Key Takeaways
- Saarinen is the 38-year-old CEO of project management startup Linear.
- Linear, which was valued at $1.25 billion in June, is a remote company that offers five weeks of paid time off per year and four months of paid parental leave.
- At the heart of Linear’s success is the belief that great products don’t come from nonstop hustle, but from a fulfilling life outside of work.
Silicon Valley’s infamous 996 work schedule (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week) holds little appeal for Karri Saarinen, the 38-year-old CEO of project management startup Linear.
“We haven’t implemented that kind of culture, and I don’t personally believe it produces the outcomes I want,” Saarinen says in a new interview with Entrepreneur.
Instead, Saarinen asks employees to work the standard 40 hours, with generous perks. Linear, a remote company that offers five weeks of paid time off per year and four months of paid parental leave, is proof that it’s possible to build a world-class tech business without sacrificing worker wellbeing. The startup’s 100 employees are spread across 10 different time zones, from the U.S. to Finland.
Linear’s core product is a system to coordinate work in companies. It offers a project management issue tracking tool as well as a code review tool. The startup was last valued at $1.25 billion in June after raising $82 million for a Series C funding round, bringing its total funds raised to $134.2 million. More than 2,000 companies, including OpenAI, Cursor and Block, rely on the startup’s software tools, according to Saarinen.
Saarinen sees the urgent rush in AI as a race that won’t end soon, and says companies that adopt 996 work schedules and other “hustle culture” methods risk burning out staff in pursuit of speed. Plus, the output from demanding companies is “actually not that good,” Saarinen says.
“People are rushing too much and launching things that don’t quite work,” he says. “In our company, we always try to err on the side of quality, not quantity.”
Saarinen himself prioritizes work-life balance. Instead of a standard hour-long commute to the office, he spends the first hour of his day playing with his 3-year-old son before logging on for work remotely at 8 a.m. “With remote work and working from home, you have the ability to participate in family life as well,” he explains.
He ends his day at 4 p.m., but sometimes logs on for an extra hour of work between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. as needed to answer Slack messages and emails.
Proponents of in-person work, like Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt, say that working in the office allows junior employees to learn from senior ones by soaking in office conversations. Schmidt said earlier this year that tech workers had to make “some tradeoffs” between work and life to succeed in the industry.
Meanwhile, companies like Amazon and AT&T have called workers into the office full-time this year, saying that the move would strengthen company culture.
Saarinen, who previously worked as a designer at Coinbase and Airbnb, decided to make Linear a remote company back when co-founding the startup in 2019, before the pandemic and the remote boom. The practical reason was that building a company was a 10- or 20-year journey. Linear got started in San Francisco, but Saarinen couldn’t see himself living there for the next two decades. He and his co-founders couldn’t commit to one specific location for the long haul, so they decided to make the startup remote-based.
“Remote is not necessarily a better or worse way to build a company,” Saarinen says. “I just think it’s different.”
Going remote has allowed Linear to tap into talent outside of San Francisco — and permitted its founders to live wherever they want. Saarinen is now based in Southern California, while his two co-founders live in New York and Finland.
Linear’s culture builds in autonomy, as team members have the freedom to set their own work hours, rather than adhering to rigid schedules. “We want to hire people we can trust — and trust their judgment not just on product, but also how much work is enough,” Saarinen says.
Linear has grown slowly and deliberately. Saarinen noticed that in hyper-growth companies, hiring quickly meant quality of work could suffer because there were suddenly a lot more people who didn’t really know what was happening. He wanted to avoid that. “We tried to hire really good people and tried to hire them slowly,” he says.
Linear’s approach had an unexpected side effect — the startup’s revenue grew much faster than its costs, leading the company to become profitable for the past four years. Saarinen says achieving profitability allows the company to control its own path because it is not beholden to external investment.
At the heart of Linear’s success is the belief that great products don’t come from nonstop hustle, but from a fulfilling life outside of work.
“If your life is a little more balanced, you’ll feel happier, more fulfilled — and it shows in your work,” Saarinen says. “You’re not just grinding; you’re inspired.”
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Key Takeaways
- Saarinen is the 38-year-old CEO of project management startup Linear.
- Linear, which was valued at $1.25 billion in June, is a remote company that offers five weeks of paid time off per year and four months of paid parental leave.
- At the heart of Linear’s success is the belief that great products don’t come from nonstop hustle, but from a fulfilling life outside of work.
Silicon Valley’s infamous 996 work schedule (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week) holds little appeal for Karri Saarinen, the 38-year-old CEO of project management startup Linear.
“We haven’t implemented that kind of culture, and I don’t personally believe it produces the outcomes I want,” Saarinen says in a new interview with Entrepreneur.
