Pod Insights Lenny's Podcast Notion's lost years, near collapse during COVID, staying small to move fast, building horizontal About this episode Ivan Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Notion. Ivan shares the untold story of Notion, from nearly running out of database space during Covid to finding product-market fit after several “lost years,” and the hard-won lessons along the way.
What you’ll learn:
1. Why you sometimes need to “hide your vision” behind something people actually want—what Ivan calls “sugar-coating the broccoli”
2. How Ivan and his co-founder persevered through multiple product resets and complete code rewrites
3. Why Notion prioritized systems over headcount, keeping the team small and focused even at scale
4. Why Ivan believes in craft and values as the foundation for product development, balancing technical excellence with aesthetic sensibility
5. The surprising story of how Notion nearly collapsed during Covid when their single database almost ran out of space with only weeks to spare
6. Community-led growth tactics
7. Ivan’s unique journey from a small town in China
8. Much more
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Brought to you by:
• Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments: https://www.geteppo.com/
• Airtable ProductCentral—Launch to new heights with a unified system for product development: https://www.airtable.com/lenny
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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-notion-ivan-zhao
Where to find Ivan Zhao:
• X: https://x.com/ivanhzhao
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanhzhao/
Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Introduction to Ivan Zhao
(04:41) Ivan’s early life and education
(07:46) Discovering the vision for Notion
(10:49) The lost years of Notion
(13:56) Rebuilding and perseverance
(17:14) Layoffs and company morale
(18:53) Advice for startup founders
(25:08) Product-market fit
(29:56) Staying lean and efficient
(34:27) Creating a unique office culture
(37:20) Craft and values: the foundation of Notion’s philosophy
(38:44) Navigating tradeoffs in product and business building
(41:24) Leadership and personal growth
(49:11) Challenges and crises: lessons from Notion’s journey
(51:08) Building horizontal software: joys and pains
(01:02:40) Philosophy of tools and human potential
(01:06:17) Lightning round and final thoughts
Referenced:
• Ürümqi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi
• Notion: https://www.notion.com/
• SpongeBob SquarePants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpongeBob_SquarePants
• Augmenting Human Intellect: https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Engelbart/Engelbart_AugmentIntellect.html
• Alan Kay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay
• Ted Nelson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson
• Steve Jobs on Why Computers Are Like a Bicycle for the Mind (1990): https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-for-the-mind-1990/
• Xerox Alto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto
• React: https://react.dev/
• Simon Last on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-last-41404140/
• Magna-Tiles: https://www.magnatiles.com/
• Design on a deadline: How Notion pulled itself back from the brink of failure: https://www.figma.com/blog/design-on-a-deadline-how-notion-pulled-itself-back-from-the-brink-of-failure/
• Bryan Johnson on X: https://x.com/bryan_johnson
• Tobi Lütke’s leadership playbook: Playing infinite games, operating from first principles, and maximizing human potential (founder and CEO of Shopify): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/tobi-lutkes-leadership-playbook
• Smalltalk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#:
• Lisp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)
• DeepSeek: https://www.deepseek.com/
• Shana Fisher: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/shana-fisher
• LAMY 2000 fountain pens: https://www.jetpens.com/LAMY-2000-Fountain-Pens/
• Macintosh 128K: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K
• Toshiba rice cooker: https://www.toshiba-lifestyle.com/us/cooking-appliances/rice-cooker
• Transistor radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_radio
• Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira
• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/
• HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/
• Zendesk: https://www.zendesk.com/
• Misattributed McLuhan quote: https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/we-shape-our-tools-and-thereafter-our-tools-shape-us/
• Phin Barnes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phineasbarnes/
• Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/
• Pablo Picasso quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/629531-good-artists-copy-great-artists-steal#:~
Recommended book:
• The Romance of the Three Kingdoms: https://www.amazon.com/Romance-Three-Kingdoms-Luo-Guanzhong/dp/024133277X
Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected] .
Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
Transcript 12,840 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Lenny Rachitsky? The way you described the early years of Notion, you described the first three to four years as the lost years.
0:05 Speaker 01 We tried many different versions. The first version, 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 tried that like a couple of years and learned that actually most people just don't care. The 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? Productivity software. It took us two years to realize we need to build a productivity tool. We called a sugar called broccoli. People don't want to eat broccoli, but people like sugar. So give them the sugar, hide the broccoli inside of it.
0:40 Lenny Rachitsky? What other elements do you think are key to you finding something that actually ended up working?
0:44 Speaker 01 What is 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 users. You're just doing our project. And too much for business, you're building a commodity.
1:03 Lenny Rachitsky? 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.
1:15 Speaker 01 Tools are extensions of us. And once they extend us, once we shape them, once we bring them to the world, they can come back to shape us.
1:27 Lenny Rachitsky? Today, my guest is Ivan Zhao. 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 three 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 COVID because the one database that everything lived in almost ran out of space.
2:10 Lenny Rachitsky? 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 lennysnewsletter.com. With that, I bring you Ivan Zhao. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next-generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the
2:53 Lenny Rachitsky? performance of new features. And Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous, deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytics cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A/B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case,
3:35 Lenny Rachitsky? including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com/lenny and 10x your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Airtable Product Central, the unified system that brings your entire product org together in one place. No more scattered tools, no more misaligned teams. If you're like most product leaders, you're tired of constant context switching between tools. That's why Airtable 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.
4:18 Lenny Rachitsky? From resourcing to voice of customer to roadmapping to launch execution. And because it's built on Airtable's no-code platform, you can customize every workflow to match exactly how your team works. No limitations, no compromises. Ready to see it in action? Head to airtable.com/lenny to book a demo. That's airtable.com/lenny.
4:44 Lenny Rachitsky? Ivan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
4:47 Speaker 01 Thank you for having me.
4:48 Lenny Rachitsky? 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-plus tech company. And I don't think a lot of people know it. For example, you grew up in a small town in China. And the way you got out of there, the way you got into tech is pretty interesting. Can you just walk us through that early years of Ivan and how you got out of there?
5:16 Speaker 01 I think a small town in China, the definition, it's actually a 4 million people city. So it is called Yurumuki. It's in the northwest desert part of China. So I grew up there and then I moved into, my mom took me to Beijing, the capital of China. And 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 are different paths. You can get a math or you can get a programming, like information Olympia. I was really into computer games at the time. So of course I picked the programming one. So I can play with computers all day long.
5:58 Speaker 01 And I win some competition and come into a good school. So that's how I got into programming.
6:05 Speaker 01 Later, then I moved to Canada. When I moved to Canada, got into college, did not study computer science since I already know how to code. Played a lot of video games, did a lot of art, actually, art and science.
6:22 Speaker 01 By the time I graduated college, I realized most of 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, four websites and realized, oh, actually, people don't know how to create with the software medium, 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 daily work and life.
6:49 Lenny Rachitsky? 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 enter a programming contest and you, uh, you placed first or second or how, how well did you actually do in this?
7:05 Speaker 01 I kind of in Beijing, so.
7:06 Lenny Rachitsky? In Beijing, okay.
7:08 Speaker 01 Pretty big, Beijing is a big city, so.
7:10 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, incredible. Another stat I, uh, or a story I heard is that you learned English by watching SpongeBob SquarePants. Is that real?
7:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's real. Um, I moved to Canada pretty late, uh, sixteen years old and what I learned is, yeah, in, in China, you can learn English, but it's typically 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 understand jokes, right? Uh, watching cartoons, it's probably the easiest way to do that.
7:45 Lenny Rachitsky? That's amazing. Um, and there's another kind of seminal moment in your path. I don't know if it was at this point or later, but the Douglas Engelbert paper ended up being a very meaningful moment for you.
7:57 Speaker 01 So while I was in Canada in last year of school, working on trying to building website from our friends and building a creative tool for them. And then you just look into the history of a creative tool for software for computing. You eventually arrive at nineteen sixty and seventies.
8:20 Speaker 01 So you realize the first generation of computing pioneers, which is around San Francisco, Stanford areas, South Bay, they actually had the best ideas. For them, people like Douglas Engelbar, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, those first generation pioneers, for them computing, there shouldn't be a separation between builders and users. It's the same medium. Engelbar's original paper called Augmenting Human Intellect, when I read that paper, it's like, holy shit. If you're making software, if you know how to code or design, this is the highest leverage thing you can do for other people. So giving them the ability to use computing to augment their problem-solving ability or their intellect. That just got me obsessed with this problem and I want to start a company like Notion.
9:05 Lenny Rachitsky? Makes me think of Steve Jobs's famous line of how the computer is a bicycle for the mind.
9:10 Speaker 01 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 your story. Xerox PARC has, working on the first generation personal computers, called Xerox Alto. Alan Kay was one of the main person behind it. Alto runs down the system called Smalltalk, which is there's no separation between users and users app. There's no thing called application. Everything is mutable. You can change the tools, right? So when Steve Jobs, the famous story is when he went to Xerox PARC to in demo with Alto, he does not, it's the first time he see graphic user interface, one of the first time. And it's also, they present them with this Alto system
9:55 Speaker 01 that everything could change. But he did not see the power of it. Even when 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. 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 oriented environment power. As the generation of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates bring PC, personal computing, popular. And they sort of stuck with this kind of application framework rather than this small talk object oriented framework.
10:38 Speaker 01 Then that has all the apps we have today and has the SaaS bra we have today.
10:42 Lenny Rachitsky? That a vision of how product should be, it 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 in 2013 and so over 10 years ago at this point. You described the first three to four years as the lost 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 ARR in like two years, in the 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.
11:24 Lenny Rachitsky? What went on during these lost years as you described 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.
11:32 Speaker 01 Because the goal is always building a computing tool.
11:36 Speaker 01 It's like, what product is this? It's really hard to shape the product, right? The vision is, the, the, the dream is there, but the product is very, there's so many path. We'll try many different versions. 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 tried that like a couple of years and learned that actually most people just don't care. The majority of people, they wake up, they, they have a 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. So we give it to our friends, give it to investors.
12:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, it did not resonate with people.
12:25 Speaker 01 But we really want to build that tool, so we just keep going. And the realization is actually,
12:34 Speaker 01 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? Productivity software. So that's why I came to Notion today. If you use Notion, Notion are more understood as a productivity suite, but our intent, and we use Notion more, you'll understand discover intent, which is Zerohash has a no-code developer power into it. You can create almost any kind of productivity software using Notion itself. That took us two-plus years to realize. So actually, the world is not like you. The world are not like developer designer minded. The world is, they only care what's in front of them, and they're so noisy.
13:16 Lenny Rachitsky? 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.
13:23 Speaker 01 Very much so. It's like sense of maturation is, you don't see the world just from your perspective, but from outside your perspective, right? It takes, we were young, take us multiple years, it hit your head straight into the, into the wall to realize that. People just don't care.
13:40 Lenny Rachitsky? I love the way you phrase that, that you kind of have to hide your vision behind something that people understand and know how to use and.
13:47 Speaker 01 We call the sugar called broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli, but people like sugar, so give them the sugar. Hide the broccoli inside of it.
13:55 Lenny Rachitsky? Wow.
13:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:57 Lenny Rachitsky? The other thing I've heard is that you had, you threw away your code every time. Like, so you rebuilt it many times, you threw away the code each time.
14:03 Speaker 01 That's true. Actually, it took us four years to get somewhere. First two year is that you build too much like a no-code, like developer product, nobody cares. Took us two years to realize we need to build a productivity tool. Then it took another year to realize, to build this out, but in the middle of that, realized we built on the wrong technical foundation. So like. Eight, ten years ago, there's competing before we, 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.
14:44 Speaker 01 And then we realize, because it's so new, it's just so unstable. It don't know where the bug come from. It's from your source code, it's from underlying libraries.
14:55 Speaker 01 Then we have to restart the company. Otherwise, rebuild the whole thing. Otherwise, we're gonna run out of time. So that's, instead, reset the codebase, reset the company, so we can build on a round more orthodox techno- technology foundation.
15:10 Lenny Rachitsky? How did you actually stay solvent all this time? A lot of people want to keep working at an idea. Oftentimes, they need to pay the bills. How practically were you able to keep working for three to four years? I know there's a story of your mom loaning you some money during that time.
15:25 Speaker 01 Well, Chinese mom always can.
15:28 Speaker 01 And I'm a single child. Yeah, 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 then raised the money, and sort of returned the money to her. Then we run out of money, so I, "Hey, mom, can I borrow that just to bridge us?" Which she did. I really grateful for that. How do you bridge? How do you last here so long? Because the thing you want to create does not exist.
16:00 Speaker 01 With Cores Call Notions, it's a Lego for software. It doesn't quite exist, right? There's a Lego for Lego. You can see that in furnitures where it exists. But Lego for software, at the usable mass market adoption level, doesn't quite exist. And you just want that thing to exist. And I grew up with Legos. The only toy I ever wanted and I want the same feeling of creativity and playfulness to the tool that people can use every day. So and my co-founder Simon feels the same way. Lego is the only thing he lacked, wanted for every Christmas.
16:36 Lenny Rachitsky? Have you guys seen magnet tiles though? I have, I have a one and a half year old and magnet tiles are quite delightful. It's like a, I think it's like a pre Lego. I like the
16:46 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, it's like they're little magnetic, plastic planes and then you can build little, you can build much bigger things really quickly. It's more for babies, but I'm having a blast.
16:58 Speaker 01 Oh, I see. It's kind of like, uh huh.
17:01 Lenny Rachitsky? 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 magnet tiles for software.
17:08 Speaker 01 Now, most people know Lego magnet tile, ideas, but same modular creativity.
17:14 Lenny Rachitsky? 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?
17:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, that was during the one of the rebuild phases during the, we know what the product should look like. It should be a productivity software with Lego power hiding inside of it. We built on a wrong technical foundation and if we continue to build on the wrong ones, we're going to run out of money, company won't exist. So we decided to lay off everybody. At that time, notion was five people. We lay off, I brought back to me and Simon, two people.
