Notion's lost years, near collapse during COVID, staying small to move fast, building horizontal

the way you describe the early years of notion you describe the first three to four years as the last years we try many different version the first version they everybody can make and create their software so let's just build a developer tool that's so easy that more people can do that we try that like couple years and learn that actually most people just don't care the our realization is actually let's hide our vision which is everybody can create their software in the form factor that people do care so what kind of tool do people use

every day productiv software it took us two years to realize we need to build a productivity tool we call the sugar called the broccoli people don't want to eat the broccoli but people like sugar so give them the sugar that highy your brocc inside of it what other elements do you think are key to you finding something that actually ended up working what is the building a product or business you want user you want Revenue that's a product business and building for something you want the world to have is building for your value you have

some taste you have some aesthetic there are different energy you need to create a balance too much of yourself then there's no user you're just doing art project and too much for a business you're building a commodity the way you think about notion it's almost like a philosophy of how to work and be versus just a productivity tool and so I'm just curious how you think about the relationship between tools and human potential tools are extensions of us and once they extend us once we shape them once we bring them to to World they can

come back to shape us today my guest is Ivan Jiao Ivan is the co-founder and CEO of notion Ivan is a really unique and also a deeply philosophical founder who doesn't do a lot of podcasts so I'm really excited to share a glimpse into how he built one of the most beloved and most popular products in the world we talk about the first 3 to four years of notion that he describes as the Lost Years how he was able to get into a great School in China by winning a programming contest the joy and suffering

of building a successful horizontal product plus his approach to staying lean and craft and making trade-offs and also leadership also a wild story about how notion almost died during Co because the one database that everything lived in almost ran out of space if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube also if you become a paid annual subscriber of my newsletter you now get a year free of notion Pro and perplexity Pro and superhuman and linear and granola check it out at Lenny newsletter. comom with

that I bring you Ivan Xiao this episode is brought to you by EPO EPO is a Next Generation AB testing and feature management platform built by alums of airbeam be and snowflake for modern growth teams companies like twitch Muro clickup and DraftKings r on EPO to power their experiments experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features an EPO helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does when I was atbb one of the things that I loved most was

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EPO at geo.com Lenny and 10x your experiment velocity that's get eo.com Lenny this episode is brought to you by airtable product Central the unified system that brings your entire product or together in one place no more scattered tools no more misalign teams if you're like most product leaders you're tired of Constant Contact switching between tools that's why air table built product Central after Decades of working with world-class product companies think of it as mission control for your entire product organization unlike rigid Point Solutions product Central Powers everything from resourcing to voice of customer to Road

mapping to launch execution and because it's built on air table's no code platform you can customize every workflow to match exactly how your team Works no limitations no compromises ready to se in action head to airtable.com Lenny to book a demo that's airtable.com Lenny Ivan thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast thank you for having me I know you don't do a lot of podcasts and so I'm very honored that you're here I want to start with the story of Ivan your background is quite unique for a founder of a

10 Billion Dollar Plus tech company and I don't think a lot of people know it for example you grew up in a a small town in China and the way you got out of there the way you got into Tech is pretty interesting can you can you just walk us through that early years of Ivan and how you got out of there I think a small town in China the definition it's it's actually a four million people City so the city is called uruki is in the Northwest desert part of China so I grew up

there and um then I moved into my mom took me to um Beijing the capital of China and um that's actually how I got into programming coding because I'm from somewhere else and in order to go into good school in the capital you need to win some kind of competition and there's different path you can get at math and there or you can get at programming like information Olympia um I was really into computer computer games at the time so of course I picked the programming one so I can play with computers all day long

and I win some competition uh and got me into a good school so that's how I got into programming um later then I moved to Canada and when I moved to Canada got into college did not study computer science since I already know how to c um play a lot of video games did a lot of art actually Art and Science um by the time I graduated college I realized most my friends are artists they need to make their websites get web portfolio made and I'm the only nerd in my art friend Circle so I

made three or four websites I realized oh actually people don't know how to create with a software media Computing medium so that got me to want to create a product like notion today which is a lot more people to create tools create software for their DayDay work and life okay so going back to uh you you to get into a great school and to kind of leave this small town not so small you had to uh enter a programming contest and you uh you placed first or second or how how well did you actually do

in the second in Beijing so in Beijing okay pretty big V is a big city so okay incredible another stat I uh or story I heard is that you learned English by watching SpongeBob SquarePants Is that real yeah it's real um I moved to Canada pretty late uh 16 years old and what I learned is yeah in in China you can learn English but it's typical just grammar and doing exams what you're missing is the context the culture so you have to watch SpongeBob or Simpsons to get a sense of humor essentially you can't understand

jokes right uh watching cartoon it's it's probably the easiest way to do that that's amazing um and there's another kind of seminal moment in your path I don't know if it was this point or later but the dungl Englebert paper uh ended up being a very meaningful moment for you so w was in Canada in last year of school working on trying to building website from our friends and uh building a creative tool for them and then you just look into the history of creative tool for software for computing um eventually arrive at 1960 and70s

so you realize the first generation of computing Pioneers which is around San Francisco Stanford area South Bay they actually had the best ideas for this them people like dogas angle bar alen k 10 Nelson the first generation Pioneers for them Computing there shouldn't be a separation between Builders and users it's the same media angle Bar's original paper called augmenting human intellect when I read that paper it's like holy if you making software if you know how to codor design this is the highest leverage thing you can do for other people it's so given them the

ability to use Computing to augment their problem solving ability or their intellect uh that just got me obsessed with this problem and I want to start a company like noit makes me think of Steve jobs' famous line of how the computer is a bicycle for the mind you know what Steve Jobs is actually at fault of this in some strange ways so the story is like actually the fact it's not just story um Xerox park has working on the first generation personal computer it's called Xerox Alto alen K was one of the main person behind

