Nothing makes you feel like a fintech veteran like remembering when you could put "banking" in the headline without a footnote explaining that, legally speaking, you’re absolutely not a bank.

My first startup internship was in Palo Alto around 2009. The financial crisis had just wiped out the jobs many of my classmates expected to have. Banking and consulting offers were being rescinded. Some of us found our way into startups because we needed a job -- any job. Others passed up Google because they wanted to work on something they believed should exist. It would be easy to romanticize this. People wanted to make money then, too. But joining a startup wasn’t an especially reliable way to impress anyone. You usually had to explain what the company did, and sometimes why you'd joined it. Someone asked me why I joined Stripe when it was small. You could already accept credit cards online. What was new or innovative about that? It was a reasonable question. The opportunity seemed obvious to the people working on it, but it wasn’t obvious to everyone else. That gap was part of the appeal. You could see something worth building before there was much social reward for seeing it. In the early 2010s, teams like Pinterest and Stripe were still in Palo Alto. As Palantir took over more of downtown and space became harder to find, those teams chose to move to SF instead of further south to Mountain View or San Jose. We were in our early 20s. Of course we wanted to live in the city. Over time, friends who'd gone into banking and consulting moved into tech too. Tech companies had become THE companies. SF became an industry town, and a career that once required some explanation became the obvious choice. The odd thing about startups becoming prestigious is that they attract people who would never have joined one before they were prestigious. The ambition is still there, but more of it goes toward looking successful before you’ve made anything work. You can see it in founders creating videos holding an influencer mic, or in a room where working at OpenAI is more interesting than starting something nobody has heard of. The famous company gives people a shortcut... they can be impressed without having to form an opinion of their own. That’s what I miss. There was a time when joining a startup meant being willing to look unsuccessful for a while.

One thing I learned at Stripe is that moving money is only part of the problem. Knowing where it came from, where it went, and why is just as important. As agents start making financial decisions and moving money autonomously, that infrastructure becomes more critical. Excited to see Fragment building the financial primitives for this next era of commerce. Congrats to @neckelthomas and the team on the $12M raise!

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Got this text from a friend this morning after their large public tech company rolled out Linear: “Whereas I just used [legacy tool] when I had to, with Linear I actually… want to use it.” Your context will always be wrong if people only use your system when they’re forced to. That’s why we invest so much in making Linear great for the builders actually doing the work. The best system of record is one people want to keep up to date.

Ambitious startups should get to use the best tools from day one. More free Linear for the companies of tomorrow thanks to our partnership with Claude!

The strongest brands are built through the product and the experience around it. Excited to co-host this conversation with Warp and hear how leaders from Cash App, Coinbase, and Plaid think about making a brand feel inevitable. Join us tomorrow in SF!

Peer hasn’t opened a Linear ticket by hand in three months. I believe him. Most of my own issue creation now happens through Slack and the Linear Agent. So we’ve been watching a question closely -- as agents get access to Linear, do people stop using the app? Over the past year, weekly MCP usage has grown roughly 20X from a much smaller base. The number of people using Linear’s app each week has grown significantly too. Today, about 84% of weekly active users use the app, 48% use MCP, and 12% use an OAuth integration. Those groups overlap. People use different ways to work with Linear. Paid seat utilization is also higher than it was two years ago. Creating an issue may move to an agent. But the team still needs a shared view of its work. Making it easier to get information into and out of Linear may make that shared view more valuable. For SaaS companies, the question is broader than whether agents take clicks away from the app. Watch whether human engagement falls as agent activity rises, and whether the product becomes more central to the work. At Linear, app and MCP usage are both growing. We’ll keep watching to see how user behavior and our product evolves along side it.

Nothing says “modern enterprise technology” quite like someone trying to recall an email as though we’re operating a telegraph station in 1954. Meanwhile, hitting recall doesn’t erase your screw-up. It just sends everyone a second email announcing, “Hey, remember that email you weren’t supposed to see? Yeah, that one.”

Personal agents you talk to by voice are a bold bet that what’s missing from my life is more phone calls.

The strange thing about VCs investing in competitors is how normal they pretend it is. When a VC takes a board seat, they aren't merely making an investment. They become a fiduciary. They gain access to the company's strategy, performance, weaknesses, and plans. And they accept a duty to put the company's interests ahead of their own. Then their firm invests in a competitor. We're supposed to believe the conflict disappears because everyone involved is professional. But how many firms actually prevent partners from seeing how competing companies are marked? How many require them to recuse themselves from portfolio reviews? How many have real information barriers, rather than assurances that no one will misuse what they know? A conflict doesn’t have to produce obvious misconduct to be a conflict. Simply knowing that one company is accelerating while another is struggling influences where a firm puts its attention, capital, recruiting help, and introductions. The board member’s job is to bet on the company. If their firm needs to bet on its competitor too, perhaps they shouldn’t have taken the board seat. (A sidenote: I’m not talking about situations where a portfolio company pivots and begins competing with another company in the portfolio. I’m talking about knowingly investing in competitors. And yes, founders sometimes claim that every company in their broad space is a competitor, when very often it isn’t.)

Linear Montreal Offsite Day 1 Agenda Four walls. 85°C. And everyone agrees on the product roadmap.

Built a @bot that turns every @Linear X mention into structured product feedback. It checks whether the feature exists, finds or creates the right issue for the eng team, opens an issue for our support team, and drafts an on-brand reply. It's a very online PM who never sleeps.

AI agents may eventually transform shopping, but we still have a long way to go. Shopping is visual. I want to compare products, browse photos, check sizing, read reviews, and notice things I wasn’t specifically searching for. That’s why I usually ask the agent for a product link instead of buying through it. I need more data and interrogating a chatbot one question at a time is rarely the fastest way to get it. What is the agent-equivalent of the storefront?