17:47 Speaker 01 And morale obviously was really low. You have to say goodbye to your teammates. And so we have the idea, let's just go somewhere that we've never been to, to change the scenery a little bit. And Japan is always top on our list. So you know, the funny thing is, if we, and we sublease our apartment and office, we're actually making money living in Japan than San Francisco. So we did that for a while. We actually traveled around the world for a while just to like changed up. And me and Sam just coding every day and design every day. That's, that's some of the happiest moments. Birthday every day.
18:27 Lenny Rachitsky? I saw a stat you're coding 18 hours a day. So here's the quote I heard. We just code, code, code, then hey, let's go for food, then we go eat, go back to work and do it again.
18:35 Speaker 01 Because me and him working so well now, even back then, it's like you sort of know what you try to people are thinking. And you can just cross through the problem space really quickly. The technical product space, design space. And just nonstop of shipping stuff.
18:55 Lenny Rachitsky? 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. I've 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?
19:36 Speaker 01 I'm kind of lucky and Simon kind of lucky that high is never too high, low is never too low for us. So somehow it wasn't feeling too down.
19:47 Speaker 01 Whenever I feel down, I just go to sleep and next day I'm, I'm just reset. So that's kind of lucky for me.
19:56 Speaker 01 Definitely don't worry, don't, don't be afraid to reset. I think courage is quite important. Because like oftentimes you're working on things don't matter, but momentum just took you there.
20:08 Speaker 01 Your first point of building something you want the world to have.
20:14 Speaker 01 What is the building a product or business? 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'd want to optimize the scorecard work. It's building for winning. And I grew up playing sports. I like to compete. So I like that. And building for something you want the world to, 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. They're different energy. I realized, actually fairly recently, like they're really different. Depends on which day I wake up, I might, I might be in a different mood for things.
20:58 Speaker 01 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, their notion, and still every day for me.
21:24 Lenny Rachitsky? 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 a thing that you are still excited about, but also have, you go back and forth, here's what the business needs and here's the thing I'm excited about.
21:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, really a Q, 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 day, if you're building a product or tool has to be used by others, you need to create a balance, too much of yourself, then there's no users. Then you're just doing art project, you're just doing a research project, right? And it's too much for business, you're building a commodity, right? So where's the spectrum?
22:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's, it's a, it's never ending spectrum.
22:15 Lenny Rachitsky? That's interesting. Yeah. Okay, so I'll summarize some of those things you shared of just how to stick with it and stay with an idea and not give up. So I love that you said just get sleep, very Brian Johnson of you, just like get some sleep and it's a real down day, there'll be another day tomorrow. Really simple, but.
22:32 Speaker 01 It's like a daily personal physical reset, right? You can reset your co-host, you can reset your mental model.
22:39 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, and then there's also, I love these points, don't be afraid to kind of reset, as you just said, like, Toby Lutke was on the podcast, he said the same thing, just be comfortable with sunk cost. I have done all this already and I will throw it away and start again and that's okay.
22:53 Speaker 01 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, it can catch up to all the thing you build much quicker than you ever thought. Or humans are not thinking, not good at thinking in terms of abstraction or the exponentials. We're thinking in terms of linearly.
23:23 Speaker 01 If you just reset and you find a better way to do it, you can get all the thing you have, the sunk cost recovered really quickly. So actually going back to the computing pioneers part of like, Smalltalk, the one of the first system and a huge influence for Notion was really tiny code base. And inspired by Lisp, which is another programming languages and probably like a hundred 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're, you are free to lose really quickly.
24:05 Speaker 01 So I think that's the, the kernel of why reset is so powerful.
24:10 Lenny Rachitsky? And we're seeing exactly what you're describing in L L M 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 on this for decades are today. Because they are building off these abstractions, as you described in these.
24:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, like trying to cut up the U S really quickly.
24:36 Lenny Rachitsky? 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 network actually where generally L L Ms are like next word, next word, next word, next word. And if they ever make a wrong turn, they're stuck and 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 A I has almost figured out exactly what you're describing.
25:06 Speaker 01 Interesting.
25:07 Lenny Rachitsky? Oh, man. Okay. Last question about the early years. Everyone's always wondering, what does 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?
25:20 Speaker 01 I think going back to me and Simon, high is never that high, low is never that low. It never hit me, hit us as like a binary state. It's just kind of like, oh, good, we have people who care about this thing we make now. Oh, good, people are reach out to us or paying us and it's a kind of very gradual ramp.
25:41 Speaker 01 Maybe that's why early days, when it's really the lost eras, it doesn't feel too low because it just, even for Notion today, it feels like it's so small in terms of where it could be. And it just, they keep going.
25:57 Lenny Rachitsky? Right.
25:57 Speaker 01 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? Way of thinking about things. So it never, there's a such moment in the product market, boom, milestone achieved. It didn't feel that way.
