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• DDoS attack on Linear website |
• Use of Figma for ad-hoc AMA during downtime |
• Importance of agile design systems for small teams |
• Growing with larger teams, including enterprise customers |
• Shift from primarily serving small teams to also focusing on larger teams and enterprise customers |
• Plans to automate manual processes and integrate customer feedback into the product |
• Goals to provide a seamless end-to-end experience for users |
• The importance of learning from early users and adapting product development accordingly |
• Balancing support for smaller teams with larger enterprise clients' needs |
• Role of sales in helping companies adopt Linear and addressing their specific challenges |
• Prioritizing user education and guiding companies to use Linear effectively |
• Addressing the need for tools like Linear to bridge gaps and unify conversations within organizations |
• Future plans for improving workflows, triaging, and reporting within the application |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So Jori, welcome to Founders Talk. It's been a journey, the past four years, building kind of in silent; not much chatter about Linear and how you're building things... You kind of keep quiet and just build awesome stuff. Is that a good approximation of y'all's style? |
**Jori Lallo:** Somewhat. Maybe it's just the Scandinavian background and humbleness; we're not in press, or doing these kind of engagements either. This is the first podcast I'm being part of... But I think we've just mainly done our own thing. A lot of Twitter, I would say... So you definitely probably heard about us... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, very impressive. I mean, I think if you've never been to Linear.app ever, even if you've never used it, the first thing you think of is "Wow. Beautiful design, thoughtful user interface design", obviously thoughtful user experience, because you could just see the thoughtfulness in all those de... |
**Jori Lallo:** It's definitely intentional, or there's intention behind it. Going back a little bit to how we started the company, we started the company with Karri and Tuomas. Both of them good friends, and worked at different companies in San Francisco - Uber, Airbnb... Myself, I was at Coinbase for quite many years... |
With Linear, we're always being very focused. So just trying to focus first on the core fundamentals of the product, and get something working that we like to use, a couple of other people want to use... When we started Linear, we didn't -- this was like 2019. We were like "Let's just build. We luckily have a little sa... |
Later we, of course, hired folks, but we always tried to hire very slow. During the first year I think we maybe hired three or four people, mostly on engineering and building... But still, very focused on the building part. And now, we're still hiring very slowly. And that's intentional. We do week-long work trials for... |
So a lot of these things are -- we think about them, and it's easier to be a little bit more maybe like slow, or intentional and careful, than trying to fix stuff afterwards. Overall, we know this is a long journey; these products have existed for a long time. We kind of know how companies work, we kind of know how peo... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. What struck me as interesting was the way you describe yourself. You say it's the new standard for modern software development. Meticulous design, we've already talked a little bit about that... You focus on speed, you're opinionated, but flexible workflows... This seems, obviously, very soft... |
**Jori Lallo:** \[05:42\] I mean, on the higher level we just want to help people make better software. And issue tracking is the term that we've been using historically, because it's something that people already associate the product category with. Of course, it's not only that, and I think a lot of other companies m... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. I was gonna say, because when I think issue tracking, it's kind of like one part product planning, where you sort of take a roadmap or a trajectory of where you want to go, and you sort of map out user stories, and you plan things etc, you have the right kind of team members there... But the... |
**Jori Lallo:** There's both product improvements, and then there's bugs and faults that need to be fixed. Sentry, for example, is one of the intakes into Linear. You can create issues from your Sentry exceptions, issues can be created from customer support tickets, they can be bugs, or they can be feature requests. It... |
So it's definitely our playing ground, and we try to build out workflows into like the triaging, managing ongoing things, but also more on the other side of the coin is the project management piece... Which people kind of do all around; they might use other products to prioritize things, or get user feedback, and so fo... |
A lot of people use Google Sheets, and spreadsheets, managing their projects, and that's fine. If that works for you, cool. Ideally, we can integrate with that. Of course, we'd love to have a better experience for it, but we're not going to force anyone into it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, speaking of better experience - I mean, you've got some pedigree yourself. You were part of -- this is interesting too, about your past, Convore, and Leah Culver, and Grove... You know, way back in the day before Slack, we were trying to like "Can we just use IRC in a more modern way?" And tha... |
