Karri Saarinen (00:00):

My view of the world is that people do want to use thebest tools or products available. And so if we can just do that, we have muchmore likely chance to succeed. And then you can do all those other things, butI don't want to do all those other things if the product isn't good. Welcome toSpotlight On where we examine the technology shaping our world throughconversations with the people building it.

Miles Clements (00:24):

Welcome to Spotlight On, I'm your host Miles Clements withLinear CEO and Co-founder Kari Soden. Kari, thanks a ton for being here. Thisis going to be fun. For people who don't know the linear story, tell us what islinear?

Karri Saarinen (00:39):

So Linear's purpose-built tool for planning and buildingproducts. So we help modern software teams to streamline some of their normalsoftware workflows when you're building software like planning a roadmap,planning projects, executing on those projects, tracking bugs and trackingissues, and we do a lot of more, but generally we are the tool for thetechnical organization or the product organization.

Miles Clements (01:07):

Yep. You came back from Linear's, last team offsitetalking about this concept of simple strategies executed well, which I think isa Charlie Munger quote, which I didn't expect from you, but I was veryimpressed by. Is it fair to say that that was the guiding principle in theearly days simple strategy just executed really, really well and thoughtfully?

Karri Saarinen (01:27):

Yeah, I wasn't thinking about that quote back then, but itwas basically the thinking was that, hey, what if we just do this productreally well and make it really fast, make it enjoyable to use, make itinteresting because again, if you think about this category, it's like aproject management or a back tracking. It's not the most exciting thing foranyone really, but it's kind like the walls in a building. It's like you needthose things, you need the walls, you need this kind of issue tracker and everyonein this industry has to use it.

Karri Saarinen (02:03):

So it's very needed and important, but it's not somethingpeople think about a lot. So it's almost like we have to wake up people alittle bit to actually these things could be much better and they could be muchmore exciting. So I think there was that kind of simple idea of can we just doit the best we can and also make sure that it really works well for the endusers, which are the engineers and the builders, which was all experienced toothat maybe the tools work well for the management, but it won't work for us asa builder. So we wanted to flip that. It should work really well for thebuilders and the teams and we should just somehow figure out the managementside of things. But that the management side is kind of secondary because thework actually happens in the ground and with those builders

Karri Saarinen (02:58):

And they are also this real source of truth for this kindof system. The engineers know, did they do this task? Did they fix this bug ordid they write this feature or not? So they're always the source for thisinformation. So making them enjoy using the product and reducing the frictionfor them to use the product creates this more like a valuable foundation forthe whole business where all the information is system is much more up to dateand more real. And then if you start building the different management layersor functions on top of that, it's much more connected to the reality. I thinkthere's been actually attempts of this problem before, but some companies canapproach this from the top down where it's like, well, as a top down person, Iwant to a leadership person, I want to know what's going on. So then they builtthis tool that is really wait molded for the higher level people, but then noone in the ground uses it. So then if there's no information in the system,it's almost like a fantasy football. You're operating this fantasy footballteam in this tool, but there's no players in it. You just have this fantasyplayers, but then actually no one's actually doing anything there.

Karri Saarinen (04:13):

So what we are trying to build is more that here's thetool for the whole company, but the core of the tool is that the engagement onthe layer that really matters is that the engineering layer is very high andthey produce the information in the system and then we can do stuff with thatinformation to inform the different layers of the management about what's goingon.

Miles Clements (04:40):

So you're actually plugged into the heartbeat of thecompany. We know each other pretty well. So I'm going to get right into thespicy stuff if that's okay. So we met a couple of years ago and we both knowthat you didn't need the capital when you were raising your series B, you wereprofitable at the time. You hadn't even touched your series A today. Youhaven't touched your series A or B. In fact, I think you have more cash in thebank than the sum total of capital that you've raised. So why did you do thefinancing and why'd you let us invest?

