I think a lot of times we just think like, okay, this is like the scope of it for now and we are okay, like launching this and the execution is good. but we know that like this is not the like fully figured out version and we just need to see people trying it out and like see the 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 like a lot of things that we do is it's more like that but we don't do api testing or we don't do specific or follow like certain metrics or something we might sometimes we do have telemetry or like we can look at like how people use certain things and we sometimes do that but like 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 like based on the understanding of the problem we have and based on the like what we think is right is this the right solution and is this a good enough solution to be released to 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 who just review here is what we need your feedback on? Yeah. So there's like projects don't necessarily have like specific states to them. But like, I would say like roughly usually do start with design. So there's like some explorations on the design. Like okay, there's like different ways that we could like approach this or sometimes there's just one way because it's like pretty clear. But then like I think what I said before is that like we do try to like get into the building phase as quickly as possible because then we can also like see is this this direction actually like reasonable and like what what else does it call like

is there some problems it causes or how does it just generally feel here so i think like that there isn't like specific like review stages it's more like yeah let's check like if let's check on this project like every week or every two weeks and then before releasing let's also make a review of it and like really test it out that like is it the 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 willing 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 a 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 like this modern ways of building software and thinking about it. And we wanted to like share some of our thinking on it. And that's kind of like also, it relates to how we built linear as well. Like so you might like understand why we make some choices because this is like the way

we think about making these. choices. So we're trying to like share our thinking behind the product and it's like, here's the product and like figure it out. Yeah. So like the opunated piece, like I personally have like this belief that productivity software should be and especially company software should be opunated. I think that like what the productivity software is trying to do is is like make people productive. And I think like what productive means is like you actually do something that matters for the company, which is, which is like, I don't know, built some new feature or, like, fix something or design something.

Like, all of those things are, like, eventually they provide something of value for the customer. I think there is this, like, ideas or notions in the world that, like, flexible software is great. I'm like, I think it can be great sometimes. But, like, what happens is, like, people start spending a lot of time, like, figuring things out. Like, how does this feature work?

Like, you can use it in 10 different ways. and then every team or everyone figures out a different way of doing it. So our thinking is like we like to provide this like good defaults or good opinions. Like 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 like my design mantra is always like 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 opunated solution is that that's the best solution or the most optimized solution we think of and then like when you use it hopefully you agree and like you can feel that it's most optimized so being opinionated it's like I think the value it provides people is like 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 it 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 is 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. But basically I think that 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, there's a new thing coming in. Like, should we work on that or should we work on this other thing we've decided in the past? So the cycles is just a way to say that, like, like for the next week or the next two weeks, whatever time frame, we are going to work on these things.

And like these other 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, like, I don't know, we really need to jump on this other thing. At least there was like some kind of initial state that like 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 you have like a answer when someone comes to. do 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 have 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 it does it start or like every time like set it up manually. So it's just like runs automatically.

And so it's just meant to like to help the team to focus. on like let's just like 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 let me start there and then I have a follow-up question.

Yeah. So we might have like a company level goal sometimes like, for example, like weekly active users. that's like a metric we want to increase or something. But in terms of like specific features, we don't have goals for those. And the reason is that I think like product like us or like 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 like a very, 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, like, their usage of different features can, like, 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, like, 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, like, the main feature. Like, that's the main metric for every feature. Like, we don't actually, we don't

have that. Like, we just think that, like, 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's the state of things are. But we don't necessarily want to set like, oh, we need to increase this specific metric by X. It's more like we want to solve this problem. And ideally, the success way 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 spent 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 internal. I like this mixture of magic and science and like how we described is like there's always some level of science that we do. And I think, like, some companies are very scientific on their product management that, like, they like to measure everything and they do do a lot of tests and things.

