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

[00:00] My belief is that like any... [00:02] 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 even considered [00:32] So I think today, it's almost like a very basic thing now. Pretty much from the very beginning, you need pretty high level design for people to even pay attention or consider you seriously. Today, my guest is Kari Saarinen. Kari was the founding designer at Coinbase, principal designer at Airbnb, co-founder of two previous startups, and most recently is the co-founder and CEO of Linear. [00:57] 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 A-B tests, no metrics-based goals, instead a focus on tastes and opinions. Also, no durable cross-functional teams, instead teams assemble around a project and then disperse once it's done. [01:27] manager as the head of product and that's it. In our conversation, Kari shares how he built a culture around quality and craft, how he makes trade-offs, and how he operationalizes quality and thoughtfulness, where design can be a differentiator in competing against incumbents. We talk about something called the linear method of building product, which is big on building opinionated software, working in consistent cycles amongst other principles. We also get into linear's unique hiring approach, which involves a paid work trial where candidates

[01:57] birthdays instead of just having an interview. Also, a glimpse into how Linear got their first 10 customers, found product market fit, and scaled their growth engine. There is so much gold in this episode. I am very excited for you to hear it. With that, I bring you Kari Saarinen after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Mercury, who I also happen to use for my business checking account. I've tried a lot of business banks, and there is nothing even close [02:27] from another bank and it literally took less than half an hour to set up the account and wire money over at no cost. They kind of make you want to use the site more often, which I've never felt with another banking site. Mercury is banking engineered for the startup journey, a modern solution to help your company become the best version of itself. And Mercury isn't just a place to hold and send money. It's software built to help you scale with safety and stability, whether you're a team of two or a team of a thousand. [02:57] foremost investors, operators, and tools. Visit mercury.com to join over 100,000 startups on Mercury, the powerful and intuitive way for ambitious companies to bank. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank, banking services provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust, members FDIC. This episode is brought to you by Composer, the AI-powered trading platform now with retirement accounts. Algorithmic trading has historically been reserved

[03:27] leads. Now with Composer, you can automate your trading with a library of over 1,000 strategies that are easy to understand and tweak using an AI assistant and visual editor. Composer is the first ever algorithmic trading platform where you don't need any coding experience. It includes a full range of trading indicators for you to get creative and a Discord community of 2,500 traders to discuss your ideas with. Composer also has a powerful backtester to see the historical [03:57] single click. Once you invest, Composer will automatically trade for you based on the logic of your strategy. 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 LENI for an extra week of free trial on your Composer membership. That's Composer.Trade. [04:25] Kari, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Lenny. It's great to be here. [04:31] Maybe to start, set a little context. Can you just... [04:34] explain what is linear, what does linear do, and then share maybe a few stats of just the scale of linear at this point. [04:41] So linear is the project and issue tracking system that software companies and technical teams love to use. We help software companies to build software. We started 2019. Today, some of the top growth companies like Block, Vercel, Ramp, Retool, Mercury and Substack are building with linear. We also additionally have

[05:06] Lots of [05:06] other companies, like thousands of other companies using Linear. These companies can be like very early stage team, like some company just graduated from YC or a public company. And just like briefly, why we created Linear is that like, like you said, like we, I work with you at the Airbnb. And before that I work at Coinbase. And before that I had my own startup and all of us founders, there's three [05:36] different stages. And what we saw often is that the tools available for managing software projects weren't that really cutting it. I think a lot of them felt very clunky or complex or just like they had this kind of legacy way of thinking about software development. And so we just felt like we should [05:58] do something about it, then that's-- so with Linear, we set out to do-- like, build this, like, most frictionless and streamlined [06:06] system for modern software development. I'm also happy to share that we've been profitable the last two years. And we also have this thing where we actually have this net negative lifetime [06:20] burn rate, which means that we just have more cash in the bank today than we have raised. I think a lot of startups, usually the normal way is that you raise money and then you need to spend it to build it. But I think since we were able to build a business pretty early on, we've been able to be in this position that actually we haven't spent any money on building the business. That is insane. I didn't even know that.

[06:45] Okay, so for all those reasons, a lot of founders and a lot of product leaders [06:49] look up to the way when you build a product and the way you think about product. And so, to kind of frame this conversation, there's three areas I want to [06:56] dive into. One is just how you approach building product. [07:00] Two is how you go about building the team and the business in general. And then three is just how you grow linear. [07:07] And to start, I want to talk about craft. [07:11] Clearly one of the biggest reasons that [07:12] People look up to Linear and use Linear as the quality of user experience and the product. [07:18] And I know your team puts a lot of emphasis on craft. [07:21] and user experience. [07:22] I imagine that also comes at [07:24] The cost of some trade-offs takes probably longer to get stuff out the door. You're probably losing sales because people are waiting for a feature and you're not ready to launch yet because you want to make it better. [07:34] What have you learned about [07:35] creating space for craft and building product that is [07:39] really, really great. Yeah. And I think it's interesting that those things that you mentioned, like hiring, building business and building product and craft is like, I think that all of those are somewhat related to each other. But so what I can say about the product craft per se, it's 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 that we see that [08:06] collaboration only happens if people use the product and like our product, which is supposed to help the collaboration coordination. If there's friction or the experience isn't that great, or there's this little paper cuts, I think it gets really annoying for people to use. And so we think like for the business to be successful, the quality is, and the graph is very important. There's definitely like trade-offs sometimes, like there can be like, for example, timelines, like we are about to launch something. And then for example, I, or someone else goes to look at

[08:36] like, oh, this doesn't feel right. And we should fix it. So I don't think we should launch this now. So sometimes it doesn't definitely push that time-wise. But this might be days. It's not like we need to-- [08:49] redo everything. The other way we think about it is like we are actually very okay [08:54] like pushing things out to ourselves and into for like a small group of [09:00] 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 [09:08] 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 and 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 [09:38] you 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 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. [10:01] But once we get to that, kind of like it. [10:04] the full general release, then we pay more attention to the actual polish or the craft. That is so interesting. I didn't know you'd do that. So you actually go ahead and launch things really early to a select group of people that want the early stuff?

[10:19] And then did you say that you find one customer to kind of co-create and help evolve the feature and change with? [10:25] Yeah, usually it can be one or it's like three or five or ten. [10:30] So it's often... [10:31] 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 [10:45] work with us to explain, okay, this is how we do something. And something like, for example, we work this way with Vercel that there was some changes they wanted to see in the roadmap feature. So we work with them to improve it and then they could give us feedback along the way. [11:02] That is so interesting because I think people seeing linear from the outside, it feels like you just take... [11:06] the time you need to build something awesome and then it launches and it's amazing and it's great. [11:12] But it turns out that isn't exactly how you build. You actually do launch things really early and people don't necessarily see it until it's done. But there's this whole process behind the scenes. [11:21] Yeah, I think sometimes people can think that craft is about perfecting things and perfecting them in a very organized way or very early on. The downside with this perfection mindset is that it can be sometimes... [11:36] hard to put anything out because nothing is ever fully perfect. And so we try to balance this thinking with the fact that we should be always pushing things out very quickly. [11:47] but then also fixing them, improving them very quickly. So it's almost like the opposite ideas. But then we try to combine that. And I think it's been working well that generally in the company,

[12:02] There's not necessarily a lot of reviews or something that we always review everything that [12:08] gets shipped this way because we do want people to feel that they can put something in the app and then we can try it out. So it's more like, let's just try it out. But then, yeah, we do need to look at it again before we release it to everyone. A lot of founders, a lot of product leaders, a lot of designers, definitely. Yeah. [12:28] want to create [12:30] space for [12:32] craft and making products really great, something they're really proud of. [12:35] But in practice, it's really hard. Very few teams and companies do this. [12:40] Is there anything else you've learned about creating space for this sort of thing and prioritizing it? [12:45] for founders that are listening that are trying to instill more and more of this? Or do you have to be a designer CO like Kari and it's hard to do otherwise? Yeah, I don't think actually it's not purely coming from me. I think they all have founders like Jory and Thomas. Additionally, their background is engineering, but I would say they actually have almost, I think they spend even more time on the details than sometimes I do. [13:10] I think very early on when it was three of us, I would be the one doing the broad strokes designs. This is how the UI works and this is how the... [13:19] some of the things work and that they were the ones that like, oh, there should be animation here and there should be like, [13:25] 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,

