Transcript for "From 0 to $1.25B: How Linear grew without over-hiring": Well, I don't really have a show opening, but I do think maybe this we can just start, if you wanna introduce yourself with your name, your title, and the company you work for. Yes. I'm Christina Cordova. I'm a coordinator, the COO at Linear. We're a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Well, you've had this remarkable journey yourself from Stripe where you helped to find GTM there and build out some key partnerships to scaling notions, product like growth. And now you're at linear, and you've hit, I believe, at 1,225,000,000 valuation, with more than 80 people. And that's just pretty remarkable trajectory for anyone in tech. And I'm curious what drew you initially to Linear. Yeah. So the way I actually discovered Linear for the first time, was when I was at Stripe. Linear was one of my beta users on a product I was working on, actually. And one of the Linear founders, when we launched the product, I tweeted out something nice about our product launch, and I appreciated it. And I was like, I'm gonna follow this person, on Twitter. And, from there, I started to, of course, then get Linear News into my Twitter feed. I started following some other people from Linear primarily because I thought they were thinking about building a company very differently from maybe what I had seen in my time at Stripe and at Notion previously, specifically wanting to really focus on, like, having small teams, hiring, you know, the best of the best and keeping teams really nimble, and able to kind of move on to the next challenge very quickly. And then, at the same time, focusing on building a company that people wanna be at for a very long period of time. And it was a philosophy that I really appreciated, and a lot of the outcomes of that were, you know, Linear was profitable, also still growing very fast, and also focused on being really intentional about what customers wanted and what they should build and focused. And so all of those things to me were just, you know, things that, were really attractive in terms of company building. And if Linear could be successful and also do all those things and build a really great business at the same time, I would love to be part of that. So when I was thinking about, what I was gonna do next, I just literally shot a DM to Linear CEO who I hadn't met. I I met one of the other founders and said, hey. Like, I really admire what you've built and would love to just have a chat sometime. And then, you know, five months later, I was working at Linear. That sounds awesome. Also, you've kind of touched on this a little about how you were kind of drawn into Linear's philosophy and their early success. And I'm sure if there was anything in that that you spotted as you were, like, still checking the company out that was almost a direct contradiction of the playbooks you ran at either Stripe or Notion. One thing for me was specifically quality, as a value. And to be clear, like, we didn't even have values as a company at the time. Like, they were not, like, written down, but it was clear it was clear how much the company cared about this even from the outside. And so for me, I thought a lot about, like, initially, you might go to, like, quality of the product, making sure it's, like, bug free and that it's very usable and also scales and it's fast and, like, all those things. But I also thought a lot about quality as it comes to customer experience specifically. So, you know, there have been companies I worked for in the past where, you know, you write into support and it takes, like, five days for someone to get back to you. Or the support is outsourced and the reply is, like, not helpful or useful. And then, you know, you reply and then you have to wait another four or five days for, like, a real response or escalation or something like that. And one of the things I saw that, you know, they had, like, incredibly fast, like, support response times. That was something they talked about as a company. And then when I ended up talking to such the founders, you know, they were maniacal about not wanting to outsource any support and wanting to kind of con continue to kind of control the experience and make sure that it was very high quality for customers. And it was one of those things that where you realize, like, you know, most companies are probably not going to, like, invest deeply in that experience because you often only find out how poor the support experience is at a company when you're already using the product, you're already a customer. So it's kind of at that point, like, a little too late. Right? And, like, are you gonna switch to another product just because the support experience isn't so great? Right? So it just kind of, like, dampens your feeling about the brand and about the company when that happens to you, even though you don't switch away. And I think for them, the fact that it was just, like, so important, and I compared that to experiences I had previously where, you know, it wasn't as highly valued. That to me was, like, an indication of how much they value quality and also understanding that, like, values are not something that only apply to certain aspects of the company and not to others, but actually should apply to everything as a whole. And so, you know, for for me, it was it it was things like that where I was just like, oh, yeah. Like, I've been at companies where they say they care about these things, but we don't really mean them, or they only care about these things when it applies to certain aspects of the company and not in others. And, to me, that's, like, an example of where I felt like I really wanna be at a company that does that well, and I want that to be something that I care about, and that's something that everyone in the company cares about I'm getting right. And I I hadn't seen that up until Linear at any of the companies I'd worked for. Yeah. And so I mentioned previously, I just, like, kinda threw out, you know, the the metrics about linear success and how fast they've grown and to what valuation in in a short time. But I think it's another thing to live it as you've as you've done. And I'm curious if you could almost take me back to maybe the first, what you would call a big milestone moment. What do you think was the tipping point? Was it finding an early signal of product market fit or something even more specific with working with customers? But I love to hear in your own words when you felt you were gaining that momentum for the first time. Yeah. I feel like for me, it started to, I mean, of course, like there, there were, there were elements of the business already having momentum before I joined. Right? So kudos to everyone who is, building Linear before me because there was there was a lot that that went into it. But upon joining, I think similar to other companies I've been part of that have been product led growth oriented, started by selling a b two b product to, like, early stage start ups, early stage companies. Linear was, was pretty similar, and I think in all of these companies, the moment for me of, like, oh, wow. Like, this is really exciting, is when you have, like, your first, like, very large public company switch over to your product. And and then you start to see, like, the opportunity as ahead for the business, in, like, you know, growth, mid market, and enterprise companies going forward and knowing that this is just, like, the first of what could be many, many businesses who get to take advantage of your product who historically would have said, linear is for start up or Stripe is for start ups or, you know, whenever. But that big first deal, I think is huge for for a company, and I think puts a lot of, like, faith and and trust into the fact that you're doing things right, and it's, like, naturally leading to that growth into other segments in the market. Because I think as a start up, you you should intentionally be very focused. Right? So for Linear, it's, like, initially, it was, like, finding that little wedge within, like, early stage companies. Right? And then over time, like, growing and growing and growing. And then, you know, you get your first, like, big public company deal. And then, you know, recently, we had our first, like, Fortune 20 deal. And so it gets, like, bigger and bigger. And and and those all really pile on to make you feel like, okay. This is this is really working, and our message is resonating with the right people. So yeah. I think within that crux of, like you said, what comes next after that tipping point moment, I guess, get the exciting part of the start of when you made that when you hit that magical point starting to scale. In my impression, that's kind of where your role shines, especially in ops and kind of molding the organization, what specific organizational choices, maybe one or two, have you made that you think have just, like, really helped LeniRs keep itself so lean and continue to scale? Yes. I would say organizationally, one of the things we have done since the beginning of the company has been to have these, you know, very small, high leverage teams that are highly autonomous, and I think that really forces, like, clarity of ownership, reduces a lot of coordination overhead, and ensures that people are seeing a lot of their direct impact. So I've seen that in other companies, but I I think seeing that again here is is great. But the thing I haven't seen at other companies is having collapsible product and eng teams. So, you know, there's a big new initiative in the company. We spin up a team of engineers, product, design, etcetera, to work on that particular area. And once that is shipped out the door in maintenance mode, that team spins down and goes off to work on other things. So as, like, an engineer or designer, you get to work on the full product service area and, also, you get to work on things that are by definition because we're choosing to spin up a new project and start working on something very important. Whereas, I think at a lot of other companies, you can get very quickly into, like, a team with, like, a pretty narrow scope of work, and then you're just focused on the highest priority things within that scope of work. And for linear, it's like, no. No. No. This product surface area may not need any more attention. We have most of what we need here, but, actually, we need to go build this full new thing in this new area. And so, you know, instead, we're gonna apply our resources to, the things that were, you know, ultimately in the most need. And so that is is very unique at a lot of other companies. You know, you are on the, you know, product platform team or something like that, and then you're on that team for two years until you, like, move on to a different team or something like that. And I think in reality, like, most early stage companies don't really have a good idea of how organizational structures should work, and that ends up forcing, like, basically a lot of reorgs. Like, I've been through so so many reorgs in my time working at startups. And, you know, in reality, it's almost like every time we spin up a new team and spin down a team, on a project within engineering product design, it's almost like, you know, you're having, like, a mini reorg. But, you know, you don't have to call it that. It's not dramatic. You know? You're just moving on to the next thing that is highest priority for the company. So I think that, like, nimble and and lightweight, like, organizational structure and and way of choosing, work, to to get done is really critical to our success. Yeah. I'm I'm curious how you landed on that decision with the product engineering design team. Were they a part of those conversations from the beginning when you were discussing, like, how to organize it? Yeah. I I think it really came from our founders, like, first and foremost, just being, like, let's let's stay nimble. Like, you know, why do we have to call this a particular team or a thing? Right? You know, we designate our teams by geography, so, like, half our engineering team roughly is in Europe and half our team is in The US. And so, you know, you work with other people in The US as a US engineer and, you know, the same would be true as an EU engineer, and that's purely just because we want you to be working with people on the same time zone. So, like, that makes sense as, like, a team. Right? But outside of that construct, like, I think it's it's very much, like, a founder led first principles approach to saying, like, we don't know what our most important priorities are going to be in six months. So why should we organize, like, our team, like, as if we will or would know what, you know, those priorities are necessarily going to be? And the easiest way, I think, to remain nimble and, like, react to user needs and the market and what we're being pulled to do, is to kind of operate in this way. Yeah. That kind of segways into a point I'm interested in exploring around just the dysfunction of start ups because I think healthier dose of it can be a great thing and too much, obviously, like you said, can get chaotic. What's your stance on dysfunction being productive or not? And and how do you think leaning into that at linear has actually made you guys Yes. I would say, I guess, like, if you don't like some some ones of dysfunction, startups are probably not the best place for you. So, that's certainly a part of it. I think, I, like, really enjoy it, though. I like that, you know, one of our founders earlier today was like, I feel like our priorities are not in the right place and, like, when it comes to, like, hiring, for example, and we should just switch gears and focus on these roles. And the leaders of the parts of the company where, you know, they're gonna be getting less resources are like, okay. I'm on board. I'll take on more of the work myself. And and you just, like, shuffle. Right? And you think about how that type of change would happen at a very large company, and it's like, we're gonna we're gonna come up with some documentation. We're gonna have a meeting. There's gonna be an all hands. We're gonna record it. We're gonna make sure everyone's on board. We're gonna go around to all the teams and make sure right? Like, there's just, like, so much big socialization of, like, what needs to happen and why. And one of the things I appreciate most in a start up and, like, maybe why it can seem very chaotic is that you can shift priorities very quickly, which means what you're working on right now, someone might say tomorrow, actually, that's not the most important thing you should be doing, and instead, we're gonna work on this. And I think for a lot of people, that's, like, difficult, right, to feel like, oh, am I working on something? Like, am I working on the right thing? But I think as someone who works in early stage startups, like, that's a very normal thing, and we shouldn't keep doing something that's not a priority just because you started on it. Right? So one of the things that that you have to embrace is speed, you know, the ability to move without a lot of things in your way, and focus on, like, what's most important. But I think to be able to have that as a start up, and not have it feel like a chaotic dumpster fire all the time. You have to understand what the company goals are and what the mission is. And that way, you can understand, like, when this change is made, why we're making that change, and, like, very quickly make the move. Because the alternative is that you have no idea, like, what our vision is, what our goals are. And all of these changes are happening, and you have no idea why. And so you're just, like, moving along with emotions, trying to keep things going as someone told you to. And I actually think the best startups are startups where people are very empowered. So even if direction comes down, that says priorities need to change. Oh, this is chaotic. Right? Like, you understand why the priorities are changing, and you can respect that the company has to make a move quickly and that you're gonna, you know, get on board with it. So those are the elements that I think can make it feel like an exciting, you you know, type of journey and something that you can learn from as an employee versus making it feel like, oh, this is crazy and and you can't handle it and, you know, there's no rhyme or reason to to what a company is doing. Totally. Yeah. And going one step further, I think there's almost like a crossroads where I think there is the chaos and the changing of priorities very quickly, and they're happy to embrace it as well. But how can they tell if something is, like, a good, normal growing pain versus something, like, more actually dysfunctional? Yeah. Under I mean, it's funny because, like, when I was at Stripe, the API was going down, like, a lot. And, you know, if the API goes down, that means, like, our customers can't process transactions, their customers can't pay them. Not good. Core function is, like, high uptime. But it was also a signal that we were scaling. Right? There was a period of time when we'd go down a lot and, like, no one would write in about it because we didn't we didn't really have that many customers. Right? Like so it's almost when people notice that you're down, it's like people really care about us. People care about our product. Like, how exciting is that? Right? So, like, you can turn it into, like, a little bit of a positive that people really care about us now, and that also we needed to do something to fix this. Right? And it took a long time to get to a period where we had high uptime for our API. And it was very stable for, like, a long period of time, and there was a lot of effort put into that as a company. We had something at Stripe called code yellow, and it was basically like, you know, if this is a big important initiative and it's a priority, it's a code it's a code yellow. Right? And I think it's really important to be like, oh, this is important. And that's like a signifier of it in a way. When I went to Notion, we had a very similar situation happen where the product was going down. Like, we were scaling a lot, a lot of customers were coming in to use the product, and the product was going down. And, but this time, I'm like, I'm an old timer. Like, I've been at start ups for a while. And so people come to me and they're like, Christina, should we be worried? Or should should I start looking for a new job if we can't