it alutto runs down the system called Small Talk which is there's no separation between users and users app there's no thing called application everything is malleable you can change the tools right so when Steve Job the famous story is when he went to Zer zerox part to in demo with Al he does not it's the first time he see graphic user interface one of the first time and it's also they present him with this Alto system that everything could change but he did not see the the power of it even when um people demonstrate like

hey Steve Jobs say I don't like this direction of scroll bar Direction when you scroll up and down it shouldn't scroll the opposite reverse Direction and then people just instantly change the scroll bar direction for him uh that's the power of the original Small Talk auto system he only saw the graphic user interface he did not see the underlying object orent the environment power as the generation of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates bring make PC personal Computing uh popular and they sort of stuck with this an application framework rather than this a small talk object

or in the framework then that has all the apps we have today and has the SAS spr we have today that uh vision of how product should be sounds very familiar and we'll talk about that later of how you think about notion but let's Zoom to the beginning of notion when we were chatting earlier the way you described the early years of notion you started notion 2013 and so over 10 years ago at this point you described the first three to four years as the L years of notion and I think this is actually a

really big deal for Founders to hear about because there's all these companies these days you hear these stats they had 100 million AR in like two years under two years now and you don't hear a lot of stories of companies of your scale and success that took three to four years to find product Market fit essentially what went on during these last years as you describe them and just how did you how did you stick with it that's a long time to stick with something that isn't working because the goal is always building a Computing

tool it's like what product is this it's really hard to shape the product right um the vision is the the the dream is there but the product is very there's so many path we try many different version the first version to take okay everybody can make and create their software so let's just build a developer tool that's so easy that more people can do that we try that like couple years and learned that actually most people just don't care the majority people they wake up they they have report due they need to get their job

done they don't care creating software to optimize whatever they're doing they don't care uh so give to our friends give to investors um yeah did not resonate with people and but we really want to build that tool so we just keep going and the our realization is actually let's hide our vision which is everybody can create our software in the form factor that people do care so what kind of tool do people use every day productivity software so that's why I came to notion today if you use notion notion are more understood as the productivity

Suite but our intent and you more you honor discover intent which is that has has a no code developer power into it you can create almost any kind of productivity software use notion itself um that took us two plus year to realize so actually the world is not like you the world are not like develop developer designer minded the world is they only care what's in front of them and that's so noisy there's a quote that this makes me think about where you said the first version of notion was more about what I wanted than

what people wanted very much so because like sense of maturation is you don't see the world just from your perspective but from outside your perspective right it took We Were Young took us multiple years it hit your head straight into the into the water realize that people just don't I love the way you phrased that you kind of have to hide your vision behind something that people understand and know know how to use and we c a sugar called the broccoli people don't want to eat the broccoli but people like sugar so give them the

sugar H inside of it wow yeah the other thing I've heard is that you had you threw threw away your code every time like so you rebuilt it many times you threw away the code each time that's true actually it took us four year to get somewhere first two year is that you build too much like a no like developer product nobody cares took us two year to realize when to build a productivity tool then it took another another a year or two to real to build to build this out but in the middle of

a realize we build on a wrong technical foundation so like eight 10 years ago there's competing before re right now all the web app runs on react right before react wins there's a competing technology called Web component from Google and it makes sense web component feels like a Lego like like the building block like and we're betting on that technology and then we're realize because it's so new it just so unstable you don't know where the bug come from it's from your source code from underlying libraries um then we have to restart a company otherwise

rebuild the whole thing otherwise we're going to run out of time so that's inste reset a c-base reset a company so we can build on our WR worther do techn technology Foundation how did you actually stay solvent all this time a lot of people want to keep working at an idea uh oftentimes they need to pay the bills how practically were able to keep working for three to four years I know there's a story of your mom loaning use of money during that time well ch's mom always can when I'm single child um yeah they

my mom helped me actually my mom helped me Kickstart a company because I'm Canadian in order to move to us you need to like register a company so my mom helped me with the initial and raise the money and I sort of return the money to her then we run out the money so hey Mom can I borrow that just to bridge us H which she did I really grateful for that um how do you bridge how do you last you so long because the thing you want to create does not exist with C is

call Notions the Lego for software it doesn't quite exist right there's a Lego for Lego you can see that in Furniture sort of exess but leg for software at the usable Mass market adoption level doesn't quite exist and you just want that thing to exist and a grow up play Legos it's the only toy I ever wanted and I want the same feeling um of creativity and playfulness to the the tool that people can use every day so and my co-founder s feels the same way Leo is the only thing he like wanted for every

Christmas have you guys seen magnatiles though I have I I have a one and a halfy old and magne tiles are quite delightful it's like a I think it's like a pre- Lego I like the CH yeah it's like a they're little magnetic plastic uh uh planes and then you can build little you can build much bigger things really quickly it's more for babies but I'm I'm having a blast oh yeah it's kind of like uhuh it's like a different version of Legos I like that you're in real time looking it up you're like okay

we're our new vision magne tiles for software now most people know likeo magneti ideas is the same modular right yeah creativity okay back to your story so there's also a moment where you moved to Japan just what was that about is that just like escape and disconnect yeah that was during the one of the Rew faces um during the we know what the product should look like it should be a productivity software with the Lego Power hiding inside of it we build on a wrong technical foundation and if we continue to build on the wrong

ones we're going to run out the money company won't exist so we decid to lay off everybody at that time notion was five people we lay off everybody back to me and samon two people um and morale obviously was really low you have to say goodbye to your teammates and um so we have the idea let's just go somewhere that we never been to to change the scenario a little bit and Jaan is always top on our list so um you know the funny thing is if we and we sub leas our apartment and office

