Rasmus

Founder. Wine-nerd. Mediocre Golfer. Father of four.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

The fallacy of this is that more creates more. More hours, more hiring, more something.

And it is true in a sense. If you put in more work, more work will happen. But I think for most startups, the leverage is really in how differently you approach the problem, how well you cultivate your team, and the strategy.

Any large company can outspend you on hours. They have thousands or tens of thousands more people, spending more hours. If hours worked were the metric, every large company and government organization would always win and do the best work. More hours, better output.

This thinking is often representative of younger founders, where the startup becomes their identity and life. They have a hard time doing anything else, and cannot understand that your work is not the person that is you. But activities outside of work can grow you as a person too and make you do better work.

I’ve never worked this way. As a designer, I always saw the need to take a step back, to take a break. At times, I might work 12 hours or 16 hours, or whatever amount was needed, but it wasn’t the norm. You just can't grind design, you need inspiration. But taking that step away from the work, would give me more perspective, inspiration and I could approach the problem differently or I could just see the solution.

Grinding is never good for any creative problem, and startups or creating new products are often mostly about creative problem solving. Grinding works ok for email jobs, or where you just executing on very clear playbook.

With Linear, we’ve never worked this way. We work reasonable hours, 5 days a week. All of us founders have families. Many of our employees have families. I personally stop every evening, spend time with the family, cook dinner for the family, eat dinner together, and focus on things outside of work. Sometimes I work in the late evenings or weekends, but to me the pride is that I don’t need to. Company should be succesful without it.

My goal is to build a company that is sustainable in the long term, and doesn’t require heroics or personal sacrifices every single day.

There are times when our team is heroic. Launches, incidents, some other work that just needs to be done. They will work late into the night because they know it is the right thing. But we don’t require that every day or every week, and the more this happens, the more I think it is a failure of our company and leadership. The team and the leaders should always keep a reserve to use when something is needed.

Our thinking was also that quality, which we value, doesn’t emerge from working more or stressing people more. It emerges when you create the conditions for it to emerge. Often it is the appreciation, space, time, and how the person feels. A person who is rested will do better work.

I wouldn’t attribute much of our success to working a lot. The success came from having clear thinking, ideas, and focus to do the right things.

I sometimes wish we could move the culture more toward a Zen master.

Real mastery is not exerting the most effort. It is achieving the outcome with the least necessary effort.

[Rasmus @Musse_S]

Anthropic will probably ship their own version on Friday. Counting on it.

[Rasmus @Musse_S]

Every morning I wake up to another Claude release. Last 2 weeks: 13 blog posts, 8 Claude Code releases, an SDK release.

Hard to keep up. Someone ELI36 this for me.

Wrote a skill that reads my project context and tells me what actually matters.

[Rasmus @Musse_S]

Claude Code already ships /release-notes. Dumps the full changelog. Doesn't know what I've built. My CLAUDE.md and skills are sitting right there in the repo. Read the room.

https://t.co/5Q0lNb5jcN

[Rasmus @Musse_S]

Claude is SO done with me

[Rasmus @Musse_S]

@james406 You're insane. In the best possible way 🤌🏻

[Rasmus @Musse_S]

*chef's kiss*

[PostHog @posthog]

Today we announce an exciting new chapter in PostHog’s journey, our new range of PostHog Heroes action figures.

With PostHog Heroes, our precious youth can finally realize their dreams of one day founding a B2B SaaS company and delivering shareholder value.

We’ve already sold the movie rights to A24 with Timothée Chalamet attached as the lead. We’re hopeful this is the movie that will win him the Oscar he craves.

[yoni rechtman @yrechtman]

https://t.co/CJrgWXvVSx

[Rishi Mody ツ @rishimody]

we’re about to speedrun this realization across every institution in society aren’t we

[Rasmus @Musse_S]

Imagine NYR hurting you both emotionally and financially 💀

Can't wait!

[Mike Vorkunov @MikeVorkunov]

MSG Sports said it will explore separating the New York Knicks and Rangers into two separate publicly traded companies. The MSG Sports board of directors has approved the plan to explore that spin-off.

[Matt Shumer @mattshumer_]

https://t.co/ivXRKXJvQg

[Jeff Weinstein @jeff_weinstein]

Autonomous agents are an entirely new category of users to build for, and, increasingly, to sell to.

Today, we’re launching (a preview) of machine payments on @stripe—a way for developers to directly charge agents, with a few lines of code. 🤖💸

$ Let’s start tinkering… ⤵️

[Rasmus @Musse_S]

@matt_elevenlabs 11B

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Kaja Kallas put it perfectly when she said that if Ukraine is expected to hold elections, then Russia should first commit to free and fair elections of its own, something it has not had for 25 years. That is where the real problem lies, and shifting the focus away from it only serves the aggressor.

Too often the debate drifts into complete nonsense. We hear claims that Ukraine must hold elections right now, that it is somehow a dictatorship, that it should limit its army, avoid NATO, or accept losing territory that Russia has violently seized after killing civilians and soldiers alike. This framing is dangerous. It ignores the basic reality of the situation.

Ukraine did not start this war. Russia did. Ukraine is defending itself against an invading power that violates borders, crushes dissent at home, and wages war without regard for human life. Any discussion that forgets who is attacking and who is defending has already failed. If we want peace, stability, and a rules based world, we must keep that simple truth front and center at all times.

[Carl Bildt @carlbildt]

The Trump 🇺🇸 team is now going overboard in vitriolic anti-European outbursts. After the bizarre National Security Strategy comes this. The Trump team is portrayed as defending Western civilization - always welcome - but EU as pursuing policies of ”civilisational suicide”. This is extremist nonsense.

[Rasmus @Musse_S]

☠️☠️☠️

[Rasmus @Musse_S]

If you’re exploring how to modernise rewards in your organisation, or interested in working on this problem space, my DMs are open.

[Rasmus @Musse_S]

Looking back, a lot of choices across my career ended up compounding in ways I didn’t fully see at the time.

And if I have a default mode, it’s just doing things.
So I did.

[Rasmus @Musse_S]

Commerce and discovery are shifting.
Reward infrastructure needs to shift with them.

We’re building for that future.