Introduction to Alphalist Podcast -- Tobias Schlottke: Hello, friends. This is the Alphalist Podcast. I am your host, Tobi. The goal of the Alphalist Podcast is to empower CTOs with the info and insight they need to make the best decisions for their company. We do this by hosting top thought leaders and picking their brains for insights into technical leadership and tech trends.
Tobias Schlottke: If you believe in the power of accumulated knowledge to accelerate growth, Make sure to subscribe to this podcast. Plus, if you're an experienced CTO, you will love the discussion happening in our Slack space where over 600 CTOs are sharing insights or visit one of our events. Just go to alphalist. com to apply. Tobias Schlottke: Welcome to the Alphalist podcast. I am your host, Tobi. Meet Tuomas Aertmann, CTO of Linear --
Tobias Schlottke: And today I have a very special guest to talk about building better software, which is a great topic. Um, and, um, the guy in front of me here is, uh, Tuomas Aertmann, and he's the CTO and founder of Linear. Uh, whoever don't know Linear, um, must have slept the last years, uh, somewhere.
Tobias Schlottke: Um, uh, but, um, it is a competitor of, uh, various, uh, product management tools and tech, let's say. A very famous one. And, uh, Lydia is, is, is special because they, they just started a few years ago and then they absolutely nailed it in funding. So they, they, they raised like 50 million from very, very well known angels and VCs, such as Sequoia or Index Ventures, and they are all Finnish.
Tobias Schlottke: So European founders, um, and very focused. on the details and, uh, the, the, the, the nitty gritty, uh, things of handcrafting very good software. So Tuomas, did I, did I introduce you properly? Tuomas Artman: Oh, yeah. Thanks so much for the introduction. Like I think it was, you know, it was a proper introduction. That's literally in a, in a box what we, what we try to do. Tobias Schlottke: Okay, good. Tuomas' Early Journey into Computing --
Tobias Schlottke: So we talk about Linear later and first talk about yourself. How did you. get where you are. Like, what is your, what is your nerd path? Let's start with that. Like, how did you get into computing and why are you doing that? Why are you fascinated by machines? Um, and, um, yeah, why do you actually build better software?
Tuomas Artman: Um, yeah, I mean, it's, it's a pretty long story. I think, like, I've been in the industry now almost for 30 years, um, as, as sort of a professional. But it started before that. Like, it started when, um, my father bought me a Commodore 64. Um, back in I86, I think. Um, and literally when I saw that box, I was like, I was fascinated.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and from there on out, like, I, I didn't sort of realize that I want to be a programmer, you know, the moment I saw it. Um, but I, I wanted to use it. I wanted to be involved somehow in, in, in computers. Um, and, uh, I obviously, you know, did what, what you usually do, play, play games, um, on your Commodore 64.
Tuomas Artman: Then I got an Amiga, um, you know, played some more games on that and then it became so interesting to sort of, you know, figure out how to make games myself. Um, and that's sort of my path into, you know, first a bit of design, um, and then into, um, into programming and engineering, um, per se. Um, so it started with games.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and I've done a few games, you know, in my professional career as well. And it's something that, you know, still, still sort of interests me. . Um, but um, that was the, that was where I, where I started off, off at. From Consulting to Startups -- Tuomas Artman: Um, and when I, you know, got out of high school, I, um, I went to study, I studied for a week, computer sciences.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and then I got a job. Um, and I realized that, you know, back in that was 96. That in 96, like the computer studies that you got weren't really great. Like, um, they were, they were teaching Pascal and it was like. Why should I learn Pascal when there's Java and when there's, you know, well, JavaScript wasn't around, but, you know, all the other things like C and stuff like that.
Tuomas Artman: So, um, I sort of realized that, you know, um, working is probably a better, better school at that point in time than, than going through computer sciences. So I took a few courses here and there that were interesting. But otherwise, I've learned by just, you know, creating things, um, and I've been in the sort of, you know, uh, consulting industry for way too long.
Tuomas Artman: That's maybe one of my regrets that I have in life. Um, I spend Altogether, like 15 years consulting, um, nine years with my own company, um, but it took me like, you know, ages to understand that that's not really what I want to do. Like, I want to build something, you know, either off of my, of my own, like something that I own, that I, that I, um, you know, that I created, um, or, or something where I could sort of, you know, just. Experience at Groupon and Uber --
Tuomas Artman: work a long time on like consulting always with about like three months projects that you would you know finish throw the fence and then you know move on to the next one um and at some point i longed to sort of really make an impact in working on on one thing for for a longer longer period of time so i did a few startups in finland moved to china for a year did games and animations and toys for the local market there which was interesting culture wise professionally maybe not so much um in 2010 i think that was Um, and then I got the opportunity to move to Silicon Valley, um, to join Groupon.
Tuomas Artman: Um, thankfully not on the Groupon business, but, you know, I was working on a point of sale application for high end restaurants. So they had, sort of, iPads installed in the restaurant. Um, and you need to take, sort of, orders and swipe credit cards and send those orders to the kitchen. have some sort of synchronization engine between, uh, between those, those, those, uh, point of sale, uh, applications.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and you know, a few years later when I got my green cards, um, and I was freely to, you know, uh, or I was free to select where I actually wanted to work at because, you know, my visa was tied to Groupon at that point in time, before I got my green card, um, then I switched over to Uber and spent five years, um, doing, you know, mobile engineering and figuring out how to, how to scale mobile engineering at Uber, um, which, you know, was a wild ride, um, when I joined, I think we were 15 mobile engineers.
Tuomas Artman: When I left, we were 400. Um, so it was, um, you know, a pretty, pretty interesting and challenging time. Like, you know, lots of learnings, um, went through hyper growth, know that I never want to go through hyper growth again. Um, and that's sort of, you know, what, what we try now to do with Linear, like hyper grow, obviously the business, but sort of not headcount. Founding Linear and Its Philosophyx --
Tuomas Artman: Um, and, um, yeah, five, six years ago, we started talking about, about project management and issue tracking with, with Kari and Jerry, my other co founders. Um, and here we are. Tobias Schlottke: Yeah, it's an interesting story. Um, I mean, uh, like many aspects of it. Um, I obviously like the, the decision most that you decided against hypergrowth and, and just focus on a good product in a small team, right?
Tobias Schlottke: Uh, even with like, equipped with lots of money that doesn't, doesn't like normally doesn't play, play well together in the last two years, maybe got a bit more popular. Yeah. Let's say, um, trendy. Uh, and you kind of, yeah, for sure. Like we're, we're leading the trend, right? Tuomas Artman: I don't think like we sort of stumbled into this.
Tuomas Artman: Like, I don't want to make, you know, us look like, you know, um, people sort of really understood what's going to happen with the, with the visa industry and, um, with startups in general. Challenges and Strategies in Software Development -- Tuomas Artman: Um, but the way we started the company, like we immediately realized that, um, we're not, building anything novel, anything new.
