Karri Saarinen
Co-founder and CEO of Linear; previously principal designer at Airbnb, where he led the Design Language System, and founding designer at Coinbase.
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What they believe
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Founders, designers and developers need to develop their taste the way a sushi chef develops a palate, and appreciating culture is how.
Like sushi chefs, we as founders, designers or developers, need to develop our tastes, in order to build things people can be impressed about.
karrisaarinen.comSaid 2 Sept 2012This on korrents
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A product needs a soul, and for that it needs one person of great taste who is its living, breathing aspect and gets furious about every small detail.
For the soul, you need a person with a great taste to be the living and breathing aspect of the product. The one forging the blades. The person who thinks about the in and outs of the product and the business.
karrisaarinen.comSaid 12 Feb 2010This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These 2: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 14 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
An organization should not become a software factory that outsources the work and thinking and focuses only on efficient output, because the output is not the product.
Don't become a software factory where you out like outsource all the work and thinking to somewhere else and like just focus on like how efficient can the output be because the output is not the product.
Context is now the product: Product leadership when software can build itself | Karri Saarinen (Lenny & Friends Summit, San Francisco, 10 September 2026) Said 10 Sept 2026
Making products produces two things: the product and the learning.
So making products produces two things. The the product and the learning.
Context is now the product: Product leadership when software can build itself | Karri Saarinen (Lenny & Friends Summit, San Francisco, 10 September 2026) Said 10 Sept 2026
A company that does not learn from the work it does would probably eventually lose its advantage.
eventually if you don't learn from the work you do I think eventually you would lose the advantage of what you have currently in your in your space or in your company
Context is now the product: Product leadership when software can build itself | Karri Saarinen (Lenny & Friends Summit, San Francisco, 10 September 2026) Said 10 Sept 2026
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People often seem to focus on what AI can execute and not on what it can teach them.
So a lot of times people I think focus on what AI can do what it can execute but not what AI can teach you.
Context is now the product: Product leadership when software can build itself | Karri Saarinen (Lenny & Friends Summit, San Francisco, 10 September 2026) Said 10 Sept 2026
Working alone with agents may be efficient, but it means people stop learning from each other.
a lot of people are working alone with their agents building things and I think it's efficient but then there's also the problems like we not learning from each other anymore
Context is now the product: Product leadership when software can build itself | Karri Saarinen (Lenny & Friends Summit, San Francisco, 10 September 2026) Said 10 Sept 2026
If colleagues seeing a feature for the first time are confused, users are likely confused too.
So they if they are confused it's likely that the the users are confused too.
Context is now the product: Product leadership when software can build itself | Karri Saarinen (Lenny & Friends Summit, San Francisco, 10 September 2026) Said 10 Sept 2026
More of the known, repeatable work that teaches little should be automated.
we should automate more of the known things like the things that are repeatable and maybe are not that impactful. It's not something we can learn a lot from.
Context is now the product: Product leadership when software can build itself | Karri Saarinen (Lenny & Friends Summit, San Francisco, 10 September 2026) Said 10 Sept 2026
Intuition is not a magical force but something learned while working and listening to customers.
intuition is not some like magical force that like and Star Wars or something that it's happens to you. It it is something that you have learned while working on something or listening to customers or something.
Context is now the product: Product leadership when software can build itself | Karri Saarinen (Lenny & Friends Summit, San Francisco, 10 September 2026) Said 10 Sept 2026
The better the context and understanding of the people making decisions, the better the products probably are.
the better context those people have and like better understanding they have about the what they're supposed to do I think the products are better
Context is now the product: Product leadership when software can build itself | Karri Saarinen (Lenny & Friends Summit, San Francisco, 10 September 2026) Said 10 Sept 2026
Hiring people is the first step in building great products.
at linear I always thought that hiring people is the first step building great products
Context is now the product: Product leadership when software can build itself | Karri Saarinen (Lenny & Friends Summit, San Francisco, 10 September 2026) Said 10 Sept 2026
Founders, designers and developers need to develop their taste the way a sushi chef develops a palate, and appreciating culture is how.
Like sushi chefs, we as founders, designers or developers, need to develop our tastes, in order to build things people can be impressed about.
Jiro’s Dream Said 2 Sept 2012
A product needs a soul, and for that it needs one person of great taste who is its living, breathing aspect and gets furious about every small detail.
For the soul, you need a person with a great taste to be the living and breathing aspect of the product. The one forging the blades. The person who thinks about the in and outs of the product and the business.
Your Product Needs a Soul Said 12 Feb 2010
In making products, taste is not a matter of opinion but a sense of sophistication, learned by making something real rather than at school.
In making products, taste is not a matter of opinion, but an actual sense of sophistication that a person has. People who make new things need to practice taste and recognize beauty when they see it. Schools or education have very little to teach in the area of taste, you need to get involved in making something real.
Your Product Needs a Soul Said 12 Feb 2010
A product vision cannot be transferred through specs and bullet points; the product visionary has to engage in doing.
As a product visionary, trying to describe the product on a piece of paper with paragraphs and bullet points is like trying to paint the Sistine Chapel with a whiteboard marker.
Your Product Needs a Soul Said 12 Feb 2010
What is a korrent?
