Karri Saarinen
Co-Founder & CEO, Linear. On 4 shows, 4 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveoperator@karrisaarinen ↗LinkedIn ↗karrisaarinen.com ↗
Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear, an issue-tracking and project management platform. Prior to Linear, he served as the founding designer at Coinbase and the principal designer at Airbnb.
4shows
4appearances
95statements
3resolved
1supported
1contradicted
33%fully supported
17said about them ↓ Everything Karri Saarinen said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Saarinen: Companies mistakenly treat resources as headcount instead of output
“Companies don't really do it that much because I don't, I find they often think about the resources as number of people, not, not necessarily like the output of those people. So it's easy to say, like, we need to hire like a hundred more engineers, but maybe y…”
Saarinen: Startup success enables mass hiring, not the other way around
“I don't actually believe that those people are needed for the success. It's more that the company is so successful that they can hire these people. So it's like when you have the growth there, you are able to do that. That's the lesson people should take from …”
Saarinen: Productivity tools should optimize for individual contributors rather than management
“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…”
Saarinen: Individual contributors and executives align on output while middle management obstructs
“I noticed in all of the companies I worked at that actually the ICs and the high level leadership was, I think more philosophically aligned because I think CEOs and a lot of the high level leadership, they just want to see things happening.
They want to see ou…”
Linear models user needs internally rather than building direct feature requests
“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…”
Saarinen: Startups should do the opposite of incumbent competitors
“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.”
Saarinen: Software should be structured for execution but flexible for leadership
“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…”
Product quality suffers across tech because organizations incentivize speed over craftsmanship
“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…”
Saarinen: Business success is a founder's only true protection against investor control
“The only real protection you can have as a startup founder in your business is to be successful. If you're not successful, there's a lot of ways investors can exert their control.”
Saarinen Would Choose to Invest in Brian Chesky Over Brian Armstrong
“If I really had to choose, I would really choose Brian Chesky, because I think he's really this I don't know, power of nature that he can drive through anything. I think Brian Armstrong is as well. But I think like if you put Brian Chesky to do something, like…”
Saarinen: Maximizing startup valuation is dangerous and leads to demotivating down rounds
“So I'm not trying to aim, like get the highest valuation possible. I think it's dangerous and what we've seen in the past couple of years that it can lead to down rounds and those are really annoying or unmotivating to people.”
Karri Saarinen explicitly rejects the 'always be raising' mantra for founders
“I mean, I would say like absolutely not to be always raising.”
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: 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 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…”
Linear operates with only one product manager across the entire company
“The other thing I would say that what we like to do is we actually don't have much BMS in the company. We only have one”
Linear assigns an engineer or designer as project lead instead of PMs
“So yes, like for every project, there's a project lead. That lead can be engineer or designer. It's not like a formal role or it's not based on it, like your whatever level or it's just like, you need to be certain title that you can be that it's more like a a…”
Operating without PMs requires interviewing engineers for product sense and judgment
“Probably the only thing I would say, it's like the hiring front that like you really need to spend more time on it. And like, basically you cannot really interview engineers only for the engineering skills. You also have to interview them for like the product …”
Linear does not use A/B testing or target metrics for product releases
“We don't do AP testing or we don't do specific or follow like certain metrics or something. We might sometimes, we do have telemetry or like, we can look at like how people use certain things. And we sometimes Do that. But like, that's not usually the goal we …”
Saarinen: Overly polished websites create misleading expectations for early-stage startups
“You might try to, like, build very polished or fancy websites very early on, but what that kind of, like, tells you is, like, it maybe sets the wrong expectation for the user, that if your product is just that, I don't know, you built it last month, and, like,…”
Business schools teach middle management theory rather than practical entrepreneurship
“And then like later I realized that like business schools are not really about founding companies or entrepreneurship. They're more about the middle management or the kind of the theory of like, how do you run a company, but not actually the practical aspects …”
Saarinen: Founders must think about business models and monetization early
“Made me realize that the advice on like starting a company and not thinking about the business model too much is, is not good. Like I think you should think about it a little bit. It's like, what is, what kind of business are you in? Like what, who is going to…”
Saarinen: No project management tool properly targeted engineering to rival Jira
“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.”
Saarinen: Enterprise software is built for buyers instead of actual users
“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.
…”
The other half of the tape: Karri Saarinen's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 17 times in 10 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 7Miles Clements 4Jason James 3Lenny Rachitsky 2Dylan Field 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 14
Lenny's Podcast 2
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 1
2026 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- "Cursor is Dead" is Total BS: Here is Why | Miles Clements · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- NVIDIA Crushes Quarter | OpenAI Cuts Off Cursor | Instinct Hits $2.5B Valuation
- Enterprises Fear Frontier Models | Sam Altman Offers Trump 5% of OpenAI | DeepSeek Builds Own Chips · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- 20Product: Why Most CPOs are Bad | Why You Do Not Need PMs in a World of AI | Why the Design Stage is Dead and How to Use Vibe Coding to Replace It | The Three Roles All Founders End Up Firing on Repeat with Jason James @ Tezi
- 20Product: How Duolingo Build Product 10x Faster with AI | Duolingo's Biggest Lessons on Paywalls, Push Notifications and In-App Purchases | Why Small Teams are the Future of Product | Why PMs Will Become Extinct with Cem Kansu, CPO @ Duolingo
- Dylan Field: Scaling Figma and the Future of Design · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2020 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Karri's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 IN DEPTHLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Linear | 1 | 31 | — | full record on In Depth → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Linear | 1 | 27 | 0% 0/2 | full record on 20VC → |
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Linear | 1 +1 | 23 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Linear | 1 | 14 | — | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |