Y Combinator Startup Podcast - How To Design Products That Truly Stand Out

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, the issue tracking tool used by thousands of high-growth companies. Before Linear, he was the first designer at Coinbase and later a lead designer at Airbnb.On Design Review with YC's Aaron Epstein, Karri shares how his design background shaped Linear’s product philosophy, why quality and craft matter from day one, what founders should look for when hiring, and how AI is changing the way teams build. It’s a deep dive into building products that truly stand out.

Great design can make or break your product. So to learn more about how to prioritize high-quality design in the earliest stages of your startup, we're sitting down with Kari Sarnan, the co-founder and CEO of Linear. Kari worked at Coinbase, Airbnb, and built one of the best issue tracking tools on the market in Linear. And today, he's going to share some of his advice for how you can design a product that truly stands out.

Welcome to another episode of Design Review. Kari, thank you so much for joining us. Well, it's awesome to be here. Maybe just to kind of give people a sense of where linear is at today. Maybe you can just kind of give us a high level of any interesting stats or facts and maybe a quick description of what linear is. The idea with linear is that we want to be this purpose-built platform for building products and or planning of building products. It's not a suite of tools, but it's more like an integrated workflows. It's a tool that engineers might use every day.

So I think design is especially important and speed is very important because if any kind of paper cut or bad experience, it will multiply a lot of times. Where we are now, like fast forward today, we have about 15,000 companies as customers. And then we have growth companies like MercuryRamp, Retool, Prex and a lot of growth companies, as well as like a larger companies like Open AI and Block, which is a, with the financial company. We wanted to build, focus on the quality and keep the focus really tight to build the best product we can for these customers. So that's why we've done some of the things differently.

You're also a YC founder, and I'm curious, kind of at all the stops of your career from founding your first company, going to Coinbase as the first designer there, lead designer at Airbnb, and then starting your own company again at linear. What's one lesson that you took away from each of those stops that's

kind of made linear what it is today. I think linear is very much built with the advice we got from YC and just make something people want and talk to the users and simplifying the startup building process or clarifying it that not a lot of these things matter that you see out there and a lot of things can wait. What really matters is like you find those someone you can build something for and you can build it it in a good way. So I think YC really helped me to understand that building companies, it doesn't have to be, especially in the beginning, it doesn't have to be that complicated. You almost just need the singular focus of making progress, building something for the customers. And then all the other stuff

can kind of come automatically or later or something, it can wait. I think OYC also helped me with the ambition that you could see like, hey, you can make a lot of progress, you know, very fast time. And I also, So eventually that progress will lead to like a massive company's or massive growth. So I think it was really important for me. Coinbase was actually in the same batch that I was saying, which was 2012 summer. Maybe what I learned there was that you kind of have to really clarify with the company, but also like especially I think as a designer, what is the one or a couple problems we are really trying to solve with the design or with the company itself?

And for me, at Coinbase, thinking about crypto back in 2014, it was a very different time. Like, there's a very little trust in the market. And also just because it's a new thing, you don't have that trust built in. So, like, what I saw that my job as a designer is, like, I have to change this company to look like more trustworthy and more professional because they want to go mainstream. But we also need to simplify this. We have to make the design really simple and explain it in a simple way. So we can break out of this crypto niche group. I kind of look around the website, the product, the brand,

and I basically just made a list of like these things needs to be fixed. So it's like the logo was this stack of coins, like a little bit like kind of like a, you know, like Donald Duck or Uncle Scrooose kind of like. Yeah, it's like the coins on the table. One of them is like tipping over. It's like, why is it tipping over? It's like, that's not, that doesn't feel good. It should feel like staple or something.

I did have some trouble convincing them to like pick up a new local mark. And eventually, yeah, we didn't do it until the IPO, they finally picked one, which is like a kind of like a circle that looks like a C. There's like a thing going into it. So it looks like a C. And then on the website, like what it looked like was so Brian and the team had basically built it over the past two years. I think they had quite a lot of users already.

They had a lot of money in the background, like in the platform. But everything was built with Twitter boostrap. I think that the product itself worked quite nicely. It was quite simple. The problem was that the visuals, using this kind of standard library, made it look like a hack project.

So like someone coming to a website thinking, oh, should I buy some Bitcoin and like, should I store my money in this Bitcoin bank? it kind of like makes it a little bit uneasy. It's like, can I trust this people? Like is this a real company? Is this some like side project? This is the hack project.