Karri Saarinen (05:10):

Yeah, I mean I think it is an interesting position to bein. A lot of times normally startups, you are building the business, you areburning a lot of money to build that business or build the growth, but we foundourselves in this position that the business is actually growing faster thanwe're able to spend the money. But to answer your question, a lot of times eachof the rounds, we almost never needed the money, but we felt that there'ssomething like a next stage happening with the company that might be a goodtime to bring someone new on board or more people on board as well as thinkabout what is that next stage look like. So what was happening with the SiriusB is that we started seeing more traction from these larger companies and wedidn't know what it will exactly mean. There could be a chance that we actuallydo have to hire more people or we need to hire more salespeople or engineeringor some other type of things. So there's a chance that we actually will needmore money. And often I like to raise the money when there's a good moment todo that when the company is looking strong and when we have interest frominvestors rather than waiting to as time that you already there's, I knowsomething is going wrong at that very moment.

Karri Saarinen (06:41):

And I think there was a timing question here too is thatthere was this, we had the SERP era of companies raising a lot of money and wesell our product to linear to a lot of startups. What we could see already inour side is that companies are going down, they're doing layoffs. So there wasalso a market timing component that we were not sure what the next few years isgoing to look like for anyone in this industry. So it might mean also for usthat we would actually, growth might slow down because the whole market isslowing down, which kind of happened, but it didn't happen that much. Then wemay be what was the worst case we expected.

Karri Saarinen (07:29):

But yeah, to like the short answer is that I think thereis the component of understanding this company is in some kind of tipping pointor some kind of new next stage and it's like those moments I think is good timeto bring someone else in. So you came in and then joined the board and thenthere is I think some of that. What's the state of the business or state of themarket that you want to time it? Well, I think there is also a potential talentand customer side of things where raising around can signal that you are acompany that is doing well and they're the next year as well. Versus I think wehad some comments sometimes from the customers that, hey, you're a serious acompany, can we trust that you will be there even though we were profitable andwe had all the ability to be there. But often people just see the patterns ofwhat series A today is almost like a seed round and it's very uncertain if thecompany will survive. So I think that was another component of raising a seriesB. It made us look a little more serious for some of these customers as well as

Miles Clements (08:54):

Talent. So that's a pretty nuanced and thoughtful answerand it's different than how a lot of founders would answer the question of whyyou raised money. I mean typically you would hear we wanted to hire more salesreps, we wanted to test some new marketing channels, we wanted to be a unicorn,we wanted to press cycle. You guys sort of approach things in every capacityjust from a different set of first principles, and I think your fundraisingdecisions were reflective of that and really that's kind of how you guys runthe company. So there's kind of this mystique of how linear does thingsdifferently. This term gets thrown out a lot the linear way. For people thathaven't followed the story the last couple of years, what's the best way youcan summarize what is the linear way? What is the philosophy for how you'rerunning this company?

Karri Saarinen (09:40):

Yeah, I think all of it starts from the initial insight wehave that in order for us to win in this category, we think we need to be thebest product in this category and truly be the best product. I think everyfounder or product builder, they always want to believe that, that you are,they're building the best product out there. But I think for us it was like wereally want to make sure that's is the case. And to me, the best also meansthat you need to be a quality product. It's included in that definition to me.And so to me the quality is one of the things that drives some of thesedecisions. So one of the main reasons why we do a little bit thingsdifferently, it's like we had these experiences in other companies. I worked atCoinbase early on and then I worked at Airbnb kind of like more in later stagecompany. My other co-founders worked also at Coinbase and Uber. And we've seenthis story play out of you are the hyper cross company, you hire a lot ofpeople and we kind of see the effects of that. What happens to the culture,what happens to the product, what happens to the whole company? And we wantedto avoid that, that we saw that. And then when we started linear, we kind oftold ourselves we don't want that.