[13:46] He was asking me about it [13:48] In their case, their founders were coming from different companies. Maybe this one founder came from Airbnb and then the other ones came from Facebook and Amazon. And I think, for example, I think Facebook and Amazon have a very different culture on quality or craft or shipping. [14:18] for certain kind of products and like you should all kind of [14:21] believe in that and then like instill that with everyone [14:25] you hire. The other thing I would say that what we like to do is we actually don't have much BMs in the company. We only have one. And we can talk more about it, but one of the things [14:38] I think that 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. [14:52] 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 the feature, they start seeing this opportunities that [15:16] this thing could be better. Like a good example of this is like we

[15:19] One of my engineers, Andreas, like when we were [15:23] building this right-click menu in the app, so you can right-click different things, and under that you have submenus. Mac OS does this well, whereas when you open that menu, you hover on the menu, and then you want to go to the submenu, so you hover to the right. You don't have to go exactly horizontally to get into that menu. You can actually go diagonally, or you don't actually have to hit the menu exactly. There's this kind of safe zone. [15:50] But a lot of software just implements [15:52] "Hey, let's do this menu, let's make the submenu." It only works if you exactly hover over the menu, and then what happens is the user often misses with few pixels what they were trying to do. So what Andreas did, which we didn't tell him to do, is like, "Yeah, this kind of sucks, and we should make this better." And so he figured out the way to create those safe areas that are dynamic based on the submenu positioning and everything. [16:22] to the actual thing you want to go to. So I think these kind of things happen when you give... [16:29] People like more of the ownership of the project and also like the space to do that. And then you also have like. [16:36] leadership or generally the company culture that values the quality or the craft. [16:41] All right, well, I got to follow this thread. There's a couple 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.

[16:52] Awesome. So what made you decide to hire him and even have any PMs? [16:56] 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 hired Nona as a contractor to help us with this like, [17:16] insights data tool. So we have this data tool feature built in linear, so you can get data on what's happening in the workspace. And for us, founders, we realized none of us are like, we are not super experienced in data tools. So we need someone to help out. And luckily, Nan was like, we knew him and he actually worked at Mode, which is a data tool. And so we initially hired him, like, can you help us figure out what exactly should this data tool tool and how should [17:46] because I think there's different ways of doing that. And I think always the easiest way is like, let's just 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, [17:57] useful way to use this data or get this data. [18:01] So it helped us with that, and then we kind of saw like, yeah, this could be useful in other [18:06] larger areas or overall with the whole product, we might have these kind of questions like, [18:11] what should we exactly be thinking around here and why and how would we [18:15] define this direction and then like [18:18] help the teams to also like align on it. So like it to us, it's more like he's kind of like the,

[18:24] figures out the direction of the product and steers some of the efforts and not like he's there in every meeting and making every decision or writing every spec or something like that. Another question along this line, because there's a lot of PMs listening and they're going to be like, oh, shit, these guys don't need PMs. Their PM is over. Product management did. [18:44] And so just another question along these lines. [18:47] Somebody, [18:49] 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 [18:55] If they're not there, other people have to do those things. [18:58] And what I'm hearing is basically you give those responsibilities to the engineer, designer, and maybe other functions within the team. [19:06] Yeah, so I mean, definitely, I think what it means is, and there is definitely a 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% of their time like coding something, then it's like they're using their skill set to the max. But then we just think that [19:24] in order to build quality things or build things in a certain way. It's actually better if people actually also spend some time thinking about things and not just executing. [19:34] So yes, like for every project, there's a project lead that lead can be [19:39] engineer or designer. It's not like a formal role or it's not based on 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, okay, now

[19:54] you're responsible by getting the project started and working together with the team, figuring it out, and then communicating when changes or communicating how the progress happens. And so it's definitely like it means that the engineers and our designers also have to do these things and they do need to communicate and then do need to think about the scope or things. [20:19] It's a different way of doing things. Also, not everyone wants to do that, which is fine, but we [20:25] when in the hiring front, try to hire people that are kind of interested in the broader [20:30] scope than just the specific skill set that they have. Yeah, I think those last two points are really essential. [20:38] is one, people... [20:40] 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 [20:52] Make sure timelines are hit and all that stuff and run meetings. [20:55] A lot of people don't want to do that. A lot of times they do. [20:58] 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. [21:04] that's very product minded and the hiring bar needs to be very, very high. [21:08] for [21:08] say engineers and designers to want to do all these things and be good at them. [21:11] And so I think those are two necessary ingredients for this to work out. [21:15] Yeah, sure. [21:16] for teams that want to try this sort of approach, especially startups that are kind of starting out and maybe not [21:22] excited about hiring product managers. Is there anything else that you think is essential or important to

[21:27] functioning well without [21:29] any product managers, and you're at around 50 people at this point. [21:32] Yeah, we are around 15. 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 [21:41] 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 like, it's like, you cannot, I think, expect that people have some like, if you do some kind of PM interview for them, it's not, they're not going to have the same kind of [21:55] skill set or the same understanding of the concepts or something. But the way we've done it in the past is basically I might interview them about the product. I'm not a technical person per se. So I will just ask them questions about how did they do something or how do they think about something. And it's similar to other roles too. We just look for, do this person have opinions about products and how they work and can they form opinions and can they use their own judgment at [22:25] then, um, [22:26] like can they communicate or articulate those things as well. Awesome. I was just thinking it's interesting that a tool that, [22:33] I don't think it's designed specifically for product managers, but essentially for building products like the... [22:37] infrastructure for building product in a team is built by a company that has one PM and very few PMs. [22:43] Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways I would say that with Linear, we're trying to help the whole company. And I think engineers is probably the largest user group of the product. And I think in some ways we want to make the BM's job easier or that they have to spend less time managing everything or the day to day.

[23:04] because the engineers are actually using the product, and they're updating the things. It's like, for the BMs, it would be much easier to get this, like, what is the state of things, and maybe trust that much more, because people actually use the product. So in some ways, I think we're trying to make it easier for everyone, and easier for the engineers. They can focus more on their work. And then for the BMs, I think we're trying to make it so that they can also focus on more on other things than it's just like, I don't know, [23:32] managing the tool that they use. I think that's not the most important job of a PM. I think they should be thinking more of the [23:40] I don't know, bigger picture or other problems or figure out the next features or something. [23:47] Just one more question along these lines. There's other companies like Stripe, I think, waited until 200 employees to hire, I think, their first product manager. [23:54] Snapchat, I think, is famous for something around that. [23:57] 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? [24:05] I think we will definitely hire more. It's like, I think like what I said before, it's like, I think we like to see in the PM smarts like operating on a higher level, like the whole company, like I think the way we, [24:16] Trying to build it is like we have less people, but people who are more high caliber and can think about [24:24] external, like [24:25] larger scope than what their current role is. So I think we're just trying to build this smaller units, but more effective units, which I think where the PMs go, and that there would be also less of them, and they're not there at every level. But I think in the future, as the company grows, and the team grows, and the product grows, we might have several PMs that are

[24:49] focusing on or looking at specific areas or specific types of things of the product. [24:54] or specific customers or something like that. Awesome. Okay. That was a tangent because I could not go in that direction. [25:01] But I want to come back to design again and craft. [25:04] So it feels like linear, one of the reasons you guys have been successful is design and experience is basically a huge differentiator. [25:11] from other products. [25:12] And there's always this question of, can design be enough of a differentiator in specific markets? Is there always an opportunity to build a significantly better product experience and have a real shot at it? [25:25] disrupting an incumbent [25:27] Do you have any sense of when design can be enough of a differentiator [25:31] And this is coming from a founder trend aside, should we go big on design and experience, or should we invest in distribution? [25:37] or new technology or something along those lines. Any thoughts there? My belief is that like any [25:42] domain or industry the more it matters the more the design matters i think like it's kind of like it's [25:49] 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, [26:05] well designed necessarily because they are the first but then like as as you built the hundreds like thousand like different email clients any email client now has to be like pretty good to be be even considered like reasonable like an email client it's like that the bar is so high so i think

