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The Profitable Startup - Linear Blog

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For years, startups have been taught to prioritize growth over everything else. Profitability was seen as unambitious or even wrong – something to worry about when you hit scale. Why focus on profits when money and valuations were easy to come by? But that thinking was always flawed. Profitability isn't unambitious; it's controlling your own destiny. It means you don't have to rely on investors for survival. It means you can focus on your unaltered vision and mission. And it means you as a founder decide the pace of growth. And once you experience it, it's hard to imagine doing things any other way. Paul Graham famously wrote about "ramen profitability" – the point where a founding team could survive without external funding. He argued this made startups more attractive to investors, showing they could get customers to pay, were serious about building valuable products, and were disciplined with expenses. Graham wrote his essay in 2009. I’d argue that we now live in a world where it’s

Skip to content → Now Practices The profitable startup Karri Saarinen · February 21, 2025 For years, startups have been taught to prioritize growth over everything else. Profitability was seen as unambitious or even wrong – something to worry about when you hit scale. Why focus on profits when money and valuations were easy to come by? But that thinking was always flawed. Profitability isn’t unambitious; it’s controlling your own destiny. It means you don’t have to rely on investors for survival. It means you can focus on your unaltered vision and mission. And it means you as a founder decide

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