26:13 Lenny Rachitsky? I've heard that from a lot of founders, actually. Was there, was there like a moment in that point of just like, oh, this is different? Or maybe it's going to work this time?
26:23 Speaker 01 I think for a while, like, okay, once we start revenue, product grows faster now. Investors start knocking on the door with like, I remember one day it's like, there's a dog food, dog food, uh, dog treats sent into our ma, uh, sent to our office. So first of all, office wasn't public address and the dog treats, like, why do people want this so much? Right? So that was a moment I paused a little bit. And I guess there's enough attraction for investors.
26:54 Lenny Rachitsky? And the dog treats, we're trying to, it was like a gift to be like, hey, you should talk to us. We're sending this fun gift.
26:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, because of the way how we just hire someone in the office as a dog. Then we're, I think we post on Twitter or something.
27:06 Speaker 01 And so why did this show up to our office? Someone really hustle into where we are, our office address and follow us on Twitter, so.
27:17 Lenny Rachitsky? Did you end up taking their money?
27:19 Speaker 01 Not the first time, yeah.
27:21 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, later. Okay. It's a long game.
27:24 Speaker 01 No.
27:25 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. So that's, that's, I've never heard that before. Sign product market fit as VCs are starting to, you start getting a lot more messaging and cold outreach from VCs.
27:33 Speaker 01 So actually I had, um, one of our investor is really helpful.
27:39 Speaker 01 Because all those years you, you sort of just like. There's no feedback loop. You just go for it, then the feedback will gradually show up. Then you, oh, then for a while, oh, we see start knocking on doors. So I also talk to those people that people like what we're doing. Right? I did some meetings, quite a few meetings, maybe a dozen. Then I realized, and one of them started saying like, Ivan, what are you doing? Like you clearly don't need money.
28:06 Speaker 01 Do you just trying to feel good to 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.
28:20 Speaker 01 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 Doc Fu story came about and realized, oh, that's interesting.
28:30 Lenny Rachitsky? You mentioned this investor that you said was really helpful. You want to give them some cred? Or do you want to keep?
28:35 Speaker 01 Oh, Shana Fisher, she's in New York.
28:38 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, cool.
28:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, she's like another therapist, right?
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29:57 Lenny Rachitsky? I want to shift to talking about Notion today and the way you've approached it. And a good segue 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. One is that you're, you guys are profitable. You've been profitable for a couple of years now. You haven't, I don't know if you've spent even the money you've raised. Like, I think most of it is still in the
30:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
30:19 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, it's still in the bank. You're nodding if you're on YouTube. You didn't have a salesperson until you hit over 10 million ARR. 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?
30:43 Speaker 01 I think going back to the abstraction system with problem solving. I think we're lucky that me and Simon and Akshay, we have the skills that you probably can run a whole company, which is a couple of us. I can co, I can design, I can do marketing, storytelling, talk, talk, close sales deals. So you sort of realize you don't need a lot. And when you can do a lot at the same time, or hire people who can do that, naturally keep the company small. And you all know, you're doing product management. The overhead is actually more from internal communication, right?
31:27 Speaker 01 It's really hard to get people's mind to be aligned on things, to see the world in the same way. And the part that you do need people, maybe you can solve better through systems, through better tools. Like Notion itself is a meta tool, to build other tools. So we pretty much run everything on Notion. We use the same mindset to build our company. And accidentally that keep our headcount low, keep our company profitable, and which then puts you on the positive treadmill of you don't have to go for the next 18, 24 months to find money. You just have to, you can just focus on building. And also because your team's small.
32:07 Speaker 01 We have this internal notion called talent density.
32:11 Lenny Rachitsky? Right.
32:11 Speaker 01 Which we're not, we don't try to track number of people, but we try to track how talent dense revenue per employee we are. And people want to work with other more talented people. So it's a positive company.
32:27 Lenny Rachitsky? I 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?
32:41 Speaker 01 No, I wouldn't say we're notions like a cost saving first company. Like I like fancy chairs, I like furnitures. But we're not like wasting money. I think it's more just from a taste or approach to problem solving. I just believe better system is much better than through for through people.
33:05 Lenny Rachitsky? When people hear this idea of staying lean and, you know, staying small, like it sounds great. Yeah, or we're going to be super efficient and lean and smart with our money and down dense. 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?
33:29 Speaker 01 I think just understand abstraction or system is a better curve than Pecan curve, right? Linear. And we internally help other people to understand this internally. We use the metaphor, the notion is a small bus.
33:44 Speaker 01 The bus, 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 boat, bigger the bus slows down. And as a leader in the company, you decide who sit around you on the bus seats. Right? That dictates how fast our overall bus moves. Dictate your work and life experience at this company because you're, you've picked your roommate, you've picked your seatmates. That metaphor clicks with people inside a company and.
34:16 Speaker 01 And overall, how best optimize to make the bus tight, make the bus lean?