Karri Saarinen (11:02):

And the main reason there is that the faster you grow theteam or sometimes even the business, but I think you are kind of diluting thequality of the team or diluting the quality of the culture in the company. Sowe have this not exactly a rule, but basically we didn't want to more thandouble that team every year. So we started with three people, then we went tosix people and 12 and 25 or something. And so it is like a slow, we stilldoubling but in a slow way. And part of that is because we saw that in ourexperiences. Every project in our kind of career, we felt that was done reallywell. It was always done with a small team and it was never the biggest teamthat did that best work in a company. It was like few people that did that bestwork in the company. So our thinking is can we just have more of those bestpeople in our company and that they can work on this project with a small team?And the benefits of a small team is you have less of a communication. You don'tneed to convince that many people that they about your ideas. And I think thatpeople can focus more on that, on delivering that quality.

Speaker 3 (12:30):

So

Karri Saarinen (12:30):

A lot of this, all of the things we do kind of culminateinto that idea of that quality we think is important. And that's the thing wedrive and we don't want to sacrifice that because someone's telling us, hiremore people or we need to chase this growth metrics. So being profitable alsoplays into this quality aspect I think because it gives us the freedom to dothe focus on the quality. A lot of other startups, what they have to do isfocus on the growth because if they burn the money they need to go eventuallyraise the next round. And you cannot raise the next round necessarily if youdon't have the growth numbers for it. Luckily we've been able to do both. So wecan do the quality but also the growth. But it is more like the quality comesfirst and the growth second,

Miles Clements (13:18):

There's a lot of good stuff to unpack in there, but one ofthe things that you just touched on that I really love about this company isthere's a couple of points of really, really beautiful contrast in linear. Soyou talked about the founders came from some of the iconic hyperscalecompanies, but you like doing things deliberately and thoughtfully. You alsotalked about the balance between speed and quality. So I want to tap into thosea little bit. So before linear, you spent time at Coinbase and Airbnb and yourco-founders came from Uber and Coinbase also. So these are among the mosticonic hyperscaler companies out there, yet you're all very principled anddeliberate about growing conservatively still very quickly, but conservativelyand durably at the same time. You're these Finnish bootstrappers, veryprincipled original thinkers, but you've been at Bay area companies, you buildthis tool that's used by over 50% of Y Combinator graduates. Over 50% of AIcompanies are all building with linear today. So stepping back, do you consideryourselves, are you Silicon Valley insiders or do you think of yourselves asoutsiders?

Karri Saarinen (14:29):

I would still say that we're insiders. Just the fact that,and I was also in YCE with my previous company and I think through there and myother work, I do know a lot of founders and some investors too, and I feelinsider that way. But currently for example, none of us founders live in SanFrancisco. We are outsiders in that sense. We don't live here. And part of Ithink why we can do that is that we also already had some of these networksbuilt in or we know some of these people already. And I think that to me it'salways that you can criticize some kind of path, you could criticize thehyperscale or the other side of the coin, but if you haven't actuallyexperienced it or done it, I don't think that you can't really know what it'sactually like criticizing it. It's a little bit, you criticize it from theoutside, but you don't actually know exactly why or what are the bad things orgood things about it. So I think for us, I think it's much more that weexperienced that and we saw that and there's some good things and our groupbelieve this company are very successful. It's not like a bad path,

Speaker 4 (15:47):

But

Karri Saarinen (15:47):

Then we just didn't feel that that's a path for us or itdoesn't necessarily the market we are in, the category we are in, we don't haveto follow that path or we can focus more on this being the best of class forthis type of,

Miles Clements (16:05):

Yeah. This is something else that I hear you say a lotthat I have really learned from you, which is that the same tactics don't applyfrom one company to the next. So the way that you're growing linear might notbe the way that another software company should grow their business. Just likewhat Uber did, certainly worked for Uber, what Airbnb did, worked for them, butyou can learn some things from those companies, but this concept of frameworksand things that work from one company to the next just don't apply. And youguys always reiterate that lesson,

Karri Saarinen (16:34):

And I think actually Uber and Airbnb are very similarcompanies in terms of both of them are kind localized marketplaces. If you havesupply on demand and people delivering that experience and what also happenedwith them, both of those companies, you have a lot of copycats that areregional and that market dynamic forces you to grow fast or you get kind of runover if you want to be the biggest player. You don't want to give space forother players to come. But our market is much more, there's always been almostlike as long as we've been building software, there's always been some kind ofbug trackers out there or project management systems. So it's not that this issome kind of new need that we discovered. This is more just the iteration onthat need and so we don't have to try to rush it as much as some of these othercompanies.

