The Exchanges

Q What product other than linear do you use and go, oh, quality?

A I think something I use a lot is, is superhuman. Um, I think it's, it gets the right things right. Uh, it's, it's fast and it has the features that I need. Like, I think there's the, it's like the intro thing where you just hit the shift I or something, and it's kind of does the PCC for you and those kinds of things that you, you do constantly like in this job is there and no other, Email client really has it. To me, it's similar to linear. We, they, they build it. It's more purpose-built. It's purpose-built for people like us, and it's not maybe the best email client for every single person out there, but I do think it's like the best email client for me or maybe for you as an investor.

AI assessment note: “I think something I use a lot is, is superhuman.”

Q What blog post written post-two thousand is your favorite?

A I like a lot of book, Graham's essays. I think they're the classics, and, um, I think going back to this like profitability, I do like his, his blog post about ramen profitability. And this, I think this was written maybe like a decade ago. And I always thought like, that's the, that's the ideal way of building a startup that you can, you with being profitable, gets you the highest leverage you can have in terms of when it comes to talking to investors, because it gives you the leverage of not needing them. That's his point in the essay too. And so that's always the highest leverage if you can walk away from any deal. So I always loved that. Like it was an explicit goal when we started linear, but when we started seeing it's like, oh, this is actually possible and we can kind of project or forecast how is this going to happen? We, we did get excited about it. It's very motivating and freeing to, to be in that position.

AI assessment note: “I do like his, his blog post about ramen profitability.”

Q Now, I was chatting to, uh, Miles at Excel beforehand, and he said, you've just got to start with context, and so I didn't want to do like the, oh, how did you come to found linear? Uh, he told me I had to ask about potato farming in Finland. Why?

A Uh, I, I think this, this came to be like, I think like linear also came to be from, from like my frustration. So, so I think like my frustration living in a U S or in California last decade is that the potatoes here are not very good, or there isn't that much of a variety of things. So when you go to a grocery store, you usually have four different kinds. You have the large one, the, the, um, golden one, the small one, and, and like a red one. And. Like growing up in Finland, that's not the case. Like those are like the, the main categories, but then within this categories, you might have different kinds of varieties and some of them are more like seasonal and, and some of them are more specific to a region in Finland where they're grown. So in during summer in Finland, you go to a grocery store, there might be like five different kinds of like different varieties of the same kind of potato, like the same category. And then like some of them might be picked this morning and they're like really fresh and that the taste and the texture is very different. It's they're like very buttery and that potato flavor is much more stronger. Like if, even if you just boil them, you can taste a lot versus like if you boil normal potatoes, I, I think you get on a grocery store, they don't generally taste that much anything. So I'm, I'm so sad that like there isn't Good potatoes in, in the US.…

AI assessment note: “I'm so sad that like there isn't Good potatoes in, in the US.”

Q You said about kind of sitting on the bench when someone should maybe be on the field. If I would have pushed you and say, where did you sit on the bench too much and you should have been on the field more?

A The first or the last two years, I was maybe too much on the bench when it came to like the quarter market function and the marketing or The sales function. And now maybe last the last six months or the last year, I've been focusing on it much more. We have weekly chats about it with the, with the, like the leadership team there. I think the reason for that is that I don't, my backgrounds in, in design and for example, Airbnb and Coinbase, they weren't very like go to market driven companies. They're not sales cult. Like you, you didn't have sales people in the company, but When you are building more of an enterprise business and selling to enterprises, the go-to-market function can be More complicated, or it can be more nuanced, or there's something more in there. And to me, I have to learn about it. I have to learn about these things and in, in order to be more effective there.

AI assessment note: “I was maybe too much on the bench when it came to like the quarter market function”

Q What blog post written post-two thousand is your favorite?

A I like a lot of book, Graham's essays. I think they're the classics, and, um, I think going back to this like profitability, I do like his, his blog post about ramen profitability. And this, I think this was written maybe like a decade ago. And I always thought like, that's the, that's the ideal way of building a startup that you can, you with being profitable, gets you the highest leverage you can have in terms of when it comes to talking to investors, because it gives you the leverage of not needing them. That's his point in the essay too. And so that's always the highest leverage if you can walk away from any deal. So I always loved that. Like it was an explicit goal when we started linear, but when we started seeing it's like, oh, this is actually possible and we can kind of project or forecast how is this going to happen? We, we did get excited about it. It's very motivating and freeing to, to be in that position.