So the second thing is like, well, we need to fix the website. Like we need to make some kind of visuals to it. And then the third thing is that the product is solved that. It also looked like that. It used to Twitter push-up. Like I didn't change the layer of the kind of structure of the product, but I just changed the visuals. And that way like fairly quickly, we could

get got to a state that it like from the outside this company looks more trustworthy and more real or like more like a real company and then the third thing like later on the brand i was using a lot of photos because i think that photos of people photos of the earth like mountains for something i found out that the crypto and the space is so abstract and ambiguous that like it doesn't feel like crowning. You're like, what is this? Like, there's this magic internet money. It doesn't exist, you know, like, kind of like, it's weird. So I think like those kind of things, like those kind touches. I don't know how much it actually impacted anyone. Like I don't know if anyone like picked on it. But that was the thinking in the back end. And then lastly, I think with Airbnb,

I joined there like much later. They were already a huge company. They weren't public yet, but there were a couple thousand people at least. What I learned from Brian Teske, there was that the brand and I think Silicon Valley still start with startups don't quite understand brand or design there's I think they logically tired to understand it that yeah okay design is important we see that it makes sense and brand is important makes sense but what is it like they don't have maybe the language or the experience to to think about it or maybe they just don't want to think about it It was interested in see with Airbnb is like how much the CEO was actually focused on the brand. And seeing that certain kind of advantage, which turns out it is an advantage.

Brand is really like the story you tell. Like what is this company about? Like what do we care about both internally and externally? And then you try to follow those values or those actions, like those, that thinking as much as you can. And not kind of like sacrifice on it. So that from the external, I could see like Airbnb is like, like, this is the Airbnb brand and their actions are following that. And then over time, I can trust them that they're like predictable.

They're not one day. It's like Airbnb is great and they're doing everything right. The next year, everything is bad. And like I don't trust that kind of, there's too much volatility in it. So I think that that was interesting to see like how much he care about it. Yeah, that's really interesting. So it sounds like at those stops, Coinbase and Airbnb, I think a brand is always helpful for building trust,

but it seems like the design and the brand, especially for those two businesses where, you know, somebody's going to come stay in your home or you're going to stay in somebody else's home. It seems like that was incredibly important. And now at linear, it seems like your brand, at least as an outsider, it seems a lot is about craft and quality and just like a high quality professional product. And I'm curious, what are the things that you do on a daily basis to try to create that brand? And how intentional is it for you? It was something that we worked in this companies and we're working in this industry a while. So sometimes you kind of get tired of the things that exist and you kind of try to think,

would there be some other way of doing this thing or other way of thinking about it? And that's like a good starting point. Like you start thinking like what do you personally really care about as a founder? And then you start going into that work. Well, what should the company then care about? Those things should be aligned. Like otherwise like why you work, why do you found this company? From there we saw that there's a lot of competition.

it's not super easy to differentiate with the features, I think, because I think people just look at all, it's just project management, whatever, like these other tools do it too. But what we see that none of these companies in this market actually had any kind of brand. You can truly say what they're about. You could know that they exist, but you can't really tell what they're about. So for us, it was really that can we be really authentic and kind of direct or honest and also, like, show that we have this like care or values for certain things and quality being one of them like we we are helping companies to build software and for us personally we find it annoying when things

don't work that well and we don't want that to have what our customers do have that feeling so we try to like tell everyone internally and and when we do this work that like we need to strive for the quality quality doesn't mean perfection that you can't have anything rough or anything You need to polish everything to like for years. It's just mean that like you have this direction or idea in the mind that we are about quality. We want the user to like the customers to have a great experience. And that's like the most important thing. And yeah, sometimes you might have to launch something to get feedback and that's okay.

But like you should then like remember to come back and say find like ways to like improve it or fix it if it's rough in some ways. you are building this culture around something internally. So that's part of my job, that sales is part of the experience of linear. I wanted to be a quality experience. What we really want to find people that can do like a quality experience. And like what I think in this kind of market is that these buyers are quite sophisticated and they already have maybe a product they use. So they do want to understand like how can they, how can linear do it better or differently?

