YouSaid · the spoken record

Karri Saarinen

lines on the record: 112
first: 2023-10-08
most recent: 2023-10-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So I'm on Twitter. My name, Kari, Sarinen, and we also have the Linear account, which is I think is interesting. So that's this at linear. And then, yeah, I think I hope everyone can check out Linear and see if it could work for them in their company and figure out if there's a pilot. I think we are always happy to assist on those things that if you just want to try it out and try it with the team, we can help you to set it up and help you to understand how to use the product.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think I've never seen it here in the US in any restaurant, but it's not very hard to make it yourself if you can probably Google recipes. It's basically you just need some salmon and”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is like this salmon soup, and it might sound weird like a fish soup. Like maybe it's not going to be that interesting, but it is like a creamy soup with some potatoes, carrots, and other things. And it's kind of like almost like a sweet, a little bit like sweet flavor to it. So that's one thing. You can make it yourself at home or you can like, if you go to Finland, there's probably like always a few restaurants that offer it.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's like respecting people and things. So I think it's, I mean, I think the people respect us is pretty obvious, but I think with the things you have, also, I think you should take good care of them. When you use them, you're just, I don't know, clean them or put them away. And then they're ready for the next time. So I think I like that rather than you treating things that they're trash or or kind of like not that valuable. You should kind of like treat things that they are valuable.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Slow to go fast is, I think for me it's about that. Sometimes people have tendency to rush into things, and especially, I think, in startups, but other places too, that you kind of have this like, I think urgency is important, but then sometimes you have too much urgency and you are rushing things. And what happens is that you rush it, and then now you need to come back to fix it. So I think sometimes I like to think that you should take some time to actually think about it and what are you going to do and then do it, because then in the end, it's going to be faster that way than like going back and forth and fixing things.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I just manually change it so I have like on my home app. I have scenes that like, so there's the night scene and then there's the day scene or like the morning scene. And so I just like click that button and then it turns changes the lights.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure if I discovered them recently, but recently I've been in this home office. I've been installing some of these hue lights. And I really like them because throughout the day, I kind of have more kind of harsh lighting because I'm in meetings or something. And then in the evening, I can kind of change the temperature. I make it much more red or orange or something. So it's just like, I think it's nice that you can kind of transition to space. It's like, okay, now I'm working and now I'm like doing something else and you can use the lights to kind of like indicate that.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to ask what is the candidate most proud of and why, like what on their professional life or otherwise, like what they're most proud of and why. And then I think we can go deeper on that. But I think it's kind of like gives you a little bit of indication what the person values and how they think about things. And also, I think it's always nice that people can share something they think they did really well and we can spend time on it versus just like asking something more like negative things.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The movie is like probably the John Wick for, I think it's like. Kind of feels like, I mean, I'll say it's like there's no store in that movie, but it's like, I think it's very true to its nature. So I like that fact. And then also recently I started watching the silo on Apple TV and I think I kind of like it. It's like a good mystery. And then also it kind of reminds me of the Fallout game. So I kind of like it that way too”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Timeless way of building by Christopher Alexander. He's this, he wasn't really an architect, but he, I think, thought in Berkeley. And I think he has this interesting thoughts about building things and he focuses on building and towns and these kind of spaces. But I think there's a lot of things that are also interesting for building software. The other book that I like is the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance because it's also talks about the quality of things. And I think that's one of the main themes of the book and the thing is also that quality is so hard to define. It is like if you actually start thinking about it, it's like how do you define it? It's like it's kind of like hard to be down, but it's kind of like when you try something or see it, then you kind of know if it's quality or not.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have, and then they can start doing stuff with it. And if they have questions or additional questions to the actual person who requested it, we can send those messages back to the person through Slack so they don't have actually have to go to Linear or they don't have to be a linear user to use it. So we think like this is like just like a good way for the company or the whole company to be more potentially involved in the company like the product operations without having to be like a power user of Linea or because not every function really uses it or needs to use it.