we're actually making money living in Japan uh and then San Francisco so uh we did that for a while we actually travel around the world for a while just to like change up and me and S just coding every day and um design every day that that's some ofat the happiest moment birthday every day I saw stat you're coding hours a day like here's the quote I heard uh we just code code code then hey let's go off for food then we go eat go back to work and do it again because me and him

working so well now even back then it's like you sort of know what you other people are thinking and you can just cross through the problem space really quickly the technical product space design space um and just non-stop of uh shipping stuff so maybe just to close out this thread for people for Founders that are either struggling and just like can't find a thing that's working have been working on something for a long time I'm curious what advice you'd share for sticking with it and I'll share things I've heard you say so far and I'm

curious if there's something you'd add one is you just like believe this needs to exist in the world and you need to like really feel this I need this to be a thing I think there's an element of staying lean like you've let everyone go it's just you and Simon again there's also this element of disconnecting almost and just like going to a different location and just like let's just reset what other elements do you think are key to you finding something that actually ended up working I'm kind of Lucky and S I'm kind of

lucky that high is never too high low is never too low for us so somehow it wasn't feeling too down um whenever I feel down I just go to sleep then next day I'm I'm just reset so that's kind of lucky for me um definitely don't wor don't don't be afraid to to reset I think courage is quite important because like often time you're working on don't matter but momentum just took you there your first point of building something you want the world to have um what is the building a product or business right you

want user you want Revenue that's a that's a product business it's almost like a sports the market is the arena then you want to optimize the scorecard word um it's is building for winning and I grew up play sports I I like to compete so I like that um I'm building for something you want the world to ex to to have is building for your value you have some taste you have some aesthetic you have some values you want the world to have more of that there are different energy uh I realize actually fairly recently

like they're really different depends on which day I wake up I might I might be in different mood for things but building for Value it's more lasting and more fulfilling looking in the thing we're building today and looking looking back I find most proud of thing like I create something authentic to myself and happen to be also useful for others and that just keeps you going and that feels like a more durable energy source for all those dark years Lost Years through an oce and still every day for me it's interesting you say that because

there's also this there's this aspect of it wasn't working initially because you're building it for yourself and not for people but what I'm hearing is it's still important to build the thing that you are still excited about but also have you go back and forth here's what the business means and here's the thing I'm excited about you're really a que almost like a therapist right so it's true like you're building too much for your own self and value without realizing at the end of the day if you're building a product and Tool has to be

used by others you need to create a balance too much of yourself then there's no users you're just just doing art project you're just doing a research project right and and too much for a business you're building a commodity right so where's the Spectrum um yeah it's it's a it's never ending Spectrum it's interesting yeah okay so I'll summarize some of the things you shared of just had to stick with it and stay with an idea and not give up so uh I love this said just get sleep very Briant Johnson of you just like

get some sleep when it's a real down day there'll be another day tomorrow really simple but it's like a daily personal physical reset right you can reset your coase you can reset your mental model okay and then there's also I love these points don't be afraid to kind of reset as you just said like uh Toby ly was on the podcast he said the same thing just be comfortable with sun cost I have done all this already and I will throw it away and start again and that's okay yeah I think it's not just like

a self-help way to say don't be afraid to reset that's like that's okay that's fine I think the more interesting point here it's like you can create progress through better abstractions and that thing compounds faster can catch up to all the thing you build much quicker than you ever thought right your humans are not thinking not good at thinking in terms of abstraction word exponentials we're thinking in terms of linearly and if you just reset and you find a better way to do it you can get all the thing you have the S cost recovery

really quickly so actually going back to the Computing Pioneers part of like small talk the one of the first system and a huge influence for notion was a really tiny coase and inspired by lisp which is another programing languages and probably like a 100 lines of code or something right the kernel of things could be really small but just like math it can compound it can it can have complex behavior that unlocks so much value and things for you but if you just find those right you can catch up to all the thing you did

you you are free to lose really quickly so I think that's the the ker of why reca is so powerful and we're seeing exactly what you're describing in llm advancements these days all these companies have been working on this for so long and then they've cracked kind of an abstraction of how to think about scaling these these systems and now just people launch them and are immediately where the companies that have been working us for decades are today because they are building off these abstractions as you described in these yeah like how trying to cut

up the US really quickly with deep seek yeah the point you also made about momentum like be afraid be weary of momentum taking you in a direction and moving in a different not being stuck to that direction is exactly the way uh I think the Chain of Thought models now work actually where generally LMS are like next word next word next word next word and if they ever make a wrong turn they're stuck they keep going from that path and these Chain of Thought models are now good at just like wait let me think let

me rethink is this actually the right path or should I start again so I feel like AI is almost figured out exactly what you're describing interesting oh man okay last question about the early years everyone's always wondering what does par product Market fit feel like you worked on it for three to four years what was kind of the moment what did what would it look like what was different when you're like okay this is gonna work I think going back to me and S high is never that high low is never that low it never

hit me hit us as like a binary state it just kind of like oh good we have people who care about this thing we make now oh good people are um reach out to us or paying us and it's it's a kind of very gradual rep um maybe that's why early days when it's really the loss eras it doesn't feel too low because it just even for otion today it feels like it's so small in terms of where it could be and it just steady keep going right it's it's a it's a less of a

milestone way to thinking about things it's more just like can we do the same that's in our head and better than we did last week with thinking about things so never there's a such moment in the pr Market boom Milestone achieve didn't feel that way I've heard that from a lot of Founders actually was there was there like a moment uh in that point of just like oh this is different or maybe it's going to work this time I think for a while like okay once we start revenue product grow it faster now investors start

