Inside Linear: Why craft and focus still win in product building | Karri Saarinen (Co-founder and CEO)

Brett: Thanks for joining. I'm excited for the conversation.

Karri: Well, thanks for having me.

Brett: Maybe kind of a place to, to start, was your childhood like? Like when did you get excited about software and design?

Karri: I would say like quite, quite early on the software or on the computer side, so I was told, I don't really remember this, but like, when I was five years old, I wanted to play like we, uh, we got the Commodore, 64K or something at our house. and I, I, I wanted to play those games, but to play those games, you actually have to type in the launch command and I couldn't even read them.

So I had to like have my sister to help me show me like how I type the right commands so I could match it visually. even though I didn't know what the letters are, I couldn't read really but I could match the visual combination of things.

So that got me into like computers and then that continued with other like PCs and, gaming, online online gaming, and which then got me into designing websites. Like I, I wanted to design a website for a gaming clan or team. And, that got me, like, I went to the library, to get a book on HTML and, and got learn about that.

on the design front, I also feel like since I was very little, I always noticed things that, weren't right, like to, to my perspective and, I remember like one story that with my parents, we went to look for a new bike for me, and then I, told me like, go to the store and look at the bikes.

Like what, what kind of bike is interesting to you? And I f elt like a lot of the bikes were just ugly. And I, I just couldn't understand. I was like maybe seven or eight or something, and I just couldn't understand like, why do you make ugly bikes? Like if you make a bike, why don't you make it nice? and then like maybe years later I realized that, oh, you actually need someone to do it.

Like you need to have a designer or some kind of person that selects the design or creates the design. and then I kind of realized that, that there's that kind of career. but I actually entered the computer side from, from the programming. So I, my first job when I was 16 was, actually like building websites and that was my job.

But even in that job, I saw that actually what the company needed more was the design help. So then I got sucked into the design and every company I went to is I found that like I'm pretty good at programming, but they're very bad at design. And so that always like got me to design, wherever I went.

Brett: Why do you think that is? Or was?

Karri: I can visualize things quite well, so like when I look at something, I kind of like noticed that something is off and then I start thinking about it. Like, why, why is something off? What is bothering me?

And then I can visualize a version that is what I think is better. So I, I think there is some innate ability to see how things can be better. And then it, it's like, easier to do designs when you can do that.

Brett: Did you, growing up, think of yourself as an entrepreneur or as a programmer or gamer or designer?

Karri: I've never been too focused on any specific identities. So like even in school, I wouldn't join this like group. So like I wouldn't form my identity along like some kind of group that like, I don't know if you are a skateboarder or you are like a musician or something, would like hang out with all of those people and I found some of the aspects interesting, but I was never a person that I'm gonna go hundred percent in it.

And I think when I was thinking about where should I study and what should I study, I did feel that way that I am interested in, entrepreneurship because I had, I had my own little agency. I built websites for some, some customers, so I had some concepts of running a business.

I was interested in it, but I also know programming and I also knew design, so my choice eventually was those three. Like what should I study out of those three? And my thinking at least back then was that I think that, I can learn design by just doing it. And programming is similar that I can, I, so far I've been just learning it by doing it.

I'm not sure what I find in this school. So what, do I actually learn there? So I actually went to the business school ' cause I wasn't sure like what you actually can learn now. Can I learn something there? And then like later I realized that like business schools are not really about some founding companies or entrepreneurship.

They're more about the middle management or the kind of the theory of like, how do you run a company, but not actually the practical aspects of it.

Brett: Were you into school or it was sort of an a side thing as you were pursuing building and designing and all that type of stuff?

Karri: Yeah, I was never into school at any level. Basically, I think how my motivations or mind works is that I always was more interested doing something where I could see there's a value to someone. So when I was younger, that could mean that we make events, like we made this like LAN gaming events. Like we, booked some space and then we sold tickets and like we, created something for someone.

And that always felt to me like the real work or like the real thing you can do in this world is like you can create some kind of value. So I was always interested in that, but school is not like that, so I always found that the school is kind of like fake because it's actually, you learn something yourself, but you, you do these exercises or tests or studies, but you are just learning, you are not actually creating value to anyone else.

I And that, doesn't feel motivating to me. So yeah, it, a lot of times it was more like a side thing that I, did, and actually I did end up dropping out because I, I could see like, I can just go work in these companies or startups and I don't necessarily need this, studies.

Brett: So what was the story behind your first company?

Karri: when I was very young, I had like just an agency on around building websites, but then like in 2012, I had this other startup, called Kippt and it, basically just came to be from an idea that back then, Delicious was the kind of bookmarking tool. And, and Yahoo had bought it like in the early 2000s and basically done nothing with it for 10 years.

And it was kind of stuck there. And, I didn't like using it then. I felt like maybe a lot of other people feel the same way. And, there was some other things that I don't quite like about the model model they had. Like, for example, the tagging. Like I, I found like tagging was this like, hot thing back in the day.

Like a tag, like an interesting idea how you can categorize everything. The problem with tagging is that you might end up with more tags that you have content and to me it doesn't feel like it has some kind of purpose then like you, you are categorizing for really no benefit.

Like you just have too many things. so we created this product kit, which was basically bookmarking service for saving things from the web, like different articles, videos. We could actually also try to like, bring in the content to your library so you could kind of access it, even if the, the content went away.

we also built some social features. You could follow people or like make lists that other people can follow. And one of the ideas there was that Google, even back then was kind of bad at finding quality content if you actually wanna learn something like, Hey, I wanna learn about React. and it's like, what is the best content around that?

It's not curated because it's just based on the search rank. And the search rank can be like, it's probably like just gives you the React website, but it doesn't give you like someone's like, great tutorial that they created, but someone who knows the subject, they could like actually create these things.

But, we built that tool and then, found out a lot of people liked using it, we put it online, we put it on Hacker News, and then turns out like a lot of people liked using it. 

Brett: You start it as a company or as a side project?

Karri: It started as a side project. So yeah, how it went was that we, we just put it on Hacker News, Hey, we built this thing and then in a couple months we had 10,000 users on it.

And then at that point we were like, oh, maybe this could be a company. So we went to apply to YC in 2012, and then got into the summer batch and that, that kind of like, also got me to move to California or San Francisco. I, grew up in Finland, so that's where I'm from and where, where I was at the time.

And then, um, the YC kind of made the reason for me to move. And then we came to do the YC and then, then run the company from the US.

Brett: What was sort of the trajectory of the company?

Karri: It's like definitely like lessons learned. So we always, I, I still like, even like yesterday someone was, I was talking to some, some investor and they said like, Hey, I really remember this Kippt service you had and like, I really liked it. so I think we had like a good group of people who were very excited about the tool and liked using it.

Some of the, I think the mistakes we made, and maybe it was also like a timing component that we just didn't, because we didn't start it as a business, we didn't actually think like, what is the business? so Delicious, I don't think really had a business like they got sold. Like I think like advertising is only works if you just hit a massive scale.

And so, and we weren't there, so we some hundreds of thousands of users, but, but tens of thousands of users, and then later a hundred of thousands of users. But not then in millions of users. And it's still, I think what we found out is like, not everyone likes to like, collect stuff and it's not, the most mainstream thing. So, so we, we struggled a long time with the business and we, people like did some different ideas, people that, but like in the end we were just running it, two of us, like two founders, um, most of the time for a couple years and just tried different ideas.

We didn't really raise any funding because we didn't really have like a vision, but what we are actually doing. So we were trying to figure it out the same, same time as we were building stuff. And in the end, I think it was like a good experience on, on building things. And then also like, maybe made me realize that the advice on like starting a company and not thinking about the business model too much is, is not good.

Like it, I think you should think about it a little bit. It's like, what is, what kind of business are you in? Like what, who is gonna pay for it? And like, are they gonna pay for it? In our case, these were like mostly like individuals. and then I think back in the day, people weren't really like willing to pay for like web tools as much.

So I think like if we had done it now, I think we probably could have gone and done it better. But I still don't think it's like a venture scale type of business. It's, the market is not there to, to support it now or probably never. It's just like, it's not a thing or it's not that interesting for that many people.

But I think the ending for that company was that, so Coinbase was in our YC patch in 2012 and they didn't have any designers on the team, so, so I sometimes like advise them on some stuff early days and, Brian Armstrong was always hounding me about, it's like, Hey, maybe you should join Coinbase.

And I was like, well, we have our own company and, eventually it got to a point that like he offered to like buy our company, so we ended up being acquired by CoinBase in 2014.

Brett: What, I mean, you talked a little bit about one of the lessons, I guess I'm always interested in sort of this topic of, founders that start multiple businesses and there's obviously this pattern where there's many spectacular companies that were built by founders. When you look back, their first company didn't really work or their first two companies didn't work, and then they land on something and it really has the properties of something that can really get big and, and kind of create something that, that's adorable. the thing I kind of find curious about is kind of the question of this intersection of the founder and the idea and product that they're building, and ultimately sort of, how much of it. When a founder goes on to build a really good second to a third company, is it that they've learned a lot or is it just more that there's more randomness than anyone would imagine? And that you take a capable founder and they're pointed in one direction, it doesn't really go anywhere.