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's always things we're working on and improving. One, like a newer thing we're working on is this feature called asks. And basically what it is, is that we see that in a company, there can be a lot of different people that needs to interact with the product team or different people that needs to interact with this team, but they're not necessarily in Linear or part of this team. So we've been building this like an Ask feature, which is like integration to Slack where you can very easily go to a Slack channel and then ask your question. You need something from this team. Maybe it's the IT team that you need a laptop or maybe it's the infrastructure team and you need help them need something from them. Then the team that is handling the request, they can very easily send it to Linear into this triage that”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And staying somewhat focused still on something. So I think I haven't necessarily fully figured it out, but I also figure it out that like, yeah, like hiring and delegation helps with this, that like if you can find other leaders that can take on certain areas, that's helpful. That's the main thing that. It's like a very wide range of things that you maybe didn't have experience before. But also I think it's interesting for me to learn about these things and like you learn about financials and you learn about legal things and then you start to feel like, oh, actually I know something about this thing over time.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For some reason, it was surprising to me. I think that being a CEO or some of this leadership roles is that you end up doing so many different things. And I think when I was a designer, even if I would be some high-level designer in some company, it's still like you're just mostly focusing on the design. And that's your job. But then when you're a CEO, then it's like every week or every day there's some different thing going on. It's not like there's sometimes there can be like problems, but a lot of times it's like, hey, we need to figure out how we're going to do this. Like, how do we going to do this compensation or how do we do this marketing plan? Or like, how do we going to do this off-site thing? And so it's just like, to me, what it's like, definitely like challenging for me is handling that, like different kinds of things that come to you.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if we declare winers that much, but I do think since I'm a designer, I do have some advantages on the visual presentation. So I think that I generally do well on that. And obviously that's like with this remote competition, that's the only thing you can really look for. It's not necessarily about the taste or the texture because you can't really taste it through the Zoom.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Since the beginning of the company. And yeah, the latest thing we were a little bit like, I think Don't have that much time, so we decided to do like an easier thing, which is like a summer drink recipe. So I think it was like people made matcha drinks and some like. Coconut drinks or iced tea or something. So even that was kind of like interesting to do.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bastel Neda, which is like Portuguese. And then we just hope on Zoom, everyone's doing their thing, following the recipe. And then sometimes people have questions like, hey, I'm stuck with this or my dough looks weird. Like, does your dough look like this? And people can kind of like help each other. And then also chit chat about whatever random things at the same time. And then we do the thing and then everyone takes pictures and posts this on this Slack channel. It's like what they achieve. And I think we have like kind of friendly competitions like who did it better and or who did it best. So people some nice little effort into the decorations and visuals. So in a way, it's again like a craft thing that we do. It's like, I think baking and cooking and these kind of things is also a craft. So we liked it that way. And yeah, we've been basically doing it quarterly.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then we just tell people I go buy the ingredients, use the company card. Everyone has a company card. And then when I cop on Zoom on this day, and for me, it's usually like, since I'm in California, it's like 8 a.m. in the morning. So we start baking or cooking then. So we've made things like roll cake and lemon meringue pie. And we made some.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so since we are like a fully remote and distributed company, so we have people in Europe and US group gatherings are kind of challenging, like remote group sessions are kind of challenging because the time zones are so different. So like some of the basic things like happy hours, it's not really doesn't really work that well and also like Zoom happy hours is probably not that fun anyway. So what we, I think a lot of people in the company watch the great British baking show. And so we decided like maybe we do something like that, like where basically we just pick a recipe. Firstly, it was like baking. Now we expand it to cooking recipes too. And so we just pick a recipe that is like somewhat reasonable to do in a few hours, in a couple hours. And it doesn't require tons of equipment or skill or something.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the way we announced it resonated with a lot of people. And then I think we did have some friends. And as I said, we got some data like Angel Round where we got some friends involved. And the main reason we did it was that we just felt like in the early days, it's good to have like, you feel like a real company in a way that you have someone to answer for in a way, even though the investors normally run your company or they don't have that much power. It's more like, oh, I took someone's money, so I now need to like make it worth it, kind of. But then I think with the announcement, again, we could use some of those people to spread the message as well.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wrote it more direct or authentic to us. This is like what are we going to do and this is why and like this these are some of the things we're going to do. Then on a Twitter we did the same thing. Like all of us founders, we wrote our own reasons why we're doing this. And I think it was like just much more like, and I think people could repeat people like us could resonate more with it. So we were kind of writing to the right audience. And like, I think that's probably the first thing when you're announcing your company is like you think about like who is my first audience, like who would be the best users, like early users for this product and like where are they? And then like, how do they think about things and like what kind of language they use? So for us, it was like very, it came very naturally because we are these people in building software and these companies and we've seen other people have seen similar things we have seen.