You'll see a lot of “us versus them” pages on company websites, where they trash the competition and pretend they invented everything from scratch. That's not what this is. Great artists learn from what came before them. Musicians, painters, scientists, all of it is building on prior art. You study what exists, you figure out what you love and what you'd change, and you make something better. Linear is one of the companies that shaped how we think about building Macro, and I want to talk about why.
What I Admire
When I was younger, I used to Google a startup idea, and if something already existed in the space, I'd move on. That's a hilariously wrong way to think about it. Linear did the opposite. They picked a category that already existed, project management, and rebuilt it with real conviction. That's the part most people underestimate. You have to believe the category is righteous to do it justice. If you look at project management and think it's a boring commodity, you'll build a boring commodity, and hundreds of thousands of people will use your mediocre tool every day of their working lives. Linear took the Steve Jobs approach instead: there's going to be a computer on every desk, and it can either be a shitty version or a beautiful version. They chose beautiful.
What really elevates them beyond just being a well-crafted product, though, is the myth they've built around it. Nike doesn't make most of its money on pro athletes. They're selling shoes to everyone. But by partnering with the best, they make the entire brand aspirational. Linear proved you could do that for software. They have the Linear Method. You don't see the Jira Method. You don't see the Google Docs Bible on Writing. The idea that software should be paired with a philosophy on how you ought to do your work is what gives a product a genuine reason for existence, and the aura that flows from that conviction, that this tool is purpose-built for engineering teams, that the people behind it believe they're creating the highest and best form of this thing, radiates outward into every team that adopts it.
Why should anyone think your company matters if you don't believe it matters? There's so much money flowing toward companies where the people building them don't seem to care about what they're making. Linear is a company that cares, and you can feel it in every interaction with the product. That kind of conviction takes time to compound. It's not as quick as dumping a million dollars into Meta ads. But in the long run, it's how you win.
Where We're Going Further
For all of that admiration, I have to be honest about my experience as a user. I'm the CEO of a product-focused company, and Linear markets itself as a great tool for building products, but I never developed the habit of actually checking it. When I needed to know what someone was working on, I'd just ask them directly, and the fact that asking was easier than looking tells you something important about where even the best project management tools fall short.
The number one thing you want out of a ticketing system is the same thing you want out of a CRM: that it reflects reality. Linear was more current than Notion had been, but not current enough to be genuinely useful to me on a daily basis, because you still have to go in and manually create and update tickets. The system is always trailing behind the actual state of the work. It encouraged some good behavior among the engineering team, and I think it made them happier, but it didn't go far enough to actually replace the casual “hey, what are you working on?” check-in, which means it never crossed the threshold into something I relied on. The opinionated workflow features, cycles, initiatives, didn't quite land for us either. When our engineers wanted to move off Notion, the real driver wasn't methodology. It was that Notion was slow and Linear was fast, and Linear had this aspirational energy around it. Speed and aura, more than structure, is what drove the switch.
This is the gap we're building into with Macro. Project management in Macro isn't a separate application you have to remember to update. Tasks emerge from conversations, from your channels, your emails, your threads, so the system stays current because it's woven into how people actually communicate rather than sitting off to the side waiting for someone to manually feed it information. Everything flows into one unified inbox, emails, messages, tasks, docs, triaged by priority, so you're not bouncing between tools trying to reconstruct what's happening across your company. And because all of it lives in a single system, AI has full context across everything your team is working on, which means you can get a real picture of where things stand without going on a scavenger hunt through three separate apps.
Linear proved that craft and conviction matter in software, and they showed you can build a genuinely different kind of company by caring deeply about what you make. We're carrying that same energy forward and applying it across the entire workspace: faster, fully integrated, and designed so the system keeps up with reality instead of asking reality to keep up with the system.