Karri Saarinen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Maybe to start, set a little context, can you just explain what is Linear? What does Linear do? Then, share maybe a few stats of just the scale of Linear at this point. Linear is the project and issue tracking system that software companies and technical teams love to use. We help software companies to build software. We started 2019. Today some of the top growth companies like Block, Vercel, Ramp, Retool, Mercury, and Softstack are building with Linear. We also additionally have lots of other companies, thousands of other companies using Linear. These companies can be a very early stage team like some companies just graduated from YC or a public company. Just briefly, why we created Linear is that, like you said, I worked with you at Airbnb and before that I worked at Coinbase. Before that, I had my own startup. All of us founders, there's three of us, we had a similar path where we worked in multiple different companies in different stages. What we saw often is that the tools available for managing software projects weren't really cutting it. I think a lot of them felt very clunky or complex or just like they had this legacy way of thinking about software development. We just felt like we should do something about it. With Linear, we set out to build this most frictionless and streamlined system for modern software development. I'm also happy to share that we've been profitable the last two years. We also have this thing where we actually have this net negative lifetime burn rate, which means that we just have more cash in the bank today than we have raised. I think with a lot of startups usually the normal way is that you raise money and then you need to spend it to build it. I think since we were able to build a business pretty early on, we've been able to be in this position that actually we haven't spent any money on building the business. That is insane. I didn't even know that. For all those reasons, a lot of founders and a lot of product leaders look up to the way Linear builds product and the way you think about product. To frame this conversation, there's three areas I want to dive into. One is just how you approach building product. Two is how you go about building the team and the business in general and then three is just how you grow Linear. To start, I want to talk about craft. Clearly, one of the biggest reasons that people look up to Linear and use Linear is the quality of the user experience and the product. I know your team puts a lot of emphasis on craft and user experience. I imagine that also comes at the cost of some trade-offs like it takes probably longer to get stuff out the door. You're probably losing sales because people are waiting for a feature and you're not ready to launch it yet. You want to make it better. What have you learned about creating space for craft and building product that is really, really great?…

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