[26:24] Today [26:25] The startups, like, I don't know if you look at, like, the web page Google launched with or, like, the web page YouTube launched with or some of these, like, older companies, they were very basic. Like, if you launch that kind of website today, no one would really pay attention. So I think, like, the design is always, like, it's almost like a... [26:44] Thank you. [26:45] very basic thing now that like you from pretty much from the very beginning, you need like pretty high level design for people to even like pay attention or consider you seriously. And I think it's like it's honestly fair because like sometimes it's like, [26:59] Maybe the product is really good, but they didn't have a designer or they didn't have time to do it. And then people just kind of dismiss it because it doesn't seem like... [27:08] something that interests them. [27:10] So I think that's the first thing is like, I think it is. [27:15] and it's going to be more and more important. But I would also say design is never going to be [27:21] like uh the reason or like the the reason why a company is successful it's like it's like the company still has to have some other things that 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 and it enable and similar to technology it's like if you have good technology it's like easier to do certain things and like it the product works

[27:51] bad infrastructure. So similar to design, I think if you have a good design and people are, or even a good brand, people are drawn into it and then it makes some user acquisition or user retention or just even people perception of the product better. [28:09] I think an example is packaging and products. It's 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. [28:21] for the user who is receiving the product. It's like, even before you use the product, you start thinking, [28:27] 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. [28:39] So, yeah. [28:40] I think similarly 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. [28:48] something to the user and they're setting the expectations. And then I think that that [28:55] can be like very useful thing especially early on when no one really knows you or or knows the product or cares about you so i think like especially i feel like design can be very [29:06] good leverage in the beginning. I think that's such an interesting insight, especially that first thing you said around how [29:12] The more often and the more crowded the space is, the more opportunity there is for design to be a differentiator. [29:19] Is that roughly how you think about it? [29:21] Yeah. So, I mean, like, just think about, like, I don't know, any product category. It's like, basically, people...

[29:27] people have then like lower choices and then they like, how do they make choices? Like maybe there's a specific thing they want, but like a lot of people don't necessarily know what, [29:34] 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? [29:42] If you put things side by side and you just [29:45] people see things, people are visual. So like then like the design can be one of those things. It's like stands out. It's like, well, that looks the best or that looks the most like, [29:54] quality product to me, so I'm going to use that one. [29:57] Like when people have a lot of choices, they probably will pick the one that looks most interesting. And then I think there is the second part is the brand, which is... [30:06] Mm-hmm. [30:07] something that you, if you can build a brand, then I think it's like, [30:13] it doesn't really even the product almost doesn't matter like it's it's it becomes this kind of default like i don't know like [30:19] 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... [30:37] of the product, but also the design of the brand can be very strong. [30:42] like kind of things that like pull people to your company or to the product [30:48] Is there anything you've learned about just building a brand over the course of building linear something you find to... [30:53] be really important in actually building that [30:55] perception that linear is really great and amazing.

[30:59] To me, I think the brand should be always authentic and it should kind of like... [31:04] I think even if people can't articulate it, [31:08] If people start to feel like something is off, like I think [31:12] there can be like companies or startups. They like think about brands like, Oh, brand is the logo or the colors of the website or something. And then they like, [31:20] do the same thing and some other company does. And then they think, okay, now we have a brand. But you actually didn't think about what's your brand, what is the message or voice you wanna talk about. [31:31] And it doesn't have also like the brand doesn't happen overnight. So it's basically just you start in the beginning. And like when you start a company, you don't have no brand. And so you have to create it. And you create it over time by the things you do, the things you say, like how you say them and like what kind of. [31:50] How do you approach things? How do you treat customers? How do you build the website or the product? Like all of these things start to like build this like idea. Like what does this company mean to me in people's heads? I know like we both worked at Airbnb and like I think Franceschi is like, I think the brand was probably the most important thing for him. And I don't know how many hours or meetings or conversations there was about the brand. And it's like the brand was always like, it's like part of everything the company does. [32:19] Because it's true, you could book things, places to stay, a lot of places on the web. But when people think about, "Oh, I want to stay in some cool place,"

[32:30] they're going to think about Airbnb. It's like they're not going to think about those other places. So that's the power of the brand. People stop thinking about the other things or they start understanding 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 Googling, "I want to stay in a home." They're like, "Airbnb.com." [32:52] 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. [33:00] There's very few sites where people go. I'm going to go straight there and look for someone, knowing that they can also compare hotels on all these other sites. [33:07] Mm-hmm. [33:08] Coming back to design briefly, just like very... [33:11] Practically. [33:12] how do you guys do design reviews? Just like, how do you actually go about reviewing what's going at? And then, this may be too big a question, but just whatever you can share is just like, how do you know when it's done? How do you know when it's ready and approved, car sealed, [33:24] checkbox ready to go. [33:26] We've been exploring different ways of doing this. I think today, I still run the design team, so I do see some of the designs on a weekly basis, and then I or one of the other co-founders or... [33:43] one of the or the head of product, we are basically the sponsors for the projects. So then like we are kind of like responsible, like reviewing the work. And so we might just have a meeting where we go through, OK, let's go through the demo. And like people can explain what's going on and like how they think about it and why.

[34:02] And then we might have feedback, okay, this seems like... [34:05] strange 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 [34:16] in the initial stages, obviously, we're not going to like... [34:21] start fixing everything. It's more like, let's try to get the main concept there and figure out how it works. But then before we are launching it, [34:30] I might just go in and try it out and try the different states and click it around. And sometimes I find things like we were building this [34:39] threading to comments and [34:41] And then when it looked all good in the demos and stuff, then I went to try it and tried different lengths of messages and stuff. And then I started to see, sometimes the animations are kind of janky. [34:53] or it's just like off, like they don't go the right way. The screen doesn't scroll exactly right. So then I just like, I kind of like captured those things and like send it to the team. And so we had to like, [35:06] kind of pull back the release a little bit until those things were fixed. That one was like, it's, it's very like, I think like a simple concept and it's like very, [35:15] known concept like, okay, this is how threading comments works. So that was mostly about like, okay, what's the execution of this? But then we have projects where we are not sure exactly how this should work. And we can try it ourselves. We also have to see how companies use it. So something like we built this feature, project updates, and it's a common thing companies do. It's like, you need to write an update on your project. Is it yellow, green, red? And companies

[35:45] of doing this in different tools. And we just thought, well, I think it would be really nice if it's inside linear and the team, when they work on a project, they can write the update. Linear can also capture some of the stats, like what actually happened. [36:00] I think with that feature, it's been working well, but then also now it would be exploring. It's like after using it a while, we think, oh, actually, there could be a more robust way of following these updates. Maybe people could [36:12] Maybe the leadership could just get these updates over email, or maybe when you have a lot of updates, you should have a search or a filtering system or something. So I think a lot of times we just think, "Okay, this is the scope of it for now, and we're okay launching this, and the execution is good." [36:28] But we know that this is not the fully figured out version. And we just need to see people trying it out and see the feedback. [36:36] 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. [36:42] feeling gut level, this is ready, or this needs a little work. Yeah, I would say a lot of things that we do is more like that, but we don't do AP testing, or we don't do specifically go follow certain metrics or something. We might sometimes, we do have [36:58] telemetry or like we can look at like how people use certain things and we sometimes [37:03] do that, but that's not usually the goal we have in mind. It's like, yeah, we should move this number this much. So it's more about like, [37:12] based on the understanding of the problem we have, and based on what we think is right, is this the right solution, and is this a good enough solution to be released to the customers? One more question along this thread is,

[37:26] How do you actually structure these reviews? It sounds like you go straight to a prototype. Is there a design? [37:32] review phase? Is it all kind of informal and people just review, here's what we need your feedback on? Yeah, so there's projects that don't necessarily have specific states to them, but I would say roughly usually we do start with design, so there's some explorations on the design, like, okay, there's different ways that we could approach this, or sometimes there's just one way because it's pretty clear. But then what I said before is that we do try to get into the building phase as quickly as possible. [38:01] because then we can also see, is this direction actually reasonable? And what else does it cause? Is there some problems it causes? Or how does it just generally feel here? So I think that there isn't specific [38:16] for if you [38:18] stages it's more like yeah let's check like if [38:22] Let's check on this project every week or every two weeks. And then before releasing, let's also make a review of it and really test it out. Is it the quality we want? [38:33] Awesome. [38:34] So that's a good segue to another area I wanted to spend some time, which is the linear method. [38:39] You espouse this way of building product that you call the linear method, which you publish online and we'll link to in the show notes. And I just want to ask a few questions around this way of building product. [38:50] One is you are big on this idea of building opinionated software. [38:55] Can you talk about just what does that mean? And then maybe give an example or two of how you actually have done that in linear.