Tuomas Artman: Like we're competing in an existing market, um, and a market that has existed for, you know, 25 years at that point. Um, project management solutions were, you know, all over and there's, there's hundreds of them. Um, so we, we, we did understand that our way of winning was to create a much, much better version of, you know, a project management tool.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and that's what we set out to do. And with that, um, you know, came all these, um, these constraints, like you, you can't just hire super quickly and then grow super quickly the headcount if you want to keep the quality, um, as high as, as we want to keep it, like you need to be super diligent in hiring and really make sure that you get like minded people who sort of love the the craft of software and want to create something beautiful.
Tuomas Artman: Um, even though we're working in project management, like, you know, we still wanted to create a beautiful, beautiful piece of software that, um, would sort of, you know, we didn't dare to think that it would sort of set some sort of standards and how people would sort of, you know, design their application in the future.
Tuomas Artman: But, you know, the hope was always there. And I think we've, we've, you know, somewhat achieved that now. Um, like you're a good example of, um, sort of a well working web application. Um, uh, today, which is, which is awesome, but just, you know, literally what we wanted, wanted to do, wanted to build something that is much, much better.
Tuomas Artman: Um, you know, not only from sort of a product standpoint, but also from a design and UX standpoint. Um, and therefore we, we didn't grow as quickly. Um, and that's probably also the sort of biggest reason why, um, we, we still have, you know, so much money left in the bank and why we turned profitable so early as we, as we did.
Tuomas Artman: Um, I think we've been profitable now for four years. Thanks. Um, and that was sort of way beyond, you know, the downturn in, in, in VC money when, when money got scarce. Um, and now everybody is sort of, you know, looking for companies that are profitable and all the VCs sell their, you know, investments that, you know, they need to path or at least told like now it's probably changing again.
Tuomas Artman: Like, you know, who will know what, what, what happens a year from now? Um, but at least in the past few years, like. You know, VCs have told their, their, uh, their companies to figure out a way to get profitable because money's not easy. You better Tobias Schlottke: think of rule of 60 instead of rule of 40, right? That's it.
The Importance of Quality and User Experience -- Tobias Schlottke: Interestingly, um, there's this, this race for quality, um, Like, I was always, I was thinking about it, um, like yesterday at lunch, I was meeting a friend who built a translation tool and send it to, uh, like, uh, sold it to, to some private equity fund, um, and, and he basically said that, like, in, in his industry, which is also very boring industry, right?
Tobias Schlottke: Like translation tools, um, This, this, this race for quality is, is kind of a cycle, like, which is, which is like an endless loop. You basically build something, then you get acquired. Like you build something with having like a great software tool in mind, then you get acquired and your good idea gets shred down by some fund that needs to sell you again.
Tobias Schlottke: And then, 10 years later, another team starts with the same ambition, uh, and, uh, and, and, and the good thing in mind, uh, and then gets acquired again. Would you agree that this could
Tuomas Artman: be true? I mean, you could break the cycle by not getting acquired, um, and just continuing. And I think that's like, you know, one of the reasons why we sort of, you know, went initially with Sequoia was, um, because they believe in building sort of long lasting companies, companies that sort of are around in 10, 20, 30 years from now.
Tuomas Artman: And even on their roadmap, like, you know, when they pitch you, they will tell you like, you know, where are they going to help you? Um, and one of those points is like, you know, getting, getting rid of those pesky, you know, offers of, of getting acquired and helping you not get acquired, but sort of build something, something long lasting.
Tuomas Artman: Um, but I think you're on a point there. I think we were going around in cycles, um, and you can see that on a, on a much smaller scale, even like if you look at, um, you know, a good example would be zoom, um, like five years ago and, or, you know, yeah, six years ago, I think when zoom came out, um, you know, it was the best tool around for video conferencing because, because one thing like they had just awesome media quality, um, and audio quality as well.
Tuomas Artman: Um, on even sort of low bandwidth connections, um, and that's what was needed to sort of, you know, get to the market that now, if you, you know, talk about Zoom, like, I don't think there's too many happy Zoom users out there, people are waiting for the next thing to come around and, you know, make things better because, you know, that wasn't enough, like you then needed to sort of, you know, build all these, in my mind, awkward tools around, you know, Zoom to make it viable for the enterprise.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and that has sort of degraded the user experience and made it, you know, a far worse, um, application than it was five years ago, because it just got too complex and the use case for at least us is, is, is sort of gone. Like it's just in, you know, let's talk to each other and that's it. Like, I don't need all the apps that are, that are coming with it.
Tobias Schlottke: I mean, you could also, uh, like just look at your direct competition, right? I mean, Jira, uh, was a tool that I know back, back in the days when I installed it on some, some, some server. It was kind of a great tool. Then it became shabbier all of a sudden they acquired Greenhopper and it was like, okay, again.
Tobias Schlottke: And then they built so much around it, uh, that, that it's really hard to keep track of. Um, and, uh, really hard to find the good pieces. of it, which most likely are still there, right? Um, and well, that's the reason why you started the company, I guess. Uh, like, Hey, and there are other examples as well, like Basecamp, right?
Tobias Schlottke: Basecamp started as a great application and, um, I dunno, uh, it, it is profitable and most likely they are more milking it or whatever. Um, but it is how it is.
Tuomas Artman: Uh, yeah, I mean, you know, for sure that it was, um, one of the reasons why we, why we found it in there. Um, Like the, the thing that we, that we, um, understood, like, you know, when we were working ourselves in these big companies, like I was at Uber, Kari was at Airbnb, and Jory was at Coinbase, and all of them use project management software, you know, one or another, um, and sort of talking with engineers, like, and the way we got talking with Jory about like project management issue tracking was that like we felt And whatever we were using, um, and whatever our colleagues were using, like, they really didn't like the application or the, the, the, the software that they were using.
Tuomas Artman: And, you know, verbs were thrown out like hate in, in, in terms of like their project management software, which is super crazy to think about. Like you have a piece of software that you have to use daily. Um, and then you say that you hate it. Like, seems like there's a, you know, big opportunity to, um, you know, come up with something better and, um, sort of get, get people moving over.
Tuomas Artman: So, part of the thing was that we, we found, you know, this opportunity, we found that, you know, whatever was out there didn't really, Um, you know, it wasn't really enjoyed by, by engineers, um, and that got us sort of a, a nice niche into, um, the market where we could sort of focus trust on, you know, smaller companies and engineers in those small companies and build something for them, which would then be something that, you know, we could, we could, um, effectively ship in, um, in half a year or a year because like they didn't need all the features is that, you know, PMs need.
Tuomas Artman: They need just something for their workflows. And if you, if you target, you know, small companies, you actually can build something pretty simple, um, that is extremely good and solves their, um, their, their use case. And that's also how, you know, how we got to the idea of like, you know, let's build purpose built software and not sort of this big monolith that tries to, you know, cover the entire market.
Tuomas Artman: Let's build something that. is built for a specific reason and for specific users in mind and let's keep that, you know, pretty small, um, so that we don't, um, you know, explode the product with, you know, hundreds of functionality and make it more complex for no real good reason, um, for, for, you know, the specific users that, you know, Are trying to build software. Technical Decisions and Synchronization Engines --
Tobias Schlottke: Do you think it's a common mistake of, of, of people building software that they are easily, too easily distracted by opportunities that clients throw at them? Like, Hey, if you integrate MailDrip into this CRM, uh, and just build a tool, which is a bit similar to this MailDrip tool and integrated, uh, then I, I send you another 40 K a year or whatever.
