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

“I think very early on when it was three of us, I would be the one doing the broad strokes designs. Like, this is how the UI works and this is how some of the things work. And they were the ones that were like, oh, there should be animation here and there should be this kind of thing here. So I think it's kind of like that DNA, I think, comes from all of us. And I think with the craft, it always starts with people need to care about it. Like if it's not valued in the company, then it's very hard to do for anyone to do because people don't feel like it's valued. And I gave this advice to some founder. He was asking me about it. And in their case, their founders were coming from different companies. Like maybe this one founder came from Airbnb and then the other ones came from Facebook and Amazon. And I think this, like, for example, I think Facebook and Amazon have very different culture on quality or craft or”
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 actually it's not like purely coming from me. So I think the all of us founders, like Jory and Thomas, additionally, their background is engineering. But I would say they actually have almost like, I think they spend even more time on the details than sometimes I 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
“So it's more like let's just try it out. But then, yeah, we do need to look at it again before we release it to everyone.”
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 sometimes people can think of that craft as about perfecting things and like perfecting them in a very organized way or like very early on the downside with this like perfection mindset is that it can be sometimes hard to like put anything out because nothing is ever like fully perfect and so we try to like balance this thinking with the fact that we should be always pushing things out very quickly but then like also fixing them like improving them very quickly so it's almost like the opposite ideas but then we we try to like kind of combine that and and i think it's been it's been working well that generally in the company there's not necessarily like a lot of reviews or something that we we always review everything that like gets shipped this way um because we do want people to like feel that they can like put something in the app and then we can try it out”
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, usually it can be one, or it's like three or five or ten. So it's often, especially with the larger company, like larger company facing features we usually do try to find a large company because sometimes it's hard to imagine these things, how they should work. And so it's better if someone is willing to work with us to explain, okay, this is how we do something. And something like, for example, we work this way with Vercel that there was some changes they wanted to see in the roadmap feature. So we work with them to improve it and then they could give us feedback along the way.”
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
“Just like put it into the app and ship it to production, but only visible to us. So we internally can test it out. And then I think the next stage is like we look for a customer that could be interested in this feature or we just ask people to opt in to some kind of better program. And in those stages, the experience can be janky or it's not that bullish, but we're okay with it because we are saying it's not finished. We just want to get your feedback early so we can make it better. But once we get to the kind of like the full general release, then we pay more attention to the actual bullish or the craft.”
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
“Goes to look at it and sees like, oh, this doesn't feel right. And it says, should fix it. So I don't think we should launch this now. So sometimes it doesn't definitely push the timelines, but this might be days. It's not like we need to redo everything. The other way we think about it is we are actually very okay pushing things out to ourselves and into for like a small group of customers like if they opt into that. So whenever we build a new feature, one of the things is like we don't want to spend tons of time upfront just like designing it and polishing it perfectly because we actually believe that when you start building the thing, you actually start realizing more like how it should work and how it should be better. So a lot of times with the teams we tell them like just put it there in like, I don't know, the first week almost like after you have some kind of designs in place or some kind of design ideas.”
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 interesting that those things you mentioned like hiring, building business, and building product and craft is like, I think that all of those are somewhat related to each other. So what I can say about the product craft per se is definitely starts with the people that on the hiring front, we always look for people that care about it. As a business, why we really care about it is that we see that cooperation only happens if people use the product and our product, which is supposed to help the collaboration coordination. If there's friction or the experience isn't that great or there's this little paper cuts, I think it's gets really annoying for people to use. And so we think like for the business to be successful, the quality is and the graph is very important. There's definitely trade-offs sometimes. Like there can be, for example, timelines. We are about to launch something and then, for example, I or someone else.”
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
“You need to spend it to build it. But I think we, since we were able to build a business pretty early on, we've been able to be in this position that actually we haven't spent any money on building the business.”
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
“Companies in different stages. And what we saw often is that the tools available for managing software projects weren't that really cutting it. I think a lot of them felt very clunky or complex or just like they had this kind of legacy way of thinking about software development. And so we just felt like we should do something about it. And so with Linear, we set out to do like build this most frictionless and streamlined system for modern software development. I'm also happy to share that we've been profitable the last two years. And we also have this thing where we actually have this net negative lifetime burn rate, which means that we just have more cash in the bank today than we have raised. I think a lot of startups, usually the normal ways is that you raise money and then 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
“So, linear is the project and issue tracking system that software companies and technical teams love to use. We help software companies to build software. We started 2019. Today, some of the top growth companies like Block, Vercel, Ramp, Retool, Mercury, and Substack are building with Linear. We also additionally have lots of other companies like thousands of other companies using Linaire. These companies can be very early stage team, like some companies just graduated from YC or a public company. And just like briefly, why we created Linear is that, like you said, I work with you at the AirPMP and before that, I work at Coinbase. And before that, I had my own startup. And all of us founders, there's three of us. We had a similar Bass where we worked in multiple different.”
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
“My belief is that any domain or industry, the more it matters, the more the design matters. What happens is whenever there's like a new paradigm, I don't know, it's like the mobile or the web or something, the first iterations of those products existing there, they don't have to be super well designed necessarily because they are the first. But then as you build the hundred, like thousand different email clients, any email client now has to be pretty good to be even considered reasonable like an email client. It's like the bar is so high. So I think today it's almost like a very basic thing now, pretty much from the very beginning, you need pretty high level design for people to even like pay attention or consider you seriously.”
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