Linear: In Search of Magic
When developers rave about the magic of a new product, sharing their love and enthusiasm entirely on their own, you know that product is special. That’s how the journey began when I first discovered Linear and the dream team Karri Saarinen, Jori Lallo, and Tuomas Artman.
One cold email to Karri, a coffee, and an afternoon in a refurbished apartment turned office in the Mission (where I vividly remember a sign on the wall that said “Kitchen” in front of office desks, because they were “cooking new ideas”) were the beginnings of our conversations about the pains and ironic “backwardness” of so many products we use for software development, even today.
Why were they so slow, cumbersome, demanding of time, effort, and knowledge around best practices and processes for software development? Instead of dedicated teams to customize and maintain your software development tools, wasn’t the original purpose of these products to enable creators to build and collaborate more easily and efficiently? Was a new generation of companies going to continue to accept the status quo? Or, in a world of bottoms-up adoption, would developers embrace best-in-class products that enabled them to collaborate more simply than ever before?
I was hooked by Karri’s vision to solve this at the root of the problem. He described the early innings of The Linear Method: the principles and practices that enable creators to build magical, high quality software. It was inspired by a deep obsession with craftsmanship — inspired by the team’s appreciation for tools of craft from a variety of disciplines from food to travel to art — and that they felt driven to bring back to the world of software.
It was clear that Karri, Jori, and Tuomas deeply believed that teams that have the time and energy to focus on work itself (rather than managing the tools we use for work) are best enabled to build high quality software — and they wanted to enable more teams to do so.
After Sequoia led Linear’s Seed round last year, we loved working with Karri, Jori, and Tuomas. They were deeply obsessed with product, thoughtful about the many small moments of delight weaved into Linear, and dedicated to nurturing our early adopters in a Slack group for fast product iteration.
That customer love continued to snowball over the last year:
So it’s no surprise that today, I’m thrilled to share that Sequoia is deepening our partnership by leading Linear’s Series A, and that I’ll be representing Sequoia on the board.
We’ve been lucky to partner with many developer tools at Sequoia that have redefined each of their own categories, catering to a wave of new developers with simple, delightful products that become integral to their day to day. We see the same potential in Linear to redefine software development with a product built for speed and delight.
Growing with a new generation of developers, engineering managers, and companies, we believe Linear will become *the standard* for software development for all companies.
If you’re interested in trying the product, check out https://linear.app/ to get started with your team. And if you’re interested in joining the Linear team, check out https://linear.app/readme. (The team is fully remote, both bicoastal in the US and transatlantic across the US and Europe — a true team dedicated to making products that make it easier to collaborate!)
We’re thrilled to be on this journey and can’t wait for you to join us on our quest to bring magic back to software! ✨
