Why This $1 Billion Startup CEO Rejected 996, Hustle Culture

Silicon Valley’s notorious 996 work schedule (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week) has little appeal to Karri Saarinen, the 38-year-old CEO of a project management startup. linear,

“We haven’t implemented that kind of culture, and I personally don’t believe it gives the results I want,” Saarinen said in a new interview. entrepreneur,

Instead, Saarinen asks employees to work the standard 40 hours generous perksLinear, a remote company that offers five weeks of paid vacation per year and four months of paid parental leave, is proof that it’s possible to build a world-class tech business without sacrificing workers’ well-being, The startup’s 100 employees are spread across 10 different time zones, from the US to Finland,

Linear’s main product is a system for coordinating work in companies. It also offers a project management issue tracking tool as well as a code review tool. Startup was last evaluated $1.25 billion This brings its total funding raised after raising $82 million in a Series C funding round in June $134.2 millionAccording to Saarinen, more than 2,000 companies rely on the startup’s software tools, including OpenAI, Cursor, and Block,

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Saarinen sees the immediate rush into AI as a race that won’t end soon, and says that companies that adopt 996 work schedules and other “hustle culture” methods risk wasting employees in the pursuit of speed. At the same time, the output of demanding companies “is actually not that good,” Saarinen says.

“People are rushing too much and launching things that don’t work at all,” he says. “At our company, we always try to err on the side of quality, not quantity.”

Saarinen himself prioritizes work-life balance. Instead of the usual one-hour commute to the office, he spends the first hour of his day playing with his 3-year-old son before commuting to work remotely at 8 a.m. “With remote work and working from home, you have the ability to participate in family life as well,” he explains.

He ends his day at 4 pm, but sometimes logs in for an extra hour of work between 7 pm and 8 pm as needed to respond to Slack messages and emails.

Proponents of personal work, such as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, say that working in an office gives junior employees the opportunity to learn from senior employees by being immersed in office interactions. Schmidt said earlier this year that tech workers have to make “some compromises” between work and life to succeed in the industry.

Meanwhile, companies like Amazon and AT&T have called employees into the office full-time this year, saying the move will strengthen company culture.

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Saarinen, who previously worked as a designer at Coinbase and Airbnb, decided to make Linear a remote company when he co-founded the startup in 2019, before the pandemic and remote boom. The practical reason was that building a company was a 10 or 20 year journey. Linear began in San Francisco, but Saarinen could not see himself living there for the next two decades. He and his co-founders couldn’t commit to a specific location for long, so they decided to make the startup remote-based.

“Remote is not necessarily a better or worse way to build a company,” Saarinen says. “I think it’s different.”

Moving away has allowed Linear to tap talent outside San Francisco — and allowed its founders to live wherever they want. Saarinen is now based in Southern California, while his two co-founders live in New York and Finland.

Linear’s culture creates autonomy, as team members have the freedom to set their own work hours rather than following a rigid schedule. “We want to hire people we can trust—and trust their judgment not only on the product, but also on how much work is enough,” Saarinen says.

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Linear has evolved slowly and deliberately. Saarinen observed that in highly growth companies, hiring quickly meant that the quality of work could suffer because suddenly there were a lot of people who didn’t really know what was going on. He wanted to avoid her. “We tried to hire really good people and slowly hire them in,” he says.

Linear’s approach had an unexpected side effect – the startup’s revenue grew much faster than its costs, causing the company to become profitable for the last four years. Saarinen says achieving profitability allows the company to chart its own course because it is not beholden to outside investment.

At the core of Linear’s success is the belief that great products come not from constantly running around, but from a full life outside of work.

“If your life is a little more balanced, you’ll feel happier, more fulfilled — and it shows in your work,” says Saarinen. “You’re not just grinding; you’re motivated.”

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Silicon Valley’s notorious 996 work schedule (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week) has little appeal to Karri Saarinen, the 38-year-old CEO of a project management startup. linear,

“We haven’t implemented that kind of culture, and I personally don’t believe it gives the results I want,” Saarinen said in a new interview. entrepreneur,