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.

A CEO from one of our portfolio companies shared this with their team. I’m re-sharing it with their permission, because it resonated and reflects what all founders and CEOs should be communicating. -- We are living through a period of compounding change. And in moments like this, the biggest risk is no longer making the wrong decision. It is moving too slowly while the world moves around you. There are two paths. We can play defense: - Protect what we have - Optimize what works - Wait for clarity It feels safe. It isn’t. Or we can play offense: - Learn faster than the environment changes - Use new tools to solve old problems in better ways - And create entirely new strategies and businesses That’s where the opportunity is. Challenge yourself to do things faster and better than you have ever attempted. Stay uncomfortable. Stay on the front foot.

Every week something happens that makes me more excited (and nervous) for what’s coming with AI Speaking to Perplexity Computer for 15 minutes resulted in 3 agents that now make starting my day so much easier… - Filterable web-hosted dashboard showing status of deliverables (which I keep in @NotionHQ) - Emails from contacts that aren’t in my CRM yet - Suggestions for who to add to my CRM and proposed actions based on the inbound context Kind of shocked me in a good way 3 years into using Perplexity too! Thanks @AskPerplexity

At @NotionHQ, we believe every business deserves powerful & beautiful tools. AI is the most important technology of this era. It shouldn't only belong to companies that have AI teams or can afford forward deployed engineers. Today we're launching Custom Agents: — The first multiplayer agents built for business. — No coding. Minutes to set up. Hosted in the cloud. — Run autonomously 24/7 with all your business apps. — Switch between the best LLMs (usually the same day they're released). — One person builds it, the whole company benefits. Rolling out for Business and Enterprise customers today. The AI era should leave no one behind 👌

Signed up for the beta 🚀 Realizing computers as bicycles for the mind... Excited for what's under the hood @dps @dreamer