Karri Saarinen (17:32):

I think the other thing happened past decade, I thinkthere's this Facebook and some of these other successful companies, people alsotry to emulate those companies like AP testing and experimentation and thosetype of things work really well for a company like Facebook that is an ad-basedengagement product that you just want to boost the engagement numbers. But Ijust don't think that that kind of operation or tactics apply to an enterprisecompany like our type of company. So I think that's what I always findsurprising in startups, that people are so willing to follow this frameworks ormodels without actually thinking, can I actually apply this kind of thinking inmy company? It doesn't make sense. It probably made sense for that othercompany but doesn't make sense for my company or the strategy I have. So Idon't think you can follow these other companies so blindly.

Miles Clements (18:35):

Right. Talk about the trade off between speed and qualitybecause conventional wisdom is that you can't do both well at the same time.But what I've always observed from linear is that from, you have a maniacalfocus company-wide on quality, but you also ship very frequently. How have yougotten that balance right?

Karri Saarinen (18:54):

Yeah. I don't think actually we don't believe that thereis some kind of problem with doing both speed and quality. I think it's oftenthey can actually go hand in hand if you have the right people. If you don'thave the right people and they don't have the skills, then you probably can'tdo that. But there's some tactics where you have to balance these things. Ifyou internally and externally talk a lot about the quality, I think there's thething that probably always pops into people's heads. It's like it's aboutperfection and perfection is impossible. If nothing is perfect and there'sdifferent stages of products and features and no product or features, never ina perfect state, there's always something lacking or something wrong orsomething. And so you don't want to build this culture around perfectionbecause then people don't want to ship anything until it's perfect and it'snever perfect. So it then slow things down. And I think that's the classicargument that people just get too focused on the perfection and then theyactually move forward. So I think a lot of startups and companies took theopposite extreme where let's just move fast and not care about the quality atall.

Karri Saarinen (20:11):

But that's not right either. So the one thing, forexample, how we balance that in the product work is that we talk about thequality and why it's important. We try to hire people that care for the craftand have the skills, but then when we build new features, we always build thembehind these feature flags that we are the first users of this feature so wecan ship the feature to ourselves

Karri Saarinen (20:38):

And we tell the team and push the teams as soon as you canjust put it into the app, you can just add the button in there even if it'shorrible. But we can start internally trying it out and see how it fits intothe product. And then the next stage is that once we figure out it a little bitmore, we can then select some customers or users or people to also better testit. And at that stage it can be also a little bit still not that polished orperfect in a way. But then eventually when we push it live to everyone, weexpect that the execution of the feature is good, the concept should be good.We actually, I go there to click it and see that the animations feel good andthese little details feel good. So we expect the high level of polish or somelevel of perfection before we ship it. But in the end I think this kind ofmethod of trying to keep pushing the teams forward with their work still makesus quite fast. And then we just at the end have this check that have we hit thestandard we want to hit with our work we do. Right.

Miles Clements (21:55):

I've always observed that I think you have, I know thatyou're not striving for perfection, but I think one gift that you and thefounders have that maybe you don't even realize is you just have greatintuition around it when a product is pretty close to perfect. Which brings meto another contrast, the contrast between your own intuition and responsivenessto customer feedback. When you're thinking about the next iteration, what'snext on the product roadmap? How much of it is what you are dreaming up for linearversus what you're hearing from customers?