knocking on the door with like I remember one day like there's a dog food do food uh doctor sent enre CTI office so first office wasn't public address and the doctor is like why do people want this so much right so that that was a moment I passed a little bit um and I guess there's enough attraction for investors um and the doct treats were trying to con it was like a gift to be like hey you should talk to us we're sending this fun gift yeah because of the way had we just hire someone

in the office as a dog then we I think we post on Twitter or something like why did this show up to our office someone really hustle into where we are as our office address and follow us on Twitter so did you end up taking their money not the first time yeah okay later okay long no awesome so that's that's I've never heard that before sign product mark as VCS are starting to you start getting a lot more messaging and cold Outreach from VCS so actually I had um one of our investor is really helpful

because all those years you you sort of just like there's no feedback loop you just go for it then the feedback loop gradually show up then you oh then for a while oh VC started knocking on the door so um I I should talk to those people that people like what we're doing right I I did some meeting quite a bit me maybe it doesn't I realize and one of saying like Ian what are you doing like you clearly don't need money um do you just trying to feel good do external validation about this and

I said oh that's so true it's like I don't there's it doesn't help us make a better product right and the truth is with our what customer tell us um then we then sort of like we just went back to building I went back to hardcore building no meeting modes that's where the dog food story came about and realize oh that's interesting you mentioned this investor that you said it was really helpful is you want to give them uh some cred or do you want keep oh sh Fisher she's in New York uh okay cool

yeah she's like um another therapist right this episode is brought to you by cinch the customer Communications Cloud here's the thing about Digital customer Communications whether you're sending marketing campaigns Verification codes or account alerts you need them to reach users reliably that's where cinch comes in over 150,000 businesses including eight of the top 10 largest tech companies globally use cinches API to build messaging email and calling into their products and there's something big happening in messaging that product teams need to know about rich communication services or RCS think of RCs as SMS 2.0 instead of

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and the way you've approached it and uh a good Segway is what you've been talking about right now is how lean and efficient you've been and how that's been a big priority for you so a few stats I've seen uh one is that you're you guys are profitable you've been profitable for a couple years now you haven't I think I don't know if you've spent even the money you've raised like I think most of it is still in the yeah yeah still in the bank you're nodding if you're on YouTube uh you didn't have a

salesperson until you hit over 10 million AR you hired your first pm at like 50 people you've always kept the team generally really small why has that been important to you it's like very cool now everyone's like of course that's how it should be but for the past decade that has not been the case you've always been that way why has that been so important I think going back to the abstraction system way of problem solving like I think we're lucky that me and Simon and AE we have the skill set you probably can run

a whole company which is couple of us I can c i can design I can do marketing storytelling talk talk s close sales deals so you sort of realize you don't need a lot and but when you can do a lot at the same time or hire people who can do that naturally keep the the company small and you all know you're doing product management this the over overhead is actually more from internal communication right it's really hard get people's mind to be aligned on things to see the world in the same way um and

the part that you do need people maybe you can solve better through system through better tools like notion itself is a meta tool to do to do other tools so we pretty much run everything on otion we use the same mindset to build our company um and accidentally that keep our highcon low keep our company profitable and which then put you on the positive trend Mill of you don't have to go for the next 18 24 month find money you just have to you can just focus on building and also because your team small uh

we have this internal notion called Talent density right we we not we don't try to track number of people but we're try to track how Talent Den Revenue per employee uh we are and people want to work with other more talented people so um it's it's a positive compounding group oh wonder how much of this is actually from being around for so many years without success of we just have to stay very lean and save our cash because otherwise we'll die do you think that was that was like a formative experience to inform how you

want to operate or is that always something no I wouldn't say where notion is like a cost-saving first company like I like fancy chairs I like Furnitures uh but we're not like wasting money I think it's more just from a taste approach to problem solving I just believe better system is much better than Pro for through people when people hear this idea of staying lean and you know staying small like it sounds great of yeah well we're going to be super efficient and lean and smart with our money and DT it's very hard to do

and it's very hard not to hire more Engineers more designers what advice do you have for folks that want to operate this way like what has allowed you to actually be successful while staying lean and not having as many Engineers as competitors many designers competitors I think just understand abstraction or system is a better curve than pcon curve right linear and we internally help other people understand this internally we we use the metaphor notion is a small bus the bus the the the the smaller the bus is easier to turn Corners easier to accelerate easier

to maneuver the bigger the bus it is it just like bigger the bat bigger the bus slowed down and as a leader in the company you de who sit around you on the bus seat right that dictates how fast our overall bus moves dictate your work and life experience at this company because you're you pick your roommate you pick your seatmates um that metaphor clicks with people inside a company and and overall help us optimize the make the bus type make the bus link I've never heard that matter for before it probably came up somewhere

but or small bus um so along these lines actually so I visited the office recently and I noticed that it's just like a very cozy Vibe and I learned that you had a rule of no shoes in the office for a long time until the last office that you all ate around one table for a long time that you try 30 different uh shades of Warm White on the walls before you chose why is that important to you why is it so important to be so thoughtful about the office experience maybe think there are two

