Ishan Korde

Design @ Okta

[FOX Sports @FOXSports]

From underdogs to history-makers. Thank you, Cape Verde.

[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.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

non-designers who have never designed anything: "designers are cooked!"

people who have worked in code, want to work in code, always will work in code: "future of design is code!"

companies selling tokens: "move that button 4px with a prompt!"

designers:

[Ryo Lu @ryolu_]

as agents make it easy to add features, design matters more, not less. the role is no longer just pushing pixels – it’s deciding what should exist, how it fits together, how humans stay in control, and how intelligence feels clear, trustworthy, and useful.

taste, craft, and judgment have always been the bottleneck. the game is not who ships fastest, but who makes the right thing for humans.

[Dick Fain @dickfain]

Omg how bad ass is this cover?!

[HawkMania @hawkmania4]

#Seahawks Coby Bryant and Nick Emmanwori are locked in to whatever HC Mike Macdonald is saying:

[📷: NFL on Peacock]

[NFL @NFL]

THE SEATTLE SEAHAWKS ARE SUPER BOWL LX CHAMPIONS 🏆

[Bleacher Report @BleacherReport]

Not seeing Ghosts anymore 👻

Sam Darnold and the Seahawks are headed to the Super Bowl 🔥

[Mina Kimes @minakimes]

Man…I’m just really freakin happy for Sam Darnold. We were in Arizona for his loss to the Rams last year—to go from that to this, and from castoff to the Super Bowl.

What an incredible journey. What a game. What a moment for him.

[Seattle Seahawks @Seahawks]

WE'RE GOING TO THE SUPER BOWL ‼️

[Seattle Seahawks @Seahawks]

21 months in the making. Stacked every opportunity to get here.

[Ishan Korde @ishankorde]

@FedExHelp My packages are consistently delivered to the wrong address down the street. This happened again last week and I have lost an expensive order. Your app is horrendous and calling customer service is a waste of time.

[NASA Solar System @NASASolarSystem]

BREAKING: Sugars essential for life have been found in pristine asteroid Bennu samples collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Combined with previous detections of amino acids and nucleobases, we see that life’s ingredients were widespread throughout the solar system: https://t.co/Tb3HpwZG9J

More on the study led by Yoshihiro Furukawa of @TohokuUniPR⤵️

[Darren Shepherd @ibuildthecloud]

This is incredibly cool. Anthropic, OpenAI, and MCP-UI all working together on a common MCP Apps standard. This is going to be huge. https://t.co/cZpGxNQPUC

[Evan Hill @EvanHillHB]

It’s now two straight weeks that I’m incredibly relaxed watching the Seattle Seahawks play a football game.

Is this real life?

[DANN© @DannPetty]

Dear designer,

You're not cooked. It's not over. You just became 10x more powerful as long as you don't sit there and do nothing. You can move faster and build your ideas. You can provide the human touch that will be needed to stand out.

It's your time to shine if you adapt.

[Frank ☼ Bach @zendadddy]

Being a great designer is one thing. Being a great designer, while navigating structures and processes of a major corporation, and actually getting stuff built? That’s a whole different game.

[Ari Hoffman @thehoffather]

What the Seattle weather people predicted

[Nike @Nike]

The difference between patience and persistence is your first major. Congrats @Madison_Keys on winning in Melbourne.