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Karri Saarinen
Professional Profile
Karri Saarinen is the co-founder, CEO, and designer of Linear.app, a software company that develops an issue tracking tool for managing software development.12 Here are some key details about Karri Saarinen:
Professional Background
Previous Roles::
- Principal Designer and design systems lead at Airbnb1
- Founding designer at Coinbase1
- Co-founder of Y Combinator-backed startup Kippt12
Education::
- Attended University of Vaasa, studying Management and Organizations at the School of Economics2
- Participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2012 batch with Kippt, the first Finnish company funded by Y Combinator2
Achievements and Recognition
- Received the Ruby Hero award in March 20132
- Awarded the Material Design Award by Google in October 2016 for the Airbnb mobile apps2
Linear.app
Karri co-founded Linear.app, which has quickly become one of the fastest-growing and most beloved issue-tracking tools in the world.3 Some notable achievements of Linear under Karri's leadership include:
- A team of 50 employees working 100% remotely across 16 countries5
- Used by tens of thousands of companies, including 66% of Forbes top 50 AI companies5
- Raised $52 million in total funding while remaining profitable with a negative lifetime burn rate5
- Achieved impressive growth with minimal marketing spend (0.5% of revenue) and a small sales team5
Personal
Karri is known for his focus on design, product development, and building with taste and craft.34 His approach to leadership and product development at Linear has garnered significant attention in the tech industry.
Highlights
What excites me most is how agents and AI are making @linear vision more true: the product building system for modern companies.
We’ve spent years building the foundation around context & goals, (customer feedback, docs, projects, issues, initiatives), coordination, and planning.
Now soon, we will be extending that to execution: writing code, reviewing code, automating code writing and product management.
The product system would be become:
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capturing requests and feedback from many channels in to one place, with their full context to understand customer needs and make plans.
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agent interface to that shared interface to company context and codebase knowledge to ask questions or task work
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orchestrating multiple Linear agents and other agents in that shared environment to to build from the context, or from the problems you see
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automatically noticing product gaps, routing problems, triaging, and resolving work as it comes in
If you want to work applying AI, agents to the best product orgs in the in the world, we’re hiring across engineering, design, and product.
also btw:
- Been profitable for years. We have made money, not lost money over the years
- Growth accelerating quarter after quarter.
- Employee tender offers when possible.
DMs open.

I use this feature daily. Understanding features, planning for new ones. And debugging user problems.
And team made 1,055 Code Intelligence queries in February, 2,681 in March, 4,267 in April, and is on track to clear 5,200 in May