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think with the announcement one of the things we did, I think well is like, I think sometimes startups do try to emulate successful large companies too much. And you kind of like do this fancy announcements where it's like, hey, now we're doing this fancy thing. And then it's like sounds very corporate or something. And I think with our announcement, we try to like.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think definitely if you have a following and like opus, it depends what kind of following. But I think my background as a designer, I was at Airbnb and Coinbase and other places and I did some talks in conferences and write some blog posts. So I was definitely out there and then kind of had some of that following, which was helpful. But it wasn't like I have like thousands of like hundreds of thousands of followers or millions or something. I had maybe like. 10,000 or something, which is like a significant number. But then I think the other thing is”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think there's Assets often like there can be sometimes, for example, now we have most of the AI companies are using us. So I think it's always, and before that, it was like a crypto company. So I think there's when we see these kind of things happening, then we start to think like, oh, could we do something differently? Or should we get more of this AI companies on board?”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Counterintuitive things is that actually, if you're doing Luba in some category, it's just kind of double down on that. This is something I talk to the Zoom founder Eric at some point in the company's lifecycle. And this is also what he said. When they were building Zoom in early days, they would get this one type of customer, I don't know, maybe it's like a university. And then they worked really well for them. Then they're like, well, how do we get more of the universities? So they would always focus on a certain kind of customer rather than like, let's just try and get everyone. So let's focus on everything, which is not possible. So again, it's about the focus is like if you have some like, you see that something is working really well, then it's almost like you should focus on doing that more until you hit some kind of point. It's like, okay, now we do have that category captured or handled as much as we want. And we should expand to.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like that for some social consumer apps. Like, you know, if it's taking off or not, then you don't really have a lot of different segments. Like, you don't really think about it. Like, you just have users and you have millions of users. And then you see it's taking off. And so you have a product market fit. But then I think in a more like a B2B world, I think there's always like you can have different sizes of customers. You can have different domains the customers are in or there's different kind of like categories where it's like you might be doing really well in one category and and then not that well in other and i think like maybe the”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think like a spectrum is a good way to think about it too. I think there's this blog post ended up written in the past where it's like, you know when you have product market fit and I think it's probably”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, like, after, or at the same time, we start getting some larger companies and we saw like, yeah, it's not really great for you right now, but like, let's work on it, making it better. And so I think the last two years, we've been focusing on that. It's like, how do we make this software work better? How do we get the product market fit better, like stronger in this larger company segments that are like thousands of people or like hundreds of people or like a thousand people?”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The whole market, and not just like these early stage customers. But we knew that if a Fortune 500 company came to us then or even today, we might not be like, I don't think we can provide them the solution today that works for them. So I don't think the fit is there. So for us, the way I think about it is like, do we have the fit in this specific segments and how strong that fit is? And so in the companies, like journey, I think we the first year we kind of just focused on like, can we get the fit in the first two years we focused on like can we get the fit in the early stage like startup kind of segment and like basically the goal was like we want to be the default for for startups like the default tool that the startups pick and i think we were able to accomplish that but we just purely focused on that segment and getting the product market fit there”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think we've always been kind of, I don't know, some like paranoid or skeptic is a good way about the product market fit. I think it's like, Paranoid in a way, like we're always wondering, do we really have it? And like, with who do we have it? And I think it's true in our kind of business is that I think we started feeling it very early on. And when people first started using it and we could see like, oh, now the whole company is using it and they seem like happier using it and the feedback is good and they might have some additional asks for them for us. But we started feeling there was definitely like a product market fit with certain kind of customer and these were like more like smaller early stage companies maybe were still the founder is still running the product and they care about the speed of the shipping or they kind of have like a certain values in a way. So it was like a good fit with them. And then I think we always know that we want to like address”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think it's a canvas like arena of data to decide. I think it's, but I think it was good to see that it's like there were some people that went. I think that 20 was probably the maximum that people could pay. So I think there were some people that went to it and they felt like actually like, yeah, I really love the products. I'm happy to pay like $20. So I think at least it gave us some confidence that if we charge for this and it's like something under $20, there's going to be market for it.