AI assessment note: “I do like his, his blog post about ramen profitability.”

Q my growth rate is Two X. And there are companies who are growing four, five, six X. AI revenues are unbelievably different to what we've seen before. I'm just not going to raise money. So like, it almost feels like quality growth is a luxury product. And I need hyper growth because that's the only way I can get the next round. What would you say to that thought process?

A Well, I mean, I think that's exactly right that, that you need the growth to, to raise the round. But there is the other option. If you just think about this problem is that, Like, what if you don't need to raise the round? Like, what if you can sustain without raising a round or you raise some round, and then you just try to focus on making the business function work that actually try to make money and not spend that much money. And then you're no longer kind of tied to those metrics because you don't need, you don't need to raise. And if you can get to, to Profitability, then you probably, you don't necessarily need to raise ever again. You can, if you want to, but you don't have to. I think it, it definitely depends on your market dynamics, how fast, like how hard or fast you need to go. But that's, I think like what I advise founders is that you should think about what, what, what game you're playing, like what markets you're entering, what do you need to do there? What's the dynamic there? Like our market, It was kind of clear from the beginning that the way we win in this market, it's not like a fast moving market. There's basically one solution every company uses, and it's been there for about 20 years, and it's kind of the legacy solution. It seems like nothing has happened in the last 20 years. I don't think there's a lot happening in the next five or 10 years unless w…

AI assessment note: “I think that's exactly right that, that you need the growth to, to raise the round.”

Q So when you have that list, A lot of people are told always be raising. You need to continuously build relationships between rounds. How do you feel about that?

A I mean, I would say like absolutely not to be always raising. I do think that as a founder or CEO, you should always think about the next round or what would make it good or what would like, what kind of ideally, what would you want to get out of it? Like what kind of person would you want to get in? Um, and, and obviously if, if you do need the money, Then you also need to think like, when is a good time to do that, that, that like, you still have good amount of leverage and, and the momentum in the business is good. So I think like there is this background process that you need to run every now and then, like, you don't have to think about it every day, but maybe every quarter or every month or something that just think like, is there something I should do or think about, about the next round? When is it going to happen? Like, what should I prepare for that? And I do meet with some of these investors, even though I'm not Fundraising, but they're often very casual chats, and I, I just want to get to know the person a little bit, so when, when the time comes that I want to run this process, I already have some level of relationship there, and then we can just go deeper into the, what kind of investor they are, and like their questions, and my questions, and, and, and that kind of stuff.

AI assessment note: “I mean, I would say like absolutely not to be always raising.”

Q You said about kind of sitting on the bench when someone should maybe be on the field. If I would have pushed you and say, where did you sit on the bench too much and you should have been on the field more?

A The first or the last two years, I was maybe too much on the bench when it came to like the quarter market function and the marketing or The sales function. And now maybe last the last six months or the last year, I've been focusing on it much more. We have weekly chats about it with the, with the, like the leadership team there. I think the reason for that is that I don't, my backgrounds in, in design and for example, Airbnb and Coinbase, they weren't very like go to market driven companies. They're not sales cult. Like you, you didn't have sales people in the company, but When you are building more of an enterprise business and selling to enterprises, the go-to-market function can be More complicated, or it can be more nuanced, or there's something more in there. And to me, I have to learn about it. I have to learn about these things and in, in order to be more effective there.

AI assessment note: “I was maybe too much on the bench when it came to like the quarter market function”

Q You know, we mentioned kind of growth and different periods of growth, uh, there. I, I have to start. You said something to me before the show about quality growth over hypergrowth. What do you mean by quality growth and how does that differ from hypergrowth?

A So with, with linear, we, uh, Been growing much more this sustainable way, or like, I like to call it more like a quality growth way. And what, what it means that the growth is based on something real that is working in the company. And it's not something that is overly artificially juiced or, or, uh, it's not like the growth is on steroids. It's like the growth is coming from the fact that you go to the gym and that that's more sustainable than, than using steroids. You can maybe not, you should probably shouldn't use steroids, but maybe you could Some people might use it at some point, but it's not sustainable. So similarly, I think startups, we have this culture of growing fast, scaling fast, doing every like growth hacking, trying to hack our way to the growth. And to me, it, it feels dangerous because it's artificial. Some companies, they put a lot of money into the growth and they can get that money that they can get the growth, but they also spending more than they're making. And eventually That function just doesn't work. Like you, you, you need to keep raising more and more money and it might be really hard to actually turn the function now to actually make money versus like spend it. So for us, like the, the quality growth has always been the product that we almost spent no money in marketing. We didn't even have sales for the first three years that we just wanted to …