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Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 2 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Liked Jiro Dreams of Sushi
I’m a fan of sushi, but even more, I look up to people who care about their craft. I don’t think I can ever have that kind of dedication for 75 years, but I can be inspired by people like Jiro.
karrisaarinen.com 2 Sept 2012
Recommends The Auteur Theory of Design (Macworld speech)
In his Macworld speech The Auteur Theory of Design (I highly recommend you to watch it), John Gruber underpins taste to be even more the liability of the person in charge
karrisaarinen.com 12 Feb 2010
What others say about The Auteur Theory of Design (Macworld speech) →
Where they publish
Site karrisaarinen.com Essays on design and craft, and his work at Airbnb and Linear.
Link verified 6 Sept 2026.
x.com @karrisaarinen Where he posts about Linear and design.
Recent
- Linux. Git. SSH. MySQL. IRC. Almost all started by individual Finns. 🇫🇮 The key here is individuals. The more organizations or broader environment get involved, the worse it gets. It’s nice to be proud of where these things came from. But what matters more is what you do with them. European individuals can invent. But America is, ironically, a much better collective environment for trying new things and turning them into something impactful. That’s why so many these ambitious people move there. Building something great is and needs to be a shared ambition. This has been missing from Europe… 18 Oct 2026
- lot of people are now preferring Linear diffs for their PRs 17 Oct 2026
- Final form achieved: @linear now also builds and deploys my site. Took me about 15mins to set up from my previous Codex scripts. - Github repo to store the code - Discuss with the agent and write posts as Linear docs - Linear coding agent run the code in the sandbox, build the site and deploy to S3 - S3 credentials are stored in Linear env as secrets - I can now just tell the agent "publish this article" or "republish the site" - Added a lightbox, rss feed today with the coding agent, reviews and merged with Linear Diffs. Can now write, make changes, review code and publish from any computer… 16 Oct 2026
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- Someone behind the software I think good products carry something of the people who make them. Their experience, what they care about, and how they think things should work. You might not know who those people are, but you can feel their perspective in the product. The industry often talks about software as though it comes out of a factory. You collect requirements, build features, and measure whether they work. Follow the process and you should get a good result. Now we're talking automating this whole pipeline with agents. But two teams can talk to similar customers, have access to the same… 16 Oct 2026
- New on the blog: — Someone behind the software I think good products carry something of the people who make them 16 Oct 2026 karrisaarinen.com
- The problem with EU is that every country sends their worst/problematic politicians to EU parliament so they can do less harm to the country. The solution that EU needs a super EU where the worst eu politicians can be sent to reign some fantasy bureaucratic version of Risk 16 Oct 2026
- I feel like more ui is being built than ever and even foundational labs are competing on ux/ui form factors now. Remember when people predicted ui is dead and TUI is the future? 15 Oct 2026
- At this point, calling yourself “the Switzerland of AI” isnt much a of a differentiator. There are only two companies that aren’t Switzerland, and everyone else is offering all the models (+ maybe a home cooked one). 14 Oct 2026
- Join us for our first @linear conference on continuing the craft of great software 14 Oct 2026
- New post: — Brand is who you are 14 Oct 2026 karrisaarinen.com
- I take it, @linear top10 🫡 14 Oct 2026
- Linear is becoming the place to drive more work forward in your orgs. A customer shared this chart showing dramatically faster & automatic bug resolution after enabling Loops + @linear Cloud Coding Agent (claude/codex/open): > Their 95th-percentile time from bug report or customer request to a fix in production dropped from 9 weeks to 3 days over three months. Some use other use cases for Loops: - cleaning up deprecated code - investigating and fixing bugs - routing customer requests to whoever is on call - monitoring security vulnerabilities - checking up on important projects or customer th… 13 Oct 2026
- one man’s treasure is another man’s slop 12 Oct 2026
- Lesson on why you need to select your investors very carefully and especially if they have any kind of larger ownership or rights. Best of luck to Valar 10 Oct 2026
- Instapaper doing it right. Automating the straightforward bug fixing with @linear Linear can now handle the full software development cycle, and with Loops it can be automated 9 Oct 2026
- Guided Diffs (ai makes you a review guide of the PR changes) is now available for all @linear paid plans 9 Oct 2026
- We didn't become builders because we want more output, but to make something good. To keep make something good, the learning for is needed as much the product you build. 8 Oct 2026
- I scrapped the tool. I realized how much I like to write in @linear and how simple, fast and elegant the document experience is. So Team Documents in Linear is my CMS now. I have local tool that pulls the markdown with site metadata, renders html, saves backup, publishes it to S3 within 10seconds. I'm on free plan btw. 7 Oct 2026
- working as planned... @linear 7 Oct 2026
- We like to build tools for builders, which is how @linear Diffs originated, and team is cooking up some amazing new additions. What would want to see more from us to make the best way to understand the changes agents are making? Today we have: - Guided Reviews break diffs into focused sections with explained code - Fast even with large diffs and thousands of files - Edit PR live with various agents + multiple people - Color themes, various formatting options - Cmd-f to search and cmd+click to view symbols - Long list of various helpes - Rendered markdown & image diffs - Do reviews on your pho… 7 Oct 2026
Link verified 6 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
GitHub @ksaa Personal repositories.
Link verified 6 Sept 2026.
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