Tobias Schlottke: Um, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, Tuomas Artman: that's, that's probably how like, like every single company struggles with that, especially if you're not profitable, like if you're, you know, yearning for revenue, like you're easily swayed by requests or, you know, big customers coming to you and saying, Oh, your product looks, looks good, except for, you know, we need this feature or we need this integration.
Tuomas Artman: Because, you know, that's how they are, the way we, we work. Um, and like, it's, it's also, it's not a problem for us, but like, we, we, we see that problem happening every single day. Like we call them, you know, Um, well, customers aside, like we ourselves find things that we find super interesting that we want to, you know, sort of, you know, try out and built into the product, um, because we think that, you know, we found something that is, that is unique, unique and great.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and we call them sidequests because like, they, they, they bear no meaning in the bigger scheme of things and they're, they're really not planned out. Um, but you know, every week we come up with, you new things that we could build into the product that, you know, in our minds would, would make it sort of, you know, better.
Tuomas Artman: Um, but would also add that to complexity. Um, and so far we've like on the customer side, we've been able to, um, pretty well say no to sort of individual requests. Like we obviously do listen to our customers and that's, you know, how we built the product. And when we start hearing the same feedback all over again, then we notice that there's something sort of important to solve here.
Tuomas Artman: But we rarely just take sort of a feature request and implement it as such, like we try to understand what the problem behind a feature request is. get to the roots of it, um, and then have a holistic look at how we can solve it for everybody and not just this one company who has, you know, that specific request.
Tobias Schlottke: Understood. Um, I think, yeah, like your, your, your, your, your, your, your journey is quite similar to the, to the one of, of, of Basecamp, uh, as I mentioned them. Um, and I, I found an, a funny tweet by you that I just wanted to quickly touch on because DHH was one of my former guests, um, and Jason Fried as well.
Tobias Schlottke: Um, you, you basically said that you found your anti me and it's DHH. Um, and you, you're always of the polar opposite, opposite opinion. Uh, like what, what, what was behind that? Because I think like what you just said about like small teams. it's kind of similar, um, to, to some things, uh, they think, right. Um, and, and, and they preach. Tobias Schlottke: Yeah.
Tuomas Artman: I mean, obviously that was sort of, you know, um, written tongue in cheek, but, um, always there, like there's always truth, uh, truth to it. So, um, I've had this sort of, you know, feeling in the back of my mind, like whenever I read VHH tweets about you know, tech about, you know, how to, you know, what they want to build with, um, like, you know, getting rid of TypeScript or not bundling anything, um, or not implementing passkey.
Tuomas Artman: Like just two days ago, he was like, you know, passkeys are too complicated. And then, you know, we at least won't be, won't be implementing them. I'm like, of the total opposite opinion. I'm like, literally you should be using TypeScript, like nothing else. So you should be bundling your stuff and you should be, you know, implementing passkeys.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and I keep on finding those things, you know, over and over again, where he comes out with a technical, um, technical thing that I'm just, you know, totally opposed of. Um, I think the biggest example is, is Ruby on Rails. Like, obviously I'm, I'm in the minority and, you know, obviously it's a, it's a big feat, um, but he's done.
Tuomas Artman: Um, I don't want to downplay that. I'm There's, you know, hundreds and hundreds and probably even, you know, tens of thousands of companies that have been built on Ruby on Rails. I've never used it, and I have never liked it, um, for, for, you know, various reasons. Um, like, to, to me, the, the big one, um, when I had to touch it when I joined Groupon, um, Groupon was a, was a Rails shop, uh, back then, and then they switched over to Node.
Tuomas Artman: Um, but, um, yeah, they had a big monolithic API, uh, API and application on, on Rails, and everybody had to go through a boot camp to learn Ruby on Rails. And, um, in that bootcamp, like you started off with, with this, um, hello world project, like where you just, you know, have the routes and then you print out hello world.
Tuomas Artman: And when I got it running, I was like, um, it takes like three seconds to, to load, like whenever I refresh, it takes three seconds and I immediately raised my hand, like, what am I, what am I doing wrong? Like, why does it take three seconds? And the instructor just came, came over and says like, you know, no, that's, that's how it is.
Tuomas Artman: And I'm like, all right, I'm, I'm done. Thank you. Um, You know, uh, and, and I haven't, haven't touched since. Um, and I've, you know, ever since been, been, um, working with other, other technologies, Tobias Schlottke: it became faster. Uh, I can tell you. Uh, so I'm, I'm a Rails fan. Um, still yet. I most likely, if I was like at day one, I most likely wouldn't use it.
Tobias Schlottke: Um, for, for various reasons. Right. Um, I learned in the last years that mainstream has a value. Um, and I think it was mainstream now, right now it potentially is not. Um, and, and yeah, this, this, this, um, like whenever complexity increases, um, your, your projects get, become slower and slower, uh, which. is like due to various reasons.
Tobias Schlottke: And I think that's, that's also potentially why you started Linear, right? Like, Hey, applications have to be snappy, even from, from the, from the developer's perspective, like it has to be there instantaneously. Otherwise it just like, I don't know, decreases developer experience by a lot. Um, I
Tuomas Artman: mean, there, there's, there's a, there's an interesting story in how, how we, how we started, you know, how we, what we started working on when we, when we, when we created Linear.
Tuomas Artman: Um, We've always had this idea of like, let's, let's not do it as every startup hasn't done before. Like, let's not just follow the startup runbook, but let's figure out like what, what actually makes sense in this world. Cause you know, we thought that times have changed. Like, again, we're not in a, in a, um, blue ocean, but you know, it's a super red ocean with, you know, all these, you know, competitors from, from day one.
Tuomas Artman: So you have to build something that is better. And I had, I had spent like, I don't know, eight years just doing mobile development. I had, I hadn't done web in, in ages. So, um, when we started sort of just, you know, hacking on, on, um, a prototype on, on linear, um, like I got interested in first of all, seeing like what the web had evolved into.
Tuomas Artman: And to my surprise, it was awesome. Like it was, it was crazy good. Um, and how it had all these frameworks that you could, you know, sort of easily, easily put together to whip up, um, you know, pretty interesting and complicated applications. Um, and the, the first thing that I, like, I had done a lot of synchronization engines before. Tuomas Artman: Like, Tobias Schlottke: yeah, back in the days you said that, uh, in the POS, right?
Tuomas Artman: Yeah. Um, even before that, like my first, you know, um, synchronization server was, um, I think in was probably 2004 or something, like for Shockwave 3D, like we were working on a, on a sort of multiplayer game with like sort of eight, you know, first, it was a first person sort of shoot em up game, um, with, uh, sort of, you know, real time, um, synchronization.
