At Home w/ Karri Saarinen, Co-Founder of Linear

A few years back, I got a DM from a founder wanting to meet and swap stories about adventures in entrepreneurship. Despite being backed by some of the top VCs in the world, they were taking a very different approach from the classic VC blitzscaling playbook. As we sat on the back patio of a bar in Brooklyn, it was clear that how Jori and his founding team at Linear were building was very aligned with how we were encouraging founders to consider building through indie (note — we are, sadly, not investors in Linear).

A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jori’s co-founder, Karri Saarinen, at his home in California for a wide-ranging talk. We covered everything from their time at some of the biggest hyperscalers of the last wave (think AirBnB, Coinbase, Uber), to net-negative lifetime burn rate (they’ve basically never spent the $52M they’ve raised), to their version of “Founder Mode”, to Finnish potato farming.

Building a Different Kind of Company Linear aims to build a company and product in a way that differs from typical Silicon Valley startups by focusing on product quality and craft rather than rapid scaling. By maintaining profitability and controlled growth instead of burning through venture capital, they’ve been able to build a venture-scale company without giving up optionality. The founders draw on their experiences at companies like Airbnb and Coinbase to avoid pitfalls they observed there, like culture dilution from hyper-growth. They’ve emphasized a small, high-quality team over rapid hiring.

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