Karri Saarinen (22:27):

We talk about this internally too, that we tell peoplethat intuition is good and you should use it in the product work, but we wantto explain it that you should be training your intuition by talking to thecustomers and understanding their problems as much as you can. So we encouragethe whole team to be answering questions in our community Slack or when they'reactually building features, they should be talking to some users or customersabout those problems we are solving. So I always think that the intuition isnot some kind of magical force that is there in the universe, but it's moreyour experience and the training data that you have collected. So I putting inthe AI terms, it's like you training your own product thinking model in yourhead and the more this data you input there, I think your experiences, yourbrain make some kind of connections or distillations of that

Karri Saarinen (23:29):

Information. But how we do roadmaps is usually thatsimilarly, we don't have one system for that. I know some companies like to usestack ranking of here's the list of what's most valuable or most requested orsomething, but to me it's always been a little bit too simple way of thinkingabout it. So we often get a list of things from the sales or success or otherchannels. We hear from the customers that we really need this thing and thatthing. And so we get that list and then we also have our own list of asfounders or the head of product or someone else or what we hear from the teamthat these are actually some areas we should really think about or do. And thenwe look at both lists together that is there some kind of connection here, whatmake sense to do next? And maybe they're on that sales or the customer list.There's something that connects with that thing where any way want to do.

Speaker 3 (24:30):

So

Karri Saarinen (24:31):

Then combining doing both of those things actually makethe product more valuable or interesting.

Miles Clements (24:39):

It's really interesting. So I mean we just walk throughthese series of contradictions, are you insiders or are you outsiders? Thetrade off of speed versus quality, the trade off versus of intuition versuscustomer feedback. And I think the answer on all three is the value is in theinterplay. You have to define the right combination and you have to do it. Ijust think you guys as founders have done a really special job of finding theright balance of doing all of those things.

Karri Saarinen (25:06):

Yeah, I don't know if partly comes from, my background isin design and I think design is much more like that. It's not that binary worldwhere you have to choose one or the other. There's all these spectrums ofthings and how generally just humans experience or feel about things. And Ithink there's a little bit that in the industry, a lot of founders come fromtechnical backgrounds and I think when your whole career you are working morewith this technical systems that are more like binary. There's the right andwrong way or there's this way of doing. I think some people just prefer thatthey like that kind of clarity of the world that things are ordered and there'sthis binary choice you can make. But then our company, I think we just like tothink that there's this art and science and you should use both,

Miles Clements (26:02):

Right? Yeah, that's very well put because it's a reallycrowded and competitive industry. There's so much going on with your customerbase, the hypergrowth of ai, et cetera, et cetera. It can be really noisy. Ifeel like you find clarity in the mission of focusing on the product and if youjust focus on the product being the best out there, then everything emanatesfrom that. And that's what I hear you all coming back to us with over and overand over again and it's really impressive discipline.

Karri Saarinen (26:28):

Yeah, I think, yeah, to me there's always all kinds ofadvice I think you see on Twitter or somewhere there where people say that noproduct is not that important or distribution is more important or this is moreimportant. And I just don't agree with that. My view of the world is thatpeople do want to use the best tools or products available. And so if we canjust do that, we have much more likely chance to succeed and then you can doall those other things. But I don't want to do all those other things if theproduct isn't good. I think sometimes we also don't want to push the growth ashard in some segments of the market. For example, we don't want to sell to somekind of customers because we don't think that the product is ready yet forthat. We think it will be ready soon, but not yet. And so it's also being alittle bit, I dunno, critical of how good your product actually you think itis, what's the state of it and understanding what is where you are in thisjourney.

Miles Clements (27:37):

One thing that is very clear about the way that you runLayer is everything that you put out into the world is just defined by suchhigh degrees of taste. Like the product is very tasteful, all of what limitedmarketing collateral there is very tasteful. Everything about the company justsort of oozes taste. How do you hire for that and talk through some of thetactics that I think are unique to linear around building this team that you'vebuilt.

Karri Saarinen (28:04):

I think a lot of times the taste comes from the craft.When we interview people for any kind of role really at linear, then we want tosee them that they take some kind of pride in their craft, whatever they do. Ithink when you understand your craft really well, I think then you also oftenhave the taste to know that what good looks like. And I think eventually that'swhat taste is about, is that when you build something or do you something, isthis good or not? Maybe sometimes other people might not agree, but I think youat least yourself should know that. So all the engineering roles, all theproduct roles, we look for that because we think it has to happen in order toproduct really have that taste or quality across the board in all of thefeatures, different things we do.