Tuomas Artman: So you would see all the other players moving around. I mean, it had to synchronize the game state. And so that was the first one. Then in China, I did my second one for sort of a more generic, you know, game, game engine, synchronization, um, uh, engine. For Groupon, that was the third one that I think still probably in production.
Tuomas Artman: It was sort of to synchronize those point of sale applications with each other to make sure that you wouldn't spike, you know, the credit card twice on different machines or that, you know, the orders will be replicated across all these machines. Um, then I wrote one for, yeah, the fourth one was for, for Uber, um, which was, you know, in the, in the early days when I joined, like, I was so hyped about, like, this new, Which I had seen at Groupon, like it made things so much simpler.
Tuomas Artman: Um, like having a synchronization engine sort of takes a lot of the complexity of building applications out. Like you're effectively just working on a front end application and your data just, you know, streams in and it's automatically sent to the backend whenever you want to, want to save things, um, without you having to deal with any of the networking or error handling or rollbacks or whatnot.
Tuomas Artman: Um, so I wanted to do the same thing for Uber. Like it felt like, um, the perfect applications to do it for like Uber mobile clients. It has a very limited set of data that it sees, like it has data from the city that you're in, it has a few cars around, and then it does real time synchronization. And the way that Uber was set up for the longest time, um, was that it would, um, what we call ping.
Tuomas Artman: It would ping the backend, um, and the backend would send a JSON object containing the entire state of the world to that client every three seconds. It would contain, you know, everything from your user credentials or not credentials, but your user account, to your payment information, to all the cars around you, to all the products that were available.
Tuomas Artman: Um, I felt that was just a huge, um, you know, waste of bandwidth, um, to, to do that, not only from the user's perspective, who still paid for the mobile plans, but also from, from the service's perspective. And I thought sort of a synchronization engine would make perfect sense. So I started working on one, um, in, in the early days when I had joined.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and, uh, you know, I think I was a bit too late, like maybe a year too late to the party because like Ewer was just taking off and there was hyper growth everywhere. Um, and it was just impossible to change sort of the future of the architecture in any, any meaningful way. Thank you. Um, we did ship one, one, um, application with it.
Tuomas Artman: Like we shipped, um, I think it was a courier service in New York. Um, and we built it on this new, you know, synchronization stack and we built the whole mobile application in a week. Um, like one week all in, like a courier could, you know, pick up a phone and start taking orders. seeing where they needed to go next, um, which was awesome.
Tuomas Artman: But, you know, alas, you know, it didn't happen. And, um, there were some other things that Ewer did in sort of the real time synchronization, um, space, but it wasn't full blown, uh, full blown sync. So when I got to Linear, I was like, you know, I'm, I'm not gonna, gonna spend my time with anything else than, than, you know, local first sync and synchronization.
Tuomas Artman: Um, like I, I, I want to have an architecture where I don't have to think about backends, where I effectively can work on a local application and everything else. Just, you know, flows from that, um, and all the complexities handled by this one engine that we need to build, you know, once or, you know, maybe twice, um, to, to make it scale.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and so that's what I started with. Like, it wasn't about like, you know, normally startups, they, they start working on the app itself and they sort of, you know, try to release it as early as possible, give it out to users, try to learn things from their users. Um, and we did the opposite, like we didn't build anything sort of, you know, functional for, for the world to see, like, I spent half a year just building the synchronization engine, um, because I believed that, you know, it would enable us to do things, um, that other applications could, simply couldn't, um, in, in, in that time, um, which was sort of have this feel of being a, um, a native application, even though it ran in your, in your web browser, because everything was stored locally, um, in, in your local, local computer.
Tuomas Artman: So when you started the application, like you would have instantly. Um, all the, all the previous states, um, available and you could render the page immediately without having to fetch anything. You wouldn't get any page loads because, you know, you had all that data locally available. So any, any clicks that you had in the early days, um, and still mostly today, like there's, there's no page loads.
Tuomas Artman: Like you just immediately are in, in that page because we've pre fetched and pre loaded and keep synchronizing the entire state of your, of your workspace. And, um, yeah, so, you know, that's what we started out with, like making sure that the tech was right before we started building product, which sort of sounds insane, um, as, as a startup.
Tuomas Artman: Um, but you know, I, I would argue that that, that is sort of the correct way to build, you know, nowadays. Um, Figma is a good example, like, you know, not shipping anything for four years and just building out this awesome engine that, you know, they then use to build a product upon. Um, and that just, you know, make them as successful as they are today.
Tobias Schlottke: I think it absolutely depends on the, on the problem you want to solve, right? Um, that the complexity of this initial infrastructure. building time. Right. And, and also if you would build, build, build as of today from scratch. Wouldn't it be much easier? Tuomas Artman: Uh, I mean, I think it, like, I would be fooled that it's much easier. Tuomas Artman: Yeah, right. And then you start and Tobias Schlottke: then you dig into the
Tuomas Artman: rebuttals. I would run into problems later on. So yeah, there's a lot of tooling around, a lot of, you know, open source projects and closed source projects that do synchronization. And they all look good, and they are They're pretty excellent. They've got some really tough engineering in them.
Tuomas Artman: Um, but I don't think that none, you know, none of them would work at sort of the scale that we are today. Like, they would have gotten us to, you know, maybe three years, four years into our journey, but then effectively would have to have, have to solve. You know, the scaling challenges ourselves, like once you get to workspaces that have thousands of users and, you know, hundreds of thousands of millions of millions of issues, like you need a purpose built synchronization engine to handle that particular use case if you want to want to make it right.
Tuomas Artman: Otherwise, you're, you know, literally again, just, you know, Loading up data when you need it. And you're no longer sort of in a fully synchronized world. Tobias Schlottke: Um, we spoke about Rails briefly and, uh, you mentioned TypeScript before. Um, is part of your, of the, the, the, the, the stack that you have built also great because it's very simple and mostly built in one language, uh, and, and, and also a bit boring, let's say. Tobias Schlottke: Uh, um.
Tuomas Artman: I wouldn't say it's not boring, like, I think TypeScript is pretty exciting as a language. Boring in a positive Tobias Schlottke: way. Like, Tuomas Artman: yeah, so like we chose our technologies based on, um, them being readily available and used throughout the world. Like we didn't go with anything, That was fancy or new. And of course, I'm sort of like, always when a new framework comes out, I'm like, Oh man, this looks really good.
Tuomas Artman: I wish we could use it. But I think it's much more important to just pick something that, you know, people know people can work with and have a good understanding of. So we chose React. We went TypeScript because type languages is the way to go. Regardless of what the HH says, um, like we wouldn't be able to have built linear with, um, with vanilla JavaScript.
Tuomas Artman: Like, we would have just so many regressions or built such a big unit test suite that, you know, it wouldn't run, um, anymore. Um, so the compiler itself, you know, covers most of the code, uh, and, um, you know, sees all the, all the problems. But having one language across the backend and the frontend, um, was super helpful as well.
