Karri Saarinen: Talks Leaving SF and Building a $400M Startup in San Diego's Backyard
An exclusive interview with Karri Saarinen, a designer and founder who spent the last decade at fast-growing unicorn startups in Silicon Valley.
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Karri Saarinen, is a well-known founder in San Francisco’s startup community, who worked as a designer at Airbnb and Coinbase, has raised $35 million in a Series B funding round led by Accel, valuing the company at $400 million.
Linear, a four-year-old startup, has built a beloved software tool, which is being used to build products by thousands of product teams tasked with scaling their startups into billion-dollar enterprises.
Saarinen, who rarely does interviews, agreed to chat about his company’s latest milestones. We discussed what it’s like living in America’s finest city, how he was able to raise capital from top investors and building relationships with Silicon Valley’s most influential leaders in technology while living 400-plus miles away from Palo Alto.