And so those people have, like the salespeople we hire, they have to be, they don't have to be engineers or like super technical people. But they have to have at least the capacity or curiosity to understand the product really well and the customers well. And I think it's been working and we've been able to hire people. But I think founders or startups, they just decide, well, we hire sales team and then, or someone like the investor sells. Like you need to hire sales. They're like, okay, we'll go hire sales. but they don't ask questions like what kind of sales it feels interchangeable right

all sales parts are you swap them in now but the companies are very different so yeah you might be an enterprise company you need someone who can do that like navigate that market really like kind of it's a complicated process so you need someone to navigate that or or something like maybe if you're like a medical product

maybe you need to have someone who is worked in the medical field so there's like like attributes that you can think like how even in sales that could be, how could you like really signal what your company is about, like what you do well? It's interesting to me. I think a lot of times founders think about brand as like the logo, the colors I put on the website, you know, like those types of things. But it sounds like the argument you're trying to make is that actually the brand is like

every touch point. And it's interesting that you're like down to the salespeople. Like they're the first contact with a lot of your potential customer. and making sure that that is the brand experience that you want them to have with your company is incredibly important and would often be overlooked by a lot of people, I think. Yeah, and I like to think it's all kind of follows from the same tree that you have this some kind of brand thinking or it's more like the company values, like what are we about? And then you try to visualize that or make it happen in a different aspect.

So visualizing means that you make your logo and you make the website and you are signaling like, we are very professional or we are trustworthy or something with that design. I would say like the brand is often like, what does the person feel the experiences? I think a lot of times people think about, you know, craft and high quality and the things that you talk about. And like you said, they think of perfection and waiting a really long time to ship something. But talk about how you operate to achieve that high level of quality while still, you know, shipping very frequently and getting things in the hands of real users before they're like fully baked in your own head.

Yeah. One of the lessons I learned in some of these other companies with that, like having more people working on things doesn't necessarily make it better. It's often can make it worse. You start to lose the tread of like, what is this feature even about? Because everyone has a little bit different opinions.

And you start into this bike shedding or like a design bike committee that we try to like kind of get everything in there. But then it's now the feature is not really, for anything because it's too broad or it's like it doesn't really quite work for anything. From the beginning we wanted that the people work in small teams and like these are often like two, three people. It's like engineer, maybe a couple of engineers, one designer. And we for a long time, we don't have any product managers and today we have about two and they are more like the product manager job in the linear is more that like they're looking across things not like necessarily

specific project all the time or specific feature all the time. And they're kind of like trying to keep the overall threat going, like, well, what is happening and like who is saying what and like where are we at things. And then then like the we want the engineers and the designers to actually run the project. It's hard to spec quality or the right solution. Like you can maybe spec the solution to some degree, but you can't really spec the quality execution of it. And I think that's where I think if someone is driving the problem,

project and building it, they have a lot of opportunities to like tweak it to make it better. Like what I think what I saw sometimes happening in other companies is that we had this like nice design or or some kind of spec and then someone starts building it and then they realized that oh, this design doesn't quite work in practice. But now no one wants to go back to change it because the design was already green lighted in this meeting like with the CEO a long time ago. So now we have would have to go all the way back and then like change the design and we have to like approve it again, which will add timeline. And then now no one's happy because the timeline's got out of whack.

People are just not thinking enough ownership or cannot use their own agency to fix things. And so with the features, we try to have like the engineer and designer to drive it. Like this is like scoping it, trying to figure out whether the first version talking to customers, talking to users, looking at the user research. How we manage the quality and speed is that we generally just, you can do whatever we use feature flags a lot, so you can put anything in the app in the internal use. Like once you have the idea almost, like you can put it in the app and we can try it out. It doesn't have to be good.

It doesn't have to be like that polished or anything. So internally, we're very okay, like iterating to stuff. And then we also have better programs where we invite specific companies like, hey, do you want to try this out? It's a little rough, but like you can try it out and see if it's like useful. But then once we get to the final like general availability release, we try to like look through the executions, like, is there, all the animations correct? Like, are the things, like, are the details correct? Like, does it feel good? Are we missing something? So there's, like,

a last check, but we don't try to polish it all the time, but we're trying to push the team, like, okay, make progress as fast as you can. But at the very last step, we should just make a look, check that everything is, like, kind of reasonably in a good shape. Because we want people to lead this project. We also need to hire people who can do that. So we can't hire engineers that only want to code and like never think about anything else. I just want to look at the editor and like press the buttons or something. But we all look always looking for people who have opinions or they have like some kind of product sensibilities or some kind of product taste or they just like exquisite some kind of curiosity. It's like I think there's a good way of doing

things and there's a bad way of doing this. This feature doesn't feel good. This feature does feel good. So we're just looking for those people that are can think and use their own judgment. I'm sure a lot people are out there wondering, what should I be looking for if I'm trying to hire somebody? Like that model sounds great. I need the right people. How do I find the right people? And what questions should I be asking to figure out if they're going to be good at that? Yeah. And they go from the resume experience level, like experience, you should be looking for something that has this person built anything on their own? Or had they built anything large, like a complete product? Like they were like maybe like a first engineer somewhere or they