Tuomas Artman: We've been able to hire effectively full stack people who are able to build functionality from start to finish. Like if you take even a complicated, you know, functionality with sort of new data objects or models and, you know, having to do some integrations with other services outside of Linear, Um, it can be done by one engineer, um, from start to finish, because, like, you have one language, you have one way of doing things, um, we, we do share code between the, the server and the, the, the client, like, we have certain sort of sets of models that we, that we, you know, just write once and use in, in, in both places and do the validation, um, automatically across the server backend and frontend, um, and it just makes it super fast, like, Having a monorepo where you do one comment for a feature and that includes all the servers and all the front end code is amazing.
Tuomas Artman: It's great. Tobias Schlottke: And your sync engine isn't written in Rust or anything? Tuomas Artman: No, it's also fully TypeScript. Yeah, like, um, yeah, there wouldn't be any reason to write it in Rust. At least that I can think of now. Tobias Schlottke: Okay. Tuomas Artman: It's, it's performant enough. Uh, as, as is.
Tobias Schlottke: Okay. Okay. Monoliths vs. Microservices -- Tobias Schlottke: Uh, if you look at your stack, um, and, and, uh, like we, we, we throw in a few passwords like monoliths and microservices, uh, where people have alternative views. Tobias Schlottke: Views on like, what is your view on that? Is it. Somewhere in between or? All of them are bad.
Tuomas Artman: That's my, that's my viewpoint. There's never a good architecture. Um, obviously a monolith is. I mean, it's good to get, like, if, if you start, if you create a startup, um, start with a monolith, like there's no reason to, you know, split it up into, into smaller service immediately.
Tuomas Artman: Um, maybe, like maybe you have a perfect use case where you sort of immediately want to split it up into, into smaller pieces. Um, but then, you know, what you can see is like, if you go the other way and Uber was a perfect example of this, like, you know, Uber went in, like started with a monolith and they were like, Oh, this monolith is no longer working for us.
Tuomas Artman: We've got like a thousand engineers working on this piece, so we need to split it up into microservices. Um, and then they went, you know, all the way to the, to the far end. Um, and at that far end, they had, they had more microservices in production than there were engineers at Eber. So you had like 3, 500 engineers and 4, 500 microservices.
Tuomas Artman: There was a microservice to tell the time, um, which is like, you know, really? Um, and that became a hot mess as well, because now you need to, you know, a way of communicating between all these microservices. Um, and, you know, it had to be done a few times, like the first one, you know, wasn't really working, the second one, I think, you know, I don't know how, maybe it was Thrift first, and then GPRC, um, um, but in any case, like, it was, it was never, never, um, perfect, um, and then, you know, try to interface with mobile, um, in there.
Tuomas Artman: Suddenly you get model objects that are all typed as optional because like, otherwise you can't make changes in the back end. And now you're, you know, stuck with a data model that, you know, you can't really represent on the mobile client. Um, so yeah, um, choose your poison. Like, which one do you want? Do you want a monolith that is easy to maintain, but then like, As you scale, um, you get into problems with, you know, having all these engineers, um, you know, work on the same code base and having long build times and having to sort of ship everything in one go.
Tobias Schlottke: Or you just don't hire so many engineers, right? Yeah, sure.
Tuomas Artman: You know, build, build, you know, keep a small team. Um, and like, we are feeling sort of the pain as well, like at some point, at least. We need to, um, split up our application into a few core pieces, um, because like unit tests are, you know, getting a bit slow and the build process is like, to us, slow means like when we, when we ship something into master, like it's live in 10 minutes, which is too slow for us. Tuomas Artman: Like, we would want it to be faster.
Optimizing Build Processes -- Tuomas Artman: We would want it to be like, you know, two, three minutes when you, when you merge something in. Um, and, um, we're, you know, getting to the point where we have to start thinking about sort of breaking it down to smaller pieces so we can parallelize the build process and just get it out faster. Tobias Schlottke: You have to get rid of Docker again, right?
Tuomas Artman: I don't think Docker is the problem. Like it's, it's fine. Like building the Docker image is, it's not, you know, it's not too, too, too slow. Debating Single Page Web Apps -- Tobias Schlottke: Um, What, what, what are your views on, I mean, you have a user of, of, of single page web apps, obviously, right? Um, um, what, what are your views on that?
Tobias Schlottke: Like, um, I, I sometimes tend to, or I at least saw this, this, those alternative approaches such as, as Hotwire and Livewire and PHP, and I kind of liked the idea of, of not having to use JavaScript heavily for some applications. It obviously didn't, like make it to like real hot shit list. Right. Uh, it's, it's still like SVP, a single page web apps and, and what, what the big tech. The Reality of Big Tech Solutions --
Tobias Schlottke: telling us, like, do you think that many people misinterpret, um, what, what big tech tells us or like takes it for granted and then jumps on stuff like, I don't know, Kubernetes, like, do you need Kubernetes? Uh, or do you just start with D. O. apps? Uh, like, what, what, what, what's your view on that? Like, is that, are we too blinded by that?
Tuomas Artman: Um, I, I actually don't know. Like, I can only speak for myself. Um, I don't think I'm blinded anymore. Um, maybe it was like, if I go back to my sort of, you know, um, days at the consultancy, like anything that sort of this big company Spotify would do, um, or, you know, Facebook back then as well, like, Ooh, that was awesome.
Tuomas Artman: And that was probably the coolest stuff that you could work with. Um, so yeah, there's, there's some, you know, Kool Aid in, in that as well. Um, but once you've seen on, you know, how things work on the other side, which is sort of usually a pretty big shit storm, um, like everything just like not, not going well and outages all the time and, and things crashing, um, you sort of, you know, understand what it's all about and, and, you know, that, you know.
Tuomas Artman: Not everything that, that sort of you, you see on an open source page, you know, with a nice facade will solve your problems. A nice name, Tobias Schlottke: right? That's often also the case that there's this Spotify model that everyone wants to use. And then you start working at Spotify and Tuomas Artman: Yeah.
Open Source and Its Pitfalls -- Tuomas Artman: And like, obviously you should take everything that, you know, people open source with a grain of salt because it's also, you know, publicity for, you know, the engineers open sourcing themselves.
Tuomas Artman: So they want to push it out. Even if they don't fully believe in it. Um, again, to give an example from, from my life, like we, we built, um, back in the day, we would reps, which was a mobile architecture, a way of building mobile applications that was, um, you know, somewhat novel and or, or sort of super large teams.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and you know, then we, we open sourced the architecture, like we built the writer application, um, first on it. Um, and we built effectively the whole mobile client that Uber had, um, with this new architecture and sort of, it worked for us. But, you know, we want to take it a step further and then open source it and tell other, you know, big companies that, hey, there's, here's a new nice architecture that, um, that, that, you know, worked for us.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and suddenly, you know, a lot of people that weren't working at big companies started using it and started buying into it. Um, and I'm like, I don't know if you should do this. Like, but you know, I, you know, I was part of the team that open sourced. And so, you know, I have to stand behind them saying, um, have to have to say that it's a, it's a, it's a great architecture, but, um, there's always a caveat, like it worked for a company with 400 mobile engineers, but it probably is too much for a company with, you know, 10, 10 mobile engineers.
