Linear’s Unconventional Strategy to Win By Defying Everything Silicon Valley Stands For

How Linear turned craft over metrics, quality over features, and paid interviews into a $1.25 billion valuation

Linear CEO Karri Saarinen. Author image.

Brex CEO Pedro Franceschi had built exactly what Silicon Valley celebrates: a $100M fintech rocket ship blasting into the VC stratosphere, serving 30,000+ customers across 120 countries.

So why did he feel like he was watching his company slowly suffocate?

The killer wasn't coming from competition or regulatory changes. It was simpler, yet far more devastating: his teams were growing apart.

Engineers spent more time updating multiple tools than writing code. Product managers couldn't answer even basic project status questions. And worst of all, Franceschi's own leadership team was in the dark, with no line of sight into who was building what, or when it would ship.

Their hypergrowth trajectory risked pushing their young company to the breaking point.

A Bold Bet to Tame Chaos

To fight back, CEO Franceschi announced Brex’s “3.0” transformation, his vision to rebuild Brex through a renewed focus on product excellence and customer experience.

Franceschi tapped Linear as his linchpin to centralize all of Brex’s planning and execution into a single source of truth tool.

Linear’s results quickly surpassed Franceschi and his team’s wildest expectations. Brex product teams enthusiastically used Linear 47% more than any of their previous tools; it boosted clarity in connecting daily work to company goals by 55%, and increased overall tool satisfaction by 63%.

Linear’s unique software approach solved Brex’s tool sprawl death spiral, laying the groundwork to support its accelerated growth, improved customer experience, and operational excellence.

From Sprawl to Zen

Linear’s success was no accident.

Software represents the shared point of view of design, engineering, and product teams frozen in time.

What Linear's founders understand is that most work tools are still stuck in their legacy bug ticketing roots, and try in vain to counter those rigid foundations through endless customization options.

But Brex chose Linear not just because of what it did, but because of what it refused to do.

Linear had spent four years saying "no" to almost everything customers requested, including complex dashboards that resembled air traffic control screens, and configuration options so complicated that they required specialized training certifications.

Built for Speed and Ease

Instead, Linear built an intuitive tool from the ground up that anticipated how high-performance teams expect great software to work.

Brex's transformation revealed that not only did Linear build better software, but did so by making radically different strategic choices that almost every other Silicon Valley SaaS company or venture capital firm would consider insane.

While competitors chase user acquisition metrics and feature completeness, Linear optimizes for something completely different.

We’ll look beyond the product’s surface to the underlying strategy choices that have made Linear’s success possible.

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Decoding Linear’s Strategic Choices

Most people would say Linear succeeded because they built better software.

But that’s like saying FedEx succeeded because they delivered packages faster. In truth, both FedEx and Linear succeed by making radically different strategic choices that have compounded over time to create competitive advantage.

We’ll reverse-engineer Linear’s strategy using the Strategy Choice Cascade framework.

Roger L. Martin’s “Strategy Choice Cascade.” Author image.