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seat and then we just see if I don't know some people paid like $28 per seat and some people paid like $1. So it doesn't really matter. We just wanted to test the functionality and see what people think. And then, yeah, like after a year when we launched, we already had in the, I don't know, first week of launching, like we had probably like some hundreds of customers.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the first 10 companies using it, I think maybe. Little over a half. Maybe there was like three friends that have startups and they used it. And then I think the majority of them were just from this waitlist. But they didn't pay us anything. We didn't have pricing in the beginning or during the private beta. At some point, we started building the payment function. So we just like added a page in the settings that you can optionally pay. And then we just give you a slider that like how much do you want to pay?”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It or this doesn't work, then we fix that. So for that year, we did this cohorts and then always get the feedback from the cohort saying like, this is wrong or this doesn't work. And then we'll fix that. So eventually, I think it was much more like a... Think an effective way of doing the initial development then, just like inviting or letting everyone use the product at the beginning”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Email and then I emailed them. They invite Link from my personal email And then, like, I would just like to email them after a few days or a week, and it's like, hey, what do you think? And the reason we, and so we would invite only like, in the beginning, we maybe invite like 10 people a week. And eventually we increased those amounts. But the reason we did it that way was that we thought that if you just invite everyone at once or a lot of people at once, all of those people are going to probably hit the same problems in this kind of software that is very early stage. So like I don't know, they hit the same bug or the same problem in the software. So then they will all send us feedback like, hey, there's this problem. And then we felt like it was kind of like a wasted effort. So we would just do these cohorts. Let's invite these people and then they say like, hey, this is a problem. Like, I don't, this doesn't work or something. Then we go fix that. Then after we fix that, we invite the next cohort of people. Then they say like, well, there's this thing that is needed.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And the reason we did it because we know that we didn't support everything. And what I said before and the focus is we want to also be focused on build a version that can work for some people or some companies. We don't have to try to address everyone in the world in the first months of the business and even before after that. So it was very selective process. And I think we, yeah, we were fortunate that we were able to get people sign up on the waitlist. And I think after a month or so, we had maybe 4,000 people on the waitlist. And then we had this like internal, I think initially it was just like a very manual process, but eventually we built this invite tool that we could just send invites. But in the beginning, I would go read the actual surveys in a spreadsheet. Then I copied.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We currently support it, and then also like I was trying to see who is more interested versus, I don't know, I just want to try it out type of purple. And then a year later in June, we launched it publicly. And back then, maybe we already had like, I don't know, several hundred of companies using it. And then we also launched the pricing. I think like almost all of them, maybe one company didn't subscribe, but everyone else subscribed to that bait plan.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like roughly mid April. And we had this little website up with the waitlist. And then I think by May, we could use it ourselves. And then we started inviting some friends, like try it out. But then I think in June, I think we started more like inviting people from the waitlist and around June, July, I think we had about, I don't know, 100, 200 users on it and maybe like about 10 companies or something. And then we were in this private beta stage for almost a year. And the way we did it was just like we had this wait list of people on the wait list that was like a few survey questions like what kind of tools you use today and then like why do you want to use linear and then we just and what's the company size and we invited people based on like we invited more like smaller companies using the tools we”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we started official in 2019, some, I think, months before that, we were already exploring and prototyping the product. So I think we prototyped different kinds of designs a little bit. And then we also, one of the things we really wanted to solve is like we wanted to make the application really fast. And the way we figured out we'd do that is like we have more of this local based data structure where all the data lives in the client and then it gets synced on the back end, like with this delta packets. And back then we were just exploring different off-the-shelf solutions and systems, but there was nothing really there. So we ended up building our own. And so we spent some time prototyping that. And then once we've officially, I think started working on the company in April 2019 and then we announced the company.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, well, I don't like it because in this case, it would not work well for this kind of users or in this kind of context or for this kind of purposes. So they have more of this reasoning or some kind of rational why they think this way. And they can articulate that. So I think that's kind of like what we often like testing for is like, can they do this and how well they can do it? And it's going to be very, yeah, they're going to be very wide ranges of how people do it. And when you see someone who really thinks about this stuff, it's very clear to see that they can just talk about it forever and they can go deeper and deeper. And then some people that. Maybe haven't had the experience or don't think this way. They're like, yeah, I know, I don't really know. I just built it and then seem fine.