No More Hustleporn: Notion co-founder Ivan Zhao on how computing devices are built for creation, not just consumption
We pulled out the highlights from Notion cofounders Akshay Kothari and Ivan Zhao's interview on EO. Transcription and light editing by Anthropic's Claude, curation by Yiren Lu 😄
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Highlights
Ivan Zhao: In college, I studied cognitive science, how the human brain works, and a little bit of computing and philosophy. But I really got into fine art as well, photography. At the end of my school years, most of my friends were artists. I was the only person who knew how to code in my friend circle. So I started building webpages for everyone. After making three, four or five websites, I realized those creative people could build their own websites if they knew how to do that. Computing as a medium, they didn't know how to speak that medium. With Spotify as a tool, everybody can play music at that stage. I was still very much thinking about how I could help other people to create websites.
Akshay Kothari: I had no intention of joining Notion full-time. That happened five years later. Even before Ivan started Notion, he was thinking about this problem for many years. He deeply believes that everyone can be a creator and that computing devices are built for creation, not just consumption. To me, that felt like a really compelling mission, because if you can actually make it happen, then you can unleash a lot of creativity in the world.
Ivan Zhao: Your environment, those are the documents you have in Notion. If we try to reorder stuff, you just drag it where you think it should be. The very first version of Notion was a web page builder. That was the prototype, and from there it evolved into a web app builder. That was pretty much the first few years of Notion.
Ivan Zhao: It took me several years to realize that people don't want to build apps. Very few people want to do that. It's kind of collaborative, building apps. It's kind of like document editing. It's kind of like Xcode for the web. It was very confusing. On top of that, we were building on top of some technical foundation that wasn't stable. So it was very hard to tell whether it was our own bug or a bug coming from the platform we were using. Fundamentally, we had to rewrite the whole software. We were going to run out of time if we didn't reset the company.
Ivan Zhao: I think the most important thing is about yourself. It's about, are you building something for yourself, or are you building something that the world wants? The first version of Notion was very much what I thought the world wanted, what I wanted.
Full Transcript
Akshay Kothari: I'm Akshay Kothari, the co-founder and COO of Notion. Notion is a productivity software company, and what we're trying to do is provide you one simple medium where you can do all your work, everything from note-taking to having a knowledge base for your company, managing your projects, all in a single medium. We've done this by giving people building blocks for what these apps are built from.
Akshay Kothari: Before this, I was at LinkedIn for many years when they acquired my previous startup. I studied electrical engineering when I came to the US and did a lot of engineering internships, but it turns out that I didn't enjoy it that much. I found the engineering work to be a bit too granular. I'm much more interested in product and business and the intersection of that.
Akshay Kothari: In between my bachelor's degree and my master's degree, I spent a year in venture capital. That was a very important year for me because I got to meet a lot of entrepreneurs. After hearing the pitches for about a year, I realized that I wanted to be on the other side, not hearing the pitches as an investor, but actually wanting to start something of my own. That took me to Stanford where I tried to start a company every quarter. Many of them failed, but in my last quarter, I started Pulse, which was a news application built for the iPad.
Akshay Kothari: We built Pulse pretty fast as a class project at Stanford in about six weeks and put it out in the app store, not sure how it would do. A few weeks later, it went up to the top of the app store and Steve Jobs talked about it in the WWDC in 2010.
Steve Jobs: And again, let me just show you some of the latest apps that have been out. Pulse, which is a wonderful RSS reader if you haven't seen it.
Akshay Kothari: Overnight it went from a class project to being a company. I learned that when you're building something, you should release it publicly even if it's not perfect. If I had waited to make things better, I probably would have never released. The professor in the class pushed me to release even the beta version of the product we had. By putting it out there, we got so much feedback, improved it, got in the market, and became a company. So a bias towards action of actually shipping something quickly worked out really well for us.
Akshay Kothari: I also learned that many times we are much more interested in becoming an entrepreneur or starting a company rather than actually solving a problem. With Pulse, we were solving a real problem that existed, which was that it was impossible to read news on your phone back in 2010. If you build something that people want, that people are struggling with, they will come and actually use the product.
Akshay Kothari: Lastly, I learned that product is only half of the puzzle. You have to think about distribution and how you take the product to market. We could be building the best possible product, but if we don't figure out a way to distribute it, people will never know what we've built.
