The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 28 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: Linear at $2.5B Will Look Cheap as AI Coding Explodes
“This will seem cheap, When Replit's at fifteen billion, Lovable's at a hundred billion, everyone's out there because Linear will be the one powering them all.”
Reyes: AI will disrupt Agile methodology, challenging incumbents like Linear and Atlassian
“I will say, though, that one of the things that is pretty clear to me is that the way we build software is fundamentally changing, and I think that Agile might be one of the things that gets hit with this new way of developing, and that makes me think that the…”
Saarinen: Profitability gives startup founders maximum leverage over VC investors
“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 …”
Saarinen Gives Prospective VCs Google Doc Homework to Evaluate Their Thinking
“I make a, Separate Google doc for each investor and say like, Hey, here's a memo. And here's a cool week at the end of the memo. There's some questions for you that I would like you to think about, and then they should write them down and then we should talk a…”
Saarinen Says Linear Would Default to Rejecting a $3 Billion Acquisition
“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 something with some other organization, it could be like interestin…”
Peng: Linear succeeded by prioritizing engineers over product managers
“Most of these issue tracking tools go for PMs first. Right. It's like, you're the manager, you're the planner, you're planning the development, the roadmap, the cycle, all this kind of stuff. That's the target customer. And the fact that they kind of flipped t…”
Greze: Users will rely on one to three digital entry points, not dozens
“Each human will have one, two, maybe three entry points into the digital space, because I don't think you'll want to be like, oh, I'm doing sales. Let me use the Salesforce agent. Oh, I'm doing project management. Let me use the linear agent. Oh, I'm doing thi…”
Stebbings: Linear will be the primary fund returner for 20VC Fund 1
“My fun one could have been, which you're an Alpean, and I'm very grateful to you for supporting me when I was 1819 but it could have been at one point the Hopin Fund, it could have been the Clubhouse Fund and it turns out that it will most likely be the Linear…”
Stebbings: Early Venture Winners Rarely Predict Long-Term Enterprise Value
“When I look back on, like, fun one where there's, like, a meaningful timeline to actually look back on the six years now, the best performers, your linears of the world, were not obvious early, and the early out performers did not signify enterprise value in t…”
Harry Stebbings: Linear is likely 20VC's best Fund I investment
“I invested in Linear, and it's, I think, probably the best investment in Fund One.”
Saarinen Calls Competitor Feature Comparison Charts a Dishonest SaaS Practice
“The last thing is, is I really hate those comparison pages companies do. Like if we never done those, because I don't, I feel like it's not honest to do this pages. Like they're never objective, like linear versus X tool and the X tool is obviously making it. …”
Linear Founders Negotiated a Three-to-One Board Seat Majority Over VCs
“We negotiated to have three seats from the beginning and the VC can have one. And so we can like retain the control of the board”
Saarinen: Remote work fails when treated as a perk rather than core culture
“Not thinking that it is a way of operating and just thinking that it's something like you can keep flipping back and forth. Like you have to build the whole company around being a remote culture and not just decide one day that, okay, today we're remote and th…”
Saarinen: Founders must do roles themselves rather than rush early hires
“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 impacts the culture a lot. It potentially sets the standard for the whole function. So if you hire your firs…”
Saarinen: Founders should avoid creating a board at the seed stage
“I think like you shouldn't have a board at seed, and I think probably you can raise a price round. I don't think you need to. You can do a safe round at seed at a series A.”
Linear Spent Only $30,000 on Advertising Prior to Its Series B
“So by the time of Sirius B, we only had spent like 30,000 dollars in advertising and 30,000, I think went to, I think to your podcast at some point, and then it went to another podcast. So we basically did two podcast sponsorships with that money and nothing e…”
Linear Spent Almost Nothing on Marketing and Had No Sales for Years
“We almost spent no money in marketing. We didn't even have sales for the first three years”
Saarinen Prefers 10% Startup Dilution Over the Industry Standard 20%
“I've never been happy with the 20% dilution. I would rather see it at like 10% or less than that.”
Sequoia's product team wrote a four-page manifesto to keep using Linear
“We adopted linear here at Sequoia with my team. And we actually had another issue tracking tool that we also, you know, had licenses for. Some teams use this, some teams use that, but EPD solely use linear. And we were being, there was a threat of us consolida…”
Linear Reaches $100M ARR Growing at 100% With Tender Offer
“Linear announces a hundred million air are growing a hundred percent, doing a tender.”
Saarinen: Distinguish between upstream and downstream roles when setting hiring standards
“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…”
Linear Chose Sequoia for Series A to Minimize Founder Equity Dilution
“One of the reasons we did the series A with them is that we could push the dilution lower because they already have ownership.”
Karri Saarinen limits initial fundraising outreach to around five targeted investors
“Usually when I start the process, it can be only like five people that I want to talk to, and they can be a little bit different kinds.”
Saarinen: Linear resisted early investor pressure to hire sales staff
“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 r…”
Lauryn Isford praises Airtable and Linear for market-leading onboarding
“I think Airtable's onboarding is very good. I also think linear's onboarding is very good.”