How Linear Grows
I've spent 6 months with the company to get you the low down on how they grow, build product, and operate from the inside
I initially made my name in the world of newsletters with company deep dives. Yet, I don’t do many company deep dives anymore. Why?
Now, when I do company deep dive, they’re only about really interesting companies (like Cursor, Notion, and Figma). Well, I’ve just found another company that meets this bar.
Linear raised a series C valuing the company at $1.25B earlier this year. The crazy thing? It did so with only 100 employees and 2 PMs. The task management company is taking on JIRA head on - and winning big clients like OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor.
They have an incredibly unique way of working that is worth paying attention to. And the way they’ve built with AI is a great case study. So that’s what we’ll explore today.
How did they pull this off? And what’s next for the company?
Today’s Piece
I believe deeply that product sense is not some magic. It’s something you can learn. And one of the best ways is to learn how the best products do things.
So today, we’re going to help you improve your product sense with a deep analysis. Screen-by-screen. Into their product culture. Into their strategy. I’ve been working on this piece over 6 months!
I had exclusive chats with their CEO, COO, Head of Product, and Head of Design. Here’s what I learned.
The Story of Linear
Detailed screen-by-screen look at Linear's PLG Iceberg
How Linear Builds Product
Linear’s Market Position
1. The Story of Linear
Chapter 1: From Big Tech to Breaking Free
The story begins in 2018 San Francisco.
Three Finnish techies, working cushy jobs at Silicon Valley’s hottest companies, were fed up.
Karri Saarinen was leading design systems at Airbnb. Jori Lallo was a senior engineer at Coinbase. Tuomas Artman was building infrastructure at Uber.
They all had the same problem: the project management tools they used sucked.
“All big project management solutions were built for management,” Tuomas explained. “As a manager, these solutions work pretty decently. However, many software engineers and ICs disliked all of them.”
The three had known each other for years. Karri and Jori had even founded a Y Combinator startup together called Kippt, which Coinbase acquired in 2014.
They’d taken those Big Tech jobs intentionally.
“I consciously took jobs in Silicon Valley to prepare for my next startup,” Tuomas said. “I wanted to learn, to build up pedigree and to create a financial buffer.”
That pedigree would prove crucial. When you have founders from Airbnb, Coinbase, and Uber, investors listen.
But first, they needed to build something people actually wanted to use.
Chapter 2: Building in Their Underwear (Sort of)
Karri and Jori reflected on building a personal product at Kippt, and realized they needed to target a bigger market.
This time around, Karri explained to me, “we wanted to build this thing, but we wanted to make sure it’s a big market and valuable, too.”
In early 2018, the three founders started talking seriously about project management.
They realized it fit perfectly:
ICs hate their current tools. Every software engineer complained about Jira, Asana, and the rest. But managers thought they were fine. The disconnect was massive.
There was a business opportunity. Atlassian had grown huge off Jira. The market was enormous.
They started building.
Unlike their first startup, they didn’t rush. They bootstrapped initially, building carefully for their friends at small startups.
The early version of Linear was highly opinionated. It wasn’t trying to be everything to everyone.
“We design it so that there’s one really good way of doing things,” Jori explained. “Flexible software lets everyone invent their own workflows, which eventually creates chaos as teams scale.”
In 2019, they raised a small $4.2M seed round from Sequoia. Then they launched into private beta.
Chapter 3: The Viral Growth Phase
By June 2020, Linear exited private beta. The response was immediate.
Linear’s Product Hunt launch got 400 upvotes. Engineers couldn’t stop talking about how fast it was. Designers loved how beautiful it looked. Product managers appreciated how simple it was to use.
Linear capitalized with a $13M series A from Sequoia.
Word continued to spread. OpenAI started using it. Then Ramp. Then Cursor.
By June 2021, just two years after founding, Linear announced it was profitable.
“We have had negative lifetime burn,” CEO Karri Saarinen tweeted. The company had more cash in the bank than they’d raised.
In 2023, they raised a $52M Series B at an $400M valuation.
In 2025, they raised an $82M Series C at a $1.25B valuation.
And in the short order of 7 years, they’d accomplished something remarkable: building a unicorn on their own terms.
The best part? They still only had 87 employees.
Chapter 4: Present-Day Success
Today, Linear has over 18,000 paying customers.
The roster reads like a who’s who of tech: OpenAI, Perplexity, Cursor, Ramp, Vercel, Loom, and thousands more.
While Linear doesn’t disclose revenue, the company is growing fast and has more cash than they’ve ever raised.
And although they’ve gone to the enterprise, they’ve stayed lean. Only 20% of employees are in sales. Linear has stayed true to its product-led roots.
But the most interesting development came this summer.
Linear launched Linear for Agents. A platform that treats AI agents like Cursor, Devin, and Codegen as first-class users.
You can assign issues to agents. They can open pull requests. They update status automatically.
“25% of Linear workspaces now use agents,” Karri shared. “60%+ in enterprise.”
It’s not just a feature. It’s a glimpse into how software will be built in the future.
In the rest of the deep dive, we’ll cover screen-by-screen analysis of Linear, how its product team works, and look at its market position. This is how you develop product sense.
2. How Linear Grows
Linear has a classic PLG motion. So let’s break down the 7 layers of their PLG engine:
Go-To-Market
Information for Decision
Free-to-Paid Conversion
Activation
Retention
Monetization
Expansion
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Product Growth to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.