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**Jori Lallo:** And hopefully that, of course shows on the product that we put out, but also other things that we put out. We want our tweets and everything to be things that we also care about ourselves, and that we find inspiring ourselves. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I think it's a lot of brands and a lot of teams -- I said this before on a podcast, we were talking to Arun Gupta at Intel; he works as essentially head of open source ecosystems for Intel... And they have a really interesting story; you would never imagine it, as big as Intel is and how focused the... |
Today, to attract the right kind of teams, to build the right kind of direction, and hire people that have taste, that you can trust to make decisions, begins with telling your story in a way that captivates them, and makes them see the world the way you see it. Because it's all about beliefs, right? If I believe what ... |
**Jori Lallo:** \[49:44\] It makes my job easier, because -- yeah, of course, I believe in this, but... Building out companies and building startups is hard. Often you don't know what -- well, first of all, no one really knows what they're doing, or what is the best way. You just have to pick a way. But when you're sta... |
We think we have a lucky viewpoint into building a better product in that space... But now it's also about communicating that inside our own company, but also to people who want to use the product. \[unintelligible 00:50:56.01\] companies are storytelling in the end. Of course, Apple is one of the best ones in that gam... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure. |
**Jori Lallo:** ...but even as a customer, you want to get behind something. And for us, we care about craft; we want to bring magic back into building software. And that is something we genuinely believe; it's not some made-up mission statement somewhere. But luckily, that's where we are today, and it makes our lives ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** This is making me think about how much you personally get to work on Linear the product, versus Linear the business, which are two separate things. I'd imagine four years ago you were knee-deep in the actual product, and today you're probably a couple of steps removed, just by nature of growth, just... |
**Jori Lallo:** It's definitely on the founder journey one of the harder things, to figure out when to step down from certain functions and replace yourself. I stopped coding this summer, more full-time. Before that, I tried, but I always felt like I was behind, because I didn't have time for it... But luckily, one of ... |
Then I unlocked all of this time, or angst that I had for -- I was okay having stuff on my calendar, because I didn't have this other job that I had to perform anymore. So now - I don't know, I try to do a lot of things. So whatever I feel it's the highest impact for the company... It varies a lot. I do a lot of hiring... |
Actually, now at the end of the year we're swapping a whole lot of tools and we're building out a lot of internal tools, just to get rid of these manual processes that we have, or swapping out tools that we don't particularly, into better ones. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[54:15\] Dropbox. \[laughter\] I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. That's smart to do though, right? I mean, there's a lot of people who will say "Don't build internal tools." |
**Jori Lallo:** Yeah. But then there's a lot of brands who have shown that you should build internal tools... Because everything you build and maintain is "a distraction" from product. And a 30-person team - I'd imagine maybe you want to be 35 the next few months, just based on pace... But that's still a lot of people ... |
**Jori Lallo:** It's a balance, of course. Some things you want to buy. But it's also then deciding which product do you buy? A lot of new tools, the teams behind them are using Linear, so we hear about them relatively early. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Oh, nice. |
**Jori Lallo:** We're using a lot of those tools... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Any you can name? There's gotta be one you can name, at least. Maybe two. |
**Jori Lallo:** \[laughs\] On the sales side, for example, we're now getting to use -- Census, they've been using us. They're, of course, a couple of years old already. \[unintelligible 00:55:20.08\] is another tool for CRM space; they've been using us, and we're now about to start using them... There's a lot that I co... |
But then the other side is some things that we have to built on top of, or integrate into these tools, and integrate across different tools... So that's something -- I hope we can bring the team together, so that we have more continuous process on this, and everyone contributes to it, instead of there being a separate ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jori Lallo:** And then we don't have to hire that many people. \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, good luck with that, because I think that you're probably gonna hire a few more people... But what strikes me when I hear you say that is it seems a good idea, but I wonder how it will affect focus. Because, when you have product team folks not focusing on product, it seems an inefficien... |
**Jori Lallo:** \[57:51\] At this point, our engineering team is a little over 10 people... But we do move -- even when we're building out product features, we move people around the product area. So people get to work on different areas, and different projects, so you're not a team that just works on integrations, for... |
And now that we've been building some of these internal tools, a lot of engineers actually really like it, because it can be less stressful. The stakes are lower. You're not changing something drastic into product that requires help from design, it requires change management figuring out all the edge cases, and talking... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That leads to this YouTube I've found, which was the recent AMA, the live at Figma, which I just see -- it was just a month ago. And you transition from the old and busted, really awesome homepage and website, to the new, phenomenally almost double better - you can market that, double better... New ... |
**Jori Lallo:** Yeah, it happened roughly, probably a little over a month ago. So we had a DDoS attack. We hadn't had one before, we weren't completely prepared. Luckily, it was at the end of the day, so our engineering -- engineering team, designers and whatnot of course set up Slack and started solving it, and we wer... |
But on the day before that, we had launched our new website, our new homepage, and we had a dedicated URL, linear.app/homepage, so that we can share it on Twitter, and if logged in people go to it, they still see it. So we had put that out, and the tweets were still going a day later... And as we had this DDoS going on... |
