Karri Saarinen

Co-founder & CEO, Linear

Search every verified Karri Saarinen interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear, spoke at the Lenny and Friends Summit in San Francisco on September 10, 2026, about the role of context in product development. He argued that while AI tools are improving and can automate more work, teams may lose the learning that comes from hands-on execution, and he suggested that companies should automate repeatable, low-impact tasks while focusing more on building shared understanding. Saarinen described how Linear collects customer feedback from sales calls, support emails, and internal discussions, and uses an AI agent to flag notable information for him. He also stated that hiring people is the first step in building great products, emphasizing the importance of judgment and taste over simply increasing output. Saarinen said that after taking a summer break from following AI news, he found that "nothing has changed much" in terms of the fundamental difficulty of making great products or growing a business. He expressed the view that the more product organizations automate work with AI, the more they risk separating execution from learning, and he cautioned that teams that do not learn from their work may eventually lose their advantage. He concluded that "context becomes the product," meaning that much of product work is about managing and learning from context rather than just writing code.