They roll the dice again and get pointed in another direction and, and that we're kind of overfitting to a bunch of these things in that, you know, certainly you've learned a lot since the first company, but maybe you're more similar and you know, it's almost like, you were drilling for oil and you were really good at drilling for oil, but you were kind of drilling in Massachusetts, not Texas, and then you put the rig down in Texas and now you know you're building something pretty special in Linear. Like it's not a very well-formed question, but like when you think about those type of topics, what kind of comes to mind for you?

Karri: I would say like, you, definitely learn something with any company, and I think it's always like important to understand like, what, what are the lessons and like maybe. try to think if those, what went wrong or what went well. Like how, how much was it about your specific situation versus how much was like your choices you made or how much was like conceptually you just went to the right, wrong direction? I think like, few lessons I've learned, one was the, the business side that, like, I probably at the time, like after that company thought like if I start a new company, I will definitely start a company that I know there's a market for and make sure that there's a market so linear. Like is that gonna company?

We knew that basically every software company needs some kind of issue tracking, project management tool. it's just a matter of like, it's linear, that, that tool or, or something else. and then also that software companies and engineering tools are type of. Products that people are willing to pay for because the engineering functions are already highly paid and, and software companies have, especially VC funded software companies, they have a lot of money to spend.

So it's like you could build linear to some other domains, but I think like the problem sometimes can be that you could build linear for stu like, uh, teachers or something, or schools, but schools are not willing to pay. Like they don't have the money to pay. So I think there is some importance of understanding the market, like what you're entering and what is the dynamics there. I think second thing which we explicitly try to do well with linear was kind of like certain kind of focus and especially the ideal buyer kind of focus. so in the first company it was this like bookmarking tool that was used by all kinds of people. It could be engineers, could be designers, could be teachers, could be sometimes book writers.

like authors And every time you hear this stories like, like as a startup founder, you might get really excited like, oh wow, someone is writing a book and they're like, using our tool. Like, that's great and maybe we could do more for them. But the reality is that you are probably just getting distracted that's probably not your audience. Like that's like a pretty specific audience. Like maybe you could build something for it, but like you probably shouldn't build anything right now, especially when you're small. so with linear, we, we set out that we basically are building this for product software companies, especially early on it was like very small early stage companies. and like whenever we looked at any kind of feedback, we are looking at who is this feedback coming from? Like why do they need this? And like, are they in our focus kind of user group? and then I think there's that focus thinking can also go beyond that. Similarly, even from that group, you might get things like, Hey, we need SOC 2 and this like security certification.

And that's like one of those things like, yes, you should one day have SOC 2, but like, is that, day today, like, is it in the first month of your company or the first six months? Probably not. So you should always think about, is this something we should do today? Like, is it blocking us in a massive way or is it, is, this the most important thing to do right now?

So there's I think, lesson on the, on the focus. I feel like I learned a lot from YC just generally that they, I think they give like pretty sage or pragmatic advice, which I don't think people usually follow though. Like, I think there's all this, they say like, don't raise a lot of money or try to be profitable if you can, but no one does it ever.

And then I don't know exactly why, But like, it's all there. It's like they give all this advice and I think we kind of been trying to follow that advice and it seems like it, it does work. but I think people get distracted by other things

Brett: Well, there's lots of things in life. Like how do you be healthy? Well, you exercise and you eat well. Then you look at how many people are exercising and eating well. Well, there's not many, you know, like part of it is that there's the, there's the whole host of things that, are pragmatic good advice, and

the real world is complex and humans are complex and their status seeking games and all sorts of other things going on.

Karri: So yeah, I would, I would definitely say that like there is things you can learn, just like practical things and there can be like just philosophical things or just experience can help. I think I also was helpful too, after my first startup, I, I worked at Coinbase, which I joined there when there were 12 people or so, and then saw them grow to like 100 people.

And then I was at the Airbnb when there were like, already quite massive scale and, but they were still growing. and it was kinda like good to see like how different companies operate, how the CEOs operate. Like what, what goes wrong? Even in this like very successful companies. And I think you, realize that even like these very successful companies are, they have problems too.

Like every company has problems. And, and as a startup you don't have to get everything right, like you just have to get few things right. And then you can like, fix things over time.

Brett: you think linear would be successful if you didn't work at Coinbase and Airbnb?

Karri: I think it's likely, it depends. Like, I think it depends what else would have done in, in those years. I like, I think it's about

five years basically of my life. So, I don't know, maybe I think what was really helpful about that experience was seeing that how these organizations get built, how they make decisions, like how do they operate? And I, I still think like there's a lot from those days when I'm designing something or talking about the product in the company, a lot of times, like in the end, like what the problem we are solving for companies is this like organizational coordination and communication problem.

And especially like the larger the company is, more problems you have with that. And it basically, the problem is always no one ever knows like what is going on and like who is doing what. and I think like having the experience, seeing those companies, seeing like how they do planning, how they make these spreadsheets and how bad the experience is or like how they prioritize things. It does help me think about like the product itself. It's like, I remember people doing it like this. Maybe we could build solution for that. And those simple things, like we have, this product project updates feature that is basically every company almost does something like that.

Like you have some kind of weekly meeting maybe that like everyone puts the slide and this is like where the project is at. So we just kind of built that into Linear, that there's a specific place you can do that and you can mark your projects like green, yellow, or red and then, then people can follow those things.

And so it's like we are trying to almost productize the practices companies already have and make, make it like more easier and streamlined for them. I think it would be hard to do if I didn't have that experience.

Brett: What about, are there philosophical things that you took from those companies that have expressed themself in what you're doing with Linear?

Karri: I think one, one would be the small teams, like with Linear. So we, we've been trying to keep the teams like the whole company quite small or not overly growing it too fast. So I think there's two problems with growing the teams too fast. One is like the, it takes a lot of time and the culture gets diluted very easily.

And I, I could see that happening in these companies that, especially in Coinbase when, when you have 12 people and then it suddenly goes to like a hundred people in one year, almost, majority of the people now has, has been there less than a year, sometimes even like weeks, and they don't know what they're doing or what they're supposed to do.

And then I think the second thing around that was that I looked back and, and tried to think like all the projects that I, I was part of, what were the projects that went really well? Like where the output was really good, where the, the speed was really fast, or executing execution speed for was really fast.

And it was always like projects where we had a small team working on something quite intensively. And it, it was like a Airbnb when I just joined. I put bold into this, project, basically redesigning the whole Airbnb application and there was like five of us. And, it's almost those kind of things are almost like impossible to do with 50 people or like a hundred people.

There's just too many opinions and too much like pool to different directions or just like communication problems. So I think like that, that was like one thing I took, that small teams can actually be powerful. And if you just find the right type of people for that, and the companies don't really do it that much because I don't, I find they often think about the, the resources as number of people, not, not necessarily like the output of those people.

So it's easy to say like, we need to hire like a hundred more engineers, but maybe you only need to hire 10 more engineers if you just structure the organization differently. 

Brett: So on the, on the small team's point, like how do you foot that with Coinbase and Airbnb being two of the largest software companies of the last 20 years is it just there are many ways to build companies? Is it for them, maybe it was good that they scaled quickly, that the market set for them required them to do that or they would be more successful if they were much, much smaller and they didn't grow head count in the same way.

Karri: Airbnb, for example, Brian Chesky is now running, it's very differently than he was running before. Like this whole idea of founder mode and be more in the details and, and I think like he is looking at this differently.

He probably agrees that he has too many people. I think it, it's, what happens in this company is, is I don't actually believe that those people are needed for the success. It's more that the company is so successful that they can hire these people. So it's like when you have the growth there, you are able to do that. that's the lesson people should take from that.

Not, not necessarily like that. I, sometimes see startups like following the hyper growth kind of model where they think the success comes from hiring a lot of people, but it's the opposite. Like Coinbase was still quite small. Like when I joined it was already like, yeah, it was two years in and there was like 12 people there.

why did they decide to grow so fast and like keep growing that fast? 

Brett: What was the earliest moment that you thought about what then became linear?

Karri: Well, I would say like the actual idea, it came from my co-founders, like probably in 2000, early 2018 or something. basically they, they wanted to do start a company. I wasn't wanting to start a company. And, and basically I think their, their first idea was like, Hey, we used all these tools in our companies and all of these different companies we've been at, like, around managing this work and all of them are quite bad and I think we could build something better.

but like interesting enough, there was like a little precursor to this, like when I actually joined Airbnb in 2014, I think 2015, that was my first time using Jira. Like Airbnb was using Jira. They had some kind of self hosted instance maybe. And, and the IT team had customized it a little bit with the Airbnb colors, but not really doing a good job with that. And so when I was first required to use it, I looked at it, I was like, what is this thing, like, it's so messy and so complicated, and I can't quite understand what I'm supposed to do with this thing?

So I refused to use it for a long time, but eventually I kind of realized, well, it's kind of, it's not great for my team to, refuse to use something and I should just play along. And, but what I did was that I, created like a Chrome extension that loaded up a custom CSS for that Jira instance, for the Airbnb instance.

And so I started redesigning it. So I started removing some of the elements. I started changing the colors, the styling, the hierarchy of the views or the, the screens. And, and then I also like removed a bunch of stuff that I don't think like are necessary, like the elements that I don't think are necessary for the actually to use it.

And so I packaged it into this Chrome extension. I, I launched it internally and they're like, Hey, I made this kind of simplify, like a nicer looking Jira for myself, but like, maybe you want that too. And I actually got like a hundred installs on it inside Airbnb. And this was like, yeah, like a couple years, or three years before we ever, ever talked about Linear.

But when, when they started talking to me about this idea is that I had this like personal experience where I actually went to the lengths of building something like custom chrome extension to, to make this tool kind of parable for me, because I'm a visual person, so this kind of stuff does bother me.

Brett: Were you at like lunch together at Airbnb and they were saying, Hey, we've been wanting to start a company. What do you think about like what, where did it actually start?

Karri: Um, so all of us founders, we are all finished and, and we are friends. And actually one of the founders, Jory, he was my founder in, in the first company. Um, so we already had this kind of relationship, and then he stayed at Coinbase, I went to Airbnb, but, uh, we all kind of were friends and we had beers every, every now and then, like, I don't know, weekly or, or so, and I think it was one of these sessions, like they just start talking like, Hey, I met like four years into my company or five years into my company.

I wanna do something else, but I don't want to go take a job. I would actually wanna try something on our own. and it kind of like came from that so it, it came from this kind of like, discussions and, and then we started looking into it. Like we started thinking about the problem. Like we started a little bit, um, designing and building prototypes and, and talking to our friends and talking to coworkers in the company.

It's like, Hey, what do you think is really bad with these tools? Like, how would you wanna improve it? Like what are some of the things you really hate about it? What, what would make you more productive? And those kind of things. And so, we kind of started this little bit of like a research before we actually like committed doing anything.

We wanted to see if that idea is actually, actually there. I think the interesting thing about it was that a lot of people had a lot of things to say and they clearly saw the problems. No one was saying anything that, Hey, I wish someone would solve this, or I wish I you could solve this or something.

Like, no one really even thought about it. Like, I think this market is like weird where you have this incumbent and I, I think people just assume it's the thing. It's like, it's always been there. It's always gonna be there. And it's, it's, it's a little bit like the, floors in the building. It's like you don't think about the floors, you just walk on them.

so I think a lot of people haven't really thought about like, could there be something like better and, and do it. obviously there's been companies, other companies doing project management and stuff, but no one has really focused on the engineering use case that well, I think and haven't been able to get to the scale where, where Jira is.

Brett: From an order of events perspective, so I understand it. Did, did you all first say, our next thing, let's start a company together and then landed on this thing that you wanted to work on? Or were you just kicking around ideas and then decided after that?

Karri: I would say that both of them came together in, in some ways. Like we, first decided like, hey, we could, like, start a company and this was the phrase next sentence, like, this is the idea. we didn't ever like, explore other ideas, so there wasn't any, anything like that. We, we were already like, sold on this idea and wanted to like start like evaluating or researching it before actually fully committing on.

Brett: You just talked a little bit about this sort of in a, in, in sort of broad strokes, but in its most tangible way. Like in the weeks after that, what did you actually do? What were the types of conversations you had and how much of it was organized around like, there's sort of the dominant players. It's a very large company, like studying them, looking at what Asana was, do like all the things that going on. Kind of ignoring everything that was there and just trying to figure out what customers wanted.

Karri: the thing we focused was like what the customers were saying. And like if they mention other tools, then that's, that's fine. And like that's, that's part of it. But we, we didn't look at, we didn't go benchmark the other tools or look at them too closely. I think the main thing thinking was just that.

Why isn't Asana used in our, like, tech companies? And I think like the, the, basically the reason is like the feature set is not there for, I think, technical projects. And maybe they've made some, like, progress there. But overall that was like just the thinking. Like basically companies start with something and then they end up with Jira because there's nothing else.

Like there's no alternative to that fate. So that, that was like the rough understanding on the market, or the different players. But yeah, we, mostly just focused on can we talk, basically let's talk to anyone who wants to talk to us about this. And usually they were like friends. Sometimes there they're founders, sometimes they're like engineers, sometimes they're designers, PMs.

I interviewed some PMs at their Airbnb and just went like, let's, hey, can you have a coffee with me and talk about something? And then I just went to like. talk to them like, what is, what is problematic in, in your current world? And, and like when it comes to this tooling or running your team or, or something.

And I found like there was like a lot of different answers. So there was more, like this step was more about the user research. So understanding are there some patterns? Like are there something that people feel strongly about? We had our own thinking all this time. Like we, we experienced all these issues ourselves.

So a lot of this, it was like, it came from us too, that one of the number one thing for us was that we were always the type of people that wanted to build something and we, we weren't really in management positions, we were more like a high IC positions because we all loved building things. And when we looked at this tool, they just didn't feel like they're helping us to do anything.

They're not helping the ICS to actually do the work, which is weird because. I think in the end, the productivity of any company comes from the ics, like what the actual, what is actually the work output and the ICS engineers or designers or someone are building that output. So I think if the tool should be optimized around anything, it should be that like to, how do we make help them to, complete that output, like, or do that output faster or better or easier somehow because then the PO company can be more proactive.

What I could see, a lot of tools, and this generally I think goes for enterprise tools, they're optimized around the buyer because that's how they get bought. you, you don't, the users don't go by the tools. The, like the actual end users don't go buy the tools. Some, someone in the procurement, it, the leadership, someone like make the decision like which tools to buy.

They might have their. Different favorite things that they want from these tools or sometimes they don't even care, like they may be. Sometimes the favorite thing is just the cost or something else. So we, we just believed in that, like you could build a tool that is very good for the end users, for the engineers and that would be really valuable because if they use the tool a lot more than, than something else, it means that all the work they're doing is like more tracked there.

And then if it's tracked there, this system can be more the real time source of truth. It's, it's kind of like tracking what, happening in the front lines. So anyone beyond those front lines have a better understanding like what is actually happening. So we had to like some of notions like this that there's certain things that we should just like hold dear or do really well, but we wanted to also like talk to people, like what are some of the other things people have problems with?

Some of the things I noticed, one of the patterns came from this conversation was speed. So. Almost everyone said that they hate when these tools are slow. So that made us think like, what if we can solve the speed issue? What if we can build a tool that is never slow? And so we went down to this exploration of prototyping on a tech stack that could allow us, and, and what it came to be is, is more of this like a local first architecture where the data is synced to the client, to the, to the actual client that user is using.

And then like all the actions you take with the data or with the tool, they, they happen locally on the client and then the changes get synced to the server versus the normal way of doing web apps is that you, you just run the app on the server and then whenever user needs to do something, they, they, request the data from the server.

And then when you make changes, it also at the same time pushes the data to, to the server. So you get this loaders in your experience and it, it makes. Sometimes if the services are slow, it, it can be really jarring. So, so we built that because we, we knew that, like, it's number one thing everyone said, so the speed is one thing.

so the first thing was the optimizing for ic, the speed was second. And then maybe the third thing was that I noticed in all of the companies I worked at, that actually the, the ICS and the high level leadership was, I think more philosophically aligned. Because I think CEOs and a lot of the high level leadership, they just wanna see things happening.

They wanna see output, they want to have progress. I see as, I think something similar. I, I don't want to sit in these meetings. I wanna complete my work and like build something. But like something weird happens in the middle where things get really messy or like lost, like that kind of thinking like, hey, we need to go push forward, like go forward and like do this thing just gets modelled by all kinds of other things. Like we need to have this kind of organizational path and like these, these kind of processes and, and something. And so what, what I saw happening in these companies is that the leadership would have very clear initiatives, what the company should do, but then the planning would happen in the middle and then like they would create this spreadsheet of 300 projects.

But then now that, the leadership wouldn't know like what those projects are actually doing. Are they like pushing those initiatives or not? And then when people work on those projects, they don't know why they're working on those projects. Like the connection wasn't there throughout the layers 'cause No, none of these systems like actually supported that.

So our thinking was always that like, could you connect the highest level of goals basically of the company to the day-to-day work and make it more meaningful that way. But for example, at Airbnb it's like, it was a pre IPO company. So there were some annoying things that maybe engineers had to do for the IPO readiness, but.

If you worked on some of those things and you could see like, oh, this is, we're doing this because we need to get, we're gonna, like, IPO think would make that work feel much more meaningful and you would understand why you're doing this. so that was one thing is like we wanted to see like if we can connect all these different layers, of the company and, and that's why kind of both helped the leadership but also also the ICs.

Brett: Before you committed to starting the company, as you were having these conversations, did you intentionally try to talk to people in different roles in different size companies, or was it just more whoever was around you were just sitting down and grabbing coffee and chatting about these things in a pretty unstructured way?

I.