Dimension part of it one is um want is the the pragmatic part you just want office to be a pleasant experience to be at um therefore most office the top life feels like hospital I just like oh man and then the white is so pale and the floor is so dark like don't use white use some kind of cream make floor is more friendly colors and don't use top light top light is evil so just the office feels cozy so people spend more time you feel more more creative more at ease in the office space

right the Vision we have is should feels like artist studio or should feel like your home that's why most our office furniture are home Furnitures just feels cozy that's more of so people spend more time feels more creative Juices Flow better the other one just like at least personally for me it hurts the eyes if you just see ugly things it's more from a value aesthetic front it's like we talk about ergonomic chairs is does it hurt your back when you sit on bad chairs but you have more visual input from at least for me

from the eyes if the chair looks ugly the wall looks ugly it hurts so it's better not have thing that hurts you also have a really interesting naming convention for your uh conference rooms yeah that's true yeah we name our conference room after Timeless Tools in history so there are um give you one example iPhones obvious one original Macintosh um various different form of chairs Lami 2,000 pens um uh Toshiba right cookers and other ones and um because they're Inspirations they're just like at the end of they were creating a tool uh we're creating a

meta tool a lot of people to create tools software tools and Toshiba rice cooker change how people eat rice in Asia for for for 100 million tens of hundred million people right the Sony transistor radio is the first one to shrink semic something small and useful for people and those things people's life and last for decades what is like to create a software product like that I want to inspire my team to think that way because it's like software and especially Tech just just every six months every 12 months cycle they don't we don't think

enough about create something that lasts uh I care creating something that's at least the form factor lasts longer than C 18 month there's a quote that you tweeted once that I think of as you talk about this from Steve Jobs the problem is that there's just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product I don't know if you remember tweeting that but just what do you think of when you when you hear that yeah I think the key word here is craft like internally our company Philosophy called craft and values

craft is like your skill set your taste value is like your personal value and how do you see the world um craf is interesting world it's kind of like about apply your value to some technical Kno how and to make more clever tradeoffs to create something new and useful um and just keep doing that at it like my wife often refer me like as a wood cabinet builder like that's how I at least in my mindset training towards building oce it's like oh can I make this what cabinet more beautiful and more useful and feels

nicer on your hand um and that's like you have aesthetic direction towards it and you have your technical knowhow to actually make things happen then you need to do permutation and trade off in your head or on paper and to get there that to me that's craft and Building Product to me at least to me feels that way building business feels that way Building Company feels that way it's interesting that so much of this conversation is this and the way you think about building this company is this balance between practical useful things people need and

like business and you know practical stuff and then the like the value of building something you're proud of and craft and there's always this trade-off almost of like speed and quality and I know that's an important element for you just like thinking about trade-offs between decisions so talk about just trade-offs just like how you think about making a trade-off yeah I think this is quite relevant especially for product makers and business makers it's there's no free launch you don't get something for free you have to give up something um um then what do you give

up it's essentially then are you give up the right thing that market where you your user wants at that given space and time it's kind of just the craft of building a business or building a product right um and the the market is so Dynamic especially now with a like the the the optimized function of the market changes so then you need to make new trade-off and new technology merges right I always feels like AI language model feels like a new type of wood it feel like aluminum it's a new type of material right so

you can make like mass air travel wasn't available until aluminum become cheap enough that people can make airplanes that's support this right and at cost and it's like computer wasn't there until semiconductor becomes like reli it's like require new technology to unlock new way to making tradeoffs and and then you're then you need to balance the technology trade out with human behavior trade off where is we're not as a human ever since we got out of Africa we're sort of set right that's like a constraint it's an a variable and every generation pick up some

new thing but after you're 16 years old you don't want to learn new things so those are like there a people trade-off technology tradeoff there's some kind of macro there's a different dimension of things just cooking together that come together as a product where more as a business then what is that and I think a product maker a business Maker's job is to find that SC spot of all the M multiple dimensions then create something has a right to exist at least more durable to exist and I'm hearing there's kind of this thread of just

like with new technologies what is now possible and I know you guys are doing some cool stuff with AI that I'm going to get to you that is unlocking some cool new ideas uh but before I get there I want to talk about just you as as a leader at this point you've been at this for 12 years something like that not like that yeah and if you don't mind me saying you're you're a you're you're a softspoken leader which is not like you're not like the archetype of what people imagine is like the CEO

of a 10 billion and I'm sure you guys are valued much more now I don't even know that that was probably an old valuation uh I think it's great for people to see leaders like you that are not necessarily the classic archetype of Co and I imagine there are things you've had to work on and build and lean into that aren't natural to you to step into this role of this increasingly growing High scale business what are some of the areas you've had to most build and and learn to do that didn't come naturally to

you yeah I guess you never been in a business meeting or brainstorm session with me I haven't seen that side of I yet yeah I wouldn't the most uh soft interaction person at work um it's actually the reverse is true because you grow up in I grew up in China people we more direct people just like say what they want say what they think right so and you move to California you move to us we mve to the West felt wow everybody says everything's wonderful everything's nice but that's not true uh um I was say

notion Etho is probably more like the East Coast rather than West Coast so somewhere in between right it's more direct um what do I need to learn um bunch of things I think the early days is like we talk about that the world's not like you the world don't care about you so you like you sort of have to shave off the idealistic part of you to build something that's like the world actually cares the Su C the broccoli you have to hide your broccoli within something sugar pills right so um that's one that's more

self that's about myself as company grow you realize I'm pretty good at storytelling so it's like that's like a onetoone influence and but as company grow you realize you need to be one to many storytellers that's the scales like I the one of reason I try not to do podcasts and other oh it's actually not drains energy me in a different ways right I prefer just Building Product and brainstorm sessions then you realize it's a necessary craft for me to pick up in order to change the shape of company the business I'm building I treat

it like a craft like there's a things skill also the video game you need to pick up something to lock something else and make a new demand to kind of trade up with yourself and the business right um that's kind of fun though every every 12 18 month notion is like a new company or at least it require different kind of skill set coming from me so I need to pick up new things and it's an infinite game and infinite games are more fun I love this idea I love that you keep coming back to

this idea of there's like the ideals and the values and the vision and what you're trying to do and then you have to find the way to uh frame it and and package it so that people actually understand and want it and that's how you get in yeah it's like human minds are resistant to change and how do you l in people's head so like that's what marketing and positioning are for right so you need to find The Sweet Spot to get in um and you also be truthful you're not just deceiving so deceiving is