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say we have someone a very scientific or some special way figured out for this. So I think it's a lot of it's like a discussion of, and like I often think like ask people that asked about their projects and I try to go deeper, it's like why was this decision made? Why do you think the decision was made? I might ask, do you think it was the right decision? Or did you agree on it? asked them what you think you would have done differently or something. So I think it's more like I'm trying to see if they have thoughts in this area and like what their answers is and people's answers can be very different levels like some people might be yeah just like I didn't like it which I don't like yeah it's an opinion but it's not based on anything it's just like you didn't like it you should be able to expand on it saying”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do they think, and are they able to make progress in a very short timeframe, which I always think is very important for startups. Like, in large companies, you have maybe all time in the world to do stuff, but I think any kind of startup, even with us when we take our time doing things, sometimes it's still important, like we can do things quickly if we have to.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there can be ways we can sketch through it so that it causes as little kind of problems to the candidate as possible. And I think we only had only a few people probably have ever declined it. I think everyone else has been, at least after the fact they've been happy that they did it because they felt like they had a much better sense of the company they're joining. And also during that work trial, they can actually join our meetings. They get access to our Slack and Notion and they also have one-on-one chats with the rest of some of the other people on the team. So they already get to know people. So it's a good way for them to evaluate us as well. And then for us, obviously we can see what is important for us to see is like, how does this person operate in this kind of environment and like how do they approach problems?”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it's always like if you don't ask you don't know, I think in our case, that's just been the standard. And we try to work with the candidate, like, let's figure out maybe we do it on the weekend, or maybe we do it some other.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And how are the what is my ownership, or like how do I approach this? I think a lot of engineers also like that they see the code base and they're like, oh, wow, this is like really clean and like it's not like some kind of spaghetti code type of thing situation. So I think it helps the candidates as well understand what are they signing up for, which I think can be very risky sometimes with especially with startups like it's really hard to tell how the startup is operating just from the interviews. And in a large companies, I think things are more standardized. So it's like, I think they're more similar and it's easier to make that choice, but with startups it can be like very different how companies operate.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why we do this is that we just seen that it's a very good way to see for both us, both for the company and the candidates to see how we work together. And I think for the candidate, what they can see is that what kind of company are joining? What is it like to work here?”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we do with all of the employees, we've done a bait work trial, and it depends on the role, what it looks like, how long it is, and depends on sometimes on the person. But basically, we do. Failure like standard like in the view loops where we test like we have some hiring manager interviews and then like skill interviews and or tests. And then the last step of the process is the work trial. And basically, yeah, they basically come as like a mini contractor to the company and we give them a very usually fairly vague problem statements. If your engineer is like, hey, there's this feature that needs to be built, like how would you build it? And like go build it. And so basically they need to first understand the problem, then they need to just go it down to something that they can do in the timeframe that they have. And then they actually get the access to a code base. They can actually go and go and build a version of it. And then at the end, they can present the work they did.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like much more interesting not to everyone, but like I think interesting to many people. And it's kind of like how I also felt about as being a designer is like I don't feel like my job is purely like just looking at the designs. I also felt like I actually need to be helping this business or helping this other area as well. So I think it's just kind of also like natural to me.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think it's the other thing is, like I said before, is like, we want to build much, I think like a company that has less employees, which means that it's like I said before, we don't want that many specialized roles or too specific areas of ownership or something. We just think that we could build this like we could have less people and those people can take on more scope and they can own more scope. I think traditionally, I feel like in companies like how do you get more scope is that you advance in the levels of the company because there's like a lot of different teams and different levels. And then to get any kind of scope, you need to rise into this higher levels. And what we try to do is have that many levels, but like people can just like already when they start, they can start owning more areas. And I think that can be.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a shared area, or it's not like it's not, you rarely get to the point, like people say it's not my job. It's more like people understand, okay, yeah, I'm kind of in operations, but today I kind of need to help on this HR thing, which is okay. And so that's kind of like what we look for people. It's like they are more than they can take more scope than their skill set would assume or what normally is expected from them.”
2023-10-08 · Lenny's Podcast · Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source