Karri Saarinen on Linear’s Product Quality, Growth and Fundraising

Harry Stebbings welcomes Linear co-founder and CEO Karri Saarinen, whom he already knows through an investment in the company. Saarinen begins with a personal frustration: he misses the variety and freshness of Finnish potatoes in California and has started growing his own. He connects the impulse to improve an unsatisfying experience with the origin of Linear.

Before Linear, Saarinen joined Coinbase when it had about 12 people and left when it had fewer than 100. He learned how much a small team can build: he recalls an early version of Coinbase Exchange being built by one person over roughly six months. The transaction-volume examples he offers are recollections, not audited measures.

At Airbnb, he observed Brian Chesky’s focus on how the product and company feel to users. Saarinen found it powerful that a company could prioritize the experience itself. Asked which former boss he would back as an angel investor, he reluctantly chooses Chesky for his persistence and energy, while calling the two leaders different and suited to their companies.

On “founder mode,” Saarinen agrees it can be used to justify bad behavior and finds the essay’s meaning ambiguous. His interpretation is not that founders should do everything themselves: they should hire leaders, while remaining involved in appropriate work instead of sitting on the sidelines.

He says he spent too much time on the bench in go-to-market and marketing, a field outside his design background. More recently he has held weekly discussions with the leadership team to learn sales and enterprise distribution. He sees enterprise go-to-market as requiring more nuance than at the companies where he previously worked.

Saarinen distinguishes “quality growth” from growth driven by heavy spending. Linear sought growth from customers choosing the product, he says, spending almost nothing on marketing and having no sales team for the first three years. His account reflects his company’s strategy and is not evidence that the same path works in every market.

Stebbings asks whether quality growth is a luxury when investors compare a company growing twice as fast with rivals growing four to six times. Saarinen agrees fast growth helps fundraising, but says the alternative is to build a business that does not depend on another round. Profitability creates that option; he acknowledges that the right pace depends on market dynamics.

He believes Linear’s market was dominated by a longstanding incumbent and did not require winning an unusually fast race. His priority was building the best product, because excessive speed and growth spending can sacrifice quality. That is his assessment of Linear’s market, not a general argument against rapid growth.

Asked whether startups must choose between a monetizable feature and a long-term platform, Saarinen says they can start with a focused use case and expand with the first customers. Stebbings agrees that broadening the target customer too early can produce a product nobody loves. Both favor serving a small group exceptionally well before broadening the offering.

Stebbings asks why Linear did not spend more on acquisition if retention was strong and the company was profitable in year two. Saarinen says small, talented teams are central to the strategy: hiring increases cost, management work and the risk of diluting culture. Revenue grew faster than the company could hire, he says, while team size roughly doubled each year.

Linear’s first customers were early-stage startups that discovered tools through peers rather than advertisements, Saarinen says. By the Series B, he recalls spending about $30,000 on advertising, through two podcast sponsorships, including Stebbings’s show. Linear later increased advertising as its product began serving larger organizations.

Enterprise expansion requires product, marketing and sales to improve together, he argues. A sales team cannot compensate for a product that fails at enterprise scale, and customers may not engage if they have never heard of the company. Early enterprise customers helped Linear find where the product broke and gave the team time to improve it.

Why raise a Series B while profitable? Saarinen says he is still thinking about how much capital Linear needs. A new financing can update the company’s valuation for employee equity and signal maturity to candidates and customers, although other methods of marking value exist. It also provides a cushion against an uncertain market.

A recognized investor such as Sequoia may signal ambition and provide candidates some reassurance, he says, but is not usually the main reason someone joins. Linear raised about $30 million in its Series B. Saarinen wanted flexibility before a potential downturn, rather than having to raise only after revenue fell or profitability disappeared.

He tries to minimize dilution, preferring around 10% or less to 20% where possible. Because Sequoia already owned shares from the seed round, he says Linear could negotiate lower dilution in the Series A. He does not seek the highest possible valuation: an excessive price can create pressure and lead to a demoralizing down round.