AI assessment note: “what it means that the growth is based on something real that is working”

Q Totally agree with you and get you there. Profitable in year two. This is a very rare thing, Harry, being profitable. Um, what is wrong with you? Uh, my, my, my question to you around that is, the counter argument would be, why didn't you spend more on acquisition? Like, have higher cax, the retention's great, people love linear as a product, just pay more and get more people faster.

A I mean, there, again, like, it, it goes to the strategy we have, is we want to be the best tool, and, and there's certain beliefs what we think. Get us there. One is that the team should be more like smaller and more focused than, um, if I look back to my different jobs and different companies, I always felt that the smallest teams always made the best results. Not like, not all the time, but usually when you put, put this special team together that are really talented, like maybe it's only three people or five people or something, they could make really Big impact in the company very fast, and that's something we believe in. So one of the main sources of expenses obviously is hiring. Like if you have a large team, you, you spend a lot of money every month. And we, we took the different approach where let's just find, try to find highest quality people we can, and then not grow the team too much because it can cause additional problems. It can dilute the culture. You spend more time managing things and like you have to, Kind of on board people more. So with generally our cross right on the. On the team size has been about two X per year. So part of that was like hitting profitability is, is that the revenue grew faster than we were able to hire the team. And then like when it comes to the marketing expense or some other expenses, part of it, it is that I want to see that the gr…

AI assessment note: “I want to see that the growth is there even without the spend.”

Q always used to swear in the car. And so as a result, I have one of the worst mouths ever, and I just blame her in perpetuity for it. Uh, so I completely agree with you for being concerned about that. Um, final one. I, I'm intrigued. How do you feel about angel investing as a founder? A lot of other founders do it. How do you feel about it?

A I've done it a little bit and maybe I would like to do it more. Um, I think as many other founders say that it can be very time consuming, just like reading the email and trying to like evaluate this business. Like, is this something I should be focused on? So my criteria is now just very. Simple or clear is that do I know this person and then do I believe what they do or in this, this, this kind of product category or something. And then I might like invest or might not, but it's like, what I like about it is that you can see how other people are doing, building their companies. You get this investor updates. You can see, sometimes you talk to the founders. You can kind of learn a little bit of how other people are doing things and that that can give you some ideas too. Like, even if they're like earlier in the process than you are, like in the, in the stage of the company than you are. So I like that aspect. I don't like the deal flow filtering or figuring out which companies to invest. So now I just try to focus on, do I already know this person and I want to support them? Or do I really believe in what they're building and I want to support that.

AI assessment note: “I've done it a little bit and maybe I would like to do it more.”

Q What thing of quality do you do today at Linear that you will not be able to do at scale?

A I think one thing is, is me personally looking at every project, uh, the design or the, um, when the team is building different features or different projects, I follow along and I, and when I start seeing them appearing in the app, I, I internally, I start playing around with them. I start trying them out. And before we, it's like, we don't have very complicated processes, but usually before we launch anything, To everyone, um, I or the other founders will do some kind of check on it. It's like, is, does this feel good? Does it feel right? Are the animations correct? And like those like little details are correct. So I don't think it's, I don't, I'm not sure if we can keep doing that or it's fully scales and even now it's hard. So I feel like it might be something hard to do when you scale the company more.

AI assessment note: “I think one thing is, is me personally looking at every project”

Q So when you have that list, A lot of people are told always be raising. You need to continuously build relationships between rounds. How do you feel about that?

A I mean, I would say like absolutely not to be always raising. I do think that as a founder or CEO, you should always think about the next round or what would make it good or what would like, what kind of ideally, what would you want to get out of it? Like what kind of person would you want to get in? Um, and, and obviously if, if you do need the money, Then you also need to think like, when is a good time to do that, that, that like, you still have good amount of leverage and, and the momentum in the business is good. So I think like there is this background process that you need to run every now and then, like, you don't have to think about it every day, but maybe every quarter or every month or something that just think like, is there something I should do or think about, about the next round? When is it going to happen? Like, what should I prepare for that? And I do meet with some of these investors, even though I'm not Fundraising, but they're often very casual chats, and I, I just want to get to know the person a little bit, so when, when the time comes that I want to run this process, I already have some level of relationship there, and then we can just go deeper into the, what kind of investor they are, and like their questions, and my questions, and, and, and that kind of stuff.

