Karri Saarinen remembers having his first strong reaction to design when he was 6 or 7. Saarinen is the co-founder of the software development tool Linear, a product known for its aesthetic point of view, and he says it happened while bike shopping with his family. “I would look at a lot of the bicycles and feel like, ‘Why are so many of these kind of ugly? I don’t like them,’” he says. 

“And then I had this thought, like, ‘Why do people do this? Why, if you make all this, if you go to the effort of building this bicycle and then painting it, why do you make it ugly?’ I didn’t necessarily understand that there is some kind of process involved, or like you need some kind of taste.” Saarinen couldn’t have articulated this at the time, but as he grew older, he realized that an object that’s off in some way could be a product of bad processes—disrespecting the materials, time and labor that went into making it. In some ways, this reaction is specific to Saarinen, who says he’s always been conscious of his sense of taste: “When I look at things, I could see, ‘This could be better,’” he says. But in other ways, this is a distinctly Finnish way of seeing. 

Saarinen, who runs Linear with fellow Finns and founders Jori Lallo and Tuomas Artman, says people in Scandinavia, Finland especially, are attuned to simplicity, with a preference for function and durability. Lallo echoes this, mentioning a memorable Finnish marketing campaign that said something to the effect that one (perfectly designed) stool is enough. “There’s more of a design sense overall … it’s everywhere,” Saarinen says. Although the founders live, at least part of the year, in America, Linear is a Finnish product. 

Finland was occupied by Sweden and Russia for more than 750 years, and so, until relatively recently, it was a poor country with a culture of national solidarity. Upon independence in 1917, one of the ways the new country defined itself was through affordable, functional design that referenced the landscape. Finland was thick with birch and pine forests and dotted with countless lakes, so long before sustainability became a global buzzword, goods were made to be durable, from wood, and with little to no ornamentation. Even though Finland started to become wealthy during post-World War II rebuilding, industrialization didn’t take hold until the mid-1960s, almost 100 years after it spread in America. This informs a Finnish aesthetic that prizes craftsmanship, both as a process and as an end. Between the three of them, Lallo, Saarinen and Artman mentioned Finnish companies like Iittala, Artek and Fiskars as influences. And they talked about what they perceive to be a specifically Finnish way of caring for others through designing objects and spaces. “Maybe it’s part of [being] such a small country that there’s this high sense of common good and equality as values,” says Lallo. “I think that also translates to [the idea] that good design should be accessible for everyone.”

Linear helps people build software more elegantly and efficiently so they can make products that are more intuitive and more enjoyable for the world to use. Saarinen is passionate about Linear’s mission because, he says, software is only becoming more important. If Linear succeeds in supporting more thoughtfully designed software, billions of daily users will benefit in ways that are subtle but cumulative. His vision is one in which countless annoyances are smoothed in the digital world, where both engineers and users feel, if not actual pleasure, the absence of frustration. “Unfortunately, I don’t think that software has gotten a lot better necessarily … in terms of the quality. A lot of people have problems with the products, and there’s bugs, and there’s products that are kind of messy, or just not really considered. Back in the day, care for the craft was there and we would like to see more of it.”

He thinks this “hacky” software is an outgrowth of the systems that dictate how it’s made, and Linear is designed to push engineers in a different direction through how the tool tracks issues, manages projects and creates roadmaps, among other capabilities. Linear’s main competitor is Atlassian’s Jira, which has more than 180,000 customers and is considered the legacy standard for software-development management. But Linear is a rebuttal to Jira. It is notably fast and only minimally customizable, defined by its meticulous design—in the fonts and colors, but also in the logic of how the product functions. Built for Agile workflows, Jira is exhaustively customizable in a way that some engineers find onerous. In contrast, the first version of Linear was designed to serve small teams, creating software with specific points of view. Linear calls Agile outdated. Agile has matured over decades from vocal rebel to status quo, which is both the opportunity and risk of Linear’s point of view. “We want to show there’s a different way, because, in our experience with most of the top tech companies, they’re not using Agile,” Saarinen says. “It’s not a thing.”

Linear’s founders want to do more than support better software creation. They want to bring back a sense of dignity to software creation, a job that today, Saarinen observes, can feel disconnected from a larger purpose. They want software engineers to feel satisfaction with and control over their work, something overreliance on project managers has chipped away at, Saarinen says. The founders want to elevate pride in craft, making something thoughtfully instead of quickly. This sense of quality has been lost, Saarinen says, to all those management layers, to “moving fast and breaking things,” and to endless process customization. It’s as though, he says with teasing indignation, the industry hasn’t evolved its practices since Jira launched in 2002. 

Linear’s early adopters were the founders’ friends, people working at small tech startups. They liked how it was sleek, built-for-them and fast. The product’s focus on craft, and on inspiring delight in users with focused functionality and design at first resonated with small and then growth stage companies, says Sequoia Capital partner Stephanie Zhan, who works with Linear, and now it’s taking off in enterprise organizations too. “There have been times where management requests to consolidate tooling or use incumbent products, and the teams using Linear inside of an organization revolt!” Zhan says. “That even happened within Sequoia itself, when our engineering, product and design teams rallied together with a full memo on why they would not use anything except Linear. That’s the resonance we strive for.”

Sequoia led Linear’s seed round in 2019 and Series A in 2020. And in late October, the company, still with fewer than 30 employees, released expanded functionality for enterprise and scaling companies. An open letter from Saarinen on the Linear website mentioned global players like Vercel and Cash App as users. Today, the founders are confident that just as Finland’s iconic, near-unbreakable Iittala glasses elevate so many dinner tables, Linear’s design choices and functionality will elevate so many software designs. “We want to make sure that the tool inspires them,” says Artman. “One of the reasons why we always wanted to design Linear to be beautiful is because if you have a project management tool that is beautiful, then anything can be [beautiful].” Artman continues, “That’s what I love hearing about … some customers say that Linear is an inspiration for them to build something as good as we did. And if Linear is always in the face of your engineers and designers, and everybody uses it almost daily, it’s a constant reminder: if you’re working on software, here’s a good example of what good software looks like.”

“When I look at things, I could see, ‘This could be better.’”

Karri Saarinen

“Maybe it’s part of [being] such a small country that there’s this high sense of common good and equality as values. I think that also translates to [the idea] that good design should be accessible for everyone.”

Jori Lallo

“Unfortunately, I don’t think that software has gotten a lot better necessarily … in terms of the quality … Back in the day, care for the craft was there and we would like to see more of it.”

Karri Saarinen

“That even happened within Sequoia itself, when our engineering, product and design team rallied together with a full memo on why they would not use anything except Linear. That’s the resonance we strive for.”

Stephanie Zhan