not truthful you can for other people once or twice then it's there's no future it has to be actually tied back to something genuinely the value creating or or exchange with the other person so yeah it's a craft it's a it's a market storytelling is a diens a vast Dimension making tradeoffs I love this where trade-offs comes up again and again too it's so interesting that there's these threads that have come up again and again in our chat uh along the Journey of becoming this leader that you've become what would you say is maybe the

biggest are most unexpected part of the Journey of something you've had to learn to do or something that didn't turn out the way expected just as a personal growth story if you use the product in the past three years you realize notion product you realize like hey we actually shipped bunch of things not so great like two years ago right is actually last year 2024 is the year that was I can say we ship good stuff at good velocity and good quality and align with our values we sort get lost there for a year year

and a half shipping something not according to our value not according to my value like notion we call Notions Lego for software we sort of ship non-legal pieces into our product it's still there we're still cleaning up part of it um that's a realization it's like going back to the value part it's like if you create this thing called a product or business you attract people are value aligned to it then if you're trying to optimize too much on this competition Revenue side of things forc to introducing something entire value and then you the system

it's like there's organ rejection with your employees with your customers right like give you concrete example um for a while and still is project management is one of most important use cases for notion and you can get your project man a better project management tool just by hard coding things like Milestones all those things into your product right or you can do in the way the notion are being through Lego pieces okay what is a Sprint Sprint is a clusters of tasks that group together so it's it's a new Lego so introducing Lego is much

harder slower um you can instead with hardcode the Sprint concept into the product and this become doesn't quite fit right and took us took me at least year year and a half to realize that's not the way we should continue building those we should build go back the original Lego way of building the product um so we changed quite a bit internally now feels good now but and building according to your value is the Met point at least for me okay I got to follow this thread what is it that you changed that allowed you

to come back to your first principles was it like ustep is it founder mode uh it was the answer is it people Personnel shift is it you what what allowed you to change the way things were going I would say all that evolve but especially just release the Sprint product through our community and customers then there like what is this it's like underpowered compared to other competitive products and to doing product management and it doesn't work well with the rest notion like go said and if you talk to Engineers it look okay there's this part

of notion you have to touch the C base that's just weird right that's you hardle too much into it from other dimension technical front col customer and when you use the thing it just doesn't feel right so um there's another saying that if you building a Lego inside notion in the c-base or product the system work for you if you put in non legal way the system work against you so in some sense we're creating the tool that has an emerging Behavior you need to channel in that emerging Behavior to unlock more values so I'm

hearing as you launched it it just didn't go out everyone's just like what is this this isn't feeling good and there's a moment of realization of I see here's what we did wrong here and we should come back to this original abstraction vision of what we're trying to build that took like n nine month a year to realize sometime yeah along those lines actually uh people come on this podcast and they share all these stories of things are going awesome all the time and like this was a great example of it didn't I'm curious if

there's another story of let's say a crisis that you all went through when things were looking pretty bleak for notion along the Journey of building notion yeah one of the bleakest one is when we um during Co we just couldn't scale up our infrastructure it was pretty um for the longest time like Sim is really good at don't do premature optimization so for the longest time we notion runs on one instance of postris database and we then we find a b machine we keep scrolling find a beier beier machine to scale our user base but

then we're running off the even the largest instance there is for it post so there's a Doomsday Clock that when we're going to trly run out this space to store everything in notion and notion got completely shut down uh so we stop building any new features all hands on De every almost every engineer in the company trying to solve that problem um eventually we did but it was it was a close call like how close we talking about if I recall correctly you're probably in weeks running all the time and then as you approach the

limit of what post wordss can do Behavior becomes sporadic it just you really don't really don't know which they going to hit you but you we just need to go as fast as you can to to become sh charting problem yeah I was gonna ask so the solution of charting the database yeah charting okay cool don't don't do as late yes don't do premature optimization but plan ahead a little bit don't do it how long did you have from when you launched this doomsday clock to time running out was that like a few months maybe

a bit longer yeah in the month less than six but more than three something like that the bittersweetness of covid just ramping up certain businesses yeah people just run like they have to use online productiv software right collaboration tools yeah blessing and a curse speaking of a blessing and curse this is a great segue to where want to go and kind of the final area I want to spend time on which is building horizontal software and building software that bundles together a bunch of different stuff notoriously hard to build a horizontal platform that does a

lot of things when they're often Point solutions that are very very good at that one thing and it's of it's interesting if you look at the timelines of companies that have built horizontal products they all take a long time to build and finally find product Market fit so it's actually a really common pattern and when we were talking about what would be fun to talk about the way you described it as like the Joy and Pain of building horizontal products so let me just ask broadly just what have you learned about what it takes to

successfully build a horizontal platform type of product first of all no regret and second I wouldn't want to build anything else because like going back to the value Lego for software doesn't exist and Lego is a horizontal thing so that's the thing we want to build we always want to do that so we did not start to optimize for business but we're optimized for that Vision um learning wise I think segmentation is quite important because people can use Lego for different things only hardcore Lego fans care about Lego bricks most people care about Lego boxes

and they actually want the Lego box to be ready made when you on package box the set is there for you right that's what we're learning a lot especially move up Market there's this term took me a while to learn it's called Solutions you need to be a solution for Enterprise customer you need to sit somewhere on a p&l to optimize for their business where due their risk um that's Lego box it's not a Lego brick um really segmentation related to that so you to shift your mindset as you more towards B2B more towards move

up Market uh I wish what have done it earlier for the longest time I felt too much in the Lego briak mindset now in the solution Lego box man that's such a good metaphor I feel like even if you're not building Legos for for business uh just this idea of what is the box that you are selling to people like what how's it being positioned how do you picture it what are the value props such a good metaphor if you're building vertical software naturally your vertical is the box right so you're you know you have