But, like, we just decided, like, we don't think that's necessary or that's that's a good for us. So the science for us means that, like, we do talk to users a lot. And, like, the whole, like, any project we start with, we do some, like, level of user research. And as founders, like, different people on the team. Like we might have like weekly calls with customers or users. We also encourage everyone in the team, like go to the customer Slack, they answer people questions. Like 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 so. 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, like, empathy and as well as, like, the understanding, like, what is the state of things today? And then we talk about that. And then sometimes we might pull up stats and see, like, oh, wonder, like, 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, like, let's us pull some metrics and then decide that we should increase this metric. And then the magic part is like what happens when you kind of build this understanding. Like everyone, the company builds, it's not like everyone has the same understanding, but like everyone builds more of that customer and product understanding. Then like we have discussions like what should we be doing or like what decision we want to make here. Then everyone is much more like kind of informed of the actual reality of the customers or the or the product.

And then we think, like, you can much more, like, use your intuition or, 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, like, the whole company kind of has to, like, be with the customers or, like, talk to them and then, like, understand, like, 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 just 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 we do sometimes like sessions with the 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 a 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 like kind of apparently if people have that. And it's not like every project, like we need like everyone to have this like 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 like a culture thing. And I think the other thing is like you kind of have to have the, you just have to kind of believe in it. Like I think sometimes people use data a lot or too much because they're worrying or they're afraid that will I make a wrong choice. and like I'm using data to like make the choice for me. But then like you might still feel like this is not the right choice,

but the data is selling me is the right choice. And then it turns out maybe it was the right choice or not. But it's more like, again, like a practice thing. Like 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 the 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 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, like, how they operate. And I think both them are successful, but not in the same way. So I think it's, again, it's like, 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, like, some aspects of, like, the domain that you're in. Like, what does that domain and the problem space require from, 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 like we need to continuously kind of deliver them like good quality product and like kind of maintain that trust that we are that we don't like fail them or or somehow otherwise. like mistreat them. And I think like some businesses are much more like transactional where it's like, yeah, we just need to make this e-commerce sale. And then once it's done, like we don't care what happens. So in our case, it's more like we really need to like build this relationship over time. And then that's why like I think some of the choices we make are also like kind of like more

about respecting the customer versus like 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-light 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, to build, ship, and optimize a successful product-led motion. But don't take my word for it. Create your free Pendo account today

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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, Gary, 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, what do you, how do you do that? Do you have any tricks, systems processes, approaches, just 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, like, I was in YSA in 2012, and one of the things, the main thing they say there is like what you should be focusing on when you build a startup is like talk to customers, build the product, exercise. And like, if you're not, like, if you find yourself doing something else, then those three things, it's probably like the wrong thing to do. And the third, when you said exercise or? Yeah.

Yeah. And the exercise is that like it's important for you to be healthy or not just like burn yourself out. So I think there is like it. It was like a balance like advice to to that. So so I'm doing those three things. And but I so I think the thinking there is like I think we often as a company also to talk about this and and like very early on. And I use this the same way. And like I think that company can use it. same way. It's like, I think there's always things that you're supposed to do or like it sounds like a good idea to do. And like it could be like, yeah, like come to this podcast. And I actually think like before it wasn't like, or like I always have this question is like, 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 scale or something that it I think would be like as interesting or. or something. So I think it was a better timing to do it later. Similarly, like, when we built the product, we initially we were just very focused on, like, is this really important thing to do? There's always, like, yeah, like, you could get, like,

SOC2, like security kind of certificate. But, and we know that, like, eventually we need to get it, but we don't need it today. So we just say no to that. And, like, if customer asks for it, so we say, like, we don't have it. And we will have it one day, but not now. and see, like, and a lot of times people are like, okay, that's fine.

And then, like, in general, we also talk about this, like, you know, like, RPG games, you have the main quest lines, and then you have the side quest lines. And we often talk about the companies, like, avoid the side quests. Like, like, there's always, like, ideas people have. And it's a good thing. And it's like, people have ideas. But then it might be like, yeah, let's make like this t-shirt. So, like, let's make this thing.

