Linus Lee: Engineering at a Startup | Seed Guest Series
Our conversation with Linus on startups, engineering, and tech.
This week, I spoke with Linus Lee, a Product Engineer at Ideaflow and avid creator. Linus has worked on over 120 side projects, written over 400k words on this blog, thesephist.com, and has supported student founders through the Door Room Fund and Cal Hacks at UC Berkeley.
You can find our full conversation with Linus in audio form on our Notion page!
Can you tell me a bit about yourself and what got you interested in software engineering?
I was born in the States, but I spent most of my childhood in Korea, which is where my family's from. Then I came back to the Midwest and went to high school there. At the start of high school, I started wanting to build websites for clubs and things like that. I learned how to build an HTML website and use CSS. I remember spending like two weeks trying to figure out how to set up something in CSS since this was before all the tools that make it really easy to build websites existed. Eventually, I got a little better at making websites, and at some point through a teacher’s family friend, I got an internship at a local startup that was looking for a web engineering intern. So I got that as my summer job, which turned into a full-time job after high school. I took a gap year to work there more until it got acquired.
Then I went to Berkeley and started out studying computer science. And all that time, I liked building stuff. Software is the closest thing you have to cheap, free material to build new things and so I got really into it. And plus, once you have a website, you want to put stuff on there, so I started writing. Since then, I've worked at a few different startups in the Bay Area.
Why did you decide to join a startup over joining a large tech company?
There's a bunch of really small reasons. A lot of it was circumstance. I started my career during the gap year at a startup that was a 30 person company and I really liked it. Just knowing everybody at the company makes for a completely different working environment. There’s a lot more flexibility, a lot more ownership over things that you ship. At the current company that I'm at, Ideaflow, we have four engineers, and I'm one of them, which means that a quarter of the stuff that we ship, more or less, is stuff that I own and made, which is totally completely different from what you would get at a Facebook or Microsoft. That’s where I started and I liked that experience. So I kept with it.
Also, if you're a startup founder and you want to get world-class talent, you can’t fight with money because Google and Apple are always gonna have more money. You can't fight with career progress or anything the big guys have. So instead, you offer things that only small-scale companies can offer, like a lot of freedom of what you're working on and how you work on it, the opportunity to work with other really interesting people, and getting to work on problems that really fit you. Those are the benefits I'm enjoying by working at a startup.
How do you decide which ideas are worth building out at a startup level?
I think startups exist in two phases. There's the pre-product market fit phase and the post-product market phase. The second phase is when you know who wants your product and you’re just tweaking the dials to get more people to buy it. At this point, your job is to not mess it up and add features to grow really quickly. The first phase is trying to get the company towards a point where you can do those things. I've mostly worked at companies in the first phase. That means my priority and the company's priority is moving really quickly to do a lot of experiments to validate or invalidate what kinds of things work for people. At a technical level, it's a balance of making sure that the product doesn't suck to use and that we ship important features and prioritize ruthlessly to make sure that things that we're adding to the product are the things that are going to make a difference. Sometimes we look at a feature that would be really cool. But is including this feature in the product going to help us lock in new customers, or is it going to only incrementally improve the experience?
At the same time, there’s a delicate dance you have to do between working on the experimental things that might deliver results and sticking to the vision that you started with. If you lose sight of the vision, there's no point working on the small stuff, but at the same time, there's a lot of small stuff that might work. The vision might be the Northstar, but it doesn't actually matter if don’t have customers, right? One of the big jobs of the CEO and founders is to keep that vision while not pushing for it so hard that it ends up hurting you.
What are some pieces of career advice you've adopted that you think everyone could benefit from?
Three things come to mind. The first one is network.
In the middle of my gap year in high school, someone recommended I read a book called Never Eat Alone. The basic argument of the book was that most of the progress you're going to make career-wise has nothing to do with where you work and what you work on, but who you know and the relationships you have with people. When I went to Berkeley, I set this goal to meet 150 new people in a year and I actually did just that. It’s also about how many people you know well. If you know people well, you can help each other out.
The second is ownership.
This doesn’t mean you need to start a company in college, you can own something by having a bunch of side projects or writing as I do. You can also research something deeply and own a niche. A lot of people spend their time chasing validation and when you do that, you don’t own anything. You’re selling yourself for the feeling of being interesting or important. But if you own something, you can benefit from it forever.
The last thing is balance.
I’ve realized recently that it’s important to balance between things that feel like work and things that don’t. Specifically, there are things you do in life to earn the option of doing things you actually like. You go to school, make money, and get a job to eventually earn things like travel or the chance to work solely on side projects later in life. And if you keep working because it feels nice and never cash in, it’s like saving a bunch of money even if you know you’ll never use it. It’s wasteful. So there has to be a balance of putting effort into things that are going to pay and then actually making sure that it pays off and you enjoy the benefits. So it’s okay to do something because you like it and not because you think you should do it.
What is your career trajectory moving forward?
I don't actually think that much about the future. I think in year increments, which is what my yearly goals are about. Steve Jobs once said that “you can only connect the dots going backwards”. And while it’s a bit of a cliche to quote Jobs, I think he's right. The way I like to work is that I try to do things that I like and find interesting. I try to work on things that I would admire myself for having worked on. If you do that, you usually end up in a pretty good place.
Right now, I want to get more experience at Ideaflow and get to see the fruits of that labor in a couple of years. Outside of work, I want to continue working on interesting side projects. I’m trying to write a book about community building and I want to travel and write more in the future.
You can find Linus on Twitter and at thesephist.com.