one or two person of you're selling to um pretty straightforward that your Market const strengths you and and no judge from people like do you can go that way but then you hit this you hit the wall of the market the the Vantage building horizontal there's no wall at least for in our space we notion go after entire software Market but then you need to create a wall yourself so to make your go market distribution to create the the spot in people's mind your customer mind more clearly for them and for your go market teams

that's why we're I solution is one of my favorite work internally to Rally the sales team and the product te you think that way but then you need to hold in your head make sure you're still building bricks behind the scene otherwise you're pitching hold yourself into the B Spot like we did with the project management Sprints features So speaking of that so I don't know you know this I ran a survey recently where I asked my readers what tools they use most what tools they love most and I went out to my entire subscriber

base we' got 6,500 people filling out the survey and notion more than any other company placed very highly in many categories for example it was I have the notes here it was the second most popular project management tool after jira it was the fourth most popular docs which is interesting because you think notion would like notion is known for docs and it's interesting it was that was the lowest one actually and then it was third in CRM just behind Salesforce and HubSpot yeah it's we did not intend to build CRM but what is a CRM

is relational database um that's why we give people that break that's a relational database and they can build CR themselves I think the good Advantage is if a customer use notion they can address those three four use cases in one place uh especially for our startup M Market companies their need for each of the vertical use case is not as complex so they can have all the information in one place good for their teams good for AI actually that's a huge Market change that's like we did not expect until recently right um and save their

cost which is um more and more people care about the bundling purchase nowadays um and our approach for that is like yes we're number two in project management number what number four in CRM but we're going to in more breaks to make us number move out the categories in ranking so it just takes time but that's our approach yeah well it's working whatever you're doing there um so say someone is trying to build a horizontal tool like like yours there's a lot of Founders that are trying to build something that can do a lot of

things really well do you have any advice for that first use case just figuring out something that initially works like you're talking about segmentation is there something there of like do this if you want to find any success with horizontal tool first I wouldn't recommend it but you wouldn't do it differently uh I wouldn't do differently myself but I wouldn't recommend it there's it's it's a problema the problem space too large to have a a best practice but I I can share something that's relevant for us like no should we always want to build a

meta tool a tool to build the L of software we somehow stun upon document notes as one use case and that just gave us a large help the funnel that there's a 1 billion plus people use this use case every day right so um that fuds our growth with with call internal strategy called B2 c2b all this consumers personal user use notion for the most simple way you can use a computer or your phone which is note taking or document sharing and and then they realize oh notion can do more of that there's relational database

power you can do tasks you can manage track other things then they bring notion to work half our B2B customers uh coming from prior personal users and lo lot most of them use notion for notes and talk in the first place so pick well at least we stum Upon A use case a horizontal use case give us a large top of funnel that help us grow are more verticalized Enterprise use cases and that's the reason where um we ship a calendar product last year because which other category of software has 1 billion plus user there's

document notes there's calendar there's email right that's why we're also working on email product right now man watch out everyone and then you mentioned AI it's such a good point that AI is best when it has data and the fact that you have all of this stuff already in there gives you a lot of really interesting opportunities to leverage AI we definitely did not expect language model uh it's such a gift for everybody building tools I completely changed the the material you can work with um one realization is you have a surface area that people

spend daily work with especially doing writing and managing your task and project uh it's really easy to slice language model writing AI capability into it so that's the first product we've built that realization is AI is so good at reasoning and understanding and searching things and and is you can do a much better job of finding and searching things if all the information are together that's what realize a is really good with bundled offerings a is really good with horizontal tools so that's a second phase we call the first product was our AI writer product

second product is AI Q&A or connectors um please to get all the information notion and give your answer right um and then we also need to work with external uh connector because there's things are living in Jura living in zenes that other customers St Reliance we need to build AI connectors um but more more and more information coming back to the notion core I will say the third one which is even more fascinating it's the for the longest time and still is the one of the biggest weaknesses of building for Legos it's it's hard to

piece together it's not everybody can put together Lego set from scratch right it's there's always the builders and user with the Legos but guess who is really good at piecing things together example things especially things like since son 3.5 it has so writing code coding is just example things together so now we're looking at holy we spent the last five six year building all those Lego blocks for knowledge work um if you're just putting a AI coding agent on top of it you can have create any kind of knowledge customer software customer agent for whatever

your vertical use cases you need so that's the most fascinating approach for me and we did not expect this at all thank you AI is there anything else along the lines of building horizontal products and bundling that you think is interesting to share important otherwise I have one last question I want to ask you I think Market is kind of like waves there's like who said this there's two way to build business bundling and bundling right there's too much of Zig into Zach actually my favorite version of this is like um in um there's a

classic Chinese literature called Romance of three kingdoms um it's great novel it talk about the three kingdom era of China and opening sentence of this novel uh it's Empires long United must divide long divided must unite as has always been bundling un bundling it's one of my favorite um book to read when I was a kid um but business Works same way right when as too much um you can sort of see this it's like if we computers everything works on paper our knowledge work are done through papers is fully democratized medium then PC happens

during the 80s the first era is a piece there actually are so many applications there's like early database software like dbase it's quite famous it start at thebase 2 because it give them credibility oh they have been stick around for time right so that's the first unbundling phase of software Computing then Microsoft bundled everything back into a one sweet in the 90s then SAS unbundled it now we're sort of at the tail end of SAS there's so many vertical light SAS average company to use like almost 100 tools it's not it's kind of Madness right

so there's more the market shifting towards more a bundling approach and with AI and with the macro so the more value to be created through bundling um at least for now but Market could shift again so understand this trend I think helpful to see should it be a vertical solution or should it be a horizontal solution because it does different things I love that story okay so last question something that uh one of your early investors Finn Barnes suggested ask you I'm curious where this goes there's this kind of any you've kind of touched on

this a number of times this the the way you think about notion it's almost like a philosophy of how to work and be versus just a productivity tool and so I'm just curious how you think about the relationship between tools and human potential in humans and how we live in the world the tools are extensions of us that's why our office room name out Timeless tools they are just extends us a little bit right um and once they extends us once we shape them once we bring them to to world they can come back to

shape us one of one of my favorite quotes like the marsh quotes like we shape our tools therea our tools shape us um I think this probably too philosophical for Building Product or business but there is there is a sense thinking like what are you bringing to the world that will come back to bite you or shape you um and are you extending the part that's so-called good part of human nature where are you standing the part that's you know might be more Zero Sum might be more negative right um for me what is Legos