And then we're like, well, is it, does it help the customers? Does it help the product? like this sounds like a side quest to me and like basically means like we shouldn't do it like this doesn't progress the main quest line which is like building this product and and like making it awesome for for these customers so similar to me it's like i operate this way personally too that i think about like is this important for the main quest line in in building this company for me or or is this something that i can ignore for now or something 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. 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, it's 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 like almost like it's always faster and better output when you have like a more, much more like smaller team. So that was kind of like the thing with linear too is like we, we just believe that you can actually build better with less people than you can with more people. So that's like this is the basic belief we have. So then when it goes to hiring, we've been like taking very like kind of like slow steps on it that like in the almost like the first year, hire anyone. Then like the second year, we hire like a couple people and then the second year we hired a few more. We never double more than doubled in a year. And that's kind of like

been our guideline that like 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 what we look into hiring is like couple of things. Like one is also that it obviously depends on the role. But basically I would say like every role we often talk about like 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 like we talked about the engineering before that like they do need to do some of this BM type of stuff and and so what we look for in them like is that like did they have some of this like skill set or product thinking or they can articulate why some

choices are better than some others or like in their past like did they disagree with some of the company's choices or the team's choices or like so we want to have this like obviously they need to be good developers but also like do they have this like a product sensibility or or can do they have like a judgment around that and this goes similar to like for example like a marketing hire Whereas we think about, like, yeah, we do need the marketing skill sets. But then we also want to see that this person also, like, maybe it's a good storyteller or like they have like this like kind of appreciation for writing or stories or like they have a taste of what's like interesting and what's not.

So I think like when we hire like operations person, we also like to see that they they maybe like have understanding on HR and maybe it's not their role. but they understand it. And what happens is like 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 like pick up things more easily or they can like work together more easily because everyone has more like a share like a shared area. So or it's not like it's not you rarely get to the point like people say it's not my job. It's 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. It's like they are more than they can take more scope than their skill set would assume or like what normally is expected from them. So essentially you're looking for kind of these Venn diagram overlapings across different functions and teammates. Yeah. And I think it's the other thing is like, guys said before, it's like we want to build much, I think, like a company that has less employees, which means that it's like, like I said before, we don't want that many like specialized roles or like two specific areas of ownership or something. We just think that we could build this like, we could have less people and those people can take on more scope and they can own

more scope. I think like traditionally I feel like in companies like how do you get more scope? 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 this higher levels. And what we try to do is, like, you don't actually have to have that many levels.

But like people can just like already when they, when they start, they can start like owning more areas. And I think that can be like much more like also like interesting. Not to everyone, but like I think interesting to many people. And it's kind of like how I also like always felt about as being a designer is like I don't I didn't feel like my job is purely like just looking

at the designs I also thought like I actually need to be helping this business or helping this other area as well so I think it's just kind of like also like 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, like we do fairly like standard, like interview loops where we test,

like we have some like hiring manager interviews and then like skill interviews and more tests. And then the last step of the process. process is the work trial. And basically, yeah, we, we, they basically come as like a mini contractor to the company and we give them a very like usually fairly vague problem statements. Like, if you're engineers like, hey, there's this feature that needs to be built, like, how would you build it and like go build it? And so basically they need to first like understand the problem, then they need to to scope it down to something that they can do in the time frame that they have.

and then they actually like go, they get the access to a code base, they can actually go and go and like build a version of it. And then like at the end, they can present the work they did. And why we do this is that like we just seeing that like it's a very good way to see like for both us, like both for the company and the candidates to see like how we work together.

And like for I think for the candidate, what they can see is that like what kind of company are joining? Like what is it like to work here? and how are the what is the my ownership or like how do I approach this like I think a lot of engineers also like that they see the code base and they're like oh wow this is like really clean and like it's not like some kind of spaghetti code type of thing situation so I think like it helps the candidates as well understand like what what are they signing off for which I think can be like very risky sometimes with especially with startups like it's it's really hard to tell like

how the startup is operating just from the interviews. And in large companies, I think things are more standardized. So it's like, I think they are more similar. And it's easier to make that choice. But with startups, it can be like very like 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 doing a pay trial is because Linney are such a 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't actually pull this off. Yeah, I mean, I think it's always like if you don't ask, like you don't know, I think like in our case, we, that's just being the standard. And 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 candidate as possible. and I think we only had like only a few people probably have ever declined it. Like 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 and they're joining. And also like doing that work trial, 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 evaluate us as well.