Karri Saarinen (28:58):

It's like everyone has to have that. Otherwise it's reliestoo much on someone else, higher level monitoring everything. And I don't thinkthat's doable or that's effective. It's better if the person who builds it doesthat. But then it also goes to some of the marketing or some of these otherareas is that we also look for that. Can you actually go deep into what is thisrole or what is this task about? So if you're marketing linear, we don't wantto see what are the tactics or playbooks or what are the growth hacks you cando. You have to really come to us to say what is the message we want to get outof the world? What should the users or the customers understand about us as acompany or a product? And it needs to be really crystallized what the messageis, even if we don't go out publicly with that message. Sometimes you want tocreate a little more than what the more core of the message is, but it's likethat can you go find the main thing in this role or in this task? Because thenI thinks some kind of intellectual clarity

Karri Saarinen (30:22):

And finding, I don't know the first principles or theprinciples anyway.

Miles Clements (30:28):

And I think screening for taste requires sort of adifferent more nuanced hiring process. So I'm intrigued by a couple of thehiring tactics that work really well with linear. Maybe let's go through themand if we're giving away any trade secrets, we can cut it later. But I wouldlove to hear more about work trials. I'd like to hear more about how we sort ofbias towards ICS and at all levels hiring people that we'll actually get in thecode or actually get their hands dirty. And then maybe the last thing is justthe quality of our recruiting team. We actually have more recruiters than wehave salespeople. It's like we almost treat the recruiting pipeline. A lot ofcompanies would treat the customer pipeline, maybe talk about some of thatstuff starting with work trials.

Karri Saarinen (31:16):

So work trials, what it means is that basically everyperson who joined linear or is considering joining Linear, they go through thiswork trial process and it's basically one to five days where the candidateworks with us, with our people team on some kind of project that is relevant totheir role. So it's like realistic project, not like a fake whiteboard kind oftask, but it's actually, if you're an engineer, it's built this feature. Here'sa vague brief about it. And so it's your job to figure out what's the scope.You can use the team, the project team that you have for the workshop as muchas you want. So it's not a test that you sit alone and you cannot talk toanyone.

Miles Clements (32:09):

You're on the team, you're part for the work.

Karri Saarinen (32:11):

So it's like if something is unclear to you, you shouldjust ask the team. And that's one thing we screen for, are you able to ask forhelp

Karri Saarinen (32:19):

Because we are a remote company, you have to do that. Wedon't know if you need help unless you ask for it. And you have to be able toblock yourself, unblock yourself any way you can. And if it's some marketingrole, it's about, hey, do this marketing campaign or something. So it dependson the role. We come with different prompts and then we pay for that time. Sowe pay a daily rate. So we don't want people to do free work. And the mainthing with that process is that we as a company can see how the person operatesnot only their skills, but also how do they communicate, how can they scopethings, can they simplify or clarify things? Do they ask for help? And yeah,what is their style? I think it's kind of like that taste factor that,especially in non-technical roles, I think that the style aspect is somethingwe look for is what kind of communicator are they, what kind of, for example,if it's a marketing job, we kind of expect that they will write some things. Soare they a good writer and do they have a good style of writing? So that's thatpractice. But it also gives the candidates an opportunity to see what linear isabout or what the team is like and how does it feel to work on the actualproduct or in the company. I think especially more senior people that have moreexperiences, good and bad experiences do appreciate that because any company,and especially startups, often the company can look very good from the outside,

Karri Saarinen (34:02):

But it can be very messy in the inside and then dependswhat kind of messiness it is. Maybe you like that or maybe you don't like that.So then this also gives an opportunity to the candidates to see what we areabout.