Lego is creativity Lego is Beauty and software to me feels like lacking both it's definitely lacking a lot of creativ creativ is so rigid so I believe both are human nature that worth amplify you can build another business thaty different part of human nature right sequ famously investing seven cents or seven human Natures of human because they're so powerful if you just latch on to them you can create a business you can create a product um but at least I prefer to amplify creativity and Beauty in the domain of software to me that's aligned with

my values and I think can at least shape the shape the market shape our user of our product towards the better part of themsel must feel so good to have a product that is so aligned with the way you want to see the world and actually working and growing at this rate and scaling and becoming this uh I don't know part of The Ether of the world feels good yeah it feels good that some of the most heartwarming thing is still and never gu old like when you walk by coffee shop and see people using

Notions oh feels good and it feels good that that we see people in our community can create the living selling notion template notion apps that they're not a software engineer and going back to the original Mission of more people create software I think that's one of the most fulfilling thing that at least as a maker of tools can experience that last point I think people don't realize uh so people are making millions of dollars selling notion templates uh on the internet like at Etsy and other places Consulting templates yeah it's like and they're not programmers

I think that's the I would say that's the heart of it because they're domain experts they they have like they're YouTubers or creators they have Lifestyle brand they know certain things but they're not makers of software then they can use notion package their workflows and experting into notion app and templates and make living with it um it's awesome no yeah like millions of dollars it's crazy Ian before we get to an a bridge lightning round I'm curious if there's anything else that you wanted to touch on think might be useful for folks to hear before

gets a very exciting lightning round I think people in Tech I wish more people look Beyond Tech to steal good ideas uh it's like Tech Hacker News Twitter are so focused on now and what's in front of it what happened six month ago right so versus Humanity if you just read books in other industry you can look sideways and if you go back into history there's a massive amount of patterns and shapes and tradeoffs you can steal from um and you can make what's in front of you much more interesting you can give you like

people figure out clever patterns in whatever domain in the past you can just take in front of you right and and I wish more people do that I think would be a very interesting way for product makers business maker to solve the problem in front of them by stealing outside of it from the domain of tech and business so at Le very inspiring very useful for me personally makes me think of the quote good artists copy great artist steel great artist steel yeah Picasso still or Steve Jobs SP that from Picasso or something who still

from somewhere else probably well this is actually an amazing segue to our very bridg lightning round and the first question is by the way welcome to the lightning ground oh okay the first question is just what are a couple books that you find yourself recommending most other people could be along the lines of what you just described or could just be generally I think the domain that are interesting the most is the complex system domain it's like it's um you can look up the term like I think more and more people talk about this but

thinking a system you know complex system when all the different thing merge together it creates emerging properties talking about ants talk about beads talk about life itself it's just so fascinating right how do with few Primitives few L of breaks you can create the thing called life uh that thing just is it's it's trigger for me so I love reading in that domain um and it's really helpful for create product at least a horizontal product because you're trying to channel the energy use smaller parts to create something that the sound is much larger than its

parts is there a specific book that comes to mind or is it just generally that's a cool that's area that's a cool area to atten uh next question do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed I like to watch old documentaries uh maybe this another area or category too there's quite a few on YouTube like people make a really good documentary in the 80s in the 70s that's like all old BBC ones they're just excellent and they have a strong opinion in them it's no longer just like general education thing

know they have a they have a Direction they have a they have a taste um go look it up like um one oh yeah one is really good one to gu start called connections um U I think it's called about the gentleman's name is Burke um it's about how different things from different domains Inspire other domains and usually he use 30 minutes or six 60 Minutes to chain together a bunch of connection of stories um is really good for technologist to to watch highly recommend feel a very consistent pattern throughout all of these answers and

your entire conversation of just emerging properties connections Legos building uh abstractions yeah I think I did anyag my anagram it's seven and eight seven is like uh it's actually perfect with what we just talk about seven is like creative finding connection C the force and tree a is they call Challenger it's like competitive AR optimizing so through energy access me oh wow this all makes sense I got to take this anagram comes up a bunch on this podcast right yeah uh final question do you have a life motto that you often think back to that

you often repeat in your head of just like when times are hard or just to keep going with something you're working on that you find useful I like to think things as a craft as just make it better make for yourself if it's Unique enough for yourself and useful for others SS will follow Ian thank you so much for being here two final questions working folks find you online if they want to follow up on anything and then how can listeners be useful to you probably find out me on Twitter Ivan hzo um just helpful

from give us feedback about notion about our product that's the best best help what's the best way to do that is it like DM Ian or is it yeah just DM me okay DM me uh yeah that's the probably the best way okay oh boy here you go uh and then you guys are hiring anything specific you're looking for anything people should know if they're like oh I want to go work here uh we try to hire Misfits so if you think you're a misfit if you're acceptional and many things especially um you want to

build Lego for software you want to take interesting spin on AI with Lego for software and DM me Amazing Ian thank you so much for being here thank you for having me bye everyone bye thank you so much for listening if you if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a raing or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenp podcast.com see

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