And then for us, obviously, we can see, like, what is important for us to see is, like, how does this person operate in this kind of environment and, like, how do they approach problems? Like, how do they think? And, like, are they able to make progress in a very short time frame, which I always think is, like, very important for startups. Like, in a large companies, you have maybe all time in the world to do stuff.

But I think, like, in any kind of startup, even with us when we like take our time doing things sometimes it's still important like we can do things quickly if we if we have to super cool just to close the thread on product sensibilities there anything you could share of just how you actually help understand someone's strength and inability there yeah i wouldn't say like we we have like some kind of very scientific or some some like special way figure it out for this so i think it's a lot of it's like a it's like a discussion of of and like i often think of like ask companies people that like, like, asked about their projects and I try to go deeper. It's like,

why was this decision made? Like, why do you think the decision was made? And like, I might ask, like, do you think it was the right decision? And like, or do you agree on it? Or ask about like 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, do they have thoughts in this area and like what their answers is? And people's answers can be very like, different levels. Like some people might be, yeah, just like, 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 like you didn't like it. You should be able to expand on it saying like, well, I don't like it because in this case, like it would not work well for this kind of users or in this kind of context or for this kind of purposes. So they have like more of this like reasoning or some kind of rational like why they think this way and they can articulate that. So I think that's kind of like what I'm

often like testing for us is like can they do this and how well they can do it? And it's it can be like very yeah there can be like 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 like talk about it forever and they can go deeper and deeper. And then some people that maybe don't, haven't had the experience or don't think this way they're like, yeah, I don't, I don't really know. Like, I just, 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 grows and what you figured out around

growth, especially in B2B SaaS. So the 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 official in 2019, some I think months before that we were already exploring and prototyping the product. So I think we prototype different kinds of designs a little bit. And then we also one of the things we really wanted to solve is like we wanted to make the applicationally fast. And the way we figured out we do that is like we have more of this like a local based data structure where all the data lives in the client and then it gets synced on the on the backends like with this delta packets and and back then we were just exploring like different off-the-shelf solutions and

systems but there wasn't nothing really there so we ended up like building our own and so we we spent on time like prototyping that and then once we we officially i think started working on the company in april 2019 and then we announced the company like roughly meet april and we had this like a little website up with the wait list. 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 wait list of people on the wait list. There was like few survey questions, like what kind of tools you use today? And then like why do you want to use linear?

And then we 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 less than all. 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 like, I don't know, several hundred of companies using it. And then we also launched the pricing. And I think like almost all of them, maybe one company didn't subscribe, but everyone else subscribed to that pay 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 it's just like 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 the story. So essentially, you launched it on Twitter. you had kind of a following, your founders had a bit of a following, say 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 you just add email addresses.

It's a survey asking them what tools they 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 like, what do I said before? And the focus is like, we want to like also like be focused on like let's just like build

a version that can work for some people or some companies. We don't have to like try to address everyone in the world in the, in the first months of the of the business and even before after that. So it was very like selective process. And I think we, yeah, we were fortunate that like we were able to get people sign up on a wait list. And I think after after a month or so, we had like maybe 4,000 people. on the wait list.