[39:02] So first, with the linear method, why did we create it in the first place? It's like we just believe that there is more of this modern ways of building software and thinking about it. And we wanted to share some of our thinking on it. And that's kind of like also... [39:17] it relates to how we built linear as well. So you might understand why we make some choices, because this is the way we think about making these choices. So we're trying to share our thinking behind the product and us just like, here's the product and figure it out. Yeah. So the opinionated piece, I personally have this belief that [39:37] Productivity software should be, and especially company software should be opinionated. I think that what the productivity software is trying to do is make people productive. And I think what productive means is you actually do something that matters for the company, which is build some new feature or fix something or design something. All of those things are eventually, they provide some kind of value for the customer. [40:06] I think there is this ideas or notions in the world that flexible software is great. And I think it can be great sometimes, but what happens is people start spending a lot of time figuring things out. Like, how does this feature work? 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, [40:29] We like to [40:31] provide this 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.

[40:44] And the other thing is like my design mantra is always like design something for someone. [40:49] Like it's very hard to design [40:51] everything for everyone, because you just end up with a very generalized solution. So then, what we're trying to do with the opionated solution is that, like, that's the best solution, or the most optimized solution we think of. And then, like, when you use it, like, hopefully you agree, and like, you can feel that it's the most optimized. So, being opionated, it's like, I think the value it provides people is like, you don't have to think, [41:17] too much like [41:18] or spend more time on the tool than you do [41:22] on your actual work. And then another core element of the linear method is something called cycles. And I know linear is all around this idea of creating cycles and working in cycles. [41:31] Can you talk about what is a cycle? [41:32] and how it works at linear? So for example, like the cycles, it's optional. Like not every team has to use it or not the whole company has to use it, but it's there as you can turn it on or off. But basically, [41:45] I think why we created Cycles is that I think any team that works on software or some other products, you always have almost infinite... [41:54] list of things to do. And that list gets longer every day. And it can be sometimes [42:00] very distracting for the individual or for the team to decide, like, what... 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,

[42:15] like for the next week or the next two weeks or whatever timeframe. [42:19] we are going to work on these things. [42:21] And like these are the things we think like are the priority or the focus for this time frame. And then the team can kind of try to focus on those things. Now, if something happens like, [42:32] 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 we decided before we want to do these things and then now something else happened and so now we have to go on this thing so so you have like a [42:46] answer when someone comes to you to ask like, why didn't you do this other thing before? [42:50] then you can say, well, we did... [42:52] decide to do that, but then something happened and we had to do this other thing. So the cycles, it's very similar to sprints, but we like to call it cycles because we are not really sprinting anywhere. The cycles also run on like automated schedule. So it's like, you don't have to think about like, which day does it start or, or like, every, every time, like set it up manually. So it's just like runs automatically. And so it's just meant to like, [43:16] to help the team to focus on, like, let's just focus on these few things, and forget about the infinite list of other things that are in the background. [43:26] 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... [43:33] number goals for features for launches and things like that. And so let me start there and I have a follow-up question. [43:40] Yeah, so we might have a company level goal sometimes, for example, weekly active users. That's a metric we want to increase or something.

[43:49] In terms of specific features, we don't have goals for those. [43:54] And the reason is that I think like product like us or like a system that is used by [44:01] 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, and 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 like, I think like, for example, I don't know, [44:28] 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. [44:36] like we don't actually we don't have that like we we just think that like [44:40] there should be features that help companies. And sometimes we can look at the metrics before we start working on it. [44:47] Let's see, what's this? [44:48] 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 customers agree that the problem is solved or they enjoy the solution. And it's not like that the metrics went up. [45:08] So just to summarize so far, you have no metrics, you have no experiments, you have essentially no PMs, just one product leader. [45:16] You spend a lot of time on design and craft and making things awesome.

[45:21] Thank you. [45:22] 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 companies. [45:30] Yeah, we like to talk about this internally, like this mixture of magic and science. And how we describe this, there's always some level of science that we do. And I think some companies are very scientific on their product management, that they like to measure everything. [45:49] do a lot of tests and things, but we just decided we don't think that's [45:55] necessary or that's good for us. So the science for us means that we do [46:01] talk to users a lot and like the whole [46:04] whole like the, 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. [46:31] I think the first part is the whole team has to be really understanding the product and the customers and the problems people are facing. And I have that empathy as well as the understanding, what is the state of things today? And then we talk about that. And then sometimes we might pull up stats and see, oh, wonder, is there some kind of patterns we see? Like, okay, these kind of companies are using this thing more.

[46:58] what do we think about it? But usually we have some kind of question we want to answer. It's like, [47:03] I wonder what is going on. And then we look at it versus like, let's just 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 in the company builds [47:18] It's not like everyone has the same understanding, but everyone builds more of that customer and product understanding. [47:24] then like we have discussions like what should we be doing or what decision we want to make here. [47:30] then everyone is much more informed of the actual reality of the customers or the product. [47:40] And then we think like you can much more like use your intuition or, or thinking, you know, [47:45] to do those decisions so you don't have to [47:48] 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 [48:01] work well or where it might fall short. That's what I imagined you were going to say, and I love hearing that. [48:07] For someone that wants to create a similar culture, [48:11] Is there tactically anything you find to understand if your employees [48:16] and engineers, designers have enough of that context and really understand the problem. [48:20] 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.

[48:28] like will every day like go to see everything and like uh has 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 [48:48] If you know your customers or the product, it's a very different way you can talk about it versus if you don't have any idea. I think if you don't have any idea, you probably don't even know what to say. So I think it's kind of apparently people have that. [49:03] every project like we need like everyone to have this like, [49:07] understanding, it's usually enough if one or two people have that understanding or have [49:13] 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 [49:22] you just have to kind of believe in it. I think sometimes people use data [49:28] a lot or too much because they're worrying or they're afraid that, "Will I make the wrong choice?" And I'm using data to [49:37] make the choice for me, [49:39] But then you might still feel like this is not the right choice, but the data I sell you is the right choice. [49:44] and then turns out maybe it was the right choice or not but it's more like [49:48] Again, like a practice thing, like you need to be, I think the company and you need to be okay. Like sometimes we make mistakes and like we've made the wrong choice and then we just can fix it. But at least we made that choice and the data didn't.

[50:00] 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, [50:09] There's such different ways of building product. Ramp is all about velocity. [50:12] shipping all the time, metrics, measuring everything. And your approach is almost the opposite. And I think what's interesting there as a takeaway is just there's many ways to do it. [50:21] Mm. [50:22] You just have to do it almost fully, and you have to have really specific people. It feels like the people... [50:29] want to work in a certain way and [50:31] A lot of it, I think, also is the founder has to [50:34] It has to be natural to the way the founder operates and thinks about building a company. [50:38] Yeah, for sure. And then if you look at successful companies, and Amazon is very different than Apple, and how they operate, and I think both of them are successful, but not in the same way. So I think it's, again, it's a decision you make as a company or as a founder, like what kind of company you want to build. I do think there is some aspects of the domain that you're in. [51:00] Like what does that domain and the problem space require from the company? And for us, I think it's like we are in the... [51:09] I think we are in the retention business, like it's like, and the trust business kind of that. Ideally, we have a company. [51:17] starting use linear very early on, and then they stay with us forever. [51:21] And I think the only way we can do that is we need to continuously deliver them a good quality product and [51:28] maintain that trust that we are, that we don't fail them or somehow otherwise mistreat them. And I think some businesses are much more transactional, where it's like, yeah, we just need to make this

[51:42] e-commerce sale and then [51:44] once it's done, we don't care what happens. So in our case, it's more like we really need to build this relationship over time. And then that's why I think some of the choices we make, [51:55] are also more about respecting the customer versus we're just wanting to drive the revenue of the company. [52:02] Awesome. Such an important point. [52:32] Pendo is the only solution you need to build, ship, and optimize a successful product-led motion. But don't take my word for it. Create your free Pendo account today and start building better experiences across every corner of your product. P.S. Want to take your product-led know-how a step further? Check out Pendo's lineup of certification courses, led by top PLG experts and designed to help you grow and advance in your career. Learn more and experience the power of the Pendo platform today at pendo.io slash lenny. [53:02] pendo.io slash Lenny. [53:06] Something you're really good at personally is focus. [53:09] I find that [53:10] Just trying to get you on this podcast was a lot of like, hey, Kari, have you thought about this yet?