keep the service up and stuff like that? And I was like, this is a good time. Like, this happened at Stripe. It's it's happened at a lot of really fantastic companies that have to figure out how to scale while meeting the current demand of the product. And, you know, the the reality is that you don't build the perfectly scaled systems from the beginning most of the time. Right? Because you're you're not anticipating that amount of traffic, that amount of users, all that kind of stuff. And you have to build it later, like, after the users are already there. And so it's a normal thing, and we should go about fixing it and prioritizing it. If we don't fix this in the next, like, x many months, then I would say we have a serious problem on our hands. But this is a normal thing, and in some ways, also a good thing because it reflects that people really care about our product, that a lot of people are actually using our product, and and that's a good thing. But I think sometimes, like, it comes from experience, which, you know, I I hate saying in start ups because I feel like so many of us are, like, walking around with, like, no experience, and just trying to, like, manage things. But I think one thing that can be really helpful, and I I do this all the time, is, like, when you feel like you're going through a tough challenge at a start up, just going and talking to other people at other companies, and it's something that Stripe did. It's like, let's go talk to all the best infrastructure leaders in the world. We can get we can get a connection, you know, to these people and take them out for a copy and learn how they scaled. You know, like, obviously, like, Facebook had to scale really quickly, like, straight out of, like, Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room. Like, the companies have had to do these things before, and we should go find the people who work on those problems and see what they learned so that as we're trying to fix this problem for the first time, because none of us have done this before, that we really understand what their lessons were and don't repeat the same mistakes. So it's something I always encourage, I think, when you're going through a challenge is, like, you're probably not the first ever company to have gone through this problem. Right? So you should go talk to companies that have gone through it and see, know, what you can do to make it better. Right. Yeah. It's great advice. I like how tactical it is as well. I do you wanna switch gears slightly and jump into hiring as a topic? Kind of again around this idea that if I'd find it so impressive that Lanier has been able to stay so lean and nimble, and you kinda share organizationally how that's happened. But I'm also curious, like, what the hiring strategy has been. Is there a framework you rely on to decide when you're truly desperate enough to hire? Oh, god. Yeah. To me, it's really, like, when I feel like there's a bottleneck or when I feel like a role is going to be almost, like, a 150%, like like a a normal person's, like, plate. Like, do I say, like, okay, we should probably hire someone for this? So, for example, you know, we're hiring an enterprise marketer right now, and we have a few marketers on our team already, and I I think I try to be really strategic about when we make hires. I think we've only made one other marketing hire this year, so, you know, kind of really focusing on on what we really truly need. But I looked around, and I was talking to our sales team, and our sales team doesn't have competitive collateral, collateral for companies, you know, with thousands of employees that are in our enterprise market. And so there's just a lot that we don't have. And I was looking around at our team, and I was like, who could I assign this work to? And I was like, everyone's working on really important things that I don't want them to not be working on so that they can work on this stuff, you know? And so that was, like, probably the first moment where I was like, okay. Should we do this? And then and my next inclination is, like, can I do it? Like, you know, like, are there things I can do, like, putting on my individual contributor hat just to fill a short term gap, or is this a longer term, you know, a priority for the company? Like, are we gonna continue to have these kinds of things come up and this kind of work is going to continuously need to be done? Then you start to say, okay. This isn't just like a you know, Christina writes a customer story, and then we go back to, like, our normal, like, work. I need to spend a lot of time on something in order to get it right, and we're gonna need to continue to iterate on it for months or maybe years. And to me, that's, like, when you start to say, this probably is a full time hire, and we should find someone who can do it. And then I think you start to look at the team that you have today, and you start to look for, like, what shape a person. Like, do I want a person shaped with, like, the kind of experience and skills that this person on our team brings to the table, or do I want something maybe that we don't have on our team today? Because I think if you're looking for the latter, it's going to be harder to find because you you don't necessarily know what it looks like because you don't know it. And especially if you you know, I've never worked with, like, confirming, like, an enterprise marketer before. And so I've never hired for it. Right? And I'm gonna be doing this from scratch. So there's not, like, a network that I can pull from of, like, really great people in this role, people that I've worked with before, etcetera. So it's gonna be a longer search. So when I know that's going to be the case, then it's kind of like a first of a kind role, new skill set, and then also we don't necessarily have the network for it. I'm also more cognizant that I need to both do research on who are who are just great people in this role and how can I go talk to them? Not necessarily to hire them, but just to learn about their job and what they do and how, like, enterprise marketing at, like, company x is going to be different for how it is at Langner. And then