And then we had this like internal, I think initially it was just like a very manual process. But eventually we built this like an invite tool that we could just send invites. But in the beginning, I would go read the actual surveys like in a spreadsheet. Then I copy the email and then I emailed them the invite link from my personal email. And then like I would just like email them like after like 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 invite to 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 going to probably hit the same problems in this kind of software that's a 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 a waste of effort. So we would just

do these cohorts. Like let's invite these people. And then they say like, 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 then we fix that. So for that year, we did this cohort and then always get the feedback from the cohort saying like this is like wrong or this doesn't work. And then we'll 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 like 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, it was from this wait list. 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 started charging. Yeah, I think like the first 10 like people, companies using it. I think maybe a little over half. Maybe there was like three friends that like friends that have startups and they used it. And then I think the majority of them were just from this wait list. But they didn't like pay us anything. Like we didn't have pricing in the beginning or doing the private beta. At some point, we start building the payment function. So we just like added a.

added a page in the settings that like you can optionally pay and then we just give you a slider that like how much do you want to pay per seat and then we just like see like if I don't know some people paid like $20 per seat and some people pay like $1 so so we by like it doesn't 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 I don't know know, first week of launching, like, we have probably like some hundreds of customers.

I've never heard of the approach to pricing is 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's like gave us like a arena of data to like decide. Like, I think it's, but I think it was like good to see that it's like there was some people that went. I think that 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 like yeah I really love the products I'm happy to pay like $20 so I think at least it gave us some like confidence that if we charge for this and and it's like something under $20 it's is there's going to be like market for it

I want to hear about the story of how you've started to feel product market fit whatever that means you when did you start to feel like oh wow this is actually going to work and maybe this is going to be a real business yeah I think like we always been kind of I don't know, some like baronoid or just kept like, yeah, I guess maybe a baronaut is good way about the product market fit. I think like it's like a baranoid in a way, like we're always wondering like, do we really have it? And like, with who do we have it? And I think it's true in our kind of business is that like I think I think we started feeling it very early on. And like when people first like started using it and we could see like, oh, now the whole company is using it.

And they seem like happier using it and the feedback is good. they might have some additional asks for them for us. But we started feeling like there was definitely like a product market fit with certain kind of customer. And these were like more like smaller like 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 like 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 like address the whole market and not just like this early stage customers.

But we knew that like I don't like if a Fortune 500 company came to us then or even like today, we might not be like I don't think we can like provide them the solution today that works for them. So I don't think the fit is there. So for us like the way we think about is like do we have the do we have the fit in this specific segments and like. how strong that fit is. And so in the company's like journey, I think we, the first year, we kind of just focused on like, can we get the fit in the, the first two years we focused on like, can we get the fit in the early stage like startup kind of segment? And like basically the goal was like we want to be the default for startups, like 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, like, after or at the same time, we started getting some larger companies. And we saw like, yeah, it's not like really great for you right now. But like, let's work on it, making it better. And so I think the last two years, we've been like focusing on that. It's like, how do we make the software work better? How do we get the product market fit better? Like stronger in this larger company segments like, that are like thousands of people or like hundreds

of people or like 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 like, 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 like 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 feel like there is this blog post and written in the past where it's like,

you know, when you have product and 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, like, a lot of different segments or, like, you don't really think about it. Like, you just have users and you have millions of users.

So, and then you see, like, it's taking off. And so you have a product market fit. But then I think, like, 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 another.

And I think like maybe the countering to do things is that like actually if you're doing really well in some category, it's just like kind of double down on that. This is something like I talked to to the Zoom founder area. at some point in the company's life cycle. And this is also what he said. Like, it's like, when they were like building Zoom and early days, they would get this one type of customer. Like, I don't know, maybe it's like a university.

And then they like really, it worked really well for them. Then they're like, well, how do we get more of the universities? So they would always like focus on a certain kind of customer rather than like, let's just try and get everyone. Like so let's focus on everything, which is not possible. So again, like it's about like the focus is like if you have some like, you see. like 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 like captured or handled as much as we want. And we should like expand to new area. Essentially look for a poll and just follow that and pay attention to that. Yeah. And I think there is like for us, it's often like there can be sometimes, like for example, now we have most of the AI companies.

or are using us. So I think like it's always, and before that it was like a crypto company. So I think there's like when we see this kind of things happening, then we start to think like, oh, could we do something differently? Or like should we like get more of this 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 wait list. Is there anything you did before that to kind of build this following? you know, that sounds like really, like really amazing. Cool, we just announced it on Twitter and we have this large wait list 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 like, oh, it depends what kind of following. but I think my background as a designer, I was at Airbnb and Coinbase and other places and I did some talks in conferences

and write some plug blows. So I was definitely like out there and then kind of had some of that following, which was helpful. But it wasn't like I have like thousands of like hundreds of thousands of followers or millions or something. I had maybe like 10,000 or something, which is like a significant number.