Tuomas Artman: Um, so yeah, I mean, you have to look into things yourself and make up your, your mind on, on what works for you and what doesn't. Um, it's not that, you know, one thing covers, covers, you know, all the needs, um, you just have to do your work. Tobias Schlottke: So this is a hammer, this is a nail, right? Tuomas Artman: Yeah, exactly. And do I need a nail or a hammer or, Tobias Schlottke: you know, but what is it that I need? Developer Experience and Tooling --
Tobias Schlottke: Um, so we briefly touched developer experience. I mean, booting up a stack quickly, right? Um, that's basically shipping things quickly. Being able to deploy quickly is a very, very big value. Um, are you, are you, are you actively monitoring that? Or are you actively, I don't know, do you have tools to kind of visualize that? Tobias Schlottke: Do you, um, Ask your engineers every once in a while, what is, what is your strategy on that? Do you have like Dora metrics, uh, No,
Tuomas Artman: like we, we are engineers ourselves. Like we have to work with this stuff all the time. Um, and our startup is super simple. Like we, we, um, like all the services that are written by us, like we run locally.
Tuomas Artman: The whole stack, like if you, you know, do PMPM start, you get all the services, the client builds, you know, everything, um, locally. Um, and then obviously databases run there as well as Docker images. Um, and the start of time is like, you can see how long it is. Like if you start fresh and then open your browser, it takes 10 seconds for you to see the first page.
Tuomas Artman: Um, which is good enough. Um, like, obviously, yes, it could be faster, but there's a lot of code. So, you know, we've done quite a few optimizations to just make, make that startup fast. What is now taking time is literally just, you know, executing the JavaScript that was compiled, um, and getting it up and running.
Tuomas Artman: So there's not much that we can do. Um, cause like we want to have an environment where we run everything. We can make changes to every single piece. in one PR, submit it, and that's the whole change set, um, that, that, that we send out. So it's important for us to be able to run everything locally. And so far, it's, it's been possible without sort of, you know, you know, getting a VM somewhere and running some of those services, services there.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and, uh, that's, you know, probably how I want to keep it for as long as possible. Tobias Schlottke: And, and what about different roles in your team? Uh, I think, I, I assume you have product, like given your size, uh, anything else? Like what, what about QA? Critical Views on QA -- Tobias Schlottke: Um, I, I have like a bit of a critical view on that. Do you, do you have that as well?
Tobias Schlottke: Or like, do we share views there? Or like, what, what, what are the roles? Tuomas Artman: Now, I have a totally critical view on QA. Like, um, we will never have QA, uh, people working at, at Linear. Um, I, I saw that, like, and that, you know, goes back to Groupon. Like, Groupon was, was really heavy on QA. Um, we were working in a point of sale application that had sort of money involved.
Tuomas Artman: People would sort of pay and, um, uh, the point of sale application would just, you know, have to work because the business effectively wouldn't work without, without it working, like if it had a critical bug. Um, so we had quite a few QA people, um, just validating every single build that went out. Um, and the moment sort of, you know, we hired them, um, you could just see engineers giving up on, on doing their own QA.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and I, I was the same way as well, unfortunately, like I, I, I want to, you know, think of myself as having high standards on, on the work that I do, but because I had the safety net, I knew that, you know, anything that I would, would ship would be tested by somebody else. I didn't really, you know, test, you know, any of the stuff myself, you know, too much.
Tuomas Artman: Obviously, I did a quick smoke test, you know, all this feature works nicely, send it over, and it would then sort of come back. Um, and that's what happened with, with most of the engineering, like people would just ship, uh, build something, ship it over the fence and wait for it to come back, you know, from QA and then fix those bugs.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and that was just lazy engineering. Um, so I, I don't want to do that, um, at Linear. Uber didn't have any QA engineers. Um, like everybody was, was, um, uh, was quality assuring their own, on, on work, uh, to the extent that, you know, they spend a lot of time, um, doing these sanity checks, like whenever there's a new build on the mobile client, again, it's super important.
Tuomas Artman: Like once you ship a mobile client, you can't take it back. So it's important that it works. Um, and all these teams would every two weeks sort of go into, you know, a day or two of just testing the build and running through the scripts of like, you know, what do I need to test in the core flow in order to make sure that the build works.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and that immediately then, like, because they spent the time, like, they got bored of it. They were like, you know, why am I testing this manually every, every two weeks? Um, and they started just automating those tests. Um, and that's what would maybe not happen with QA. Like maybe it would, like, if you have a good QA team, like, yes, they would automate the tests as well, and they would just put in a test suite.
Tuomas Artman: Um, but I think it's much more important for engineers to do that. So when they, you know, build new functionality, put in your automated QA tests and unit tests, so that you make sure that, you know, your functionality works and keeps on working, uh, no matter what, and then you don't have to do those, you know, sanity checks every, every two weeks. Tobias Schlottke: And Tuomas Artman: that's the mentality that we want at linear as well. Okay.
Tobias Schlottke: Okay. I think as an engineer, it's sometimes hard because you often only follow the happy path, right? And you, you, you, you don't see the edges. Uh, but, but I think like, If you have product, then often there's someone from product involved and you have like kind of an external check already.
Tobias Schlottke: Right. And it's not like, to me, it also often feels as if you have like someone like having someone in QA is like having someone in DevOps who doesn't work in your team. Right? Uh, like, ah, you're supposed to make it run, right? Like, I throw it over the fence. You're supposed to make it run without you having a clue of how to make it run and what it's supposed to do. Tobias Schlottke: Right? Um, that's, that's how I think about QA.
Tuomas Artman: Yeah, I totally agree. Like, it's, it's not part of your team. So you don't really like, You want to offload as much of your work to them as possible because, um, you know, you're not being bothered by the workmen. Front End Testing Challenges -- Tobias Schlottke: What about front end testing? Like, that's also automating front end tests. Tobias Schlottke: That's also an area which I found always edgy. Are you doing that?
Tuomas Artman: No, um, we so far haven't done a single front end test, um, like, and, and, you know, that stems back to, um, to, for example, what, what Jory experienced that, um, at Coinbase. Coinbase had sort of, you know, front end and UI tests for every single page that they had.
Tuomas Artman: Um, so whenever something changed, um, they had a screenshot and they had sort of a diff of the HTML that was produced by the page and the test would break and they would have to update it, um, and then, you know, ship it. And what ended up happening is, um, you know, because almost every single change affects the UI in some way.
Tuomas Artman: So every change that you made, you would have a test breaking. Um, so, you know, out of, you know, Because it happened every single time, like you would simply just update tests and, you know, commit them, you know, with, with the thing. And you won't really even look at those, those screenshots that, that the automated testing, testing did, um, because you expect it to, to change.
Tuomas Artman: Um, so it was deemed to be just absolutely useless and just the time sink, um, that didn't really help catch any problems because they were automatically committed and nobody looked at them because they were expected to change all the time. So that's why we, you know, just said, we're not going to do them.