So I just asked our web engineer who built the site, and our designer, "Hey, guys, can you put up a public Figma file of the design that we can redirect this one path into it from our Cloudflare worker?" \[unintelligible 01:01:37.20\] it's going to be a weird experience when they land into Figma. The team was a little ... |
\[01:01:59.16\] I went to have dinner at that point, but the party kind of got started, and people joined the Figma file, and our team basically did an ad-hoc Ask Me Anything by purely -- of course, without audio or anything, people were using Figma's commenting system to ask questions, and our team was writing notes o... |
So it was not people designing together, but it was like a video of this ad-hoc thing that just happened to happen. And luckily, we were able to resolve the DDoS, and later we brought the site back up... But this was one of those extremely nice things that just kind of happened without any design. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, it was interesting to watch, that's for sure, because I was like "What is exactly happening here?" But it also gave us a tour through your Figma file, which obviously is designs of the interactive website that you see at linear.app. It's not the real thing, but you can, as you said, comment in... |
**Jori Lallo:** Yup. And also, maybe gave people a little bit of peek behind the curtains how we do things, just because they saw the iterations that went into them, and also saw some of how we use Figma and how we use our design system, which is not that complicated, I think, even when it comes to engineering and buil... |
Of course, we want to talk a little bit more how we do things, because I think sometimes I realized that people have misconceptions of how we build out things, or how we think about things. I've heard, for example, stories where some founders think that "Oh, we want to build this feature like Linear. Let's use a couple... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, that also gives you a chance to change, too... Because if you put so much ceremony and so much investment into it, and it's like "Well, six months from now this isn't really working. We want to make some changes", it's harder, because you've built yourself a Titanic, versus a speedboat. And sp... |
Very interesting... So what are some of the goals for you personally, Linear, for the future? I know where you're at now, 30-ish people, building intentionally, hiring as fast, but slow as you can, with intention, getting the right kind of people that have taste on the team, so that you can make wise decisions, and giv... |
**Jori Lallo:** \[01:05:53.19\] Trying to grow with our customers, I would say. Linear's being used by larger and larger teams all the time, some of them we have as public references, for example Vercel, and even Cash App; their engineering team is using us. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I love Cash App. |
**Jori Lallo:** Those are much, much bigger organizations than we are, and they have different kinds of needs. There's a new stakeholders, or new user profiles of the product. Of course, we started building for the ICs, for the engineers, for the designers, but now we have directors, and product managers, and so on. Th... |
So we're trying to figure all that stuff out. Also, how to automate some of these more manual processes that people have, and integrating -- like, building more things from customer and like other inputs into the output that is the product. We want that end-to-end experience to be really well, to be really good... And ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. So Vercel, Cash App, or big teams... What stage is Linear right now in terms of acquisition customer type? While those might be bigger teams, would you say that you have been, and been better at smaller teams, say 5, 10, 15, 20 people, maybe 100 people on a team? Vercel and Cash App are obvi... |
**Jori Lallo:** We want to serve both. The small teams are where we started, and we want to build a really good product for them going forward. But of course, some of our focus is also serving these larger teams of several hundred people and thousands of people. But we're not trying to leapfrog into being the tool for ... |
The beauty of startups and building for growth stage companies is they're growing... We're just in it for the ride, almost. We try to learn from them, what do they need, and how can we make the product better for them, instead of artificially try to leapfrog in front of it. So we've been very fortunate on just trying t... |
Of course, when we get to larger companies, people who want to adopt Linear inside the company, they have their own hurdles. These organizations are extremely complicated, and that's where sales comes in as well for us. It's not us spamming people with email, like cold emails of buying Linear. It's more about helping t... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:09:35.10\] I would imagine, since you mentioned earlier that you play a role in working with sales -- because you said you're not coding as often; I imagine that part of what you do is work with sales on maybe specific sales scenarios. And so maybe you've got your eye on a couple of different "... |
**Jori Lallo:** Yeah, of course, there's a few of those companies that we've been talking to for a while, and trying to figure out what they need, and when we could serve them... But then I work with actually other founders, both companies relatively small stage, where they're picking up something, like learning how to... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:12:44.14\] Yeah, I would imagine, because it seems like Linear has the opportunity to sort of bridge gaps, to unify some of the conversations, to unify some of the wins, which I think is something that you all do with your changelog, which is celebrating wins. I think that if Linear helps those... |
**Jori Lallo:** And people are builders... You know, we love building. Software engineers, they love coding; they love what they do often. And it's -- yeah, you should celebrate the small wins and accomplishments, and the details that you get right in your products, no matter what the product is. So we want to enable p... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What can we share in closing? What's on the horizon for you, that not many people know about, that you can share? Not so much an absolute secret, but -- I know you don't really talk too much of the future, but what's something that people can expect in, say, January or February, that you know you're... |
**Jori Lallo:** I don't think there's going to be any drastic changes, but we're definitely trying to focus on improving the workflows that we have inside the application. Some things that we've been thinking a lot is how triaging for example happens,; when new things come in, how do you figure out if you have the righ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Very cool. Well, Jori, thank you so much for coming on and deep-diving in some of these topics with me. It's been fun catching up with you, learning about your journey, learning about some of the crossover we had with Convore, and other things... That's really interesting, to see some of our paths i... |
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