Karri Saarinen
Co-Founder & CEO, Linear · 1 appearance on the record.
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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.
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2 assertions · 7 opinions · 18 insights · 4 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
Everything Karri Saarinen said on In Depth that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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…”
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.
…”
Simple MVPs fail in project management due to high baseline user requirements
“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.”
Saarinen: Software cannot be optimal if endlessly customizable
“I don't believe that you can build the optimal tool for anything if it's very flexible and endlessly customizable.”
Project management tool brands are historically non-existent or viewed negatively
“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 …”
Saarinen: Many product designers are too narrow-minded and ignore business context
“There's maybe that a lot of designers are too focused on their, like a little bit too narrow looking at things or narrow minded and not maybe interested enough, like what happens like around them or like around there or they're more just looking at the design …”
Saarinen: Web bookmarking tools are not venture-scale businesses
“I still don't think it's like a venture scale type of business. It's the market is not there to support it now or probably never. It's just like, it's not a thing or it's not that interesting for that many people”
Saarinen: Developer tools are uniquely viable to monetize due to high budgets
“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.”
Saarinen: Linear limits team growth to avoid culture dilution
“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.”
Saarinen: High-speed, high-output projects always come from small teams
“All the projects that I was part of, what were the projects that went really well, like where the output was really good, where the speed was really fast or executing execution speed was really fast. And it was always like projects where we had a small team wo…”
Saarinen: Users treat incumbent enterprise software like permanent building floors
“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'…”
Linear secretly required waitlist users to complete an allegedly optional onboarding survey
“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.”
Saarinen: Product waitlists lose user interest after at most six months
“There's also like waitlist has a decay that it's people's interest doesn't last forever. So I think I would say like the realistic timeframe is probably months or maybe at max six months.”
Saarinen: Pressure on Short-Term Metrics Inevitably Degrades Product Quality
“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 …”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Inside Linear: Why craft and focus still win in product building | Karri Saarinen (Co-foun | Jun 5, 2025 | 1h 14m |