Karri Saarinen: evaluation

Transcript context

…To close out our conversation, just a couple more broad questions. You have a pretty unique culture at Linear, and I know one fun thing that you do is you have this baking competition. Can you talk about that and what it is you do there? Yeah. Since we are a fully remote and distributed company, so we have people in Europe and US, a lot of group gatherings are challenging. Remote group sessions are challenging, because the time zones are so different, so some of the basic things, like happy hours, don't really work that well. Also, Zoom happy hours is probably not that fun anyway. I think a lot of people in the company watch The Great British Baking Show, so we decided, "Maybe we do something like that," where basically, we would just pick a recipe. Firstly, it was baking, now we expanded to cooking recipes, too. We just pick a recipe that is somewhat reasonable to do in a few hours, in a couple of hours, and it doesn't require tons of equipment or skill, or something. Then we just tell people, "Go buy the ingredients, use the company card," everyone has a company card, "And then hop on Zoom on this day." For me, since I'm in California, it's like 8:00 AM, so we started the baking or cooking then. We've made things like roll cake and lemon meringue pie, and we made some [Portuguese 01:26:35], which is Portuguese pastry. Then we just hop on the Zoom, everyone's doing their thing, following the recipe, and then sometimes people have questions like, "Hey," I don't know, "I'm stuck with this," or, "My dough looks weird, does your dough look like this?" People can help each other and then also chitchat about whatever random things at the same time. Then we do the thing and then everyone takes pictures and posts on the Slack channel, it's what they achieved. I think we have friendly competitions like who did it best, so people sometimes put a lot of effort into the decorations and visuals. In a way, it's, again, a craft thing that we do. I think baking and cooking and these kinds of things are also a craft, so we liked it that way. Yeah, we've been basically doing it quarterly since the beginning of the company. Yeah, the latest thing, we were a little bit... I think didn't have that much time, because we decided to do an easier thing, which is a summer drink recipe, so I think people made matcha drinks and some coconut drinks or white iced tea, or something. Yeah, that was interesting to do. Have you ever won one of these competitions yourself?…

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