they built their own open source project or a side hobby or something because I think like that forces you to think about this thing so like should I do it this way or that way but I would say like a flag is someone who has worked at Google for 10 years and I can like see like well they're probably fairly like boxed in in the specific area and they probably didn't have to like think about other things and when I interviewed them I like I like to ask them about the projects they're working on like or something like they're really proud of like what is a project they're proud of and then I just keep asking questions like why why you're proud of it like why why did you do it this way and sometimes they say well someone told me to do it was like well did you agree it that way or did you

have a different opinion about it and like you're just trying to see like did they pay attention like did they feel something like this is right or this is this is wrong in their opinion maybe their opinion is wrong anyway but i think what we're really assessing is like do they even want to think about this thing or do they naturally think about these things i don't think there's like a super fire way to evaluate that. But I think it's more, the more questions you ask about the projects they worked on, and the more specific they can be in it, it's usually like a good sign. If they just say, well, it's like, it's just did this and I work on the tech and like,

whatever. But if they start going like, yeah, like I did build this thing. But the hard part was this customers were saying this and like, whatever. So you can see that like they were paying attention to the business problems too and the user problems, not just the technical problems. I am passionate about encouraging more designers to become founders. And I think you are just one of the top examples of somebody that was a designer and, you know, I guess you were a founder and then designer and then founder again.

I'm curious, like, what skills or like superpowers or unfair advantages do you think you have as a founder based on your design background, design thinking, maybe even the way you grew up? I like to think, like design is finding things that fit. kind of feel good. And I think that in a way when you're building products or companies, that's kind of like what you're doing ideally. Like, yeah, sometimes companies get built or products get built really like randomly. But I like to find that like what is the kind of like common ideas of the threats, like what are we trying to communicate or what are we trying to solve? And I think as the designer, it's not always easy to articulate that, but I can somehow like sense or feel it that

this is the way to do it. I can see that this will work. And with designs or other things, I can visualize how they will look or how they will work or like, or maybe like even like how the users might react to it. And then I can try to think like what are the inputs to that output? Like what is what kind of people we need or what kind of what the brand should be like or what the product should look like.

So I would say like as a design founder, I think that the superpower could be that you are more maybe have like a broader view of things. I don't know exactly how like technical founders think about it, but I think they are really like tech focused and it's like everything is outside of that is kind of like maybe not in their focus. Whereas I think like a designer can maybe be a little bit more broader. What advice would you have for designers that are thinking about making the leap and starting a company or maybe they're nervous about it? I'm curious what you would tell them. You should try to like broaden your horizons as much as you can. So what I'm

mean by it that is often I've seen in companies, like designers working in companies, they get quite narrow focus on the design problems. Like I was given this task or this project, so now I'm going to do it. I'm going to design it. I'm going to open Figma and then I'm going to design it. And then when they go to reviews even about those features, like maybe the CEO is reviewing it, maybe someone else is reviewing and you get this feedback and like people are not always happy with the results. You kind of get into this more like, oh, I'm not a good designer. I'm doing something wrong. But the problem is really like you're maybe not, you're kind of overlooking what the other people

are looking for. Like what is their problems? Like usually internally the CEO or the other people in the organization, they have their goals or like strategies or initiatives or something they want from this. When you get design feedback, it's not always about the design, it's about that this is actually not like kind of solving their problem. then it's not solving the business problem. And sometimes it's just like they don't even know what the problem.

Maybe people, maybe the CEO and some product manager there may be like even have a different problem in mind. Like the problem isn't clear to people. It's not, people are not aligned on it. Even if you don't become a design founder, I think it's useful to start to like expand your mindset. Like your job is not to sit there and like put some stuff in Figma but your job is to kind of solve the company's problems.

Often that means that you. you are solving them through design. But if you don't understand what the problems are, you're not going to be able to solve them. So the more you can, like, kind of learn from the people around you. So if you work in a B2B company, like, well, talk to the salespeople. Like, they talk to customers all the time. They're a good resource for understanding, like, the customers.