second, start to build a network and get recommendations of people and know that this is going to be, like, a longer search because it's gonna be the first time that we've made a hire like that. So those are the things that I think are, like, most important, I would say. And, you know, I I really try to, like, not make a hire unless it it starts to feel like we are unable to accomplish things that we should accomplish or there's clearly a long term effort that is going to need sustained support and a particular skill set in order to accomplish it. Yeah. I do wanna come back to the point, especially if you interviewing folks who are in the role currently, because I just think that it's rare, and it's also, like, super tactical way of thinking about it. But before we move on, I I something struck me if you said about you having kind of enough context and knowledge to know what all the individuals on your team are working on enough to know that, like, you don't wanna move them around onto different projects. And that kind of you know, you have such a clear line of sight really into every team and into every new function. And I'm curious if you had any any techniques you think worked there on how you've been able to kind of manage that that worked well. Yeah. I mean, I think it's easier when I'm wearing my, like, functional manager hat. Right? Like, there are some functions where I'm managing, like, a leader who's leading that function, and then there are other functions where I'm, like, managing the team directly. So in marketing, I, like, manage our marketing team directly. So I'm, like, very close to their work because I'm I'm their manager. We have blood on ones. They talk to me about their work. Right? So I I have a really good sense of that. And I think as a manager, you always should. There shouldn't be anyone on your team where you're like, I don't know what they're doing. Like, it's what's that person working on these days? Because then I think you're probably not using your people in the wisest way. And it all also allows people to, like, coast, and it's just like, we do not have enough time for people to coast. Right? And we don't have enough roles for people to do that. I think, like, understanding what your team is doing is is really important to be in the weeds. I think also having done some of the work that your team is doing is also really helpful. Before I found a person to write customer stories at Lanier, I wrote the customer stories. And so, like, I know what it's like. I know that it takes a really long time to get the customer to approve the story, like, every time. Even though you think, oh, this is a this is a slam dunk. They're gonna prove it so quick. It's beautiful. And then here here we are waiting six weeks for literally someone on their comms team to say yes to us. So it's just like you've done it and you know that some of these things take time. So when someone's telling me this is taking a long time, I know that it's gonna take a long time from experience, not just because they're telling me it's taking a long time. So I also think that that helps you get the best out of people and know when something is taking a long time for a legitimate reason or because someone is stuck and they they don't wanna tell you why they're stuck, right, or for for some other reason, you'll you'll have to figure that out. But I think that helps to understand where you wanna dig in and really understand what's going on and why is this taking so long versus where you want to say, okay. I trust you here. I I know that takes a long time. So I think those are those are parts of it. I think when you're managing functional leaders and there are people on their team that you don't know as well. Right? I've I've pretty much been involved in every hiring process for every business go to market person at Linear. So everyone has worked with me in some capacity. And I think, again, starting to figure out ways where you can skip the the manager level and go one down below to understand what is the actual work being done. So the best example of this is probably our sales team. So we have a head of sales. He manages his team, obviously, but there are a lot of deals where I'm getting escalations about a certain deal. I'm talking to an executive at a particular company, and they're considering linear, and I'm having an executive conversation with someone at their company, and we're doing account mapping and all those things. And so I get to work with individual AEs on specific sales deals, and I get to see their work and understand it a little bit more closely and also understand where we can make improvements. So I think for every team as a leader, even if you're not managing the team directly, just really trying to get into the weeds of the work and understand, is this a high performing team or not? In the sales world, for example, I can't trust just because we hit our number that our team is doing great. Hitting the number is like one of many things that we have to do. So, you know, I think understanding more of that has to come from digging in a little bit deeper. Yeah. Absolutely. And as you kind of brought up numbers, I mean, there it's definitely a balance. Right? And I'm curious what you track in terms of performance across your teams, especially in this high pressure environment that Lendinger is building in. Like you said, you're keeping yourself lean and nimble. So what metrics are you actually tracking across the teams that you find actually matter? Yeah. Yeah. A lot of metrics don't matter. Well, like, I joined Linear and we were, like, not a very, like, data driven, metrics driven, like, company, and and one of my first hires was a data hire. Because I what I didn't wanna do was, like, bother an engineer who should be building something and say, hey. Like, don't you think we should have a dashboard with these metrics? Like, we should just have a data person with a a specialized skill set. Right? When I joined, I first started with, like, the obvious things to me that I could do on my own, which were ultimately, like, revenue metrics. So really trying to understand at a high level, okay, what is our ARR