**Jori Lallo:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[09:51\] ...which I just wanted to touch on really quickly, while I was mentioning your past... But you had some history at Coinbase, and other places, and you said that Linear was born out of frustration, because there were no really great project management tools out there for developers particul... |
**Jori Lallo:** Grove was a chat product before slack came about, and that's just mainly - of my story, and my co-founder story, we actually worked on different pre-Slack chat apps among the team... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I wanted it to win, honestly. I was a Convore user. |
**Jori Lallo:** Oh, really? Okay, cool. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I think it was Convore \[unintelligible 00:10:51.01\] if I recall correctly. I can't recall the exact story, because this is probably -- |
**Jori Lallo:** Yeah, Convore was first, and then it was when I started as an intern, we started working on Grove. So I worked on the web client on that, and I was in the Python, Django scene early in my career... So this was a very, very fun experience, and it was a small company. It's actually -- it ended up just bei... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's cool. I was just like, I wanted IRC to win, and I felt like "Can we just modernize an experience on IRC that wasn't necessarily, at the time, HipChat, and a couple others I think that were trying to win?" I think Campfire was still relevant then. I think this is definitely pre-Slack, or at le... |
**Jori Lallo:** It was definitely pre-Slack. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. I wasn't sure exactly when that fell... |
**Jori Lallo:** I think it was before HipChat had sold to Atlassian. I remember HipChat - those guys, they were actually on the other side of the hallway in the office building where we worked, so... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that right? That's crazy. |
**Jori Lallo:** Yeah, it's a small world. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. So small. So close and so small. I just remember thinking, particularly for us - like, we have a free community, changelog.com/community; we want everyone to join, there's no imposters here. Everyone's welcome. And part of that experience is real-time comms with the community that has gathered... |
**Jori Lallo:** Yeah, well, that is probably one of the reasons why I didn't really go too far, is IRC is a pretty limited protocol, and you kind of have to hack around it. So in the end, I'm happy that Slack came about and built a better product and a better experience. Personally, I think why Slack really won the gam... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, that's what we needed from something like Grove. I want not just a chat on my desktop, but when I'm on the go, too. And I need to be on multiple devices... And IRC was primarily desktop-only. It just was not something that you could use on mobile. So we really needed that multiclient experienc... |
\[14:22\] That's interesting to think about though, because if you had succeeded, the market was still limiting, right? Slack is mainstream; it's used by enterprises, not just hackers. And IRC is very attractive to the pragmatic, which tends to be those around, or actual software engineering. That's just a thing. Becau... |
**Jori Lallo:** Yeah. Over the last decade we kind of went from protocols into applications. And there's probably clear reasons, too. Protocols are -- they're hard to evolve; they take time. And especially now that we're living in the era where we're kind of reinventing all of these tools... Take Slack, Notion, Linear ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How does that manifest then in an open API world? How do you see that playing out? |
**Jori Lallo:** What do you mean, like, open API? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, what's your perfect world? If that were true for everybody, if everybody had your belief of open APIs and accessible APIs for people to pull data out, or move, or whatever it might be, for whatever reason; or build something on top of. I think of like early Twitter days, when the API first bec... |
**Jori Lallo:** Well, hopefully, let's see, at least in the social area that companies will keep opening up APIs, and so on. Of course, it's hard to build stuff around them, because the products are evolving so fast as well. I still use Tweetbot. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that right? |
**Jori Lallo:** I wish Twitter would have kept their API more open. And hopefully, it'll be more open in the future. At least for business software, most companies do have APIs. So that's good. And integrating - even if they're not protocols, plugging different APIs together is becoming easier and easier with Cloud Fun... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Tweetbot is a good example... |
**Jori Lallo:** I'm pretty optimistic about it, actually. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. |
**Jori Lallo:** Yeah. As long as you provide Markdown, for example, and JSON is pretty much good to go... Markdown still works between a lot of apps. With Linear, we don't use Markdown as the data store format, or in our own editors, but we ingest and we output it, because we know that that's the format that's extremel... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[18:20\] Yeah. I think there's love and hate out there for Markdown, but it has won. So you can't deny the win, and you can't cry about it, because it's not going to change. I guess you can cry about it, but it's not going to change. So why not just work better with it, versus trying to recreate it... |
You mentioned Tweetbot, and I think that's a good example of the challenge, really, I would say, with an API... Because specifically with Twitter, they desire -- and maybe this is a challenge you can speak to, with like APIs being more open... Is that I think Twitter got to a point with their design team and experience... |
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