[53:15] And I know that a lot of VCs are just reaching out to you all the time, all these really fancy VCs that are just trying to talk to you and get close to you. [53:23] I just know you're really good at [53:24] avoiding shiny objects and staying really focused and really heads down. [53:28] And I've always wanted to just ask you, how do you do that? [53:32] tricks, systems, processes, approaches to staying focused other than just ignore the inbox mostly? Yeah, I don't think there's any complicated processes. And so I think one of the things, I was in YC in 2012, and one of the... [53:46] The main thing they say there is what you should be focusing on when you build a startup is talk to customers, build the product, exercise. And if you find yourself doing something else, then those three things, it's probably the wrong thing to do. And the third one, he said exercise? Yeah. [54:05] And the exercise is that it's important for you to be healthy or not to burn yourself out. So I think it was like a balance, like I advise to that. [54:16] um [54:18] So I'm doing those three things. And so I think the thinking there is like, I think we often as a company also talk about this and like very early on. [54:31] And I use this the same way. And I think the company can use it the same way as like, [54:35] 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, I come to this podcast. And I actually think like before I wasn't like or like I always have these questions 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.

[54:58] because we weren't at the stage or scale or something that I think would be as interesting or something. So I think it was a better timing to do it later. [55:09] Similarly, when we built the product, initially, we were just very focused on, is this really important thing to do? There's always like, yeah, you could get SOC 2 security certificate. [55:23] And we know that eventually we need to get it, but we don't need it today. So we just say no to that. And if a customer asks for it, we say, we don't have it. And we will have it one day, but not now. And a lot of times people are like, okay, that's fine. And then internally, we also talk about this. You know, in RPG games, you have the main quest lines. And then you have the side quest lines. And we often talk about the companies, like avoid the side quests. There's always ideas people have. [55:53] And it's a good thing, and it's like people have ideas, but then it might be like, "Yeah, let's make this T-shirt, so let's make this thing." And then we're like, "Well, does it help the customers? Does it help the product?" [56:04] This sounds like a side quest to me and basically means we shouldn't do it. [56:08] Like this doesn't progress domain. [56:11] quest line, which is like building this product and making it awesome for these customers. So it's similar to me. It's like I operate this way personally too, that I think about, is this important for the main quest line in building this company for me, or is this something that,

[56:29] I can ignore for now or something I can do later and it makes more sense then. [56:34] That is such incredibly good advice. [56:37] Basically, ask yourself, how important is this to do now? And is this the main quest or is this a side quest? [56:44] Amazing. [56:46] Okay, so let's talk about hiring. As with most areas, you're very, very, very deliberate about hiring. [56:54] The bar is so insanely high at linear, and you also hire very few people. So just a few questions along these lines. [57:00] 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? [57:09] I think one of the things we, all of us founders kind of saw in this [57:13] 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 just generally like in my history, [57:27] fast and 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 like more average people. It's like almost like it's always faster and better output when you have like more, much more like smaller team. So that was kind of like the thing with linear too, is like, we just believe that [57:46] you can actually build better with less people than you can with more people. So that's like the basic belief we have. So then when it goes to hiring, we've been like taking very like kind of like slow steps on it that like in almost like the first year we didn't hire anyone.

[58:03] Then the second year we hired a couple of people, and then the second year we hired a few more. We never more than doubled in a year, and that's kind of been our guideline that we shouldn't more than double. And this might be something we change in the future, that we actually might do less than that. But when we look into hiring, it's a couple of things. [58:24] One is also that it obviously depends on the role. [58:28] But basically, I would say, like, with every role, we often talk about, like, there needs to be some taste or some, like, [58:36] this kind of understanding of the, [58:38] like how things are done or how, how, what's the, like, [58:42] people have more like a broader perspective than like whatever their role is. So we talked about the engineering before that, like they do need to do some of this BM type of stuff and so what we look for [58:54] in them like is that like they have some of this like skill set or product thinking or they can [58:59] 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 a, [59:11] obviously they need to be good developers but also like [59:15] do they have this like a product sensibility or do they have like a judgment around that? And this goes similar to like, for example, like a marketing hire. It's like we think about like, yeah, we do need the marketing skill sets. [59:29] But then we also want to see that this person also, like, [59:32] like maybe it's a good storyteller or like they have like this, like,

[59:36] kind of appreciation for writing or stories or like they have a taste of what's [59:43] What's like? [59:44] interesting and what's not. So I think when we hire an operations person, we also like to see that they [59:50] they maybe have understanding on HR, and maybe it's not their role, but they understand it. And what happens is when you have these people that are [1:00:00] a little bit more than their title. It's like the company is, I think, much more [1:00:06] 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 shared areas or it's not like, it's not, you rarely get to the point like people say it's not my job. It's more like people understand, okay, yeah, I'm kind of in operations, but today I kind of need to help on this HR thing, so which is okay. [1:00:30] And so that's kind of like what we look for people is like they are [1:00:35] more than... [1:00:36] they can take more scope than their skill set would. [1:00:41] assume or like what normally is expected from them. So essentially you're looking for kind of these Venn diagram overlappings across different functions and teammates. [1:00:50] Yeah, and I think the other thing is, like I said before, we want to build much, I think, a space. [1:00:57] company that has less employees, which means that [1:01:01] 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,

[1:01:13] we could have less people and those people can [1:01:16] take on more scope and they can own more scope. I think traditionally, I feel like in companies, how do you get more scope is that [1:01:24] you advance in the levels of the company, because there's a lot of different teams and different levels. And then to get any kind of scope, you need to rise into these higher levels. And what we try to do is, you don't actually have to have that many levels, but people can just already, when they start, they can start owning more areas. And I think that can be much more like, [1:01:47] also interesting, not to everyone, but I think interesting to many people, [1:01:51] And it's kind of like how I also always felt about as being a designer. It's like I didn't feel like my job is purely just looking at the designs. I also thought I actually need to be helping this business or helping this business. [1:02:05] other area. [1:02:06] as well. So I think it's just kind of also like natural to me. Awesome. So one thing you did mention is you have a really unique way of [1:02:14] Interviewing, which is a paid work trial, [1:02:17] Can you just talk about what that is? And also just while you're in that area, you talked about testing for product sensibility. [1:02:23] So whatever you can share, how you actually do that would be awesome. [1:02:27] Yeah, so we do with all of the employees, we've done like a paid work trial. And it 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... [1:02:40] fairly standard interview loops where we test, like, we have some hiring manager interviews and then skill interviews or tests. And then the last step of the process is the work trial.

[1:02:53] And basically, yeah, they basically come as like a mini contractor to the company and we give them, [1:03:00] a very like usually fairly vague problem statements. Like if your engineer is like, Hey, there's this feature that needs to be built. Like how would you build it? Then like, [1:03:10] go build it. And so basically they need to first understand the problem, then they need to scope it down to something that they can do in the time frame that they have. And then they actually get the access to a code base, they can actually go and build a version of it. And then at the end, they can present the work they did. And [1:03:30] Why we do this is that we just seen that it's a very good way to see [1:03:36] for both? [1:03:37] us like both for the company and the candidates to see like how we work together and like [1:03:42] I think for the candidate, what they can see is that [1:03:45] Like what kind of company are joining? What is it like to work here? [1:03:49] And how are the, what is 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, [1:04:01] some kind of spaghetti gold type of thing, situation. So I think it helps... [1:04:06] the candidates as well understand like what are they signing off for, which I think can be like very [1:04:13] risky sometimes, especially with startups. It's really hard to tell how the startup is operating just from the interviews. And in large companies, I think things are more standardized. So I think they're more similar and it's easier to make that choice. But with startups, it can be very different how companies operate.