or MRR, whatever kind of matters to you? What's our new MRR every month? Like, what are we bringing into the business? What's our churn? What's our contraction? What's our expansion? What are we ending the month at? What's our month over month percentage growth? And those are, I would say, like, from a pure revenue perspective, like, most of the things I care about. And if you were to say, only pick one of those things, it would be the percentage month over month revenue growth. That's that's really all that matters. Like, you have to be growing at a certain speed to be a valuable company. And then you can kind of go into the details of, okay. Well, how many customers do we have? How fast is our customer growth growing? Those kinds of things, I think you can get into, a little bit deeper. What's the average price that your, you know, customers are paying? Is your average price moving up over time? Those are things you can look into, but there's a dashboard I check pretty much every single day when I start my work just to kind of see how things are going, and it's basically month over month revenue growth, and then on a daily basis, are we tracking to our target for the month effectively? Weekly active users, because I want the number of people in the product day to day, regardless of revenue, to be growing, and then new workspaces, which is basically our version of, like, new users, new companies using linear. And I want that to be growing at a certain pace as well, because in order to grow the business as a whole, more and more people need to be signing up for linear and trying linear. And those are the most important things. And, nothing else really matters that much, or you could look at a lot less frequently if there's a particular problem you wanna zero in on for the business. Yeah. Especially, I think it's relevant to when thinking about more external pressures on the business. So I'm thinking in particular board members or perhaps there's external pressure from customers and receive that pressure from them around maybe it's metrics, maybe it's hiring. How how have you navigated pushing back on that? Yeah. Like, push back on that that linear in particular. Yeah. Yeah. I think a very common, board push is always just more and more and more. Right? Oh, so you're growing, you know, x percentage month over month or you're gonna hit this ARR goal. Why not more? Or, oh, you're gonna hire a 100 people this year. Why not more? Right? That is the common push. And I and I actually think that's a perfectly fine push. Shouldn't you always wanna, like, push people's ambitions forward and get more out of, like, even what they think they can do? And ever since I've been at Lanier, like like, last year and and this year, like, we're gonna grow faster than we thought we would. Right? So maybe they maybe they're right that we, you know, should have even bigger, like, ambitions for ourselves. I think on the hiring front, though, sometimes the ambition is to, like, meet a moment. So for example, when I was at Stripe, we had to take the contact sales button off the website because there were so so many people contacting us, and we couldn't get back to them. So it was a worse experience if you reached out to us, because we said contact sales. Right? And we never responded to you, rather than just, like, deleting the button from our website so that you didn't have a way to contact us. So that's what we did. We were like, we're gonna get rid of this button, and that way, fewer people will reach out to us. And, you know, it worked, but we still had a lot of people reaching out to us and writing in to sales@stripe.com or something like that anyway. So, you know, we couldn't prevent it all. And a reasonable person would say, hey. Like, do you have enough salespeople to meet the moment, to meet the number of people who are reaching out to you and, like, want to use your product? And the answer to that question at that time would have been no. Right? And a reasonable person would say, yeah. We probably should have a bigger team. And if you extrapolate the numbers and you say, for how many people are reaching out to us and how big our business is growing, we should be, you know, x size and we're half of x. Right? And so then the question is how do you get there? And I think sometimes for certain companies, it's just about putting butts in seats. And, you know, it's just like, have do you fill the minimum requirements for this role? K. Great. We will hire you because, you know, that's what we need to do. You know, for salespeople, for example, maybe what you do is you say, okay. Like, we're gonna hire all of these people. We're gonna hire maybe 25% even more than we need. And anyone who isn't good enough, not maybe quoted by six months, we're just gonna fire them. A lot of companies do this. That is an approach you can take. We take a very different approach in talent and in hiring. We have a much longer recruiting process. We do work trials as part of our recruiting process. So instead of an on-site interview that lasts like four to five hours, you'll spend anywhere from two to five days with us paid working on a project, so that we can work and collaborate with you and understand if you're the right fit for linear. We do that across every single role, and that means our hiring process is longer. That means sometimes candidates drop out because, you know, they have an offer at hand and it's just easy to accept it versus, like, waiting around to, you know, do their work trial at linear. But we think it matters more that we hire the best people and that we have a really high bar for hiring, and we've always leaned into patients over pressure. And that includes pressure, like, on the board and pressure from ourselves. Like, we wanna be hiring faster too. Right? It it's it's it's really mutual. But sometimes I find that investors can often say, like, you should have this hire right now. Like, why don't you have this hire? And it's like, we just haven't found the hire that's the right fit for us, and we're not gonna make that hire until we find the right person for that role. Right? And I think a lot of that is because we need to