AI assessment note: “I mean, I would say like absolutely not to be always raising.”

Q always used to swear in the car. And so as a result, I have one of the worst mouths ever, and I just blame her in perpetuity for it. Uh, so I completely agree with you for being concerned about that. Um, final one. I, I'm intrigued. How do you feel about angel investing as a founder? A lot of other founders do it. How do you feel about it?

A I've done it a little bit and maybe I would like to do it more. Um, I think as many other founders say that it can be very time consuming, just like reading the email and trying to like evaluate this business. Like, is this something I should be focused on? So my criteria is now just very. Simple or clear is that do I know this person and then do I believe what they do or in this, this, this kind of product category or something. And then I might like invest or might not, but it's like, what I like about it is that you can see how other people are doing, building their companies. You get this investor updates. You can see, sometimes you talk to the founders. You can kind of learn a little bit of how other people are doing things and that that can give you some ideas too. Like, even if they're like earlier in the process than you are, like in the, in the stage of the company than you are. So I like that aspect. I don't like the deal flow filtering or figuring out which companies to invest. So now I just try to focus on, do I already know this person and I want to support them? Or do I really believe in what they're building and I want to support that.

AI assessment note: “I've done it a little bit and maybe I would like to do it more.”

Q Cary, what advice do VCs give that founders listen to that you think is most dangerous?

A VCs? Tend to push you to hire more leadership people, but then it's not always the right time, or it's also tough to find the right person to like, at least for me, I'm again, looking for a fit in that leadership role. So I think there's way too much push on like hiring, like, uh, especially like business roles, like hiring a VP of sales, hiring a CRO or hiring something where It's, it's never, I always ask, like, what are they actually gonna do? Like, what are they actually gonna change? And then usually there's no answer because they don't know what they're gonna do, and, and the people themselves don't know. They come into company, they start doing some stuff, and maybe, hopefully, they will do something productive.

AI assessment note: “Tend to push you to hire more leadership people, but then it's not always the right time”

Q What product other than linear do you use and go, oh, quality?

A I think something I use a lot is, is superhuman. Um, I think it's, it gets the right things right. Uh, it's, it's fast and it has the features that I need. Like, I think there's the, it's like the intro thing where you just hit the shift I or something, and it's kind of does the PCC for you and those kinds of things that you, you do constantly like in this job is there and no other, Email client really has it. To me, it's similar to linear. We, they, they build it. It's more purpose-built. It's purpose-built for people like us, and it's not maybe the best email client for every single person out there, but I do think it's like the best email client for me or maybe for you as an investor.

AI assessment note: “I think something I use a lot is, is superhuman.”

Q say is I hope you didn't use that when you were dating your, your partner. Clearly you didn't because it converted well. Um, but moving the potatoes forward, yeah, before Linear, you worked at Airbnb and you worked at Coinbase, two of the most transformative kind of product orgs in the business. When you think about, like, impact, which one had a bigger impact on how you think about product?

A With Coinbase, I was there much earlier. So it was when I joined, it was only like only 12 people or so. And then when I left, it was less than a hundred people. So it was more of the early stage experience. I think the main thing I saw there and learned there that how much you can do with very small teams, a lot of the features we built and they were used by All kinds of companies and very large groups of people or very much, um, revenue went through them. And those features were maybe built by one person or two people or three people. There was like, for example, Coinbase exchange, which is the trading platform they have that initially was built by one guy. Uh, like he was in a room and then he was building it for maybe six months, but he was built by one guy. And then when it went live, it, It's already like transacted maybe millions or tens of millions of dollars. And today it's probably transacting like billions of dollars. So that, that was like one lesson I learned there. And I think with Airbnb is much more about that. I think Brian Chesky is very driven or passionate about the experience. Like, how does this feel and like how, how we want the company or the product to feel that was like really It's great to see that you can run company that way, that you can actually focus on the experience and you don't have to focus on some of the other things like metrics or, or I d…

AI assessment note: “With Coinbase... one lesson I learned there. And I think with Airbnb is much more”

Q What do you say to founders? You say that's great, but like, I need the role today. Like that's super, super. Idealistic world. I need this seat filled.