[1:04:31] Yeah, that is so unique, and I rarely hear of a company being able to hire that way. [1:04:35] 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 linear is such a [1:04:42] enticing place to work. [1:04:44] I imagine for a lot of companies, they can't really do that, but I guess any thoughts on just maybe more companies can actually pull this off? Yeah, I mean, I think it's always like if you don't ask, you don't know, I think in our [1:04:57] we that's just been the standard and we we try to work with the candidate like let's figure out maybe we do it on the weekend or maybe we do it some other [1:05:04] like a vacation holiday or something. So there can be ways we can schedule it so that it causes as little problems to the candidate as possible. [1:05:15] And I think we only have 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 [1:05:28] they had a much better sense of the company they're joining. And then also like doing that workshop, they can actually join our meetings. They get access to our Slack and Notion. And they also have one-on-one chats with the rest of the, like some of the other people on the team. So they already get to know people. So it's a good way for them to like evaluate us as well. And then for us, it's obviously, we can see like, what is important for us to see is like, how does this person work? [1:05:55] operate in this kind of environment and how do they approach problems? How do they think? And are they able to make progress in a very short timeframe, which I always think is very important for startups. In large companies, you have maybe all the time in the world to do stuff, but I think any kind of startup, even with us, when we take our time doing things, sometimes it's still important. We can do things quickly if we have to.

[1:06:20] Super cool. Just to close the thread on product sensibility, is there anything you could share of just how you actually help understand someone's strengths and... [1:06:28] inability there. [1:06:29] Yeah, I wouldn't say we have some kind of very scientific or some special way figured out for this. So I think it's a lot of it's like a discussion. [1:06:40] And I often think of like ask people that like ask 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, did you agree on it? Or, um, [1:07:00] ask them 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, [1:07:13] 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 [1:07:30] not work well for this kind of users or in this kind of context or for this kind of purposes. So they have more of this reasoning [1:07:39] or some kind of rational like why. [1:07:41] they think this way. [1:07:44] And they can articulate that. So I think that's kind of what I'm [1:07:48] we often like testing for us. It's like, can they do this and how well they can do it? And it can be like very...

[1:07:56] Yeah, there can be very wide ranges of how people [1:08:00] do it and when when you see someone who really thinks about this stuff it's very [1:08:04] clear to see that they can just talk about it forever, and they can go deeper and deeper. And then some people that maybe haven't had the experience or don't think this way, they're like, "Yeah, I don't really know. I just... [1:08:17] I just. [1:08:18] build it and then [1:08:19] seemed fine. Let's transition to the third area I wanted to spend some time on, which is growth. [1:08:25] And basically, I'd love to just understand how linear grows and what you figured out around growth, especially in B2B. [1:08:31] SAS [1:08:32] So, first question here is just, how long did it take from starting to work on Linear to launching, say, v1, something that a number of people can use? So, we started, like, officially in 2019. Some, I think, months before that, we were already exploring and prototyping the product. So, it wasn't... So, I think we prototyped different kinds of designs a little bit, and then we... [1:08:56] Also, one of the things we really wanted to solve is we wanted to make the application really fast. And the way we figured out we do that is we have more of this local... [1:09:07] based data structure where all the data lives in the client, and then it gets synced on the back ends, like with this Delta packets. 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. [1:09:26] And so we spent some time prototyping that. And then once we officially, I think, started working on the company in April 2019, and then we announced the company roughly mid-April, and we had this little website up with the wait list and...

[1:09:42] And then I think by May, we could use it ourselves. And then we already, we started inviting some friends, like try it out. But then I think in June, I think we started more like inviting people from the wait list. And around June, July, I think we had about... [1:10:00] I don't know, 100, 200 users on it, and maybe like about 10, [1:10:04] companies or something. And then we were in this private beta stage for [1:10:10] 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 a 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 [1:10:24] and what's the company size. [1:10:26] And we invited people based on like, we invited more like smaller companies using the tools we currently supported. And then also like I was trying to see like who is more like interested versus I don't know. I just want to try it out type of people. And then, [1:10:41] a year later in June, we launched it publicly. And back then, maybe we already had like, I don't know, [1:10:49] several hundred of companies using it. And then we also launched the pricing and [1:10:56] I think almost all of them, maybe one company didn't subscribe, but everyone else subscribed to that beta plan. Okay, there's a number of really interesting things here. So one is you're in private beta for a year. Yeah. [1:11:07] And then a year later, you launched. How long was that period between starting to incubate and

[1:11:15] starting to build to that private beta. [1:11:18] milestone. [1:11:19] Yeah, I think it's just a few months. Just a few months of building the V1. [1:11:24] Yeah. Wow. OK, I thought it was a lot longer. That is so interesting. OK. [1:11:28] What a team you've got over there. Okay, and then this survey piece is really interesting. I've [1:11:35] You launched it on Twitter. You had kind of a following. Your founders had a bit of a following, so I think that helped. [1:11:40] build up the initial waitlist. [1:11:41] But [1:11:42] What you did there wasn't just like, hey, go sign up for a wait list and you just add email addresses. It's. [1:11:47] a survey asking them what tools they use, like whether it's GitHub, [1:11:50] or something else, and then also the size of the company and their interest. [1:11:54] And that helped you basically prioritize who to go after and who to onboard. Is that right? [1:11:58] 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, [1:12:09] be focused on like let's just like [1:12:12] build a version that can work for some people or some companies. We don't have to try to address everyone in the world in the first months of the business and even after that. So it was a very selective process. And I think we were fortunate that we were able to get people sign up on a [1:12:32] After a month or so, we had like maybe 4,000 people [1:12:36] on the waitlist. And then we had this like internal, I think initially it was just like a very manual process, but eventually we built this in like 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 copied that 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,

[1:13:06] in the beginning, maybe in what, like 10 people a week. [1:13:10] And eventually we increased those amounts. But the reason we did it that way was that [1:13:15] we thought that [1:13:17] Like if you just invite everyone at once or a lot of people at once, [1:13:22] All of those people are going to probably hit the same problems. [1:13:25] in this kind of software that's very early stage so like i don't know they they hit the same bug or the same [1:13:31] 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 wasted effort. So we would just do these cohorts, like, let's invite these people. And then they say like, [1:13:43] like, hey, this is a problem, like, I don't, this doesn't work or something, then we go fix that. Then after we fix that, we invite the next cohort of people, then they say like, well, there's this thing that is needed, or this doesn't work, then we fix that. So for that year, we did this cohort, and then always get the feedback from the cohort saying like, this is like wrong, or this doesn't work, and then we will fix that. So eventually, I think it was much more like a, [1:14:08] I think, like an effective way of [1:14:10] during the initial development then. [1:14:13] just like inviting or letting everyone to use the product right at the beginning. There's so many interesting lessons from this. [1:14:21] I wanted to ask how you got your first 10 customers, and what I'm hearing essentially was... [1:14:26] from this waitlist. You launched it on Twitter, people signed up, you picked people to let onboard [1:14:31] You worked with them over the course of a year to make it what they needed, and then eventually started charging.

