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If SaaS Is Dead, Linear Didn’t Get the Memo

The product management tool has successfully reinvented itself as an agent-native business

‘AI & I’: Slowing down to speed up

Today, we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. Dan Shipper sits down with Karri Saarinen, cofounder and CEO of Linear, a product management tool designed for agent-native software development, to discuss what the “SaaS is dead” narrative gets right—and wrong—and why conviction can be the best product strategy.

Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. You can also read the transcript.

Here are the highlights:

Just because the technology has changed doesn’t mean your mission should. Founded in 2019, Linear is the rare company that started pre-ChatGPT to have successfully reinvented itself as an agent-native business. Saarinen attributes Linear’s success to never losing sight of what it’s always cared about: helping companies build great software. Whereas competitors chased AI trends, Linear focused on understanding how the technology was impacting customers’ workflows, and updating its service accordingly.
SaaS winners are building for agents. Linear started as an excellent product management tool for humans. Opening up the tool to agents instantly increased the available user base. Today, agents are first-class users inside of Linear, and companies like OpenAI and Coinbase are using its platform to manage their own agents.
Speed means decisions matter more, not less. AI makes it easy to have an idea and build it without considering whether it justifies its existence. When ChatGPT was released, SaaS companies were launching their own chatbots left, right, and center. Instead of jumping on the bandwagon, Linear stopped to consider whether the application was useful. Turns out it really wasn’t, Saarinen says, a realization that freed up resources to focus on what mattered, like making it easy for humans and agents to collaborate on software development.

Miss an episode? Catch up on Dan’s recent conversations with LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman; the team that built Claude Code, Cat Wu and Boris Cherny; Vercel cofounder Guillermo Rauch; podcaster Dwarkesh Patel; and others, and learn how they use AI to think, create, and relate.

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Dissecting Claude Code

On Tuesday, Anthropic inadvertently leaked the entire source code for Claude Code. Naturally, Cora general manager Kieran was curious to see what was happening under the hood.

Become a paid subscriber to Every to unlock this piece and learn about:

The feature buried inside Claude Code’s leaked source code that impressed Kieran the most
What Every’s creative director thinks of Google Stitch
Why the general manager of Every’s AI writing tool starts every draft knowing only 30 percent of what he wants to say