34:20 Lenny Rachitsky? I've never heard that metaphor before.
34:22 Speaker 01 It probably came up somewhere. Or, no.
34:25 Lenny Rachitsky? Small bus. 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 tried thirty different 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?
34:53 Speaker 01 Maybe that there are two dimension part of it. One is one is the pragmatic part. You just want office to be a pleasant experience to be at. Therefore, most office, the top line feels like hospital. I just say, oh, man. And then the white is so pale and the floor is so dark. Like, you don't use white, use some kind of cream. Make floors more friendly colors and don't use top line. Top line is evil. So just the office feels cozy. So people spend more time. You feel more creative, more at ease in the office space, right? The visual we have is should feels like artist's studio. Or should feel like your home. That's why most of our office furniture are home furnitures. It just feels cozy.
35:37 Speaker 01 That's more so people spend more time, it feels more creative, juices flow better. The other word is like,
35:45 Speaker 01 at least personally for me, it hurts the eyes if you see ugly things. It's more from a value aesthetic front. It's like, we talk about ergonomic chairs. 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.
36:05 Lenny Rachitsky? You also have a really interesting naming convention for your conference rooms?
36:08 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's true. Yeah. We name our conference room after timeless tools in history. So there are, give you an example, iPhones, obvious one, original Macintosh. There's different form of chairs, Lamy's 2000 pens, Toshiba rice cooker is another ones.
36:31 Speaker 01 Because they're inspirations, they're just like, at the end of the day, we're creating a tool. We're creating a meta tool, a lot of people to create tools, software tools. And Toshiba rice cooker changed how people eat rice in Asia for for a hundred million, tens of a hundred million people, right? The Sony transistor radio is the first one to shrink semiconductor to something small and useful for people. And those things changed people's life and last for decades. What is it 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, it's just every six months, every twelve month cycle, they don't, we don't think enough about create something that lasts.
37:15 Speaker 01 I care creating something that's at least the form factor lasts longer than how waiting month.
37:21 Lenny Rachitsky? 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?
37:36 Speaker 01 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? Craft is interesting world is kind of like about apply your value to some technical know how and to make more clever trade offs to create something new and useful.
38:07 Speaker 01 And just keep doing that at it. My wife often refer me like as a wood cabinet builder. Like that's how I, at least my mindset trending towards building notion is like, oh, can I make this wood cabinet? More beautiful and more useful and feels nicer on your hand.
38:26 Speaker 01 And that's like you have aesthetic direction towards it. And you have your technical know how 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 more building product to me, at least to me feels that way. Building business feels that way. Building company feels that way.
38:44 Lenny Rachitsky? 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 this 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.
39:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think this is quite relevant, especially for product makers and business makers. It's the, there's no free lunch.
39:23 Speaker 01 You don't get something for free, you have to give up something.
39:29 Speaker 01 Then what do you give up? It's essentially, then you give up the right thing that market or 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?
39:44 Speaker 01 And the market is so dynamic, especially now with AI, like the
39:50 Speaker 01 the optimized function of the market changes. So then you need to make new trade off and new technology emerges, right? I always feels like AI, language model feels like a new type of wood. It's 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.
40:18 Speaker 01 It's like computer wasn't there until semiconductor becomes like reliable. It's like it requires new technology to unlock new way to making trade offs. And then you're, then you need to balance the technology trade out with human behavior trade off. Whereas 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 variable. And every generation pick up some new thing, but after you're sixteen years old, you don't want to learn new things. So those are like, there are people trade off, technology trade off. There's some kind of macro, there's a different dimension of things, just cooking together that come together as a product or as a, more as a business. Then what is that? And I think
41:03 Speaker 01 a product maker, business maker's job is to find that sweet spot of all the multiple dimensions, then create something has a right to exist, at least it's more durable to exist.
41:14 Lenny Rachitsky? And I'm hearing there's a 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 that is unlocking some cool new ideas. Uh, but before I get there, I want to talk about just you as a, as a leader. At this point, you've been at this for twelve years, something like that?
41:31 Speaker 01 Not like that, yeah.
41:32 Lenny Rachitsky? And if you don't mind me saying, you're, you're, you're a soft spoken leader, which is not like, you're not like the archetype of what people imagine is like the CEO of a ten billion. And I'm sure you guys are valued much more now, even though that, that was probably an old valuation. I think it's great for people to see leaders like you that are not necessarily the classic archetype of CEO. 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?
42:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, I guess you've never been in a business meeting or brainstorm session with me.
42:15 Lenny Rachitsky? I haven't seen that side of you.
42:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, I wouldn't be the most, uh, soft interaction person, uh, at work. It's actually the reverse is true because you grow up in, I grew up in China, people way more direct. People just like say what they want, say what they think, right? So, and you move to California, move to US or move to the West, it felt, wow, everybody says everything's wonderful, everything's nice, but that's not true.