Ivan Zhao: In college, I studied cognitive science, how the human brain works, and a little bit of computing and philosophy. But I really got into fine art as well, photography. At the end of my school years, most of my friends were artists. I was the only person who knew how to code in my friend circle. So I started building webpages for everyone. After making three, four or five websites, I realized those creative people could build their own websites if they knew how to do that. Computing as a medium, they didn't know how to speak that medium. With Spotify as a tool, everybody can play music at that stage. I was still very much thinking about how I could help other people to create websites.
Akshay Kothari: Ivan was based in Canada and decided to come to the Bay Area in San Francisco in 2011. He put out a simple post on Hacker News saying he was a designer looking for a job in San Francisco. I wanted to hire him as a designer and we gave him an offer to join Pulse back in 2011, but he ended up joining another company. We kept in touch, and after I had sold Pulse to LinkedIn in 2013, he was about to start Notion. Notion ended up being my first investment.
Akshay Kothari: I had no intention of joining Notion full-time. That happened five years later. Even before Ivan started Notion, he was thinking about this problem for many years. He deeply believes that everyone can be a creator and that computing devices are built for creation, not just consumption. To me, that felt like a really compelling mission, because if you can actually make it happen, then you can unleash a lot of creativity in the world.
Akshay Kothari: In many ways, when you're investing in early stage, you're betting on the person much more than the idea, because the idea can change. For Notion specifically, it was very easy to bet on Ivan because you could see the passion and deep thinking he had done even before he started the company.
Ivan Zhao: Your environment, those are the documents you have in Notion. If we try to reorder stuff, you just drag it where you think it should be. The very first version of Notion was a web page builder. That was the prototype, and from there it evolved into a web app builder. That was pretty much the first few years of Notion.
Ivan Zhao: It took me several years to realize that people don't want to build apps. Very few people want to do that. It's kind of collaborative, building apps. It's kind of like document editing. It's kind of like Xcode for the web. It was very confusing. On top of that, we were building on top of some technical foundation that wasn't stable. So it was very hard to tell whether it was our own bug or a bug coming from the platform we were using. Fundamentally, we had to rewrite the whole software. We were going to run out of time if we didn't reset the company.
Ivan Zhao: I think the most important thing is about yourself. It's about, are you building something for yourself, or are you building something that the world wants? The first version of Notion was very much what I thought the world wanted, what I wanted.
Akshay Kothari: Notion's first approach was to create this platform where you can build software. It gave you all the building blocks and said, okay, now you can take these and build whatever software you can dream about. The challenge is that people don't wake up wanting to build software. People just wake up to do their job.
Ivan Zhao: At that time, the team was about four or five people. My co-founder Simon and I were most likely going to run out of money, unfortunately lay off everybody and go somewhere small, interesting and quiet where we could just focus on coding. We looked at Japan, because neither of us had been there but always wanted to go.
Ivan Zhao: The reason for choosing Kyoto was that if you look at Airbnb listings, apartments in Tokyo, Osaka or other major cities are fairly small. But for Kyoto, probably because it wasn't bombed during World War Two, a lot of older and bigger houses are still there. The pace of life in the city is slower as well, so it's good for folks working on things, and it's a much cheaper city than San Francisco. So we rebuilt the Notion that everybody's working on today from that stage.
Akshay Kothari: In the summer of 2018, Ivan and I got together for breakfast just to catch up. I was at LinkedIn then and itching to get back into the garage and build again. I thought I would probably leave LinkedIn and start my own company. But as we were having breakfast, Ivan talked a lot about the 2.0 release which introduced the database.
Akshay Kothari: The tipping point for us was when we moved away from asking you to build software to providing you simple templates that allow you to do your job. We came in and said, hey, here's a knowledge base so you can collaborate with all your friends. Underneath that product, all the capabilities still exist - you can still modify it, you can still build your own software, but our marketing is less about that and more about specific things that you need to do your job and how Notion fills that gap.
Akshay Kothari: As we were talking, Ivan was looking for a COO who could really help scale the business. The company was about eight people then, and he offered me that role, which was really interesting. Everything I had done up until that point was more on the product side, and this role was trying to do everything inside the company except product.
Akshay Kothari: I think Ivan's thinking was that if he could get a product counterpart to help build out go-to-market and the foundational teams, it would allow him to stay focused on product. For me, this felt like an interesting opportunity to join well before most people knew about Notion, and get to take something that had just hit product-market fit and take it to the masses.
Akshay Kothari: After a lot of thinking, I decided to join in the fall of 2018. It's been amazing to watch the growth. We were eight people then, and we are close to 500 people now, just in four years. The business has grown over 100-fold in that timeframe.