[1:14:36] Yeah, I think like the first 10 companies using it, I think maybe... [1:14:42] a little over half, maybe there was like three friends that have startups and they used it. And then I think the majority of them were just from this waitlist, but they didn't pay us anything. We didn't have pricing in the beginning or during the private beta. At some point, we started building the payment function. So we just added a page in the settings that you can optionally pay. And then we just give you a slider that like, how much do you want to pay for seed? [1:15:12] And then we just see if, I don't know, some people paid $28 per seed, and some people paid $1. So it doesn't really matter. We just wanted to test the functionality and see what people think. [1:15:26] And then like, yeah, like after a year, [1:15:28] When we launched, we already had... [1:15:30] like, in the, I don't know, first week of launching, like, we have probably like some hundreds of, [1:15:35] customers. [1:15:36] I've never heard of the approach to pricing as just an actual sliding scale where people can slide the scale themselves on how much they want to pay. [1:15:44] Did that help you figure out what to charge, or is it mostly just an experiment? [1:15:48] I don't think it gave us enough data to decide. But I think it was good to see that [1:15:55] it's like there were 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 confidence that

[1:16:10] if we charge for this, and it's like, [1:16:13] something under $20, there's going to be like [1:16:17] market for it. I want to hear about the story of how you've started to feel product market fit, whatever that means to you. When did you start to feel like, oh, wow, this is actually going to [1:16:26] work and maybe this is going to be a real business. [1:16:29] Yeah, I think we've always been kind of, I don't know, some like paranoid or skeptic, like, yeah, I guess maybe a paranoid is a good way about the product market fit. I think like it's like a, [1:16:39] paranoid in a way, we're always wondering, do we really have it? And with who do we have it? And I think it's true in our business is that I think [1:16:50] I think we started feeling it very early on and when people first started using it, we could see, "Oh, now the whole company is using it and they seem happier using it and the feedback is good." And they might have some additional asks for us. [1:17:06] But we started feeling like there was definitely like 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 product. [1:17:23] 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 like [1:17:32] know that we [1:17:34] we want to address [1:17:36] the whole market and not just like these early stage customers. But we knew that like, I don't like if a fortune 500 company

[1:17:43] 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. [1:17:52] So for us, like the way I think about it is like, do we have that? [1:17:55] do we have the fit in this specific segments and like how strong that fit is? And so like in the, 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, or the first two years we focused on like, can we get the fit in the, [1:18:12] in the early stage, like startup. [1:18:14] kind of segment. And like basically the goal was like, we want to be the default for, for startups, like the default tool that the startups pick. And I think we were able to [1:18:25] accomplished 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 [1:18:34] 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, [1:18:49] stronger in this. [1:18:51] 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 [1:18:58] 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. When am I going to really feel product market fit [1:19:07] And what you're describing is what I often hear is it's more of this [1:19:10] spectrum of more and more confidence that there is product market fit and even more

[1:19:14] 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... [1:19:21] acquiring territory in the market. [1:19:22] with specific elements and then over time it grows and grows. [1:19:26] Yeah, I think spectrum is a good way to think about it too. I feel like there is this blog post written in the past where it's like, you know when you have product and market fit, and I think it's probably... [1:19:37] 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 in a more like a B2B world. [1:20:00] I think there's always like you can have different sizes of customers, you can have different [1:20:05] 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 [1:20:14] and then not that well in other. And I think maybe the-- [1:20:18] countering to do things is that like, actually, if you're doing really well in some categories, just like kind of double down on that. This is something like I talked to, to the Zoom founder, Eric at some point in the company's lifecycle. And this is also what he said, like, it's like, when they were like, [1:20:34] building Zoom in the 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 to get everyone like, so let's focus on everything, which is not possible. So again, like it's about the like, the focus is like, if you have

[1:20:57] some 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've [1:21:05] do have that category like [1:21:08] captured or handled as much as we want. And we should expand to a new area. Essentially, look for pull and just follow that and pay attention to that. [1:21:19] Yeah, and I think there's like a... [1:21:22] For us, it's often like there can be sometimes like, for example, now we have most of the AI companies are like are using us. So I think like it's always and before that it was like a crypto company. So I think there's. [1:21:33] When we see these kind of things happening, then we start to think like, oh, [1:21:37] could we do something differently or like, should we, could we like get more of these AI companies on board? [1:21:44] Such a great lesson. [1:21:46] Just a few more questions. [1:21:48] You mentioned that [1:21:49] you launched on Twitter. [1:21:51] And [1:21:52] That led to a large waitlist and a growing waitlist. [1:21:55] 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. [1:22:04] Is there anything you did ahead of time [1:22:05] in anticipation of this launch. [1:22:08] Would you recommend people work on building some kind of following online before they work on a startup? Was it just like, hey, we happen to have this kind of following and it worked out? [1:22:15] Anything along those lines you would recommend to founders these days? [1:22:19] Yeah, I mean, I think definitely if you have a following and like, oh, it depends what kind of following. But I think like my background as a designer, I was at Airbnb and Coinbase and other places. And I did some like talks and conferences and write some blog posts. So I was definitely like out there and then kind of had some of that following experience.

[1:22:41] 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 [1:22:49] 10 000 or something which is like a significant number but then i think what the other thing is is [1:22:56] I think with the announcement, one of the things we... [1:22:59] we did, I think, well as like [1:23:02] I think sometimes startups do try to like emulate things [1:23:06] successful large companies too much. And you kind of do this fancy announcements where it's like, "Hey, now we're like, [1:23:14] doing this fancy thing and then it's like sounds very like corporate or something. And I think with the with our announcement, we try to like [1:23:23] wrote it more like [1:23:25] direct or authentic to us. Like, this is like, what are we going to do? And this is why I'm like, this, these are some of the things we're going to do. Then on a Twitter, we did the same thing. Like all of us founders, we wrote our own reasons why we're doing this. And I think it was like just much more like, [1:23:39] And I think people like us could resonate more with it. So we were kind of writing to the... [1:23:46] right audience [1:23:48] And like, I think that's the, probably the first thing you're like, when you're announcing your company, it's like, you think about like, who is my first client? [1:23:55] audience like who would be the best [1:23:57] users, like early users for this product and like, where are they? And then like, how do they think about things and like what kind of language they use? So for us, it was like very, it came very naturally because we are these people.

[1:24:11] We've been building software in these companies and we've seen, like other people have seen similar things we have seen. So I think that [1:24:19] The way we announced it resonated with a lot of people. [1:24:24] And then I think we did have some friends and we did an angel round where we got some friends involved. And the main reason we did it was that we just felt like in the early days, it's good to have, you feel like a real company in a way that you have someone to answer for in a way, even though the investors don't really [1:24:45] run your company or they don't have that much power. It's more like, oh, I took someone's money, so I now need to make it worth it, kind of. But then I think with the announcement, again, we could use some of those people to spread the message as well. [1:25:00] To kind of close out our conversation, just a couple more broad questions. [1:25:04] 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. [1:25:10] Can you talk about that and what does he do there? [1:25:14] Yeah, so since we are like a fully remote and distributed company, so we have people in Europe and US, like 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, like doesn't really work that well. And also like Zoom happy hours is probably not that fun anyway.

[1:25:44] watch the Great British Baking Show. And so we decided maybe we'd do something like that, where basically we would just pick [1:25:52] pick a recipe. First of all, it was like baking. Now we expand it to cooking recipes too. And so we just pick a recipe that is like somewhat... [1:26:00] reasonable to do in [1:26:02] in a few hours, in a couple hours, and it doesn't require tons of equipment or skill or something. [1:26:10] And then we just tell people, go buy the ingredients, use the company card, [1:26:15] Everyone has a company card. And then... [1:26:18] Then like hop on Zoom on this day. And for me, it's usually like, since I'm in California, it's like 8 a.m. in the morning. So we start like the baking or cooking then. So we've made things like... [1:26:32] roll cake and lemon meringue pie, and we made some... [1:26:37] like pastel nade nada, which is like Portuguese, like a pastry. And, um, and then like, we, we just hop on the Zoom. Everyone's like doing their thing, following the recipe. [1:26:47] And then sometimes people have questions like, hey, I'm stuck with this or my dough looks weird. Does your dough look like this? And people can kind of help each other and then also chit chat about whatever random things at the same time. And then we do the thing and then everyone takes pictures and posters on this Slack channel. It's like what they achieved. And I think we have kind of friendly competitions like who did it better or who did it best.

