text stringlengths 0 1.78k |
|---|
**Jori Lallo:** Sure, but the people using Tweetbot, out of the whole Twitter userbase, is such a minuscule amount. And I think it's short-sighted from Twitter; I understand a lot probably of to business justifications. You don't want there to be a huge third-party client ecosystem where you can't show ads. But especia... |
I think companies should embrace their early users. This is more on maybe the SaaS business software world, where things start more consumery, and then turn more enterprisy, and you kind of forget about your early fans. |
I think Slack is actually one of the companies that has been able to walk that balance nicely. They are still extremely accessible to regular folk, but still, the majority of their business probably comes from more of the enterprise side. But they're doing both, while still being a business software example. |
On the other side, take Dropbox. I used to be a huge fan, but then they started putting up-sells everywhere, and even you easily can't opt out of it... And I was just like "Yeah, iCloud Drive", or whatnot. So there's multiple examples of that. That's something with Linear, even if we're going upstream, and selling to l... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[22:06\] Dropbox is an interesting story too, because here we're at odds again, because you're using Tweetbot, I'm using Twitter... The clients, in terms of the application I'm using... And then you're saying no to Dropbox, and here I am, Dropbox in my system tray here, or whatever the heck you cal... |
And I would say I do use Dropbox reluctantly, because -- I wanted to take a lesson from your things you've learned, which... One of them was talk to your users. I feel Dropbox does not talk to me. Not the me-me, the actual me, but more the royal me, of the people like me. Because if they did, Paper would be different, ... |
Now, we use it very specifically within Changelog Media to manage our workflows, and our editing... So we have large filebases that -- for example, this podcast will end up in the Founders Talk folder in our production flows. Our editor team will grab that, make the session, do all the things they do, edit the show, ma... |
**Jori Lallo:** Yeah. And I feel like that's completely valid. And you are like a business user of it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Jori Lallo:** For individual users, I would say that internet shared file storage between devices have been pretty much commoditized. You take Google Drive, or iCloud Drive, or -- you can put files everywhere nowadays. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** iCloud Drive is not the greatest experience though, either. It's pretty -- they're all pretty sad, honestly. There's really no winner there. They're all pretty much losers in a winner's game. |
**Jori Lallo:** But it's also like how much you care about it... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's essential though, right? |
**Jori Lallo:** I don't use files anymore. I have my text documents there, but sure when it comes to work, I think everything started being in apps. Of course, software, but I don't put software in there. That lives on GitHub. My design files are in Figma... I think it's one of those areas that are getting commoditized... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, since I mentioned one of your lessons learned that you can share, I think it makes complete sense, like hands-down sense to talk to your users, right? But there are some out there who build and don't. My gosh. Can you please extrapolate on that in particular? You mentioned build with focus, ai... |
**Jori Lallo:** Yeah, it's just like having your customers and users close to you, and having a dialogue with them is extremely important. For us, that was something we started from day one. Even before we even had the product out, we started doing change logs, public change logs. Putting out there what we're working o... |
\[25:53\] We never liked to talk ahead of time, or promise things that we're going to ship, because we kind of want to manage expectations. Plans change all the time, so you don't want to make people unhappy just because you said something and you did another thing. But a certain level of openness of things that you ac... |
Of course, not all of this -- it doesn't scale infinitely. That's why we have a customer experience team working our help desk, and everything... But still, we try to have a pretty tight \[unintelligible 00:27:03.03\] product, and also integrating the customer experience team into our product building. I think a lot of... |
At Linear we try to put same level of effort when it comes to hiring and running different functions within the company as we do engineering, because all of it is part of the same experience that you get. Whenever you're applying for a job, like talking to a recruiter, or you're reading tweets that we put out - all tho... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How does that manifest then? So let's say I'm on the customer experience team, or I'm out on Twitter, and I'm paying attention to our channels... And when I say "our" I mean Linear's channels... And I'm just -- I'm tracking the heartbeat of what seems to be either my actual user, a customer actually... |
**Jori Lallo:** In different ways. Our customer experience team - they might set up a call with the customer and invite engineers into those calls. We try to do that as much as possible. We will, of course, track stuff into Linear in terms of feature requests and whatnot... That's still not on the level that we want it... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[30:16\] Well, you're at 30 folks now; you're roughly four years old. You mentioned the first couple years you stayed pretty lean. You've hired slowly and intentionally... Do you give the teams autonomy? How do decisions get made? ...let's say in that example where our customer success team is talk... |
**Jori Lallo:** Yeah, you try to hire people that you can trust, and ideally, they're better at their job than you are. That's one thing. But when deciding what gets built and whatnot, there's of course different levels to it. Some small thing that someone complains, if you have enough context, or if you know how the p... |
Of course, some things we' re -- we're very good on saying no to things, or deferring things, unless we know what the way of solving it is. Some bigger things - we talk about them, we keep talking about them, and at some point they come on the roadmap. Right now, end of the year, we're setting up the roadmap for the ne... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, for sure. Taste is a great example. And nimble is a great example, too. I think the other word might be agile, but it can get conflated, especially considering the space you're in. But I think nimble is a great example of how you want to be. Because when I think nimble, I think ballerina. I th... |