42:43 Speaker 01 I would say Notion's ethos is probably more like a east coast rather than west coast. So somewhere in between, right? It's more direct.
42:51 Speaker 01 What do I need to learn?
42:54 Speaker 01 A bunch of things. I think in the early days, it's like we talk about that the world's not like you. The world don't care about you. So you're just like, you sort of have to shave off the idealistic part of you to build something that's like the world actually cares. The sugar called broccoli, you have to hide your broccoli within something on the 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 one to one influence. But as company grow, you realize you need to be one to many storytellers.
43:31 Speaker 01 That's a skill. It's like, I, the one reason I try not to do podcasts and all this is, oh, it's actually drains energy me in 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 some things skill, also in the video game. You need to pick up something to unlock something else and make a new demand, new kind of trade off with yourself and the business, right? That's kind of fun though. Every, every 12, 18 month, Notion's like a new company. Or at least it requires different kind of skills that come from me. So I need to pick up new things and
44:16 Speaker 01 it's an infinite game and infinite games are more fun.
44:19 Lenny Rachitsky? 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 frame it and, and package it so that people actually understand and want it. And that's how you get in.
44:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's like, human minds are resistant to change. And how do you land 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. And you also be truthful, not just deceiving. So deceiving is not truthful. You can fool other people once or twice, then there's, there's no future. It has to be actually tied back to something genuinely, the value you're creating or, or the change with the other person. So. Yeah, it's a craft. It's like storytelling is a vast dimension of making trade off.
45:15 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, I love this word trade offs comes up again and again, too. It's so interesting that there's these threads that have come up again and yet in our chat. Along the journey of becoming this leader that you've become, what would you say is maybe the biggest surprise or most unexpected part of the journey of something you've had to learn to do or something that didn't turn out the way you expected? Just as a personal growth story.
45:36 Speaker 01 If you use the product in the past three years, you realize Notion product, you realize like, hey, we actually shipped a bunch of things not so great like two years ago. Right? Because actually last year, 2024 is the year that I can say we shipped good stuff at good velocity and good quality and aligned with our values. We sort of got 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 Notion Lego for software. We're sort of ship non Lego pieces into our product. We're still there, we're still cleaning up part of it. 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,
46:21 Speaker 01 you attract people our value aligned to it. Then if you're trying to optimize too much on this competition, revenue side of things forced to introducing something anti your value. Then the system, it's like there's organ rejection with your employees, with your customers, right? Like, give you a concrete example.
46:45 Speaker 01 For a while, and still is, project management is one of the most important use cases for Notion. And you can get to project management, a better project management tool just by hard coding things like sprints, milestones, all those things into your product. Right? You can do it in the way the Notion is now being through Lego pieces. Okay, what is a sprint? Sprints are clusters of tasks that group together. So it's a new Lego. So introducing Lego is much harder, slower. You can instead we hardcore the sprint concept into the product. And this become doesn't quite fit, right? And took us, took me at least a year, year and a half to realize
47:28 Speaker 01 that's not the way we should continue building Notion. We should go back the original Lego way of building the product. So we changed quite a bit internally. Now it feels good now. Building according to values is the meta point, at least for me.
47:43 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, I gotta follow this thread. What is it that you changed that allowed you to come back to your first principles? Was it like you step, is it founder mode? It was the answer. Is it people personnel shift? Is it, what allowed you to change the way things were going?
47:58 Speaker 01 I would say all of that above, but especially just release the sprint product through our community and customers. Then it's like, what is this? It's like underpowered compared to other competitor products to doing product management. And it doesn't work well with the rest of Notion Lego set. And if you talk to engineers, they'll say, okay, there's this part of Notion, you have to touch the code base. That's just weird, right? That's you hardcore too much into it. From all the dimension, technical front, calling a customer. And when you use this thing, it just doesn't feel right. So there's another saying that if you're building a Lego way inside Notion in the code base or product, the system work for you. If you're building non Lego way, the system work against you.
48:42 Speaker 01 So in some sense, we're creating a tool that has emergent behavior, interchanneled that emergent behavior to unlock more values.
48:52 Lenny Rachitsky? So I'm hearing as you launched it, it just didn't go well. 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.
49:04 Speaker 01 It took like nine, nine month, a year to realize sometime.
49:10 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah. Along those lines, actually, 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 if 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.
49:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, one of the bleakest one is when we, during COVID, we just couldn't scale up our infrastructure. There's pretty, for the longest time, like Simon is really good at don't do premature optimization. So for the longest time, we notion runs on one instance of Postgres database. And then we find a beefy machine, we keep scrolling, find a beefier, future machine to scale our user base. But then we're running out to even the largest instance there is for a Postgres. So there's a doomsday clock that when we're gonna truly run out of this space to store everything in Notion and Notion got completely shut down. So we stopped building any new features, all hands on
50:12 Speaker 01 deck, every, almost every engineer in the company trying to solve that problem. Eventually we did, but it was, it was a close call.