But then I think like the other thing is, is I think with the announcement, like one of the things we did, I think, well is like, I think sometimes startups do, try to like emulate successful large companies too much.

And you kind of like do this like fancy announcements where it's like, hey, now we're like doing this fancy thing. And then it's like sounds very like corporate or something. And I think with that with our announcement, we try to like, wrote it more like direct or authentic to us like this is like what we're going to do and this is why and like this these are some of the things we're going to do then on on the twitter we did the

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 rest 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 probably the first thing you're like when you're announcing your company is like you're think about like who is my first audience like who would be the best users like early users for this product and like where are they and and then like how do they think about things and like what what kind of language they use so for us it was like very it came very naturally because we are these people we've been building software and these companies and and we've seen like other

people have seen similar things we have seen so i think it that the way we announced it like resonated with a lot of people. And then I think we did have some friends. And I said, like, we got some data like an angel round where we got some, like, friends involved. And the main reason we did it was that we just felt like it's, it's, in the early days, it's good to have, like, you feel like a real company in a way that, like, 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, like, make it worth it. kind of. But then, like, I think with the announcement, again, like, we could use some of those people to, like, spread the message as well. To kind of 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 does you do there? Yeah. So, so since we are, like, a fully remote and distributed company, so we have people and Europe and US, a lot of, like, kind of, like,

group gatherings are kind of challenging, like remote group sessions are kind of challenging because the time zones are so different. So, like, some of the basic things, like, happy hours, it's not really, like, doesn't really work that well. And also, like, Zoom happy hours is probably not that fun anyway. So what we, I think a lot of people in a company watch their Great British Baking Show.

And so we decide, 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 an like in a few hours and a couple hours. And it doesn't like require like tons of equipment or skill or something. And then we we just tell people like go buy the ingredients, use the company card. Everyone has a company card.

And then, um, 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, like a roll cake and lemon meringue pie. And we made some like pastel net dana, which is like Portuguese, like a pastry. And, um, and then like we just hop on to zoom. Everyone's like doing their thing, following the recipe. and then like sometimes people have like questions like hey I'm I don't know stuck with this or like my dough looks weird like does your dough look like this and people can kind of like help each other and then also like chitchat about whatever random things at the same time and then like we we do the thing and then we everyone takes pictures and posts this like Slack channel it's like what they 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 sometimes put a lot effort into the into the decorations and 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 this 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 an 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 like iced tea or something. So even that was kind of like interesting to do. Have you ever won one of these competitions yourself?

We don't. I don't know if we declare winners that much. But I do think like I do, since I'm a designer, I do have some advantages on the visual presentation. So I think that I generally do well. that and obviously that's like with this remote competition it's that's the only thing you can really like look for it's not not necessarily about the taste or the texture because you can't really taste it through the zoom maybe as the last question just again broadly you've gone from being an IC designer or manager of designers to the CEO of 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 like some high level designer in some company

it's still like you're just mostly focusing on the design and that's like your job but then like when you're a CEO then it's like every week or every day there's some different thing going on and it's not like there's sometimes there can be like problems, but a lot of times it's like, hey, we need to like figure out how are we going to do this. Like how are we going to do this like compensation or how are we going to do this marketing plan or like how are we going to do this like offsite thing?

And so it's just like to me what it's like challenge, like definitely like a challenging for me is is handling that like different kinds of things that come to you. and like staying somewhat focused still on something. So I think it's, I haven't necessarily fully figured it out, but I also learned, figure it out that like, yeah, hiring and delegation helps with this.