Karri: Yeah, I, I, I would say like it was very random and unstructured. It wasn't, to some level, I probably tried to find a little bit different people, but a lot of times it was also like, who, who do I know and who, who do I think I could have like, interesting opinions about this? And it was very unstructured.

Like, just tell me like, what is wrong? And so it, it's, it's type of a user research in a way that like, I don't, I just wanna hear, I wanna see what people have to say and how they think about these things. And then maybe I'll just have some additional questions when, when needed. And I think there was also like quite interesting to see the variance and, like some, sometimes with the PMs they would have very, this like process oriented way of thinking.

Like, I need these tools to support my process and this is my process. And then some people were kind of like the opposite, where they're like, I don't really care anything except how well the team is doing. Like my only job as a PM is to make sure that the team is productive and I don't really care what the tool does for me that much. Like that's not the, that's not kind of what is important and that, that's more like what we try to do with linear is that we want that your team is the, the productive unit. And, and maybe there's some cost to, like, it doesn't support all kinds of crazy processes, but it, it tries to be like more simpler so people actually can use it.

Brett: I think obviously one of the benefits of talking to people is to try to understand if your model of the customer in your head and what they want, those two things are aligned, right? The nice thing about what you were building with linear is you were the customer, right? You used all these tools, and so you have this model in your head about likes and dislikes and what good would look like. you know, I think the goal of talking to other people is to understand is that model representative of a broader population, or is it kind of just you? And sort of with that thinking, you, you just mentioned this a little bit, but can you sort out like in what way was your model changed by these chats that you were having before you committed to the opportunity?

Karri: You have some kind of intuition about things, and I believe as, as a founder, you should probably start companies that you have some kind of intuition about or some kind of understanding about. I know like people start companies that in fields that they don't really understand or know much about, and I think that's respectable.

But I would never do that because I, I do like the fact that I can imagine myself using this and, and imagining like how it, how it works for other, people in that position. So I think there was definitely like a strong intuition we had. And then what, the customer or user chats or research does is like, we are trying to, yeah, partly like you said, like see if that model we have is shared by other people, but also I think it's like there to hone the intuition or the thinking.

And so I think it can be. It's never been, even in the beginning or later stages, it's never that, like we listen to these users and then we build what they want or what they, they say, we went there. Like, it's more like we have that model in our heads, and then if something doesn't quite fit into it, then we, we try to like, ask them more questions about it.

Like, why, why would they wanna do it this way and not this way? Um, or like, why, just generally why they wanna do it. And then try to understand the why and see if you could, if your solution could still solve their need. It's just like, it's not the solution they, they were looking for. I wouldn't say like there was anything too much that changed from those chats.

maybe there was some like additional ideas. Maybe it just gave us validation. Like I. The ideas we had, or maybe it helped us prioritize the ideas a little bit because if someone said, a lot of people said something and we knew that like, that's okay, that's probably like area we need to like focus on early on because it seems like more, critical.

But I think like how we started line was very much like, this is our vision, how this should work. And we built that and then put it out there and then kind of see if that resonates. And it, it did resonate. And kind of even from the very blog post, we could see like, oh, this is actually resonating.

Then it's like actually getting the people in and trying the product and, and we could see like, it didn't resonate with everyone right in the beginning, but it resonated with certain people. So we knew that we're, we're onto something like, this is our thinking wasn't completely wrong here, but it, it was actually like quite right and maybe like exciting or interesting or something different that people could get excited about.

And that's, that was what was really helpful. because like if you, if you think about this like, domain of project management or issue tracking, it's maybe not the most exciting area in the world. Like, you probably don't wake up in a, in the morning, it's like, ah, I wonder if I could think about project management more or something.

It's, it's like you need to get some kind of trigger to it that like, oh, there's something new, different. This could be like, interesting. So I think it's been kinda like part of the linear to, from the beginning, it's like, we wanna make this feel exciting and not just that, okay, here, here's a new, new tool for you.

Brett: When was the exact moment that you said that you committed to going and building linear? And how easy of a decision was it?

Karri: so yeah, during 2018 we, we had this like some months of like researching and, and thinking about this and designing something. And I think along pretty quickly there, I think we made some level commitment. Okay. Like next year, like in, in January, 2019 or, or something, we will start working on this like full time.

But then I think there was some like personal things, like the end it started being more like March, 2019, which ended up being the, the actual commitment date. Like we resigned for from our jobs in March. And then basically started like full-time in April, 2019. 

Brett: In the time, in, in, in 2018, before you did that, was it like three to five hours a week you were playing around and prototyping and talking? How much of a side exploration was it before you jumped in and started doing it full-time in March? In, in 2019?

Karri: I mean, I, I think it probably varied by person and by, by each week. But I wouldn't say it was just like probably some nights and weekends, during the week. So I would, I would probably assume it's like, maybe like, yeah, 10 hours or something, but not like 20 or, or more hours. and then we did, like, I think we did one offsite, kind of like we, we booked like an Airbnb and we went there for a weekend to, to plan some stuff and talk about things.

So that was my bigger time commitment. But basically how it worked during that year is that we met once a week on Wednesdays in this bar nearby. And then, we sat in this like corner table and then brought our computers and then basically talked about like, what did we do this week and what did we learn and what, did we try?

And then we. Maybe make some decisions, like, okay, like next time, like next week, like, we should do this thing, so research this more. Or just like, whatever comes to mind. But it was like basically every, every Wednesday, for yeah, almost a year that we, we met and, talked about this stuff.

Brett: So you quit in March and you start working on this. What in its most tangible way, what happened next?

Karri: We basically have set the goal. It's like we need to build the, the product so to a state that we can use it. And we we're basically trying to use it every day. And then the basic things are like, Hey, you, you should be able to create an issue. And so, okay, like we need that function.

And it's like, we need to be able to view these things, or we need to able to change this. Like, I need to be able to delete this and, and all those like little things. I, so the first goal was just that we should get this to a state that we could use it basically daily to do our basic workflow.

Brett: before you started writing a first line of Cone, did you say, I really want the early users just to be IC developers or product people, or did you punt sort of the specific user you were building for?

Karri: Yeah. I mean, I, I would say like, we probably had some writings about this, that like, based on all the research and all the, the talks we had, we, we had defined that we want to build this, this kind of tool. I ideally for these people, so I can keep the focus, like I think for example. These kind of project management tools can be used for consulting companies, but consulting companies with clients operate very differently from like companies that build their own products.

It's like a different model. So we always funded that like, we are not building this for consulting companies. They can use it, but we, we should be like, really honed down on this user that, that they should be really good for the, I think initially for the engineers was the, the user that we were building it for and probably working in this like early stage startup, mainly because, or like a small startup, mainly because we knew that these kind of tools require a lot of breadth.

Like there's just lot of things you have to build, like a lot of those basic functionalities. You need to move things around, you need to edit them, you need to change them. Like there's a lot of, a lot of like small features that you need to build to make this even, I feel like usable product, like you could build a very simple version of something, but in this category it's like just doesn't work because people already have like pretty high standards or high needs for how this kind of tools should work.

So yeah, so we set that ideal customer and then just went to work with, in the end, like we were the first ideal customer. We just have to build it for us. Like let's build something nice for us that actually works. And that, that was the goal. And then the next goal after that was that we should have few of our friends use this, like few, maybe it's five like people or like, or something that would, that was the, or 10, we would set the goal to be 10.

Brett: And so how long did it take you to get working for you, where you were pleased with it, and then to get your first five friends using it?

Karri: I think about a month we had it in a state that we could use it, like day to day. And then basically, I think months after we had maybe like 10 people or five people using it.

Brett: Because so much of the ethos and philosophy of the company is around craftsmanship. Was there some tension, like not wanting to give it to your friends until it was crafted perfectly, or just after a month it felt like it was good enough, we'll invite some friends kind of way of thinking about it?

Karri: I think we were happy to give it, I think I would say like, yeah, probably our way of doing like a early version is like probably still pretty good. Like, so it was maybe like limited in the feature set, but it was actually like, well done. And like we, we did this, like all this like pre-work and pre-thinking on a lot of stuff so that the architecture was already almost like kind of built by the time we started.

So we already had this speed kind of solved. And that was one of the reasons, like for the early customers, like early users, that was already like a huge improvement. And if you, if that's the thing you care about, then we solved that. And, and that, that was, it was already better than something else out there.

at least for a certain group of people. So that's why like we were okay, like giving it out. There were also friends that like, looked at it. It's like, I don't, I don't get it. Like I don't really care about the speed or I don't get, like, I don't get it. so I think the friends was more just that we can't convince our friends to use it, it's kind like hard to like maybe get other people to use it. So it was kind of like the next easiest step to do. and then after that, like we, in April, we just, I wrote the blog post about what we're trying to do and why, and tweeted about it.

and we got a lot of people interested and like, it seemed like the messaging was resonating and we just wrote it very clearly, like, to ourselves that this is like with the language and the way I would wanna read this. So I think what worked there was that, was that, that like, it resonated with the people who are, who were feeling the same frustration we were feeling.

