If you’re at Config this year, @harvey is hosting a design night with our friends at @DecagonAI across from Moscone on June 24.
Come join us, we'll have drinks, food, and conversations on the future of intelligent interfaces with other exceptional designers.
Luma link below
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.
I think you're going to see it's all going to converge back to screens and data and panels and buttons.
People don't want to ask the same question over and over. They'll ask something, it'll be set up to show something, and that thing will be saved as something they can always look at. Stable pre-defined glances, not blank slates each time. Common questions will become buttons and panels again.
Most people ask the same kinds of questions about what they work on most of the time. Having to start from scratch with the questions every time seems like a step backwards.
Another way to put this: Questions are wonderful for a deeper dive, but not a daily drive.
Not sure you're suggesting questions always, but the comparison screenshots looked that way.
As I quoted in the interview "The team you build is the company you build" (thank you @vkhosla)
I deeply believe in that, especially as we continue to accelerate our product roadmap and build out our vision. And with that said, we're hiring!
Working on this from scratch w @david_zhu1 and team has been rewarding and loads of fun. Look forward to working w @mamoonha to build a generational company
Once in a while, a bold team reimagines how an entire function should work, and builds the platform to make it real.
That’s what the @reevo_ai team is doing for go-to-market.
They’ve flipped traditional CRM on its head, transforming a static system of record into an intelligent, action-oriented platform that unifies marketing, sales, and customer success.
We’re proud to partner with @david_zhu1, @CindyxHao, Curtis Tan, and @cfang619 on Reevo, the first truly AI-native Revenue Operating System built to help GTM teams work smarter.
Today, we’re announcing $80 million in funding - co-led by @khoslaventures and @kleinerperkins - to end the tool sprawl, once and for all.
GTM is broken. We’re here to fix it.
Read the full story on @Bloomberg here: https://t.co/NIez1Ndpwv
Artificial intelligence startup Reevo Inc. has raised $80 million from investors including Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, the company plans to announce Wednesday — financing that brings the startup’s valuation to $500 million. https://t.co/PuPMHJN3LW
So proud of my friend @david_zhu1 and the incredible team at @reevo_ai on today’s launch.
Reevo is the first truly AI-native Revenue Operating System, unifying Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success into one intelligent platform.
Excited to partner with them on this next chapter. Check them out, they’re hiring! - https://t.co/VLJlVmmh2L
With every technological shift a new platform reshapes how revenue teams work.
In the ’90s, Siebel set the CRM standard.
In the early 2000s, Salesforce took it to the cloud.
Now AI is that shift, and Reevo is the AI-native GTM platform for marketing, sales, and customer success. Thrilled to partner with @david_zhu1, @CindyxHao, Curtis Tan, and @cfang619 as they launch @reevo_ai.
https://t.co/J9rPpazCwL
Excited to share @reevo_ai is coming out of stealth with $80 million in funding.
Grateful to partner with @khoslaventures and @kleinerperkins - and a heartfelt thank you to @vkhosla, @SamirKaul1, & @mamoonha for their support in helping us build something category-defining.
People talk about how AI is going to make design obsolete, and/or make pixel perfect designs not be a thing anymore. I don't think so.
Pixel-perfect design mostly existed in designers’ minds anyway. The mocks might perfect but the final product rarely was. Most of the time, those designs were shipped sloppily because the product organization didn’t have the patience to see the polish through. How many truly pixel-perfect products do you see out there?Especially with growth focused companies. There are exceptions, but not many.
The idea that AI might ruin visual quality feels like a non-issue since wasn’t much quality to ruin in the first place.
I also don't believe AI makes design obsolete but I believe it will raise the floor. That it’ll lift the skill level of product teams, and I hope it will free up time for the kind of polish that usually gets cut. So ideally we continue see more overall better design and the more "handcrafted" polished designs as well.
My general view of AI is that it will just let us do more things, not take away things. We didn't stop writing less when email was invented.
Few aspects:
1. AI as a skill multiplier. LLMs can elevate frontend and design quality for companies that historically couldn’t hire strong talent—or for individuals who haven’t built those muscles yet. In a way that way, it’s not that different from using UI kits, Tailwind, or shadcn.
2. Rethinking design systems. Design systems were a product of the ZIRP era, when teams scaled quickly and you couldn’t trust every person to design and build a decent button. So systems enforced quality through components and rules. But AI flip can this, and Instead of assembling rigid blocks, you can quickly build good scaffolding and refine with AI or by hand. LLMs might even enforce standards even better than design systems because they could be trained to spot inconsistencies and fix visual bugs automatically. The kinds of things that usually get deprioritized.
3. Designing closer to code.
I think AI will allow us to design more in code. I think it’s a good thing if we move away from pixel-perfect Figma files. The way I’ve always designed: Figma is where you design the vibe. Code is where you make it perfect. The real product is the one in production, not the mock. So that’s where polish should happen. Future design tools should make that process easier.
4. Taste still matters. For teams that already care about design, teams like @linear, none of this really changes the hard part. Achieving a polished UI is not that hard if you just have the practice. The hard part is conceptual. It’s figuring out how features fit together, how ideas map across the system. That’s where most of the iteration happens. That’s the part AI still can’t do for you.
So yes, AI will make things faster. It will increase the volume of output, but maybe it will also shift the baseline.
Holistic quality still depends on taste, systems thinking, and the willingness to care about the final experience.