[1:27:17] into the decorations and visuals. So in a way, it's again like, [1:27:21] a craft thing that we do. It's like, I think baking and cooking and these kind of things is also a craft. So we liked it. [1:27:29] that way. And yeah, we've been basically doing it quarterly. [1:27:33] since the beginning of the company. And yeah, the latest thing we were a little bit like, I think, [1:27:41] didn't have that much time, so we decided to do an easier thing, which is a summer drink recipe. So I think it was like people made matcha drinks and so I'm like, [1:27:52] coconut drinks or iced tea or something. So even that was kind of interesting to do. [1:27:58] Have you ever won one of these competitions yourself? [1:28:01] I don't know if we declare winners that much, but I do think, since I'm a designer, I do have some advantages on that. [1:28:12] on the visual presentation. So I think that I generally do well on that. And obviously, that's like, with this remote competition, that's the only thing you can really look for. It's not necessarily about the taste or the texture, because you can't really taste it through the Zoom. [1:28:29] Maybe it's the last question, just again broadly. [1:28:32] You've gone from being an IC designer, manager of designers to the CEO of a very fast growing company. [1:28:39] 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.

[1:28:56] I think when I was a designer, even if I would be like, [1:29:00] like some like 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... [1:29:14] there's sometimes they can be like problems, but a lot of times it's like, Hey, we need to like, [1:29:18] 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 off-site thing and and so it's just like to me what it's like challenge like definitely like a [1:29:33] Chaunting for me is [1:29:35] 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, like, learned, figured out that, like, yeah, like, 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, like, the main thing that... [1:30:03] that like how what is the it's like a very wide range of things that you maybe didn't have experience before [1:30:09] But also, I think it's interesting for me to learn about these things. And like you learn about financials and you learn about [1:30:15] legal things and then you start to feel like, "Oh, actually, I know something about these things over time." [1:30:21] For the actual final question before we get to a very exciting lightning round. [1:30:24] What's just the future linear? What's coming? What's happening in the future?

[1:30:28] Anything you can share. [1:30:29] 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, [1:30:37] 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 are not necessarily in linear or part of this team. So we've been building this like an ask feature, which is like integration. [1:30:59] to Slack where you can very easily go to a Slack channel and then ask your question, like, you need something from this team, like maybe it's IT team that you need a laptop or maybe it's like the [1:31:10] like the infrastructure team and you need like help [1:31:14] then you need something from them. Then the team that is handling the request, they can very easily send it to Linear into this triage that we have, and then they can start, [1:31:27] doing stuff with it, and if they have questions or additional questions to the actual person who requested it, we can send those messages back to the person through Slack, so they don't actually have to go to [1:31:40] too linear or they don't have to be a linear user to use it. [1:31:44] So we think this is just a good way for the company or the whole company to be more [1:31:50] potentially involved in the company, like the product operations, without having to be like a [1:31:57] like a power user of linear or

[1:31:59] because not every functionally [1:32:01] uses it or needs to use it. [1:32:04] Awesome. What a cool peek at something coming out soon, or maybe by the time this comes out. [1:32:09] And with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got a bunch of questions for you. Are you ready? [1:32:15] Yeah, I'm ready. [1:32:17] All right. Well, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? [1:32:22] timeless way of building by Christopher Alexander. He wasn't really an architect, but he thought in Berkeley. And I think he has this interesting... [1:32:35] thoughts about like [1:32:37] building things and he focuses on buildings and towns and these kind of spaces. But I think there's a lot of things that are also interesting for building software. The other book that I like is like the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, because it's also like talks about the quality of things. And I think that's one of the main [1:32:57] themes of the book and like the thing is also that quality is so hard to define it is like if you actually like start thinking about it's like how do you define it it's like it's kind of like it's really hard to pin down but it's kind of like when you try something or see it then you kind of know if it's quality or not. [1:33:16] What are some recent movies or TV shows they've really enjoyed? [1:33:20] I think that the movie is like probably the John Wick 4. I think it's like... [1:33:26] Kind of feels like, I mean, obviously it's like there's no story in that movie, but it's like, I think it's very true to its nature. So I like that fact. And then also recently I started watching The Silo on Apple TV and I think I kind of like it. It's like a good mystery. And then also it kind of reminds me of the Fallout game. So I kind of like it that way too.

[1:33:49] I actually read the silo books, and I was really excited for the show to come out, but [1:33:52] I've mentioned this on a previous podcast. The show has so little to do with actual books. The core ideas are the same, but there's all these stories that are just making up on the show. [1:34:01] So I kind of stopped watching because I was just-- that's not what I was hoping for. But-- Maybe I need to check the books later, like once I watch the show. Yeah, definitely read the books. But there's three of them, and only the first one is actually good. The other ones are not actually very good, and I should not have read them because it [1:34:17] Just went off the rails a little bit. [1:34:18] Anyway, [1:34:19] Next question, what is a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates when you're interviewing them? [1:34:24] I think usually I like to ask, like, what is the candidate most proud of and why? Like, on their professional life or otherwise, like, what they're most proud of and why? And then I think we can go deeper on that, but I think it's kind of like, [1:34:38] gives you a little bit indication like what the person values and like how they think about things. And also, I think it's always nice that people can share [1:34:46] something they think they did really well, and we can spend time on it, versus just asking something more like negative things. [1:34:54] What are some favorite products you've recently discovered that you really, really like? [1:35:00] Not sure if I discovered them recently, but like I recently, I've been in this home office, I've been installing some of this Hue [1:35:08] 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 to like you can kind of like transition to space it's like okay now I'm working and now I'm like doing something else and you can use the lights to kind of like indicate that.

[1:35:34] That is so cool. Do you automate the schedule or you manually change the color? [1:35:38] Yeah, I just manually change it. So I have 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 the morning scene. And so I just like... [1:35:49] click that button and then it changes the lights. That is extremely cool. I'm going to try that myself. [1:35:57] 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? [1:36:04] go slow to go fast is, I think for me, it's about that. Sometimes people have tendency to rush into things and especially in, I think in startups, but other places too, that you kind of have this like, [1:36:19] I think urgency is important, but then sometimes you have too much urgency and you are rushing things. And what happens is that you... [1:36:27] you rusted 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. [1:36:44] What is the most valuable lesson that your mom or your dad taught you? [1:36:48] 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 the [1:36:57] I think with the things you have also, I think you should take good care of them. When you use them, you just clean them or put them away, and then they're ready for the next time. So I think I like that though.

[1:37:10] 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 [1:37:17] They are valuable. [1:37:19] Final question, you were born in Finland, I think you grew up in Finland. [1:37:22] What is a finished food that people should definitely try to get as soon as they can? [1:37:28] 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 creamy soup with some like potatoes, carrots and other things and it's kind of like almost like a sweet soup. [1:37:45] a little bit like sweet flavor to it. So that's one thing like you can make it yourself at home, or you can like, if you go to Finland, there's probably like a list of few restaurants that offer it. [1:37:55] Okay, amazing. Is that something we could get here or do you have to go to Finland to get it? [1:37:58] I don't think I've ever seen it here in the US in any restaurant, but it's not very hard to make it yourself. You can probably Google a recipe and it's basically you just need some salmon and some basic spices and some cream and some fruit vegetables. [1:38:15] All right, next episode, we're going to do a [1:38:18] cooking show with Kari. [1:38:20] Kari, thank you so much for being here. You're building a very special company in a really unique way. And I think [1:38:25] Many founders and many product builders can learn a ton from watching you operate in the business that you're building. [1:38:31] So again, thank you so much for being here. Two final questions, where can folks find you online if they wanna reach out and maybe ask you some more questions? [1:38:38] and [1:38:38] How can listeners be useful to you?

[1:38:40] Yeah, so I'm on Twitter. My name, Kari Saarinen, and we also have the Linear account, which I think is interesting. So that's this @Linear. And then... [1:38:51] Yeah, I think, like, I hope everyone can, like, check out Linear and, like, 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. [1:39:02] on those things that if you just want to try it out, then try it with the team. We can help you to set it up and help you to understand how to use the product. [1:39:12] Awesome. And it's just linear.app, right? Is that the URL? [1:39:16] Yes. Awesome. Okay. Easy peasy. [1:39:19] Amazing. Kari, again, thank you so much for being here. [1:39:22] Bye, everyone.