understand what our values are as a company, and cultural dilution is much harder to undo than slower short term progress. Like, yes, we're gonna build fewer things, and we're not gonna ship as many things because we don't have as many engineers. But the alternative is that we, like, dilute the culture and hire a bunch of people who aren't very good, and we build products that suck. So I I think you have to push back with saying, you need to understand what our values are and what we care about and why we're optimizing for having a really high high ranking bar versus just wanting to put butts in seats. And so, you know, I think that's the best way to push back where you're fundamentally on the same page in a lot of ways. We we both wanna hire, but these are the things we're gonna prioritize, and we're not gonna hire just because you really want us to hire. You know? Well, I think that kind of dovetailed nicely with some closing thoughts. They had just, like you said, around Lanier's particular culture on craft, prioritizing craft, like you said, patience over pressure. Now that you've been like at several startups and several different companies that have grown, looking ahead, do you think more companies will adopt this approach that Linear is taking? Do you think it will remain unique? I think so. Yeah. Our I think our founders were were over smart to really do this in even in 2021 when everyone was hiring like crazy, during COVID and, you know, really saying, like, what? Like, do you want us to hire a bunch of people that, like, aren't very good? No. Like, he's the most amazing you know, 20 engineers came to us tomorrow, and we're like, we wanna join Linear. Like, would we hire them? Yes. Right? So I think for us, when we think about our values and and what we care about and what we're doing, it's important that everyone kind of understands what the focus is and if what you wanna build is these very well crafted products, and culturally, we wanna do that with really small, high leverage teams, and that means that, like, well, we have to have a high bar for hiring. Those are all part of, you know, our culture in a way, but that doesn't mean that we have to be slow when we could be fast. Right? So, like, I think we have to resist the complacency that can sometimes happen when, as a company, you've said, well, this is just part of our culture, or this is, you know, part of what we do. But, you know, you see companies now cursor, you know, $10,000,000,000 valuation with 60 people. Right? I think a a signal for how efficient you are as a business is the amount of revenue per employee that you have on your team. So things like that, I think, can be really good signals as to do we really need all these people? Just because, you know, Stripe of today is 10,000 people doesn't mean linear has to shoot for being 10,000 people. Like, we sell a different product to a different market at a different point in time, and we should strive to build a pro a product where a lot of people don't have to reach out to sales. They can self serve, where they don't have to reach out to support because our product is so good. Right? We should strive for that. It's not gonna happen for everybody for everything. But if we can have a lean team, we should really try to do that. And it goes along with the philosophy of so many other things that we're doing that I think there are a lot of companies out there that will potentially take this approach if they see that it's possible and it's working. Because, like, you know, Stripe can't have a really tiny team when, you know, you can't respond to your inbound sales request. Like, yeah, you're gonna have to blow up your sales team. Like, I that's what you're gonna have to do. But if you have a business model where a self serve model can get most of your customers on board, then you actually don't have to have a huge sales team. But it really depends on you, like, your business model and, like, what you're capable of. Like, Cursor and Linear and all these other companies are selling to primarily technical customers who like to read the manual, don't wanna talk to sales teams, all of these things. So we're in a very unique place where we might be able to try a different style of business model and approach that hasn't necessarily been done to to great scale before. So at the same time, like, maybe we change our mind on a lot of things along the way, and we're open to that too. Yeah. And that's worked interesting too for a lot. And I think my last question really is on that, word culture that's often the most squishy to pin down and, like you said, not just saying, oh, you have to make sure your culture prioritizes craft. I I am curious if there is you think one special thing that bonds the team at Linear that makes the culture what it is. Mhmm. Maybe to me, it's probably a a default to trust and transparency. We share a lot of context widely so people can make, like fast independent decisions, which to me means there's fewer approvals, more speed, higher accountability. And a lot of people who've gone to a place where there's a lot of red tape and then they come to Linear are like, oh, this is so refreshing. But the other aspect of the the trust and transparency is that there's also a lot of directness. Our founders are Finnish. They're very direct by culture. Like, that that's their culture. Right? And they have instilled it into Linear's culture. So we've all learned to be that way. So at other companies where you might beat around the bush and it might take longer to get to a decision. No, no, no. At Linear, we're like, we're here remotely. We're operating asynchronously. We're trying to move fast. Like you gotta be direct. There's just, there's just no other way to be successful. Those elements, I think, make us a very unique culture that you walk into and you're like, oh, wow. People are really saying the thing that maybe at other companies you wouldn't say, but I think it cuts through, a lot of things, and I really enjoy it. Thanks, Christina, for that fascinating conversation. It's not every day that you get to hear from someone who's built successful GTM motions at Stripe, Notion, and now