And in the first, like after that blog post, we, we also put this website up with this wait list sign up, which, how do, like, basically you enter an email and then after that it sends you, gives you a survey that you also need to fill out. Survey was kind of optional, but actually you wouldn't really get in without filling the survey.

So the survey was kind of like required to like actually get, into the survey. So 

Brett: Why did you choose to do that? Well, let me go back for one second. You gave it to five or 10 friends and what happened? were they emailing you saying, this is incredible? Did half of them not use it? Like what was going on?

Karri: so we shared with some friends, like maybe sometimes it was like live and like sometimes I would demo it or we would demo it live and like get them on it and, and kind of like see, try to see their reactions and yeah, there was different kinds of reactions. Some, some people just didn't get it.

Some people were excited about it, so they wanted to try it. And yeah, I think like there was some, we could see like there was actually one company our friends companies just started using, it's like a 10 person team. They started using it and they were like. Basically they were using a in company, like, like any other tool.

so there was few of those people that it seemed that it's already something that works for them, that gave us the kind of confidence to move forward.

Brett: How did figure out that early roadmap after that? Or how did you figure out s omeone who didn't like it, that you didn't care if they liked it, versus if someone didn't like it, you did care and needed to improve the product or evolve the product?

Karri: It's probably like a normal thing, like when you create something new, there's always gonna be the people that, not everyone is going to like it, and not everyone is going to like it ever. Especially at the beginning.

 Not, might not look like something that people find that interesting. So I don't think you should overindex on the side of, well, why didn't that friend or that person like it, it's more like you index on the other side is like, who are the people that actually do like it and like, why do they like it? so I think what we're probably doing, I don't remember exactly that well, but I think we were talking with those people that, that started using it and were starting using it on the day to day. And then we could email them or try to like talk to them weekly. It's like, Hey, how's it going? Like what are the problems?

And like we also had this like a feedback button built in very early on so you could very easily like email us feedback from the app itself and we would read those email emails and like respond to them. so I think it was, well the roadmaps just came from. What did we need personally and then what did we hear from this early, customers, like for example, I think this sprint store, like what we call cycles was one of the early additions was that, Hey, we, we are running a sprint, like how can we do that here?

And that was something like, oh yeah. I, I think like a lot of companies, even if they don't exactly do Agile, they might still like this concept of some kind of contained time where you work on some something which is a sprint. but yeah, we call them cycles 'cause we think it's more like a continuing kind of activity of, working on like focusing on something and it's not really like you're sprinting towards something. so I think that the other roadmaps just mainly came from the people who, who actually did wanna, and then some, maybe some, sometimes we would track this blockers. Like if someone comes to us, hey, like, I, I would love to use it, but I really can't. Then that wouldn't be something like we put it on the list of like these other po potential blockers and, maybe we address them now.

Maybe we address them later. Like, I think my thinking is like early on the blockers, like I mentioned the SOC 2 for example, like I think it's a usual like easy example to give to any startup founders that like, if you start some kind of business product, eventually someone's gonna come to you ask like, do you have SOC 2?

And your kind of way to address that might be like, yes, we, we will go get it. But like, it doesn't, might actually like, not be a good idea because like that user might not even be the right kind of user and, and like that might be also like an excuse, maybe they don't really even really care about the product.

Like they just like are wondering about it. So like initially, you don't have to like get everyone, like you don't have to like win every deal. You don't have to win every user. You just have to win some that can use the product or, and can be happy about using the product and can use it like more and like maybe like daily or in their normal workflow.

And then you get feedback from them. Like, what do you need is someone to use the product. So you get feedback, not that you get the most amount of users who maybe kind of eventually stop using the product or don't even give you a feedback. 

Brett: When you started to give it to people before you had a wait list, was it like a third of people it connected with? Half? One out of 10? Because you're getting, I think you're hitting on a very simple but important idea, which is, you know, the classic thing of you're looking for, if you're trying to build the future, you're looking for people that get the future and want the future that you're building, not trying to convince everyone on planet Earth that you're future is correct.

Maybe in 20 years that's the case, but there's also this tension of like, if you went to thousand people and only one of them wanted your future, à la work in your product daily, or whatever heuristic you want to use, that's probably also not the correct thing. Or one in 10,000. So was it just organically in the 10 or 15 people, it's like there were three or five, there was just enough that you just didn't think about it?

Karri: Yeah, I think like what, what you're hitting there is that basically the boiling the ocean problems. Like yeah, as a startup you shouldn't try to like, boil the ocean. You, you should start with a pot of water and try to like boil that first. and then like, just like always try to like increase the pot size.

But, I don't remember the exact numbers. I would say like on the wait list, I remember that eventually we had about like 10,000 emails on it. I would say about like 10% of them converted during that year. but I think like on a weekly basis. So what we did was that each, so we did this, wait list and this survey, and it asked some questions about like why they wanna use this also, like what kind of tools they use currently and and kind of like qualifying questions. So what we did is like, I, just went on the list and like picked like maybe like five or 10 names from that list, and then I emailed them like, Hey, here's your invite to Linear and like, try it out. I think like out of those, I think almost probably like 90% of those people actually at least signed up.

Maybe I would say like, like half or even 30%, like I think probably became users from that like initial group. Like, because I would pick the, the users based on their, how interested they were. Like, so there was open fields, like why do you wanna use it and what your current problems. So reading that answer I could get like, who is the most motivated to try this out?

And then I would pick those most motivated people. we always invited like different amounts of people, I would say like. In the very first weeks, I think the users active user account increased by 10 each week, basically. Um, and, and we tracked like retention and we try to keep tabs of these people.

It's like, why are they leaving or why they're staying? Like, what would they need more? So it was like very much like focused on very, maybe like small group of people. And then eventually, I think like in the first maybe like six months or something, we, we already picked all the like, highly motivated people who the, the product was fit currently.

And so, so some of the like long tail of that wait list was just that we weren't a fit yet. Like we weren't able to like, serve their scale. Maybe they weren't that motivated, but we got into a scale, like in the first year we did this like a private beta with the wait list. when we launched, we had over, I think over a thousand.

Thousand like daily actives so that there was at least some, like a good group of people using it.

Brett: At what point did you decide okay, we can go launch with a wait list and start to get people, like what was the indication to do that and how much of it was just intuition and did you think about just publicly launching it, or did it just always make sense? Let's create a wait list.

Let's try to find the right people that have the right set of problems to be our first thousand users, that type of thing?

Karri: I don't remember exactly where the wait list came from, but I think it was, the thinking was that, we felt that the product, product like this, and it, eventually, it's very expensive. Like I said, like it there's a lot of features that you might need in, in a certain scale when you use the product, and so we knew that it would never be like a fit to everyone, or most people, right out of the gate.

And so we didn't wanna launch it so that we get a lot of people checking it out and then leaving. And it, it's like, it goes back to what I said earlier about the focus. Like I, I just wanted, like, there's very, like, we have the most motivated users and we can focus on them as much as possible and they can help us, like with the feedback and, and building this thing.

but we are also like, even though like we like quality and, and doing things well, we are also, we are also not type of people that wanna run like a stealth company forever. So I think we pretty quickly saw that. I think we can do this wait list for a while, but I think at least like maybe in a year we should just launch this.

And it doesn't, it doesn't help us that much in it after that. I think there was some like signs definitely that we were supporting. Like retention I think is, to me at least what I look at the most, like are the peoples there. Do the peoples stay. ' cause like if they don't, if no one stays or majority of people don't stay, you have like a problem and like probably you shouldn't launch it 'cause you are just gonna lose those people as well.

obviously there could be something else going on that could be like maybe the people you invited weren't the right kind of people, but, or something else. But I think retention is, to me the number one thing. there's also like wait list has a decay that it's people's just interest doesn't last forever.

So I think I would say like the, the realistic timeframe is probably months or maybe at max six months. I, I think like what we started seeing after a year, people weren't that like interested when we invited them. So, so I think like you have a kind of time, like a decade there that people just don't hold the interest for that long to wait for something.

but we kind of like saw the wait list as a good way to like, keep the cohorts like focused. So we would invite like 10 people. See what happens. Like do they start using it? What kind of feedback they have? Then fix those things that they tell us. Then you might the new cohort, like, is this cohort better? Like now they complain about different things, so let's fix those things and like build those things.

So it gave us a little bit more like a, like a focus is like each week we made a new version basically of the product and then we could get feedback on that version with the new users again. So rather than having this like one moment in time and in the very beginning you get like a thousand users checking it out, but maybe like lot, there's a lot of problems, that they notice now all of those people are kind of have this impression that your tool kind of sucks or it doesn't like work that well.

So we wanted to kind of like control that better, that we can invite the right type of users and then see, see, um, what kind of feedback they have and try then try to fix that.

Brett: Did you think about in those early days of product building, are we mainly trying to make our happy users happier or trying to get the next marginal user that it's not quite right to be happy?