Haebom Lee: As the first Notion consultant in Korea, I believe the key to Notion's global success is the Notion user community worldwide. I discovered Notion on Product Hunt during the release of Notion version two. After using the product, I fell in love with Notion's database function.
Haebom Lee: I then took to social media to share my knowledge, know-how, templates, guides and contribute to the growth of the Notion community. In Korea today, the community has 43,000 members. It's amazing to see similar Notion communities popping up all over the world.
Ivan Zhao: It's kind of like art combined with technology. It's very intuition driven. So a lot of things, it just feels right. And other things, we try to keep things very simple. We call it "keep it extremely simple". The simplest, we use the word dumb, like so dumb that you don't need to pay too much attention to start picking up and start using it because it feels really natural, right? It just feels like an extension of your body.
Ivan Zhao: Like you know how to use your hands, you know how to use very simple tools like a pen or a cup because they evolved so long with you. Fundamentally, it's about solving people's problems. If we do so, then people should love us. There's a lot more room to grow.
Akshay Kothari: You can do so many different things with Notion, but it's built by just over 100 engineers. And I think the reason that is possible is because architecturally, we have built the Notion product in a way that is very modular. And we sort of want to expose these building blocks to other people.
Akshay Kothari: For example, we are not building a CRM or specific project management software, but we're giving you all the building blocks so that you can build it. Similar to Lego, I think the engineers focus on building the building blocks, and then we have the marketing team and the community that takes the building blocks and creates templates that market specific use cases. And that makes it a very efficient engine.
Akshay Kothari: Engineers don't have to think about building a very specific use case. They focus on just building capability and then marketing and other stakeholders build packaging that we can go out and sell. I think that's probably one of the reasons why Notion has been able to stay so lean as we've grown to scale so far.
Speaker D: Today, we're introducing Notion AI, which brings the power of artificial intelligence directly into your Notion workspace. Let's say we're writing a blog post to introduce Notion AI. It's as simple as asking AI assist for help and clicking generate post. Next, just sit back and watch as artificial intelligence completes your first draft.
Akshay Kothari: Notion AI allows people to essentially just tell what you're trying to do and it sort of automatically generates a lot of content or does a lot of things that you want it to. If you have a long doc, you can ask it to summarize things. If you are starting from scratch, it's like a blank page. You want some help, you can ask it to write a few things so that you can get started with it.
Akshay Kothari: I think AI itself is changing every week. It's been quite a fun journey, but at the same time it still feels like pretty early. I think there's still a lot of work to be done and we still feel like our best days are ahead of us. So I'm excited to see what the next couple of years hold for us.
Akshay Kothari: We have four values at Notion. We are mission-driven owners of our mission. So essentially our mission is to enable ubiquitous software tool making, and we very much are owners of that. The second value is that we are pacesetters. Obviously as a startup, we need to move fast. I think that's one way we can win in the market.
Akshay Kothari: The third value is we are truth seekers, which is that we spend a lot of time rigorously thinking about a specific decision before we actually move forward. And the fourth one is we are kind and direct. We want to be kind to our co-workers, but at the same time we want to be able to be direct and be honest with each other so that we're pushing each other to do our best work.
Akshay Kothari: I think these four values are very much authentically us. It's not aspirational, but it's who we are and we like that. The second and third value, which is pace setting and truth seeking, fight with each other, because in many cases, some projects you want to move fast and in some cases you want to be able to take time and really rigorously think.
Akshay Kothari: We like that they fight with each other so that we find like, okay, which projects can we move faster with? Which projects should we spend more time thinking about? The fourth value of being kind and direct is obviously nice because we're not just trying to be nice with each other, we're trying to really achieve our mission, and that requires us to be direct with each other.
Akshay Kothari: These values have really helped us hire the right people. These values have really helped us make good decisions. Like when we're making important decisions, we think about, does this represent the values we have? And it's memorable. I can say these four values in my sleep now, which I think is nice because I don't have to think about what the values are.
Akshay Kothari: The long term mission of the company is to create ubiquitous software tool making, which is the simple idea that there's a billion knowledge workers out there, and our hope is that all of them feel the power to modify or create their own software. In doing that, we hope that Notion becomes the third generation of productivity software after Microsoft Office and Google Suite.
Akshay Kothari: We will be much more powerful in that people will be able to not just take notes and manage projects, but will be able to create things that work the way their brain works. So we're very excited about that. It'll probably take us more than a decade to get there, but we're excited to work on it.