And then as well as like the company leadership, try to ask them, like, what they're looking for, like, try to understand their problems. And when you do that, you start learning, like, oh, this is how businesses operate. this is how people think, this is what the different roles do, this is maybe the purpose of this function. I'm curious, like, why do you think founders should care about design, and especially from the earliest days of their company? What differences have you seen between companies that do care about

it versus ones that don't? So you have to think, like, what is actually the value of the design that brings to your specific company in the specific market? And then I think that a lot of times people just don't think through that so they either copy what other companies are doing or they just don't do it at all. Like this is like, well, we don't know how to do design. So we'll just not even think about it. But I do think like the best companies do care about design. You can crawl to a big company being in, without too much design.

I think it's possible if you just have like a very good technology. But I do think like it's it can, the design can accelerate the company and the how people think about you. Like it can even help with. investors, investors are people too. So if they think something is cool or there's a strong brand, they're more likely to pay more. Like they want it more than. Yeah. It's emotional, right? Yeah. So I think that's kind of maybe the design is partly it's making things easier for users, but I think it's partly is also like touching this like emotional needs of people. And then I think

it can amplify everything you do. So that's why I always think like even a very early stage companies, maybe you have like five people or something or three people. Maybe you should hire a designer, even if it's not that needed right now. But I think they can have at that point, they can have like very big leverage because the work, if everything is a little bit nicer, everything is a little bit better, it will compound over time and like the users will see it and you don't have to do this big redesign, like years down the line because you kind of ended up in just like horrible place and now you have to like hire more people and like fix everything. And then the customers are complaining because things are changing. So yeah, I think it's just like a smart thing to do.

You wrote a really incredible post around 10 tips for creating products that stand out. I'm curious, like what are the two or three that you think are most important that, you know, You think all founders should be aware of or think about or consider as they're building their products. I think the whole definition of being differentiated or being an outlier company or a breakout company. It's like you really need to show you are better at something like much more than anyone else. Like you have to be known for it. So then I think that that starts with that. Like you have to decide that maybe the one thing you want to be really known of or the best.

Like it can't be the same thing everyone else is doing. because then like you're not differentiated. So I would start with that, like, figuring out that like differentiator or like what you really want to be known of. I think my second thing is like it's maybe weird, but I would say like the people you hire is probably, especially in the product organization

if you're trying to build like really good product. The people you hire has the most impact on the product. I feel like we operate quite casually. We don't have a lot of processes. We have, yeah, we have this feature flags and some kind of testing, but we don't have like a lot of. of rules or processes because we want to hire people we can trust their judgment and taste.

Early on I think we, with the founders, we kind of played this mind game of like, well, if we just disappear, would this people know what to do kind of? Like I think we've done our job well and hired the right people if we think like, well, they would survive and they would like actually make progress. The second thing is like I think you need to keep them some space to do it. Like if you're like constantly hounding them as like, where is it like, do it now? Then obviously they don't have the space to do their work well. So there's some like balance there.

It's like that you can't be like constantly like micromanaging them or helping them about. Yeah, how do you balance that? I mean, I know it's important to you to like give space for people to work. And in a perfect world, I think everybody would want that. And then that's balanced with trying to ship quickly. We try to set some kind of timeline pressure that we would like to see something at this time and this date and we think that's reasonable. And then I think like what it, what we hope.

the team will do is that they will think about that timeline and then they start scoping down the project and they start thinking well what can we actually achieve and maybe we we need to really prioritize the things we can do which i think in the end is even useful because then you start focusing on the right things anyway so there's this like a little bit of timeline pressure then we keep track track of the progress like if the progress are good and like things i'm moving i'm not like i'm not going to get sad if the timeline is not hit exactly. I might ask, well, what is a new timeline or like, what is, where do you think is now and like how far is it for something? So there's a little bit pressure as like, where is it? Or like how far it, far along it is. But it's not like daily. So there's some level of pressure, but it's,

it's like we're not like super timeline date driven. Shifting gears to AI a little bit. It seems like now it's easier than ever to get design work created by AI or to ship product that AI generally generates, is that a good thing? And what are the considerations that people should be thinking about in a world where it's so easy to just generate new designs and ship new product and new features that maybe people aren't thinking about yet? Yeah, I often think with technology. I don't think you should necessarily think, is it a good thing or a bad thing? Because usually technology will happen regardless. Like you can't, I think we can't go back not having AI anymore it's not going to disappear from the world so now the next question is well what what should