That like if you can find other leaders that can like take on certain areas, that's helpful. That's the like the main thing that, that like how, 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, the 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 her very exciting lighting around, 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 that 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're not necessarily like in linear or part of this team. So we've been building this like an ask feature, which is like integration to Slack where you can very easily go to a Slack channel and then ask like so your question, like you need something from this team. like maybe it's an IT team that like you need like a laptop or maybe it's like the like infrastructure

team and you need like help them like you need something from them. Then the team that this is is handling the request, they can very easily like send it to linear into this like triage that we have. And then like they can start like doing stuff with it. And if they have like questions or like additional questions to the actual person who requested it, we can like send those messages. is 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 like this is like just like a good way for the company or the whole company to be more potentially involved in the company, like the product operations without like having to be like 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. Like he's this like a, he wasn't really an architect, but he, I think thought in Berkeley. And I think he has this like interesting thoughts about like building things and like he focuses on buildings and and towns and these kind of spaces but i think there's a lot of like things that are also interesting for building software the other the other book that i like is like the the zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance because it's also like talks about the quality of things and and i think that's one of the main

themes of the book and like the thing is also that quality is so hard to define it's like if you actually like start thinking about it's like how do you define it it's like it's like it's really hard to pin down but it's all 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 four i think it's uh it's it's like kind of feels like i mean obviously it's like there's no story in that movie but it's like uh i think it's very true it 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 good mystery. And then also it's kind of reminds me of the fallout game. 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 we mentioned this on a previous podcast. The show is 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, I was just like, I'm not what I was hoping for. Okay, interesting. Maybe I need to check the books later, like once I watch the show. Definitely read the books, but there's three of them, and only the first one is actually

good. The other one, they're not actually. If you could 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?

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 of indication, like what the person values and like how they think about things. And I also like, 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 like asking something like more like negative things.

What are some favorite products? Have you recently discovered that you really, really like? I'm not sure if I discovered them. recently, but like recently I've been in this home office, I've been installing some of this hue lights and I really like them because like throughout the day I can like have more like kind of harsh lighting because since 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 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 a like on my home app, I have like scenes that like, so there's the night scene and then there's the day scene or like the morning scene. And so I just like click that button and then it turns, changes the lights. That is extremely cool. I'm going to 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.

I think for me, it's about that sometimes people have tendency to rushing to 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 too much urgency and you are rushing things. And what happens is that you rest it, and then now you need to come back to fix it. So I think sometimes we, I like to think that like, you should take some time to actually like think about it and like, what are you going to do and then do it. Because then it's in the end, it's going to be faster that way than like 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 like respecting people and things. So I think it's, I mean, I think the people respect this is pretty obvious. But I think that I think with the things you have also, I think like you should take your. good care of them. Like when you when you use them, you're just like, I don't know, clean them or put them away and then they're like ready for the next time. So I think I like that though, like you, rather than like you treating things like that they are trash or or kind of like not that valuable, you should kind of like treat things that they are, they are valuable. Final question. You were born in Finland.

I think you grew up in Finland. What is a Finnish 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. Like 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 a list few restaurants that offer it. Okay. Amazing. Is that something we could get here or you have to go to Finland to get it. I don't think I've never seen it here in the U.S. in any restaurant,

but it's not very hard to make it yourself. If you can probably Google a recipe, it's basically you just need some salmon and some basic spices and some cream and some fruit 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, Sarnan, and we also have the linear account, which I think is interesting.

So that's at Liner. And then, yeah, I think, like, I hope everyone can, like, check out. check out linear and see if it could work for them in their company and like figure out if there's a pilot. Like I think we're always happy to assist on those things that like if you just want to try it out, then try it with the team. We can help you to set it up and and like help you to like understand how to use the product. Awesome. And it's just linear that app, right? Is that the URL? Yes. Awesome. Okay. Easy peasy. Amazing. Kari again, thank you so much for being here. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening.

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