Tuomas Artman: Um, Like, let's see if we break the application so many times. Like, when, when we find that there's, you know, many regressions that we do, um, that we break the same thing all over again, um, yeah, maybe then we'll, we'll come back and be like, well, could a UI test or a, you know, integration test have figured this out and have, have saved us from, from shipping, um, a regression.
Tuomas Artman: But so far, it hasn't happened too many times. So, You know, there's still no, no integration test or unit tests in the app. Tobias Schlottke: Great. Like, yeah, I really, really like that direction. Um, like if I would start from scratch, I think I would do a similar, like, uh, just, just one stack. Uh, keep it simple. Uh, keep it, keep it type safe. Tobias Schlottke: Right.
Tuomas Artman: I think I just said that we don't have any unit tests. I meant UI tests. UI tests, there are none. Unit tests, yeah, you mentioned that. Because they're, they're, yeah, they're much more important. Like, they can cover a simple, simple, single, you know, class or entity or piece of code. Um, and they're just a good validator, um, to make sure Tobias Schlottke: that wrote the right thing.
Tobias Schlottke: I think we could talk for hours. Like one, one thing I still want to touch, touch on is, is like your funding stack. Choosing to Raise Funds -- Tobias Schlottke: Um, uh, I mean, we. Like briefly mentioned that you have like the most prominent VCs investing 50 million and multiple rounds. So you decided to raise funds instead of bootstrapping. Why did you do that?
Tuomas Artman: Well, we actually wanted to bootstrap. Um, and that's how we, how we started the company. Um, like the initial idea was to maybe spend half a year or a year building out the first version of product, ship it. And then see if we, if we needed any, um, any VC money. Um, and, um, as it, as it happened, like, you know, we, when we announced the company, like we wrote a blog post about what we're doing, like how we want to make project management, you know, great again, um, I hate that, you know, that saying, make Project Foundation great again.
Tuomas Artman: It reminds me too much of the US political elections now, but anyways, um, we can maybe cut that. So, um, yeah, we, we wrote this blog post about like, what, um, you know, what, what we want to want to do as a company. Um, and quite a few people sort of, you know, that, that thing resonated with, with other engineers. Tuomas Artman: Um, and we got a nice following on Twitter. We've got a nice wait list. And there was some buzz around the company even before we shipped anything.
VC Interest and Sequoia's Offer -- Tuomas Artman: And whenever there's buzz, there's also VCs circling. And we had a great team coming from Uber, Coinbase, and Airbnb. Obviously, VCs were pretty interested in seeing what we could do.
Tuomas Artman: We said no to all of them. We had a few meetings just to touch the waters and see, you know. how it would look like. Um, but then, um, before we even launched, like, Sequoia, you know, um, called in, and you don't say no to Sequoia, like, you just have a meeting. Um, so we sent Kari, um, to that meeting, and, um, I, I thought that he never had a, a pitch deck with him, but apparently he did one the night before.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and, um, Just to sort of illustrate, like, what we are about to do and what the idea is. Um, and they were pretty interested. Um, and, you know, the meeting went well. And Kari, you know, ended the meeting with saying, like, Ah, we're not going to take any investments as of today, but, you know, let's see in the future.
Tuomas Artman: Maybe, maybe we need something. Um, and then through some, you know, twists and turns, um, a few months later, um, you know, we got a term sheet from Sequoia. And the evaluation was so good that it really didn't make sense for us to not do it. Like, if, you know, it was sort of in the range that we had figured, like, when we launch, um, you know, that's probably what we could get from VCs.
Tuomas Artman: And we didn't want to, sort of, you know, take in more than we could chew. Like, we didn't want to go, Raise that a huge valuation and then, you know, have this super big pressure on, on exceeding that valuation. Um, so that's why we, why we took it. Um, and obviously Sequoia itself, like, you know, was, um, you know, a company that believes in building companies as we do, like, um, they want to build, you know, You know, companies that are here for, for the next 10, 20, 30, 100 years,
Tobias Schlottke: plus they took carry hostage back then and didn't let your key designer go then until you take the money. Tuomas Artman: No, I don't think that happened. But, um, yeah, it was, um, yeah, all in all, like it was great. Um, and, you know, Index was another company that was involved in, in those early days. So we, we took a, took a seat around the problem. from Sequoia and Index Ventures. Tobias Schlottke: Cool. And then, you know, Not bad. Not bad. Um, Tuomas Artman: yeah.
Tobias Schlottke: And now, I don't know, did you buy a Ferrari or something with the money or what do you do with the money? Tobias Schlottke: If you only have 60 people, you're profitable and you don't need the money. You don't do marketing. Like what do you do with money? Tuomas Artman: The money sits in the bank or not in the bank, but in sort of, you know, mutual funds, monetary mutual funds. Um, Yeah. Sort of getting a, getting a nice increase, um, every, every month.
Tuomas Artman: Um, it, it's, it's waiting for us to find use for it. Um, you know, it could come through, you know, for example, acquisitions, or if you find a good way of, of marketing that sort of works for us, um, where we have a good, you know, return on investments, um, we might sort of need that money to just quickly bootstrap it and, you know, get started and throw some money at the problem.
Tuomas Artman: Um, we'll have to, like, in the future, um, sort of, you know, spend money to figure out, like, how we can reach all of the customers, like, not just the marquee customers, like, we're very well known in, sort of, Silicon Valley and, um, all these nice startups, like, I think the latest figure was, like, 40 percent of YC companies was using us, um, which is great, like, we don't need Thanks.
Tuomas Artman: to market to them anymore. Like, they know that we exist and if we go for them, they will use us. But then there's, you know, all kinds of other smaller companies in Europe, in Asia, somewhere else that have never heard of us. Um, that, you know, if they, if they knew that we existed, would just, you know, quickly jump on board.
Tuomas Artman: Um, so that's something that we want to try out in the future as well. And it's probably, you know, going to require You know, a bit of capital, um, to, to get that, get, get that started and get that going. But Tobias Schlottke: your product So we're Tuomas Artman: not saying that we want to be profitable at all times. Like we are currently profitable and we've always been for the past four years.
Tuomas Artman: Um, but it, it, it's not sort of a thing that we want to, you know, maintain at all costs. Look, looking forward to the linear Tobias Schlottke: TV app. But you're still fully like PLG driven and sales led, I guess, right? Like PLG plus sales on top to kind of help the bigger customers that sign up to the product? Tuomas Artman: Yeah. Um, I think self serve is still like 80 percent of all of our new, it might be a bit less now, 70 percent of all our revenue that comes in.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and then obviously sales, you know, um, the role of sales is increasing as we, um, Build more functionality and are able to target sort of bigger and bigger customers. Um, like we recently, you know, signed, you know, our first Fortune 20 customer in, um, which was great. Um, so that's what the sales team is for.
Tuomas Artman: Like, you know, that was a negotiation, a negotiation that lasted for six, six weeks, um, to figure out like all, all the details. Um, and, um, yeah, as we, as we build out more functionality for sort of PMs like we, we see, you know, getting into, into the space where we can really, you know, go after, you know, at least growth companies, if not even enterprise customers.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and that's when, when sales will become more prominent and, um, you know, bring in more of that revenue share. Future Plans and Productivity Hacks -- Tobias Schlottke: Um, we slowly have to come to the end. Um, and I I'd like to hear a few more things, like a few more like concrete tips and ideas. Um, first question is like, what, what is your, and you can't answer like using linear, linear, uh, changed my life.