i think about it or like how should i use it or how should people use it and i think it will over the the floor on things like design for example so companies that maybe before couldn't hire designers or they didn't have time for it or something i think they can kind of like help prop them a little bit that they can now do like decently good design designers themselves like if they might always not have skills for everything and sometimes they run out of ideas. I think AI can help help with that too. I do think that the top, the ceiling, it will just keep getting higher. And so if you really want to be the best design company or the best company, you have to still keep pushing the boundaries and you can't just expect that the AI will solve it for you. Like basically AI, you can get to the average level,

maybe. But like going beyond that, you still need all the work you've done in the past. You should understand the danger is that when something is easy to do, you stop paying attention to it. So if it's easy to generate designs and ship them, you maybe didn't think about it, this feature at all. Like, I think sometimes when something is really hard, you're constantly thinking about it. Like, is this worth it? Do I still want to do this? Like, should we stop doing this? Like, I don't, this is so hard. So I think that the kind of like the suffering helps to maybe clarify the design, Maybe sometimes it tells you that it's not the right thing. Maybe it shouldn't be that hard.

Maybe you're approaching it wrong. So I think you just understand that the danger is that when you outsource the output too much, you might stop losing control or even like understanding of your company or what the product does. Are you worried that AI is going to make designers obsolete? I don't think so. Similar with engineers or designers, I think there can be some shifts happening, like even today. I think it's easy to generate websites, so maybe the market for website designers will go down. I do think people will still have some designers working on websites.

And I think in my mind, the real problem with websites is not the design. It's like the actual narrative or the storytelling or the explanation of things. And I don't think the AI can really solve that for you. You really have to understand that. I mean, the AI can again help with that too, but I think you still really have to understand that what is this website for, like who is it for? They can have maybe the AI agents or something can kind of do work for them on the kind of in the background and your role might be shifts more like towards like being a

more like an IC lead or like a manager a little bit that you are not only doing your own output like as an individual contributor but you're also responsible for some kind of AI's output. And I think like your shop should be still like, is this good? Is this fitting? Is this work? And that kind of things. We don't know what's going to happen. But my feeling is also that if AI makes, for example, like building software really easy and cheap, I think we will just build more software. I think the interest will grow and you will need more designers. Like you can't just have AI. At this point, we don't have companies that are purely run by AI. Yeah. And so yeah. So so I think until that happens, I think we'll still.

live in a world where you might have quite a lot of people in a company humans doing things, and then you have AI also doing things. And I think because the AI can make things more cost effective, I think the companies will just decide to do more. That's my, I think, at least optimistic take that what will happen with the AI. And then you kind of have a front row seat to this with a lot of the best product teams using a linear. Where do you think things are going in terms of how product and design teams will operate in the future? Yeah. So with linear, it's very focused on the execution or tracking work or solving problems. And what we have, for example, being working on now is like building this agent's platform

that you could bring agents into linear and they could work for you. You could delegate work for them. So there's a bug report comes in into the triage. The agent can take a look at it and say, hey, I'm pretty sure I'm going to like solve this for you. And then you're like, okay. And then it goes to work. and then you review the code. So I think there's a lot of things

I think we can able to streamline. And what do we see from the customers in market, there's a lot of interest for this. And all the CTOs basically are saying that AI is their kind of like number one priority. And the CEOs are writing this memos about AI. And I think it's clear that on the leadership level, they understand that AI is useful.

I find that the whole industry, so there's this big launches of very broad, AI tools like there's the AI every company very big company they have the chat bot and they have all that all the different like tool AI kind of set of tools that can do anything for anyone but I think like what is missing there is like the people who are building it from like more like a crowns up like well what is a problem someone has today like for example like triaging issues like a company they don't always know where the issue should go where should this bug go So you could have a manual process, someone looking at it, you could have some kind of automation,

or you could have an AI to look at it like, hey, like, the AI could go look at your workspace and code base and I can understand. It looks like you have this kind of product areas. It looks like these kind of teams or people are working on those product areas. And it looks like generally when these kind of issues come in, that these go into these kind of teams or this kind of person. So like our approach with linear, it's like, we are now like thinking more as like, what are the specific problems we could directly solve with the AI and it could be like a better, like more quicker value to the customer than having this like very broad spectrum. Ask anything or create anything or something that kind of like approach. So that's like what we are excited about. Well, Kari, thank you so much for joining.

So much great advice and insight here for everybody. who's watching at home. So really appreciate you taking the time and sharing all of your lessons and unique things, counterintuitive things that you all do at linear. And hopefully a lot of those can propagate out through other startups as well. So really appreciate you joining. Yeah. Thanks for having me. And great to be back at the YCA office. Awesome. That does it for this episode of Design Review. And we'll see you on the next one.