Karri: I would say like both. So yeah, like I think early days I would call them like enablers and blockers, like the, the different feature sets. And I think it was definitely like a lot of focus on the, on the former that let's try to make the, the users we have extremely happy and build the things that they, they seem to need and like, have good reasons to need.

but then every now and then we would like collect all the blockers. Like what we heard also from people is like, why can't they use it? And then like, especially. Before we launched, like one of the limitations we had really in the system was that we built the whole sign up and login around Google off.

So you, you couldn't use linear if you didn't use the Google, workspace or whatever, G Suite, whatever's called this is. so that was like a limiting factor. We knew that like, if we're gonna launch it, not everyone has that. So we need to build like a basic signup, like a email login. We just didn't never get to it because we didn't think like it was important to try to get those users because we already, there was enough users that had the stack that we supported.

So I think it's more like the way I think about, it's like, in the early days of the startup just focus on like, finding that group of people who are really motivated and kind of like can see the future and build more stuff for them and get, them extremely happy.

But every now, and then, like, look at the list, it's like what are the blockers we're collecting from other people? And could we solve one of those things that then would like open up as in like a new, like a larger user group that then we could get in and they could be happy to. So that's kind of like balancing that, that like, I don't think you should optimize too much of the either side, but you just have to like try to do both.

Brett: How did you think about how opinionated you wanted to be versus flexible?

Karri: My like design philosophy has always been that you should design something for someone and it's really hard to design something really good for everyone or design everything for everyone. It's just like, it's not even possible I think.

Things about linear. We had from the beginnings, like the goal was to be the best in class tool for this particular purpose. So the purpose of building software in software companies and, and managing that work. So that was the goal. Like, and I think, like to me, trying to be the best in class means that it is actually the best tool and it is the highest quality tool.

But also like, in order you to be actually really good and the workflows and how the app application operates or the, the platform operates in order to be really good or work well for the user, you have to be opinionated. And like, I, think it's more like the Apple way. it's Like they think like, this is the experience you should have.

Like this is the experience you have with the iPhone and or Mac or something. And that's the, that's the experience you get. Like you cannot change all the things that they do. You can change some things, but you cannot change all the things. Like if you want that, if you wanna change all the things like don't use it.

But I think, like to me it's always been that I don't believe that you can build the optimal tool for anything if it's very flexible and endlessly customizable. So from the beginning, like we had this thinking of like, we wanna be opinionated there should be a good way of doing this. We should provide certain standards and, like defaults to people how to operate, which is also important in our domain.

I think that, I think like the more of the companies grow and the organizations grow, the more structure and standardization they need, even if they don't always want it. But I think eventually they need it. And I, think what we saw and heard actually from customers that what happens in other tools is that it becomes very chaotic when one team uses the tool this way and then the other team uses this very different ways like There's not a standard, like what is a project like? It, it's like sometimes it's like this epic and then maybe it's like has some sub epics or something. And sometimes it's just like a list of things. And having this like guard rails or this kind kind of opinions or some kind of defaults, it is actually also value for the organization.

And what it does also for the individual is that they don't have to think about it. I remember like being in a lot of meetings at the Airbnb basically every year with whatever team I was on, was that hey, how do we configure out Jira board? Like how do we do, it's like what are the states, like what are these things?

Like, should we do it this way or that way? And I realized like no one really care. Like I don't like, that wasn't what we wanted to do. Like we just wanted to do the actual work. Not like, think about like how the work is organized. So the idea with linear is like, it's not like.

DIY system like you, you just build it for yourself. And I don't think that's what companies or teams should be doing. It's like a more like a purpose built application around this your teams to build software. And we have the workflows and features that support that.

And yes, it's like maybe not as flexible or something else, but we don't think that the flexibility I is that good in, in some of these situations.

Brett: when you started the company and today is it. That at some point in the future, everyone that's building software is using linear or you could care less. You have a point of view on what the product is and how it should work, and for whoever that's good for that's great?

Karri: I mean I, my hope would be that like everyone would use it, like at least every software company would use it. And I think like every company, company today out there, almost like has some kind of software aspects to them. So I do think it's, it's almost for every software company one day, I think I'm also like, realistic that I, do think like it's probably not gonna be a fit for everyone, but I, I do wanna see that, that list.

Uh, I would say like the best companies use it, the next generation of companies, the kind of like leaders of the domains or the markets should be using it. So I would like to see it that way. Like, I would be happy about that, but like if there are some more of the legacy companies or some like less that don't, basically don't take software seriously, then like, yeah, maybe that's, that's not the customers we need.

Brett: How does sort of this philosophy that you're articulating kind of foot with the idea that I think if you look at most business software companies that are doing more than $500 million in revenue or more than a billion dollars in revenue, and you look at their products, they're not beautiful and elegant and easy to use.

then if you start to ask yourself, why is that? Well, there's certainly sort of a taste component, but I think one of the reasons is that their goal is for everyone to use the thing for everything, right? And so the goal of a company not saying this is the goal of your company or all companies is to basically grow forever, um, what that ultimately means is that you're always trying to expand TAM.

Like one of the misunderstood things about Salesforce, which is a really good example of something that is maybe the opposite of what Linear is in terms of product quality and craft. Is that it is the way it is because you can use it for anything. They use it in hospitals, they use it in retail set.

Right. And this act of ultimately allowing something to be flexible and powerful and customizable is that tension with simplicity and elegance. And you think about that at all? Or like, what's your reaction to sort of that line of thinking?

Karri: Yeah, I would, I would say like, first of all, like I think like it's, part of the quality is also that something that you just have to, sometimes I think the company don't even try, and I think that's like You might be able to build like a nice product that is customizable and is very high quality.

It's like, it's not like the quality, like preventing your market like. Or reducing your market TAM but, but to your point about focusing on a certain kind of customers and that customers that maybe align with our vision or the thinking. yeah, it's true that like, maybe, maybe the TAM is not as large as the, as the more of the general purpose tools, but I think like the TAM is like large enough for a company to like us grow.

And then I think what you can do then is like, if you don't wanna grow from a, like to more customers, you can potentially sell more to the existing customers so you can like, go deeper with the current customers. So I think that's like what we've been doing. And basically we started with the issue tracking 'cause we knew, that that's the core need of every software company.

Basically you need to track bugs. So, the engineers also have to do other work, not just like fixing bugs. So it's always morphs into project management as well. But what been doing, especially going downstream of the stack, which is like, well before you actually build anything, you have to actually plan it.

Like you need to like have some kind of ideas which you're gonna plan, like whatcha gonna build. So you need to have some kind of projects, briefs and like you roadmap. So we built that and then like we recently also launched this customer requests, which is basically we think that it could be for us and, and for others, like, it's very powerful to, to capture the feedback from the customers and then like have it in the same system where you actually built the things.

Because when you, bring the context of like, why are we doing this? Like what is the actual problem? Like it could be a small thing, like something we to fix. Or it can be a bigger thing where, we get customers saying they have this kind of like a planning problem and, and then we just capture things around it. And then once we think this, we should prioritize it. We can kind of like take all that feedback and then morph it into to a project. Then like, I think that why we are building this in the same system is that like, ironically, I think like these processes are not linear even though people might wanna think that way.

And that's kind of like why the company is also called Linear. It's like a little bit like, uh, aspirational, like people like linear kind of outcomes or, or processes. but like, what happens is that, is that you start building something, you realize your plan was wrong, like you learned something else.

You have to go back to like update the plans and then maybe for you to update the plans, you actually have to know like, where did this come from? Like, why are we even building this? Like what did the customers say? And go back to that. Like go talk back to those customers who said it. And then you can get, back to the planning, like, how do we like fix this?

And then you can go into the building. I think like there's opportunity. We see that the Linear, what we're trying to do is helping companies to build products and it, doesn't have to be limited to the, the issue tracking or project management. We can do other things too.

Brett: So when you think about that first 18 months and you started to really get into strong product, market fit, what are the the things that you figured out or did correctly that are generalizable? So I'm sure there's lots of things that you did that if other people knew, it's like not gonna help them with their companies, but are there, you obviously hit on a bunch of these little story points of what you ended up doing, but if you kind of zoom out a little bit, what are the most generalizable, important things that you did and got right that might be useful to other people that are maybe going and building a new product or a new tool or a new company?

Karri: Yeah, I would say like, it's, probably the first thing, like the, like if you start a company then like you probably should have some kind of intuition or some kind of point of view. Like what is, what is wrong out there? Like what is the. What is something better you're gonna do or what is the problem?

And probably like much easier if you have that kind of starting point. I think two, it's like we did that research before we actually started, partly because of practical reasons. Like we didn't, we didn't have time and like we didn't wanna quit our jobs at the moment.

But I think part of it's like sometimes it's good to like create the space of like, let's not build anything right now. Too much. Like, let's not commit into starting this company and going really fast. But let's just take some amount of time to talk to people and like take it like easy a little bit.

Like don't go like hundred percent right on the problem, but more like, oh, there's this problem. Let's try to like shape it a little bit. Let's try to like, Form our thinking around this. So when you actually start building it, or you go out there to talk to investors or something, like, you have some kind of point of view formed and it's not just like you, you're kind of coming up with it as you go.