A If it's your first 10 people, or even, like, first 15, 20 people, It's much more important in the early stages. Every role you hire, it affects the, it, it, it impacts the culture a lot. It potentially sets the standard for the whole function. So if you hire your first marketer, that first marketer is going to be the standard of what marketing is for that, I don't know, the years to come in the company. And if you hire the, your first engineer you hire, that's, that's also sets the culture on engineering. Or, or the first designer you hire. So I think I would definitely not ever do that in the very early cases. Like you just, as a founder have to do the job until you find someone who, who is really good at it, or like you find that right person at the later stages when the team is a little bit more there and it, it's maybe like less impactful role. I, I think there's more of a, I, I like to think there's more like upstream roles and downstream roles, like how much Those people might be affecting, like if they're more upstream, they affect everything downstream. So obviously like leaders or some like, for example, product people that are affecting the whole product organization or the whole product quality or direction or something. Those people have a lot of downstream impact on the business or on the company versus someone who is more on the end of the spectrum or like at the …

AI assessment note: “as a founder have to do the job until you find someone”

Q start giving your answer there. I had Zach on from Plaid, um, and he was like, actually, I think founder mode is going to be incredibly dangerous for a cohort of founders, and it's going to allow for a lot of bluntly bad behavior. How do you think about an assessed founder mode, given your context with Brian, and also now being one of the hottest founders in the valley?

A Yeah, I mean, I mean, I agree with Zach that it is, it can be dangerous or I think the essay itself, it's not very clear what it means. And like the standard advice is like you hire really good leaders in the company, and then you let them do the things. I think that the thing with the founder mode, I believe it was about that. You should do that. You should hire some leaders. It's not that like as a, as a founder, you should be operating, like doing everything, operating everything by yourself, but you shouldn't also sit on the bench. While everyone else is on the playing on the field, but you are allowed as a founder still be on the field. You can still play some roles in there, like some position there.

AI assessment note: “I agree with Zach that it is, it can be dangerous”

Q Do you wish you'd gone more enterprise earlier?

A The, the way I look at this is that I, I see that you kind of have, you have the product, then you have marketing, and then you have sales. And in order to move to the next segment of the market, each of these functions kind of have to elevate at somewhat equal base. So when you're selling to enterprises, obviously you need to have the sales team to like figure out, know how to do that. Like how, how do you work like an enterprise account? How do you, Get talk to people there more and like, how do you influence them? And then like the marketing has to be there that people have to know, know about you. They're not gonna. Engage in a sales process if they never heard of you and they don't understand like what you do or why is it better or something. And then the product has to be there that like, eventually if they actually buy the product, it actually has to work to them. Well, we started getting some of these enterprise customers, like maybe a year ago, like just before our series B and that, that was kind of the. Story there. It's like, Hey, we are seeing now that enterprises are buying this product. It just doesn't happen very often right now. It's a little bit special companies do this that they, they see the value earlier than some others. And now one year later, we have the switchers every month. So it's like, it has gained a little traction, but we needed this year to fig…

AI assessment note: “we needed this year to figure it out and, and improve the product”

Q Cary, what advice do VCs give that founders listen to that you think is most dangerous?

A VCs? Tend to push you to hire more leadership people, but then it's not always the right time, or it's also tough to find the right person to like, at least for me, I'm again, looking for a fit in that leadership role. So I think there's way too much push on like hiring, like, uh, especially like business roles, like hiring a VP of sales, hiring a CRO or hiring something where It's, it's never, I always ask, like, what are they actually gonna do? Like, what are they actually gonna change? And then usually there's no answer because they don't know what they're gonna do, and, and the people themselves don't know. They come into company, they start doing some stuff, and maybe, hopefully, they will do something productive.

AI assessment note: “VCs? Tend to push you to hire more leadership people, but then it's not always”

Q You know, we mentioned kind of growth and different periods of growth, uh, there. I, I have to start. You said something to me before the show about quality growth over hypergrowth. What do you mean by quality growth and how does that differ from hypergrowth?

