Avsnitt
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How does Linear build a $1B+ business with under 200 people, without a culture of burnout?
Cristina Cordova is COO of Linear, the product development system for teams and agents. Before Linear, Cristina was an early employee at Stripe, helping scale the company from under 30 employees to over 3,000, and later helped build partnerships at Notion.
In this episode, Cristina joins host Joelle Emerson to discuss why Linear has explicitly rejected the 996 culture common in tech startups. She explains why Linear treats headcount as a deliberate choice rather than a byproduct of growth, why the company's hiring bar is about learning ability and risk-taking rather than resume checkboxes, and why focus, not raw output, is Linear's real competitive advantage.
They also discuss Linear's paid work trials, how the company organizes engineering into project-based "collapsible teams," and why investing in brand early pays off for years.
If you're thinking about how to build a high-performing team without overhiring, or how to design a hiring process that actually predicts success, this conversation is for you.
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What does hiring look like at the frontier of AI?
Adam Ward is Head of Talent at Cursor, one of the fastest-growing software companies in history. Before joining Cursor, Adam helped scale Facebook through its IPO, led global recruiting at Pinterest as the company grew from 200 to more than 2,000 employees, and built Growth by Design Talent into the talent advisory firm behind companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Notion, and Figma.
In this episode, Adam joins host Joelle Emerson to talk about why most companies are still building recruiting teams the way they did decades ago, and what needs to change now. He explains Cursor’s approach to hiring, why the best recruiting processes look more like executive search than a traditional funnel, and why companies should focus less on hiring efficiency and more on hiring efficacy.
They also discuss talent density, referral mining, work trials, founder involvement, compensation philosophy, AI in recruiting, hiring junior engineers in an AI-native world, and what it takes to close exceptional candidates in a market where speed, judgment, and conviction matter more than ever.
If you’re thinking about how AI is changing recruiting, team design, and the future of high-performance organizations, this conversation is for you.
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The job of the people team is being rewritten in real-time. We created Below the Surface to learn how category-defining companies are navigating people, talent, and culture right now.
