The Nimble Scale Playbook: How Linear Grew to $1.25B with 80 People

Revenue per employee might be the only metric that matters for the next generation of startups.

At traditional SaaS companies, serving 1,000 customers with 200 people on payroll was the norm. Now we're seeing a different model emerge: Cursor reaching a $9.9B valuation with 150 people. Linear serving 15,000+ customers with roughly 80. The companies winning aren't just growing faster—they're growing leaner.

Cristina Cordova saw this shift coming. She joined her first tech company as an executive at 22, helped define go-to-market strategy and built key partnerships at Stripe by 24, and scaled Notion's product-led growth. When she joined Linear as COO, it was because they understood something others didn't: every hire you make in haste becomes technical debt you pay forever.

Linear's approach is radically different. They require 2-5 day paid work trials for every role. Leaders do the work themselves first to understand what's truly needed (Cristina wrote customer stories before hiring a marketer). They spin teams up for urgent projects, then reassign them to the next highest priority—no one gets stuck owning a tiny slice forever.

Taking their time to hire can feel slower. But Linear is growing faster in 2025 than 2024, staying profitable, and maintaining their culture of craftsmanship. The frameworks below are exactly how they've done it:

• The 4-Question Hiring Filter

  — Know exactly when you're desperate enough to hire (and when to wait), plus the research step that prevents bad hires before they happen

• The Dysfunction Diagnosis Matrix

  — Tell productive chaos from destructive dysfunction with real examples from Stripe, Notion, and Linear's hypergrowth moments

• The 3-Metric Daily Dashboard

  — Replace 50+ vanity metrics with the only 3 numbers Cristina tracks every single day (plus why revenue per employee might be the only one that actually matters)

• The Collapsible Team Structure Template

  — How to eliminate reorgs forever by spinning teams up and down based on priority, not politics

Download the complete playbook and start scaling without the bloat—starting with your next hiring decision.