**Jori Lallo:** Yeah. We change direction all the time also, when it comes to certain things. If you see an opportunity -- this is maybe not on which bigger product features you're going to build, but more on the company running side. If something, for example, happens on the market, you might do something differently.... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[34:21\] Can you speak to that process then? Because I think one thing that you mentioned in sort of the pre-call notes, in terms of a mistake, or something you could have done a little bit better was building that recruiting team. I think you mentioned three recruiters, one coordinator... Waiting ... |
**Jori Lallo:** We've been recruiting people for three years now... And kind of a little bit backstory... So for the first couple of years of that we did not have an in-house recruiter. Then for a year we did have one person. And today we have four people on the team. It just meant that us founders were doing a lot of ... |
For the longest time we only had one person on it, and when you're hiring for maybe four different roles, and trying to reach out to people, plus handling inbound, handling people in the process, coordinating that - that's quite a lot of different hats that you have to wear. So I wish we would have recognized it a litt... |
It's surprisingly hard to find really good recruiters. I don't know why, but... That's a role that I care a lot, and I work a lot with our recruiters, or I try to work a lot with them... Because they're like the first line of defense, or the people screening and getting people in, into the process, that you want to get... |
Of course, for the start, we did outsource it, and it ended up working well, but it's a very different experience than having that team in-house. And I just wish we would have done it earlier, and have invested more into it. But today I'm pretty happy. Maybe we could have less on it, but I'm happy that we have more res... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, the reason why I was digging deeper into that - because I think it leads to the ability, obviously, to add people to the team with taste, that you can trust... But four people a 30-person company - it seems a lot. That's 13% of your workforce. Right? I mean, if you were doing layoffs - which I... |
**Jori Lallo:** Luckily, we don't have to do that, because we've been profitable for over a year at this point, so... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Excellent. |
**Jori Lallo:** We're only looking to hire, although I still keep the hiring at a good pace... But no one's getting laid off, that's for sure. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I'm glad you spoke to that, because that's not what I want, for sure. Just using it as an example. But four seems high, is the point. I mean, four seems like a lot for a 30-person company. Is that normal, I guess? Is that common, to have a four-person hiring team? |
**Jori Lallo:** \[38:15\] When I joined Coinbase in 2014, the team was roughly 20 people, and they had two in-house recruiters. And they were both amazing. I'm still friends with both of them. And that can be a really strong asset for the company, especially if you're hiring for a lot of different roles, which we are, ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** When you say different roles, what do you mean by different roles? Quantify different roles. |
**Jori Lallo:** Different types of roles. So engineering, design, customer experience, customer success, sales, and so forth. We're probably hiring four or five different teams currently, and engineering is only one of that. So you'll want to have dedicated resources for each one of them, so that you don't switch your ... |
A lot of roles that we're hiring today are also the first time we're hiring for them... So it's a lot about learning "What do we want to see in that role at Linear?" As I said, we want every team to be excellent, so we just don't want to like "Okay, let's just get someone to do that." That's not how we work. We want to... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. How does that translate then? So if you're hiring for the first time for a role, the recruiting team - is it their job or part of their responsibility to sort of evaluate the process of onboarding that kind of new role, and that learning process? How does that learning manifest? Is it founder-... |
**Jori Lallo:** The recruiting team overall runs the process, designs the process, with founders, but also people who would be working for the team, or who is the hiring manager for the team. Of course, they have a lot of experience hiring for different kind of functions, and they can bring that to the table, and that'... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a challenge, right? I mean, it's gotta be probably the most perplexing challenge, especially as small as you are currently, to hire well, to have such great taste. I'm camping out here because the design is flawless, from an actual interface perspective. And then the software is amazing as we... |
**Jori Lallo:** \[42:22\] You have to use the time upfront, when you set up those new teams. But once you have the foundation, and they're part of your culture, and everyone speaks the same language - it's much easier to scale then. So you design products, but then you kind of have to design the companies as well, that... |
This is, of course, the first time for me to be in this role, hiring for different kind of roles... And same for my co-founders. So you're educating yourself at the same time as well, but trying to keep an open mind, and not just do what you saw at your previous company. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** From the outside perspective, you seem to be doing very well at it, so congratulations on the perception of success, even if it's not true, or if it is true. Because from the outside, it seems pretty awesome what you're building... Which leads me to the readme y'all have out there. It's Linear.app/r... |
**Jori Lallo:** The story goes back to when we first started hiring for Linear, roughly three years ago. We did have a version of this page that we called Readme... It was just text. It was just how we think about the world, how we think about building products, how we think about craft behind building things... And no... |
\[46:14\] We really care about the product details, we care about building out good products that people want to use, and sustainable software... And we're trying to communicate how we want products to be built. We know that there are older people who feel the same way. Of course, this is not the most efficient way to ... |
That page is -- it's not designed by me, it's not written by me or any of the founders. It's designed and built by the team that I get to work with every day... And it's an amazing feeling to come to work and be inspired by the people around you. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.