And I think at least, um, probably depends on the personalities, but I did, find it useful to have that, like some amount of time that you, you reserve in the beginning to just do, let's just like see what the customers say or like potential customers could, could want. I think the third thing is the focus I mentioned that like having maybe from those conversations, maybe from that thinking that you do, you would really kind of like find that clarity of like who could be like a good initial customer that you wanna focus on and like try to put all your efforts into that. I think that. Probably like for a startups though, always the hardest thing is like you don't have a lot of time and you don't have a lot of resources and you don't have a lot of anything.

So the more you can like focus your efforts into one direction and one type of area or something specific, the better outcome you probably will have. I think like what I see often startups happening is like there's a lot of like tweaking like people think and be tweaking that direction, which is I think useful or like often is, necessary.

But I, I think sometimes maybe there's a good time to like pause. It's like, what are we even doing here? It's like, what are we trying to do? And try to find that like clarity. I think like you should also think about the dynamics of the market and like what kind of advantage you can have. So something like, we noticed that brands can be like very impactful, especially if you try to be the best at something. Then I think the part of like being best at something is that people also have to believe that you're the best at something. Like it doesn't, not always enough that objectively, in some measures, you might be the best, but if you don't, people don't believe it, then it's like kind of pointless.

so I, I saw some companies like Slack for example. I feel like they always had like a good, like a brand from the beginning and it, it's kind of engaged people and made, it much more stronger that eventually they became this like default tool for certain type of companies or basically for everyone.

Like when it came to chatting or, or company, communications. so I would like the, brand is not, I think often people misunderstood the brand, brand thinking, branding is like the logo and the 

Brett: I. wanted you to talk about What is brand?

Karri: The brand to me is, is a little bit more about the what do you stand for? Like what is your take or what is your, almost like the manifesto or what is your worldview and what do you hold dear?

What do you care about? And then you just try to like operate based on those like principles or those values or that thinking and then always try to like, talk about it or try to like put your work in that context. So, why I think it's like important is like that you, you from the beginning have very, staple narrative.

Like something that people can easily understand, oh, this company's doing this because of these reasons. even if they can article it exactly the same way you can, but you feel like finding like the few things, that resonate, then you just keep like hitting those same, same things.

what we found that like in this market, the brands are kind of non-existent or they're bad, or they're negative. So if you think about project management tools, there's anything, and no one is like that exciting. Like it's even hard to say like, what do this company stand for? Like what are, what are they about?

So we wanted to make clear, it's like we are about quality, we're about this craft, and like we're about the speed. And like, there's a few of these things that we always like remind people or we talk about it often in different ways. And that's kinda like what is building a brand is about, is that you, find some kind of message and you basically like keep repeating it then until like everyone has some kind of idea of it.

so what I was kind of going with it was that you should look at the market, like what is currently underserved there. Like what is, is there like opportunity to do something differently? So I think like for startups, often one of the problems is like, Have someone to pay attention to you and be excited about you.

So if you are like everyone else, then no one is probably, or you are worst version of, or a simpler version of something. It's, it's probably not that interesting. So you have to find some kind of angle that maybe you're just weird, maybe you are doing things look differently and like that creates that attention, and interest that people have.

so depending on your market, that might be different. Like if all the players are very weird, then maybe you should be like very non weird and like if the all the players are, kind of rigid or, or something, maybe you should be very freeform or flexible or something. And so, so I think like you, I find that startups sometimes or founders make the mistake of trying to emulate the other companies and not play into their own strengths or their own, like where they're coming from.

The context they're in. So you shouldn't probably emulate, you should almost do the opposite what all the other players in your domain are doing. And maybe you can take inspiration from some other companies in other domains and do something like similar there. It's like, are you the apple of, of this industry or are you the Amazon of this industry or are you the, I don't know, some other company that has some like a clear culture that like, yeah.

And some people use that, like they wanna be a Costco of this. and it's more just like, which cultural track you choose, kind of like what is your, like if you play RPGs, then it's like almost like which type of character you pick. and that's like the company that you're,

like building and the brand you're building.

Brett: What do you think the impact of being Finnish is on the company ?

Karri: I like to say to the candidates that we have all this experience working in the Silicon Valley companies and, and, uh, we do a lot of stuff like they do, and that, that's kind of like the model we follow, but there's also stuff that we do differently and, that's maybe like the, some of the finish or European roots.

And I think there is, I think I would say that from, from US or or Silicon Valley. I think that, I feel like there's like this like obsession on scale and speed. Those are always like the two things that everyone cares about or talks about, and I think. for us, it's more like the Finnish-ness maybe comes in that being like a little more measured on those aspects that maybe speed is not always the most important thing and maybe scale is not always the most important thing.

Maybe especially like when it comes to team, like we don't actually think like it's, it's a good thing to have like a massive team or scale the team very fast. We think it's actually like a bad thing. Like, and, and like maybe a lot of people just don't agree with that sentiment, but we think it's, think it that way.

so I think there's that little bit of, uh, I don't know. I feel like Finnish culture is a little more calmer. there's like a little less of the extremes. Uh, it's a little more balanced in a way. So I think that's probably like what we're trying to do. And actually I think it's works well for our domain because in, in some ways we are like a critical component of the customer's operations and I don't think we should be playing fast and lose there. I think you lose your reputation very quickly if you, if you start breaking people's stuff, you lose their data or like you do something, something bad.

I think again, like maybe it depends a little bit. Domains like what, like today, like ai, I think it's that speed is probably important there because the, the industry is moving fast, but our industry, it's like, it's pretty stagnant in some ways. So what we are trying to like optimize for is the, like, how do we remain and, and can be the best player and, and the highest quality player and try to win with that.

instead of like, try to be the, the fastest or, or like, something else.

Brett: thing I was curious on this exact line to, to hear your thinking, just sort of as you said, there's a lot of things that you've chosen to do differently, whether it be the way that you've capitalized the company, how small the company is, this sort of craft orientation, you know, we could talk about some of the other things. And then there's other things where I'm sure you said we're, we're actually not gonna go to first principles. Generally companies are run this way. Generally companies have a website that you go to that tells you about the product, you know, whatever it might be. do you think much about like, where do you want to invent or where do you want find, go back to first principles versus like, when are you willing to adopt best practices as a company?

Karri: I think the general advice on this that you should be, you probably should be not innovating things that are not your core and or meaningful to your core, whatever you're doing. And so the things like might be HR practices or some, some of these other things, but, the way I think about it more as, as more like from the principles that what is your principle?

So I think for us it it's, the quality is, is one of the number one principles. So then everything kind of like follows from that. It's like, why to be profitable? Well, partly because we can, but also like we can get this stability or, freedom to do things in a high quality way. I think like what, what often happens to startups or any companies is like the quality goes down because they get pressured on some, some something else.

They pressured on the we need to ship this or we need to get, get these metrics up and. And then the quality goes down because they're making that trade off. So, so in some ways that being profitable, for example, serves that purpose of, we think we can win this market being quality first.

And, but like we have to like, create the environment. We can actually do it. It's also goes direct recruiting, like how do we do it the type of people we are trying to find. It also goes into the, how we structure the organization. So in some ways, like it does affect a lot of things, but the specifics of like, well, how do we decide the compounds or how do we, do some like contracts or some, some operations.

I think like that's not like good finances or legal stuff. Like I, I always been like avoiding trying to innovate, innovate on the legal side or when you do fundraising or something coming up with like crazy setups. Um, but more like, okay, like this is like. Favorable for the company or for, for the, for us.

and that like, it's, it's quite close to the standard, what you see in, in the market. So try to be not to innovate on those things that can potentially cause problems down the line. but I think like I, I more do that, division between the, like what is, what is actually important for us to do differently and what's maybe not.

but even like recently I've been thinking a lot about the go to market and I think that domain is very, this best practices and playbook driven, which I actually think that you also could have an advantage there to do things differently. And like one of the things we not surprisingly try to do is we try to provide like a quality experience even in the sales process.

And what quality experiences is The salesperson is knowledgeable about the product and can help the customers. It's not that hard or it's not that complicated, but a lot of companies don't do that. They, they don't think it's important. They just think that the rep needs to close the sale and nothing else matters.

But we think it does matter, especially in this market. And, and we think it matters because of retention purposes also, like it sets the tone for the customer and like how they feel about the whole experience. So we think it's important and we, we try to do it a little bit differently. And I think there would be other, other areas we're trying to figure out like what we could do differently.

Brett: Have you had a point of view on the way that you were doing something or running the company that you changed your mind on? Or does that often happen as you sort of grow and scale? Like there, there's often this, this tension of like, what got us here might not get us there. And I think in, in startups, the thing that's unique is that you're growing, right, and companies grow at different rates.

but I think it's easy to have a set of things that you believed in when you were seven people, and maybe it's 70 people, there, there are things that you should change because the company worked because of, or in spite of those things that a certain period of time. And then there's obviously the things that, that I think some of the things you're getting at, which are, have to be sewn into the fabric of the company forever. And because you've chosen to build the company in a very specific way, oftentimes deviating from what Silicon Valley companies would do. I wondered, as you've grown the company and you're call it six years in, are there things that you were doing in a different way that you said, oh, we're just gonna do it this way, or are most of the things pretty well solidified? 