A So with, with linear, we, uh, Been growing much more this sustainable way, or like, I like to call it more like a quality growth way. And what, what it means that the growth is based on something real that is working in the company. And it's not something that is overly artificially juiced or, or, uh, it's not like the growth is on steroids. It's like the growth is coming from the fact that you go to the gym and that that's more sustainable than, than using steroids. You can maybe not, you should probably shouldn't use steroids, but maybe you could Some people might use it at some point, but it's not sustainable. So similarly, I think startups, we have this culture of growing fast, scaling fast, doing every like growth hacking, trying to hack our way to the growth. And to me, it, it feels dangerous because it's artificial. Some companies, they put a lot of money into the growth and they can get that money that they can get the growth, but they also spending more than they're making. And eventually That function just doesn't work. Like you, you, you need to keep raising more and more money and it might be really hard to actually turn the function now to actually make money versus like spend it. So for us, like the, the quality growth has always been the product that we almost spent no money in marketing. We didn't even have sales for the first three years that we just wanted to …

AI assessment note: “quality growth has always been the product that we almost spent no money in marketing”

Q What thing of quality do you do today at Linear that you will not be able to do at scale?

A I think one thing is, is me personally looking at every project, uh, the design or the, um, when the team is building different features or different projects, I follow along and I, and when I start seeing them appearing in the app, I, I internally, I start playing around with them. I start trying them out. And before we, it's like, we don't have very complicated processes, but usually before we launch anything, To everyone, um, I or the other founders will do some kind of check on it. It's like, is, does this feel good? Does it feel right? Are the animations correct? And like those like little details are correct. So I don't think it's, I don't, I'm not sure if we can keep doing that or it's fully scales and even now it's hard. So I feel like it might be something hard to do when you scale the company more.

AI assessment note: “one thing is, is me personally looking at every project”

Q What do you say to founders? You say that's great, but like, I need the role today. Like that's super, super. Idealistic world. I need this seat filled.

A If it's your first 10 people, or even, like, first 15, 20 people, It's much more important in the early stages. Every role you hire, it affects the, it, it, it impacts the culture a lot. It potentially sets the standard for the whole function. So if you hire your first marketer, that first marketer is going to be the standard of what marketing is for that, I don't know, the years to come in the company. And if you hire the, your first engineer you hire, that's, that's also sets the culture on engineering. Or, or the first designer you hire. So I think I would definitely not ever do that in the very early cases. Like you just, as a founder have to do the job until you find someone who, who is really good at it, or like you find that right person at the later stages when the team is a little bit more there and it, it's maybe like less impactful role. I, I think there's more of a, I, I like to think there's more like upstream roles and downstream roles, like how much Those people might be affecting, like if they're more upstream, they affect everything downstream. So obviously like leaders or some like, for example, product people that are affecting the whole product organization or the whole product quality or direction or something. Those people have a lot of downstream impact on the business or on the company versus someone who is more on the end of the spectrum or like at the …

AI assessment note: “as a founder have to do the job until you find someone”

Q my growth rate is Two X. And there are companies who are growing four, five, six X. AI revenues are unbelievably different to what we've seen before. I'm just not going to raise money. So like, it almost feels like quality growth is a luxury product. And I need hyper growth because that's the only way I can get the next round. What would you say to that thought process?

A Well, I mean, I think that's exactly right that, that you need the growth to, to raise the round. But there is the other option. If you just think about this problem is that, Like, what if you don't need to raise the round? Like, what if you can sustain without raising a round or you raise some round, and then you just try to focus on making the business function work that actually try to make money and not spend that much money. And then you're no longer kind of tied to those metrics because you don't need, you don't need to raise. And if you can get to, to Profitability, then you probably, you don't necessarily need to raise ever again. You can, if you want to, but you don't have to. I think it, it definitely depends on your market dynamics, how fast, like how hard or fast you need to go. But that's, I think like what I advise founders is that you should think about what, what, what game you're playing, like what markets you're entering, what do you need to do there? What's the dynamic there? Like our market, It was kind of clear from the beginning that the way we win in this market, it's not like a fast moving market. There's basically one solution every company uses, and it's been there for about 20 years, and it's kind of the legacy solution. It seems like nothing has happened in the last 20 years. I don't think there's a lot happening in the next five or 10 years unless w…

AI assessment note: “what if you don't need to raise the round?”

Q In the linear journey, what did you not do that with the benefit of hindsight you wish you'd done?