Miles Clements (34:17):

Yeah, it's a mutual trial process. I mean I think it setsyou up for, I see this phenomenon within linear where in the first couple ofweeks of a new candidate becoming a full-time employee and starting, I'll hearthis feedback that he or she's extraordinary, this is a great hire. And I thinkit's because you exert so much effort upfront into making sure that there'sgood mutual fit and that's pretty uncommon. What about this concept of lookingfor ics? Because you want people who have been kicking ass in their last roleat whatever company it was. And typically progress in a company also iscorrelated with, you get a small team. So you might have somebody who's anexcellent operator and they're used to managing a team of 10, but you want themto come into linear where we don't have teams of 10 and also be an ic. How doyou get that balance right?

Karri Saarinen (35:07):

Yeah, I think a lot of it's also probably comes from usfrom the founder, DNA. We were also, most of us were mostly ICS in thiscompany, so we were maybe high level ics, which has some leadership qualities,but you're not a people manager, which we liked because you're more focused onthe work, not people's problems. Even still, we are a startup, so we should beputting as much our efforts into building things and ics individualcontributors are the ones that build things. So that's what we want to see in thecompany. And I don't know if there's aspects of the remote or something, but Ithink since we hire more senior people, they generally don't need that muchmanagement. I think when you are early in your career, you need a lot of helpon how do you even handle yourself in different kinds of situations. So that'sthe IC that we just see that there's a lot more value hiring ic, obviously itdoesn't scale forever,

Speaker 3 (36:15):

So

Karri Saarinen (36:15):

Eventually you just have so many people that yes, you needdifferent kinds of leads or managers. So we often do the lead structure wherethere's someone who is a little bit manager like

Speaker 4 (36:28):

That,

Karri Saarinen (36:29):

They can communicate well, they can articulate well, theycan recognize blockers or problems, but we also try to build more of thisculture where we don't have to have all these different management practices orthings going on, but it's more focused on the

Miles Clements (36:48):

Work. Yeah, I was going to get into the question that youjust touched on, which is will this scale, because prevailing logic in a lot ofour practices is, oh, that's great when you're serving small customers, but youcan't sell enterprise software operating that way yet here we are and you'reabandoning some of the biggest enterprises in the Fortune 50. How many of thepractices that you founded the company with, do you expect to scale forever?And how many are things where you'll evaluate as you go?

Karri Saarinen (37:16):

Yeah, I don't really know. So I think that's the honestanswer. It's like we are not too dogmatic about this, that we just look ateverything, that we just try to do the best thing we can. And if we need morepeople, if we need more managers to do something better, then we should dothat. It's not some kind of, we can't ever hire these people, but even in thesedeals, we don't see that you need an army of people pushing these dealsforward. It's like you need good people pushing the deals forward. It's likeone good salesperson can push it and then if we need engineering or some otherhelp, there's often one engineer and they can, if they just focus on that, theycan really do it well. And so I think there's that, the choice there is thatit's like do you hire a large organization of people that maybe have variouslevels of experience and skills and ability to do certain things or you justtry to hire very good people that definitely have all of those things and theycan land the things much more easier.

Karri Saarinen (38:26):

So for us, it's also just as founders, that's a type oforganization we want to build, want to build this high functioningorganization, not the most biggest organization or for us, that would be thedream place to work in. It's like you come to this place, this company and youhave all the people around you are very high quality and then you are giventhis or find this task, let's go work on this thing. And then you work on thatthing and then there's nothing else. There's no all that unnecessary stuff. There'sno manager breeding down your neck of wanting to get some updates because thenthey have to tell those updates to their manager and that manager have to tellit to their manager and it's like there's this extra work we think that isunnecessary, but there's some aspect of the management things that areobviously necessary and we might need to do some of this or we need to hiresome people. But that's just the way we think about it.

Miles Clements (39:27):

Yeah. When you think about the first 500 days of led firstyear and a half or so, what was the biggest mistake you made and what was thebest decision that you made?

Karri Saarinen (39:39):

Yeah, I think the mistakes question is hard. I actuallydon't feel that we have made big mistakes and maybe I'm just forgetting them orI'm just seeing that sometimes that it's not a mistake. It's like we had to dothat in order to us to learn something.