Karri: I would say that we are, we have this like principles when, but we are also pragmatic that we don't get overly dogmatic on that this is the only way you can do things and this is this, we, we can't think about anything else. So I think we are always open to thinking about things. is this still working?

And especially, yeah, often what happens is something works now, but or like worked in a smaller scale, but even like a slightly bigger scale. We do need to change something. But I wouldn't say like there is that many things that like, drastically has changed. I think there's things, for example, the sales process initially where like the investors were saying that, Hey, you probably need some, like, sales people.

And we said no. And it's not like who wants to talk to salespeople? But then at some point you start getting these customers that do wanna talk to salespeople and then like, oh, like there's actually a reason for this to exist. And then as you go more up market, you realize, oh, this, this actually gets more complicated.

Companies can't just go and buy something. They actually have to like talk about it a lot before they do it. So that's like where, I wasn't like dramatically against sale. I just didn't see the need. And then once I see, saw the need, I could say like, okay, like we can do it, but we should do it this way.

Like we should, keep, keep the quality high and like try to like, make sure that the experience is secured for the customers. I think there's some areas like we talked about like being ated before, and I think there is something, I, I talked a lot of company leaders in larger companies and try to understand their planning processes and, and found out that everyone does it differently and no one is quite happy with it, but they also have a certain way of doing it.

And what, it made me realize that I think the higher levels we go try to like support the, the processes or the, or the different things the companies are doing. We actually might have to have more flexibility there because we are not in a position to tell, go tell the, the CEOs or the boards of the, these companies to like, Hey, you should organize your company differently or you should set up this, your goals a little bit differently.

we can influence them in some ways, but I don't think we're in a position to tell people what to do on that front. So again, I'm kind of more pragmatic on it that I do think like we could still be more opinionated on the lower levels where there's more of this volume and need for structure because there's just more people and more things happening and the more flexibility you introduce, it multiplies a lot more.

But once you get to the very highest level, you might not have that many things in there and you might not have that many people there that even look at those things. So I think the flexibility can be greater, higher you go into the stack and we can then make the app fit better for the company as a whole or for the leadership.

But then the day to day can be much more opinionated or structured so that, majority of people don't have to think about this stuff and they could still like use the product and don't have to design their own workflows.

Brett: I wanted to wrap up by having you talk a little bit about sort of the role of a founder and CEO who came up through design, and maybe it felt like 10 years ago there was this movement towards more founders and CEOs that came up through design. Obviously you have someone like Brian Chesky who's been immensely successful, but it has tended to under index when you look at people building great companies like Linear.

Um, I think it's mainly more product and or mostly dominated by engineering oriented founders, as opposed to design oriented founders. And do you have any reflections or maybe thoughts on that?

Karri: Yeah, I've definitely thought about it and talked about it with people and I wouldn't say like I have the clear answer to it. I actually. Asked this question on X like some weeks ago, and I got a lot of different comments on it, but I couldn't say that there is a very specific reason for it. The couple of observations I've done is like, one is that I think engineers might often have this mindset or way of doing things, which is that they're building something and then they start thinking like, oh, maybe I could build this thing differently.

Or when they're working on some kind of project or like building some kind of feature, they might start thinking like, oh, it would be really great if we had this new infrastructure or this new system or something that is, it's kind of like irrelevant to the problem they're actually solving, but they have this like additional side thoughts and then they might go home and then like actually build it and then they realize like, oh, actually this is like a pretty good idea and this actually works.

But what happened now is that you actually, they already built it so that they have this like functional prototype that someone can use and then maybe they can show it to their friends and they. The friends are interested in it, then they maybe even wanna use it. So there's a little more like clear, like quicker bath to some kind of validation, I would say versus like designers, you, you might have this idea, something could be better, but so you design it, but you still just have designs so you don't actually have the product that someone can use or you can even yourself can use.

you are a little bit further getting to the front of the customer. And so it doesn't happen accidentally as much. Maybe there's also, I find like in my career, working in design, that for some reason designers can be quite focused on what is front of them, not, not thinking beyond that or is going around them.

So they're just focused on like making their designs and then they listen to the feedback and they improve it. But for me, my interest has always been, whenever I join some company, I always, I'm interested to understand like, how does the business work? Like why does this company exist? Like what are they doing? Who are they selling?

What people are buying, why are they buying it? What is happening in the market? Like, why is this company successful? I just want to understand the context I'm operating in. So when I'm actually working on the designs. And then maybe I, I might even wanna understand the context of the company itself. Like we have this kind of personalities here.

They have this kind of agendas. Generally they, they have this kind of role, they're pushing this kind of things. So I'm trying to understand the external and internal context that I'm operating in. actually then like when I'm designing something, I can try to like make it more aligned with that context of, I can speak to it like, why is this a good idea for the business or why this is a good idea for some, some specific person or role or something. So I think like what happened to me then is like, when you start thinking that way is you start seeing that there's actually opportunities to do different things differently.

Or there's, there's actually, you could solve problems that people have. And like what I noticed in working in this companies was that the processes weren't Optimal. Like could see where the quality fell down and where the, the process fell down because there wasn't, it wasn't like structured or there wasn't some something in place or it was too freeform or something.

So I could start thinking about this problem, so maybe I could solve this. Like maybe I could think about the incentives of these people have, like in this company, like why? I think like why quality doesn't happen in most companies. It's like, it's just because it's not incentivized. No one ever says you should do it.

It's almost that no, we, we just want you to complete this task. We don't actually care how do you complete it too much. We just wanna complete it now. so you incentivize the, the speed, but you don't in incentivize the quality. so I think that there's maybe that a lot of designers are too focused on their like a little bit too narrow, like looking at things or narrow minded and not maybe interested enough like what happens, like around them or like around there, or they out there more just looking at the design type of things.

But yeah, I, I wish there would be more design founders.

Brett: Are there any interventions that you think would, you know, if you wanted to 10 x the successful founders who came up through design? Or a designer that's listening to this conversation, and they might wanna start a company, they should consider doing this, this, or this?

Karri: I would say just like anyone individual listening to this or, thinking about this, that like, yeah, you shouldn't think your job is a designer. Maybe like it, it is your job, but like companies don't necessarily care like who, what your job title is.

They take care of what you do. So I think beneficial, even if you don't become a founder to think about like the broader context of what is happening. and so it might be just like paying more attention to companies. Like what is, what is happening? Like why are they making these decisions? And, thinking about like, are there ways that these, things could be better.

Like sometimes I would actually propose like changes in the, in the ways the projects were run or the processes were run. Because I just, I saw that there was problem and no one was addressing it. It wasn't really my job to do it I wasn't there to do that. I was there to design, but I would still like propose those changes and they could like, take it or leave it.

I don't have to force it on anyone, so I could just like point it out. So I think it's thinking that your place in this world that it's, it's something greater than just what your job title is and you can, you can pay attention to these things. I think there's probably what I said before about that as a designer, you are not, usually, some people are, but often you are not able to like build a thing you, you design.

So luckily you don't have to, like I, have two technical co-founders and they can do that. And so I have to just bring in something to the table and they can bring, bring their own skillset to the table. So I think it's always good to look for people that you like working with and who are very good at what they do and then try to see if you can start thinking about problems with them and try to see something that you could be interested working or both you would be interested working with.

And, think it's like very. Each individual probably has different reasons for this, and I think something I've been talking with some people, if, if we should make more of these examples and talk about this more and maybe it'll inspire more people. I think sometimes examples are just like a good thing and, and can inspire people more.

So I think that's definitely like one thing I can try to do or that other people can try and do as well.

Brett: So just to wrap up, I wanted to ask you what we ask everyone, which is in this case, in the topic of company building and. You Know, driving a company into product market fit, is there somebody who's had a real outsized impact on the way that you think about any of these things, where there's like a lot of residual value in the way that you think about building companies and products? and like, what's that person and the thing that they've imparted on you that's been so useful?

Karri: I would say the YC and, and probably like Paul Graham, where I think a lot of this stuff came from has been like probably the most influential thing. I still have the poster, like I think behind me, can't really see it, but it's just like, make, make something people want. And I think it's as simple as wise and there's a lot of other things.

Like I think that what YC does well is simplifying the startup problem, that a lot of this stuff doesn't really matter. You can read all kinds of books and like all kinds of, I don't know, look at all kinds of podcasts and like look at, look all kinds of materials. I think it's actually good to like read that stuff, but in the end, like what really matters in your company is like, do you have someone using the product?

Do you have customers for it? Are they using it? Are they paying for it? Like, did you actually make something that people want? then basically focusing all your efforts on that. And until you have that and until you have some kind of traction or scale, you don't have to think about anything else.

That's the only thing you can think about. so I think that, for me, has been the the the most impactful.

Brett: Thanks for spending so much time in this conversation, I thought it was awesome. I really appreciate it.

Karri: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me as well. It was fun, to chat about these things.