Saarinen would generally avoid a formal board at seed, while considering one at Series A; Linear added a board then and a second investor board member at Series B. With three founders, the company negotiated three founder seats and one investor seat initially. His comments are his experience, not legal advice or a guarantee of control.

He cites Parker Conrad’s view that a founder’s strongest protection is a successful business. If a company struggles, investors can exert influence in ways beyond formal board votes, he argues. Saarinen suggests thinking carefully about governance without assuming a particular legal structure makes every future negotiation safe.

The best investor meetings, he says, involve people who arrive informed and are willing to go deep. For a fundraising process he may start with only five candidates. He rejects “always be raising,” but periodically thinks about the next round, desired investors and timing, and sometimes meets investors informally before he needs capital.

Saarinen is unsure whether Linear needs more investors or primary capital. He is exploring whether secondary transactions could give employees more liquidity for their equity, rather than requiring another conventional fundraising round. This is an idea under consideration, not an announced transaction.

He gives each prospective investor a memo and questions to answer in writing. The exercise simulates working together and reveals how the investor thinks and communicates. He dislikes responses that mechanically apply another company’s benchmarks or playbook without addressing Linear’s particular challenges.

Saarinen says investors often push founders to hire senior business leaders before the company knows what those leaders should do. He asks what a proposed sales or revenue executive would actually change. Hiring for a title alone, in his view, can produce activity without solving the underlying problem.

In interviews he asks candidates what they have built that makes them proud and why. He listens for care about craft, detailed reasoning and an urge to go beyond the expected result, rather than a particular type of project. He treats the answer as a way to understand motivation, not a definitive test of ability.

Saarinen says Linear’s interviews and work trials have helped it make relatively few hiring mistakes. The mistakes he recalls involved accepting someone who seemed good enough without a strong conviction. He argues the first hires in a function establish its standards and culture, making early hiring decisions especially consequential.

A founder may have to do a job personally until the right early hire appears. At a larger company, he sees more flexibility for roles with narrower downstream effects; leaders and product roles can influence many other teams. His distinction is about organizational impact, not a claim that support work is unimportant.

The CEO role makes him regularly uncertain because the company, team and market keep changing. He asks himself whether he is doing enough, whether he should focus on the present or the future, and what he should do differently. Becoming a father has also made him more aware that people can absorb a leader’s words and behavior even without explicit instructions.

Saarinen has done some angel investing but finds screening deal flow time-consuming. His filter is whether he knows the person or believes strongly in what they are building. Investor updates and conversations with other founders can also provide useful lessons for his own work.

Remote work requires a company to design its operating culture around it, he says, rather than flip casually between remote and office policies. Looking back, Linear could have hired sales earlier, as its investors suggested. He also thinks the founders benefited from experiencing the need themselves before making the decision.

He believes quality still matters even when many products are marketed well but disappoint in use. One practice that may be difficult to scale is his own review of nearly every project: before release, he or another founder checks how a feature feels and whether details such as animation work correctly.

Saarinen praises Superhuman as a fast, purpose-built email product for his own needs, without claiming it is best for everyone. He likes Paul Graham’s “Ramen profitability” idea because a company that can sustain itself has leverage to walk away from an investment offer. Linear became excited when it saw that possibility in its own forecasts.

His least enjoyable investor meetings are large, silent rooms where the founder gets little feedback or meaningful questions. Asked whether he would sell Linear for $3 billion cash, he says the default today would be no, but the answer would depend on the buyer and whether the future story was compelling. It is a hypothetical, not a transaction.

He thinks a strong competitor such as Jira can help a team clarify where it wants to be different. Copying an established product with only slight improvements is not enough, he says. The goal remains solving the same customer problem in a genuinely useful way.

The question he wishes people asked more often is why it matters that people actually want to use an enterprise tool. Feature lists are easy to compare, but adoption creates value: a tool people avoid cannot deliver its intended benefit. He dislikes vendor comparison charts that he sees as self-serving or factually inaccurate, and says Linear has chosen not to use them.