Linear

“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…”

“Linear announces a hundred million air are growing a hundred percent, doing a tender.”

“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.”

“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…”

“Cole, who runs our engineering team, has like six agents that are running at once at all times. Just doing different kinds of projects. When we create a new ticket in linear, it automatically kicks off this thing that basically creates a dev environment, which…”

“There are a lot of things where we choose not to use MCP because we want to add more high touch to quality. I think search and agentic find is like the largest instance of that, where we have slack and linear and JIRA search and notion that is not using necess…”

“The other tip that I would have is figure out a tasking system, not for you to the agent, but from the agent To you. So my task for the agent, they just keep this like to do file with a bunch of checked off items. It's very loose. But sometimes we run into the…”

“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…”

“Linear is a great product. It's starting to beat Jira in a lot of ways because of their design decisions and their focus on an ICP, by the way, laser focus on that. And it's the user, not the buyer, which is super interesting.”

“There was this viral thread about how Twitter or how Cursor doesn't have PMs. And I think Linear also said something similar. And people are like, yeah, we should have PMs. And That actually makes sense, but you have to really think about for whom it makes sen…”

“You put a process in place, you write a doc down, you talk about how to do the work. You talk about how to set up your tracking system on like, you know, Atlassian or linear or whatever. Doing all that feels like real work. I just don't think it's real work at…”

“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…”

“I think about linear as we're talking, just like they are winning in, in a very crowded space because they invested in making it much more delightful.”

“They have a zero bug policy and they use cursor. If you look, this is inside of linear. Let's see if I can make this a little bigger. maybe not. Well PM reports a bug. The AI categorizes it. The engineer who's triaging just tells cursor, Hey, investigate this…”

“I invested in Linear, and it's, I think, probably the best investment in Fund One.”

“One of these really exciting use cases of AI is like automating a lot of, you know, these processes that you have to go through as a founder. Like, I recently started using, like, Claude with, like, linear, and Notion, and GitHub integration as, like, a micro …”

“We created in basically one day. We didn't want to spend weeks or months trying to create a website where we think like the actual effort should be put into the product itself.”

“In the very beginning, what you're trying to sell is you try to find someone to actually use your product and like just understand what it is. So what we did here was that we wanted to put the issue tracking. We knew that that wasn't the, like, Long-term visio…”

“After superhuman, we were one of the Products to add this, like, common menu that, like, also makes things easier”

“The second one was the kind of famous purple website that was like replicated a lot across the companies.”

“The way I think about that, that landing page, the first, the homepage is kind of like the front page. So like, you can't explain everything. Like, you can't explain all the features. You can't explain all the customer stories and everything. That's why there'…”

“It's not like you should just use one typeface, everything, because in small sizes, A lot of typefaces don't work. You probably have to use something fairly standard so people can read it. But for headlines and special points, you can pair it with something li…”

“Two things. One is like the speed was one of the main problems we heard from a lot of people we talked to, that they just don't like the tools because they're slow. And it makes sense. Like a linear is kind of like this very, it's like almost like an email cli…”

“There's also, like, a lot of automatic movement on this page, which I do think, like, adds to the chaos, so there could be some of that, but, like, I would, like, basically every section is almost, like, moving, and so I think it's, yeah, like, there's, again,…”

“So I think there is some innate ability to see how things can be better, and then it is, like, easier to do designs when you can do that.”

“Software companies and engineering tools are type of products that people are willing to pay for because the engineering functions are already highly paid and software companies have, especially VC funded software companies, they have a lot of money to spend.”

“In the end, like what the problem we are solving for companies is this like organizational coordination and communication problem. And especially like the larger the company is more problems you have with that. And basically the problem is always no one ever k…”

“We've been trying to keep the teams, like the whole company quite small or not overly growing it too fast. So I think there's two problems with growing the team too fast. One is like the, it takes a lot of time and the culture gets diluted very easily.”

“Like, I think this market is like weird where you have this incumbent and I think people just assume it's the thing. It's like, it's always been there. It's always going to be there. And so it's a little bit like the floors in the building. It's like, you don'…”

“Obviously there's been companies, other companies doing project management and stuff, but No one has really focused on the engineering use case that well, I think, and haven't been able to get to the scale where, where like GRI is.”

“In the end, the productivity of any company comes from the ICs, like what the actual, what is actually the work output and the ICs engineers or designers or someone are building that output. So I think if the tool should be optimized around anything, it should…”

“What I could see a lot of tools, and this generally I think goes for enterprise tools, they are optimized around the buyer, because that's how they get bought. You don't, the users don't go buy the tools. The, like the actual end users don't go buy the tools. …”

“It's never been, even in the beginning or later stages, it's never that like we Listen to these users and then we build what they want or what they say. We went there, like, it's more like we have that model in our heads. And then if something doesn't quite fi…”

“Like, you could build a very simple version of something, but in this category, it's, like, just doesn't work because people already have, like, pretty high standards or high needs for how this kind of tool should work.”