Tobias Schlottke: Uh, but what is, what is, what is your most recent productivity hack? Tuomas Artman: Oh, my most recent one was getting a new monitor. Um, I, I went over the top with it. Um, it's like a 57 inch Samsung curved monitor as my main display. It has like two times 4k displays. Um, and so, you know, it's, it's rather big and I can see, you know, seven files of code next to each other.
Tuomas Artman: And in addition to that, I have yet another studio display on the other side. So I'm surrounded by monitors. And I sort of like it, but I know it, you know, it's a bit over the top. But that has definitely sort of increased my productivity. Tobias Schlottke: I'm actually not sure if my brain could handle that. Uh, like I, I have, I have a 16 inch MacBook Pro and which works perfect for me.
Tobias Schlottke: And I don't know my, like, whenever I connect an external display, I struggle to. Tuomas Artman: You certainly have, have, have to get used to it. Like there's been moments where like, I know that a model popped up, but I don't know where, and then I have to sort of look around and see where it went because, you know, the peripheral vision Tobias Schlottke: doesn't cover everything.
Tobias Schlottke: Interesting. And, um, If you had like any, any, any software you discovered, like, uh, any, I don't know, cocktail party technology that you tell all your friends about, that you discovered it, and that is so great that it's changed your life a lot recently. Like anything you saw Tuomas Artman: recently, sadly, no. Um, which is unfortunate, like, which is also one of the reasons why we started Linnear.
Tuomas Artman: Like we, we want to make software better. We want to help companies be better at building software. Um, like I, I think I have to go as far back as like, you know, the iPhone coming out of having this magical moment in time where, you know, something was shipped that instantly clicked, uh, and, and blew me away.
Tuomas Artman: And I was like, this is it. Um, no question about it. Anybody who says otherwise. You know, it doesn't know what they're talking about. This will take over the world. Or at least this concept will take over the world. And before that, it was the Macs. I'm really an Apple fanboy. I still remember the first time, like, my first job in 96 was at a company doing CD ROMs, and they had Macs and I had never seen a Mac.
Tuomas Artman: And so I got to one and I was like, how do I turn it on? Obviously going to the computer itself and trying to find the power button. And somebody showed me that it's on the keyboard. got a power button on the keyboard, um, just a normal button and I pressed it and it was magical that it, that it opened the computer.
Tuomas Artman: I don't know what's so magical about it, but it was crazy nice to have a power button on the computer, uh, on the keyboard that you could toggle on your computer, um, on and off. Um, so those are the, the big two things that have struck with me in terms of, you know, user experience and technology. Tobias Schlottke: Uh, yeah, unfortunately in the Mac land, it got a bit more boring, right? Tobias Schlottke: Like,
Tuomas Artman: I think everything, everything has gotten boring, like even iPhones. you know, nothing really has happened in five years. A better camera and that's, that's all you get. Tobias Schlottke: What, what, what about, I don't know, a GPT moment or something? Did that touch you or were you just thinking, Hey, well, well, this isn't. Tobias Schlottke: Sure. I somehow totally forgot about GPT.
Tuomas Artman: Yeah, obviously. Um, maybe it wasn't a moment because like I was aware of it. Um, like before it came, but obviously as a product, yes, like it, it was, it was magical. Um, and it, it still is like, it still is amazing what it can do. Um, and what it will become. Um, like, there's no doubt that, you know, well, if they can solve sort of a few hurdles, a few more problems, make it energy efficient and all that, um, or get free energy somehow, um, then, um, it'll be just amazing.
Tuomas Artman: Like, you know, it will be, um, you know, part of everyday life in all kinds of ways. So, yeah, sure. You know, GPD chat, GPT was, uh, was a magical Tobias Schlottke: moment. I also added something. And then if you could, uh, switch roles with, uh, any tech leader out there, like whom would you choose and why? Tuomas Artman: I, I wouldn't choose anybody like I, a tech leader, Tuomas Artman: I, I, I'm not like, I don't wanna be a tech leader. I thought like Steve
Tobias Schlottke: Jobs or something. Like if you could, like, just . Tuomas Artman: Yeah. Um, I, no, I, I, I don't think I would want to be Steve Jobs. Like I, you know, he probably has. A pretty bad rep in the private world, like, you know, anybody, um, you know, with great talent becomes, you know, usually dickishness, um, as you can, you know, see with, you know, Elon Musk, for example, um, like super smart people who are just broken in, in so many other ways.
Tuomas Artman: Um, and I'd rather just enjoy what they, what they built for me. rather than, you know, being them and having to build it myself. Like, you know, they can, they can, you know, do whatever they do and I'll, I'll consume. Um, but I'm, I'm perfectly fine right here. Tobias Schlottke: And then, um, your, your CEO and co founder Carrie, um, just told me about a little Easter egg in Linear.
Tobias Schlottke: Um, it's actually a hidden console where she can open, um, and type in like secret commands. And one of the secret commands that you guys built is a time machine. which lets you physically travel back in time or travel wherever you want to get in time. But I now want to travel with you to the year 2000 when you worked at Razorfish Helsinki and type it into the console and we travel back and see yourself like a bit younger, working In a consulting role, um, enjoying the consulting life still, um, what would you whisper into young Thomas's ears?
Tuomas Artman: I would whisper to, to get out and get started. Um, like forget about consulting and build something that actually matters and something that counts. Um, you'll be much happier there. Tobias Schlottke: Cool. It's simple. So, um, I'd like to be an intern, um, at Linear once in the future. Uh, so hopefully give me the chance. Tuomas Artman: Yeah. I mean, feel free to apply on the website. Tuomas Artman: There's a form that you can fill out and I'll put in a good word. And for you.
Tobias Schlottke: Okay, thanks a lot. Um, so we're meeting then in Helsinki. I, I, I start there in your office if you have one. Tuomas Artman: Oh, we're remote, so Tobias Schlottke: no offices. Looking forward to that. Then have a, have a good day and thanks for the recording. Thanks Tuomas Artman: so much for having me. Tobias Schlottke: See you soon. Tuomas Artman: Thanks, bye.
Tobias Schlottke: Thank you for listening to the Alis podcast. If you like this episode, share it with friends. I'm sure they love it too. Make sure to subscribe so you can hear deep insights into technical leadership and technology trends as they become available. Also, please tell us if there is a topic you would like to hear more about, or a technical leader whose brain you would like us to pick.
Tobias Schlottke: Alpha List is all about helping CTOs getting access to the insights they need to make the best decisions for their company. Please send us suggestions to cto at alphalist. com. Send me a message on LinkedIn or Twitter. After all, the more knowledge we bring to CTOs, the more growth we see in tech. Or, as we say on Alphalist, accumulated knowledge to accelerate growth. Tobias Schlottke: See you in the next episode.