If SaaS Is Dead, Linear Didn’t Get the Memo

Laura Entis covers Dan Shipper’s AI & I podcast interview with Karri Saarinen, cofounder and CEO of Linear. The piece examines what the “SaaS is dead” narrative gets right and wrong through Linear’s successful reinvention as an agent-native business.

Three key points: (1) Technology changes should not change your mission — Linear kept focus on helping companies build great software while competitors chased AI trends. (2) Opening Linear to AI agents as first-class users instantly expanded the addressable user base; OpenAI and Coinbase now use it to manage their agents. (3) Speed makes decisions matter more, not less — Linear skipped the chatbot bandwagon when it realized the application was not useful, freeing resources for human-agent collaboration.

The piece also mentions Anthropic’s inadvertent Claude Code source code leak and Cora GM Kieran Klaassen’s analysis of it. Paywalled after the podcast summary.

RDCO mapping: Strong reference for the “SaaS in the agent era” conversation. Linear’s strategy — keep your mission, make agents first-class users — is a useful framework for evaluating which SaaS tools survive. The agent-as-user concept is directly relevant to how we interact with Notion, Slack, and other tools through MCP. Sponsor note: Bolt.new ad present.