“The survey was kind of optional, but Actually, you wouldn't really get in without filling the survey. So the survey was kind of like required to like actually get into the service.”

“I would say like on the waitlist, I remember that eventually we had about like 10,000 emails on it. I would say about like 10% of them converted during that year.”

“When we launched, we had over, I think, over a thousand, thousand, like, daily actives.”

“I don't believe that you can build the optimal tool for anything if it's very flexible and endlessly customizable.”

“We see that the linear, what we're trying to do is helping companies to build products. And it doesn't have to be limited to the issue tracking or project management. We can do other things too.”

“What we found that like in this market, the brands are kind of non-existent or they're bad or they're negative. So if you think about project management tools, there's anything, and no one is like that exciting. Like, it's even hard to say, like, what do this …”

“You shouldn't probably emulate. You should almost do the opposite what all the other players in your domain are doing. And maybe you can take inspiration from some other companies in other domains and do something like similar there.”

“I think like what often happens to startups or any companies is like, The quality goes down because they get pressured on some, something else. They pressured on the, we need to ship this or we need to get, get these metrics up. And then the quality goes down …”

“Initially, we're, like, the investors were saying that, hey, you probably need some, like, salespeople. And we said no. And it's not, like, who wants to talk to salespeople? But then at some point, you start getting these customers that do want to talk to sale…”

“We could still be more opinionated on the lower levels where there's more of this volume and need for structure because there's more people and more things happening and the more flexibility you introduce, it multiplies a lot more. But once you get to the very…”

“Why quality doesn't happen in most companies. It's like, it's just because it's not incentivized. No one ever says you should do it. It's almost that no, we just want you to complete this task. We don't actually care how do you complete it too much. We just wa…”

“Within augment, we have we have both MCP support for complete extensibility of tools, but we, we've also built in a few first party integrations and serve them as tools to the agent. So we have GitHub linear notion that, that we use internally, and then we hav…”

“I think all of the system of records type of applications, they will be front and center at this, you know, new revolution, like, because all of your issues are already on linear.”

“I would say talk to this thing like you do a linear ticket or a G or a ticket. That, that would be my advice is like in our order and talk to this, like you would like, you're talking to one of the developers on your team. Right. And what that means is be spec…”

“And one of the questions asked was, what tool do you wish you could switch to if your IT department allowed you to? The number one answer by far is, people want to switch from JIRA to linear.”

“When they think about speed, the thing they over-index on is, is like rushing or being sloppy, and what they should be indexing on is being really competent. Or being like an expert. So if you look at if you look at people who are like at the pinnacle of their…”

“Speed, what it really looks like is, you know, you have some rough time budget for how long you think something's gonna take, and by the time 10% of it has passed, you have a workable solution, right? It's not like, oh, at the halfway point, we have something …”

“We have a sort of gradually increasing sort of circle of users that use every single feature. So by the time it hits GA, by the time it gets released, it's been used by a lot of different users to that point, right? So the first circle is just internal users. …”

“It's customization features requested by middle managers in order to make reporting a little bit easier. At the cost of making IC workflows worse, right? Like, it's like, if it fits that description, we're just saying no. There's no debate because we've alread…”

“The moment you start going down this path and you make you make the IC user experience worse, they're just going to disengage. Right. No one has to do this. Like if I'm an engineer, I get paid to write code. My performance review is based on my like code contr…”

“What buyers care about is, is this going to make their team more effective, right? That's the reason that they're making this buying decision in the first place is that they're like, well, you know, the current situation we're in, and especially with larger co…”

“Growth in enterprise has been, you know, leading the other segments.”

“Not, not a hypothetical person, right? Not one that you made up, like, you know, Alice, Bob or whatever. It's like, no, I like, here's the first name, last name, here's their email. You can ask them. And I think that being able to tie it all the way back to re…”

“And my goal is to feel bad in the same way that customers feel bad. Right. They come to us with a request. Hey, we want X. And it's like, there's something motivating it. And it's not, you can do the normal analytical thing and be like, ask five Y's and like, …”

“The thing that we did specifically to solve this was we, you know, on projects in linear, you can just specify of target date at whatever level of granularity you want. Right. You can say it's a December project. You can say it's a Q four project. You can say …”

“And I think the more competitive your industry is, the more the sort of like low hang goal oriented stuff is, is already picked, right? Because every PM from every one of these companies has been asking like, well, like, you know, like, what's, what's your goa…”