A I actually think, like, we did the right thing, but for example, like, bringing in sales earlier, and this is credit to the investors. The investors are saying, you should bring your sales in, like, this is the time to bring the sales in, and for us founders, we're like, no, we don't want, like, I don't think it's right right now, and I think we had to go through that bane of, we re started realizing, oh, there's a lot of people actually, companies wanting to talk to us and, and realizing, do I want to be the salesperson like a hundred percent of the time, or should we like hire someone to do that? And then we realized, yes, we should hire someone to do that. So I think in the end we could have done it earlier, but in hindsight, it was also that I think it was important for us to like, learn that lesson to bane and not just do it and Then constantly think about if the sales is the right thing or not.

AI assessment note: “So I think in the end we could have done it earlier”

Q Would you sell the company today for three billion dollars?

A There's a good chance I would, or, and then there's probably like a good chance I wouldn't. Um, I think today, I mean, I think the default, it's, I think it would depend a little bit of what happens after, like, who is buying, like, what is the, what's the story there? Can I get excited about that story? But if it's just that, okay, sell the company, shut it down for three billion. I don't know if I want to do that. Um, So I think the answer today would be by default would be no, but if there would be some reason that we could see that, oh, this is really exciting and we could actually do this thing better or, or something with some, some other organization, it could be like interesting to look at.

AI assessment note: “I think the answer today would be by default would be no”

Q In the linear journey, what did you not do that with the benefit of hindsight you wish you'd done?

A I actually think, like, we did the right thing, but for example, like, bringing in sales earlier, and this is credit to the investors. The investors are saying, you should bring your sales in, like, this is the time to bring the sales in, and for us founders, we're like, no, we don't want, like, I don't think it's right right now, and I think we had to go through that bane of, we re started realizing, oh, there's a lot of people actually, companies wanting to talk to us and, and realizing, do I want to be the salesperson like a hundred percent of the time, or should we like hire someone to do that? And then we realized, yes, we should hire someone to do that. So I think in the end we could have done it earlier, but in hindsight, it was also that I think it was important for us to like, learn that lesson to bane and not just do it and Then constantly think about if the sales is the right thing or not.

AI assessment note: “for example, like, bringing in sales earlier”

Q Cary, why are you insecure in your role today?

A It comes down to the CEO role that I feel like you can be insecure all the time because it never, that role is never the same. You can never be, I think that you can never be the best at it. The company is always changing. The team's changing. The, I don't know, the market is changing. Everything's always changing. So what you did maybe well in the past, and it was Good or well done. It's not enough anymore. The company is not bigger. You need to do something differently. You need to do something better. To me, the insert insecurity is always about that, that am I doing enough? Am I doing it well enough? Should I be thinking about the next thing? Should I be focusing on today? Should I be focusing on the future at the answer is both. And so I think there's this constant, it's not every day, but every week I'm thinking about is like, am I doing a good job? Like, Should I be doing something less? Should I be something doing something more? So I would say it's just like a nature of the, the CEO job that I would say like nothing is ever enough. There's always more you could do.

AI assessment note: “insecurity is always about that, that am I doing enough? Am I doing it well enough?”

Q say is I hope you didn't use that when you were dating your, your partner. Clearly you didn't because it converted well. Um, but moving the potatoes forward, yeah, before Linear, you worked at Airbnb and you worked at Coinbase, two of the most transformative kind of product orgs in the business. When you think about, like, impact, which one had a bigger impact on how you think about product?

A With Coinbase, I was there much earlier. So it was when I joined, it was only like only 12 people or so. And then when I left, it was less than a hundred people. So it was more of the early stage experience. I think the main thing I saw there and learned there that how much you can do with very small teams, a lot of the features we built and they were used by All kinds of companies and very large groups of people or very much, um, revenue went through them. And those features were maybe built by one person or two people or three people. There was like, for example, Coinbase exchange, which is the trading platform they have that initially was built by one guy. Uh, like he was in a room and then he was building it for maybe six months, but he was built by one guy. And then when it went live, it, It's already like transacted maybe millions or tens of millions of dollars. And today it's probably transacting like billions of dollars. So that, that was like one lesson I learned there. And I think with Airbnb is much more about that. I think Brian Chesky is very driven or passionate about the experience. Like, how does this feel and like how, how we want the company or the product to feel that was like really It's great to see that you can run company that way, that you can actually focus on the experience and you don't have to focus on some of the other things like metrics or, or I d…

AI assessment note: “With Coinbase, I was there much earlier. So it was when I joined”