Miles Clements (39:57):

Yeah, I think you look at your mistakes as learningmoments and you're better now because I mean, yeah, I get that.

Karri Saarinen (40:02):

Yeah, I think there's an example of

Miles Clements (40:04):

I'm glad you don't consider your Series B investor ofmistake. That makes me feel very nice about myself.

Karri Saarinen (40:08):

Well, for example, that could be, you could say that maybewe should have hired sales sooner and we didn't. And maybe that was a mistake.But then also I would say that we probably weren't ready for it than if we haddone it earlier. Maybe we would gotten it more wrong or we would've gotten itwrong. And I think now we have to go through that stage to realize why is thesales valuable or what does it do? So there's a natural growth there. I thinkthe best thing is is bro, it's launching the product. We had this private betafor a year, but I think at some point, maybe, I dunno, six months in orsomething, we decided that again, we should, we had a lot of people on the waitlist too wanting to use the product. Then people were asking about it and wejust wanted to keep it private beta to control the initial stages a little bitthat we can try to bring in customers that are a better fit than the first 500days wasn't definitely not ready for large companies or something. So we didn'twant them to come in and see, oh, this product is not that good. But we wantedto get the type of companies that could be a good fit. So we wanted thatcontrol and getting feedback from those people. But then we just realized thatwe could keep doing this forever and eventually we will need to launch and it'sprobably better to launch it as soon as we can.

Karri Saarinen (41:48):

So we made a list of things that were, what do we need tolaunch it than there was some technical stuff, there's some other, we needed tofigure out pricing because we didn't figure it out earlier. But in the end Ithink that was still right thing to do. And when we launched the pricing at thesame time we launched the company, open it up for everyone, that product foreveryone, we got almost all of the companies did convert to the as paidcustomers. And that felt good and motivating,

Miles Clements (42:18):

No consistent with the theme of intuition and userfeedback. Last question, what does linear look like in five years?

Karri Saarinen (42:26):

Yeah, I'm tough to say. Is it exactly five years or lessor more? But I think since the beginning we started linear with more like aclear focus of this is issue tracker for software teams. And then thetrajectory or the path we took is expanding that ideas. The issue tracker partis important because we think every software company basically needs an issuetracker, but then there's a lot of other things they need like projectmanagement. And when you work on new features, you also need to plan those features.So what do we see linear becoming more, it's more of a product building systemfor product organizations. So we want to help people earlier in the processbefore they even start thinking about their roadmaps, could they have a betterunderstanding what the customers are asking for? Do they have different kind ofresearch or discovery they can do?

Karri Saarinen (43:21):

And then that can influence the planning, which then canhelp with the execution. And ironically, I don't think these processes arelinear, that you actually have to go back and forth with this. You startbuilding something, you're going to have to go back to the beginning of what Iguess the customer's saying maybe we need to go talk to them more. So there's abenefit having these all of these in one system that then those teams andpeople who work on this project can do. And then there is that other directionwhere we want to see, well, you work on these issues and you do these projects,what happens next in the workflow? And so there's some areas we want to look indeeper into the engineering workflows because engineers are probably thebiggest group of users on our platforms. Are there other things we could helpthem with? There's also the whole, if this is the product building system forcompanies, then I think there's a good opportunity also bringing this idea ofwhat's the balls of the company or the product building, which apparently, andit is very hard problem where any sizable company, any leadership people in asizable company, it's really tough to tell what's going on.

Karri Saarinen (44:38):

But linear, because that's the platform where thisplanning and execution happens. We actually have opportunity to provide thisinformation layer that what is actually going on. It can be very distilledinformation and or react to certain things. So I think there's also opportunityto help with that side of communication or information, how the informationflows between the different layers of the company.

Miles Clements (45:06):

Right. Awesome. It's such a privilege to get to work withyou guys. I really appreciate it and thanks a ton for doing the pod. Well done.

Karri Saarinen (45:15):

Yeah, thanks.