Linear. So as far as myself, I'm Camille. I am a software engineer at Rippling who previously went through y Combinator with my own company in the winner 23 badge. Right now, I've been working on a new product here at Rippling for the past year or so. We're currently in beta, and we're about to launch, publicly. And so going back to the to the conversation with Christina, she talked about how Linear hires and organizes their team with an extremely high bar for quality and excellence in mind. And so if you wanna dedicate as much time as Linear to what matters most, which is, of course, your product and, therefore, the people building that product, you wanna have infrastructure that your company can run on seamlessly in the background. And Rippling itself is, as I'm sure most of you are aware, a compound start up that handles payroll, benefits, expenses, and IT management. So that's a great place to start. And if we take Cursor, for example, they do all of their HR within Rippling, and the founder, Michael, was actually able to run payroll himself up until a few months ago. So think about that. Like, they're now reporting over half a billion dollars in ARR, and one of the founders without any prior experience in HR or HR software was able to manage payroll and all other HR processes for the company easily within Rippling. And it's not just Tursar. Clay, Sierra, and 15,000 other startups are running their business on Rippling. And with the AI boom that we're in now, more than likely, you are now building with or on top of AI at the moment. And to show you a bit more about how one data point for your employee is connected to dozens of applications inside the product, One of our start up a account executives is going to walk through an example of one of the simplest ways to leverage rippling. I'm sure all of you will be familiar with and need payroll. Hey, everyone. I'm going to show how to run payroll with the Willow demo account. As you can see, I'm logged in as an admin in my demo, so everything is turned on. Gonna take your eyes over to payroll. The my pay tab shows everything for me personally. These are all my pay stubs, my bank account, taxes, settings as an admin, and, of course, accounting integrations depending on who you use for your general ledger. Taking over to payroll, as an admin, I am going to walk through how to run and approve payroll. As you can see, any upcoming drafts for all entities listed here, US and globally, all pay run type can filter here as well as pay range. Of course, create an off cycle pay run here. I am going to show The US employees and contractors for 150 people, for the pay date of September 15. We're gonna run it as a draft and click there. First, you'll see that it asks me to first approve the salaried employees at this under this entity. You can see the pay period, semimonthly, who it's running by. Of course, the pay period, check date, take action by, so approval to be payroll to be approved, any pay run settings, and then, of course, all the salaried employees, each employee and their role, what country, pay schedule, whether, you know, their time and attendance, hours are approved, salary, bonus, expense reimbursement, etcetera. Of course, you can create, an earning type here. This can be anything specific to your business, PTO payout, payable cash tips, device reimbursement, and how often that's needed, who it's applicable to, editable, of course, any of these off cycle pay runs or pay types. We do not charge, which is great. Some companies charge per, you know, off cycle pay runs or things like that, which we don't. Awesome. So we have approved all of our salaried employees. We're gonna do the next step, which is our hourly and overtime eligible employees. Again, similarly, paychecks, the earnings, deductions, garnishments, and settings here, even import a CSV if you have employees in another, module I'm sorry, software system. Next step here is an overview of this pay run. You can see semimonthly expected payment payment instruction, and then, of course, all of the approvals and who they are going to. You'll see at the top, it's flagging who will not be paid this run, whether it's missing details that Redfin will flag, funding summary, what big account it's coming from, the funding method, and the total funding amount. Scrolling down here, I also like to show the deltas that you can see depending on the deltas that show the difference between the previous pay run or the run before last, or we can filter it with no comparison at all. Although, some really like to see kind of the differences between the previous payroll. Scrolling down, anything that's unchained, terminated employees, as you can see, the gross pay is zero. You'll press continue here and that will approve payroll. Of course, you can see that this one is also on auto approval which will be in the pay run settings. This button over here shows all of the cash deductions and requirements from your payroll journal report for this entity, company overview, cash remitted, debited summary, employee tax summary. Next thing I wanna show is that paid stub. So, of course, in your payroll, which I showed before, but, of course, always on the employee graph, you can see myself, John, the chief human resources officer under payroll on the employee graph. You'll be able to see every single pay stub, filtering between the years and even when the next payday is. We'll click in here. This was an off cycle pay run. Every payroll will have a fun little gift and then show all of the earnings, taxes, PTO payouts, deductions for benefits, and total summary here for your records. Of course, you can download this as well, and all of it sits on the employee profile here. Cool. Alright. Thanks, Olivia, for that great demo. So as far as what, the next steps will be, startups, that are venture backed get six months of rippling free, and, you have a choice of signing up, with a link in the chat or getting a demo. And the first five people to book and attend a demo will actually receive a free Theragun. So thank you all so much for attending the session. Looking forward to see you, with those fantastic Theraguns. Thank you. Bye.