50:21 Lenny Rachitsky? Like, how close are we talking about?
50:23 Speaker 01 If I recall correctly, probably in weeks, running all the time. And then as you approach the limit of what Postgres can do, behavior becomes sporadic. You just, you really don't know which day it's gonna hit you. But we just need to go as fast as you can to become charting problem.
50:39 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, I was gonna ask, so the solution is charting the database?
50:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, charting.
50:41 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, cool.
50:43 Speaker 01 But don't do as late. Yes, don't do premature optimization, but plan ahead a little bit. Don't do all.
50:49 Lenny Rachitsky? How long did you have from when you launched this doomsday clock to time running out? Was that like a few months?
50:54 Speaker 01 Maybe a bit longer. Yeah, in a month, less than six, but more than three, something like that.
50:59 Lenny Rachitsky? The bittersweetness of COVID, just ramping up certain businesses.
51:02 Speaker 01 Yeah, people just run like they have to use online productivity software, collaboration tools.
51:07 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, blessing and a curse. Speaking of a blessing and curse, this is a great segue to where I wanted to go in 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 there are often point solutions that are very, very good at that one thing. And it's off, 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 is like the joy and pain of building horizontal products.
51:48 Lenny Rachitsky? So let me just ask broadly, just what have you learned about what it takes to successfully build a horizontal platform type of product?
51:55 Speaker 01 First of all, no regret. And second, I wouldn't want to do anything else because like going back to the value.
52:05 Speaker 01 Lego for software doesn't exist and Lego is a horizontal thing. So that's the thing we want to go. We always want to do that. So we did not start to optimize for a business, but we optimized for that vision.
52:19 Speaker 01 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 unpackaged box, the set is there for you, right? That's what we're learning a lot, especially move up market. There's this term that took me a while to learn is called solutions. You need to be a solution for enterprise customer. You need to sit somewhere on a P and L to optimize for their business or due to risk. That's Lego box. It's not a Lego brick.
52:58 Speaker 01 Related segmentation is related to that. So you need to shift your mindset as you more towards B to B, more towards move up market. I wish we have done it earlier. For the longest time, I was still too much in the Lego brick mindset, now in the solution Lego box mindset.
53:14 Lenny Rachitsky? That's such a good metaphor. I feel like even if you're not building Legos for for business, just this idea of what is the box that you are selling to people? Like, what is it? How's it being positioned? How do you picture it? What are the value props? Such a good metaphor.
53:29 Speaker 01 If you're building vertical software and naturally your vertical is the box, right? So you're you know, you have one or two person you're selling to. Pretty straightforward that your market constraints you. And and no judgment, people like to you can go that way. But then you hit this you hit the wall of the market. The advantage of 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 to market distribution to create the the spot in people's mind, your customer mind more clearly for them and for your go to market teams. That's why we're I solution is one of my favorite word internally to rally the sales team or the product team will think that way.
54:12 Speaker 01 But then you need to hold in your head, make sure you're still building bricks behind the scene. Otherwise, you're pigeonhole yourself into the bad spot like what we did with a project management sprints features.
54:25 Lenny Rachitsky? So speaking of that, so I don't know if you know this, I ran a survey recently. We're asked my readers what tools they use most, what tools they love most. And I went out to my entire subscriber base. We've 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 haven't been 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 be 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 HelpSpot.
55:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's what did not intend to build CRM. But what is a CRM is relational database. That's why we give people that brick. That's a relational database and they can build CRM themselves. I think the good vantage is if a customer use Notion, they can address those three, four use cases in one place. Especially for our startup, mid market companies, their need for each of the vertical as 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? And save their costs, which is more and more people care about the bundling purchase nowadays.
55:48 Speaker 01 And our approach for that is like, yes, we're number two in project management, number four in CRM, but we're kind of introducing more bricks to make us move out the categories in ranking. So it just takes time, but that's our approach.
56:04 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, well, it's working whatever you're doing there.
56:08 Lenny Rachitsky? So say someone is trying to build a horizontal tool 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 a horizontal tool?
56:28 Speaker 01 First, I wouldn't recommend it.
56:30 Lenny Rachitsky? But you wouldn't do it differently?
56:31 Speaker 01 I wouldn't do it differently myself, but I wouldn't recommend it. It's a problem, the problem is based too large to have a best practice. But I can share something that's relevant for us. Like notion, we always want to build a meta tool, a tool to build the lack of our software. We somehow stand upon document notes as one use case. And that just gave us a large top of the funnel. There's a one billion plus people use this use case every day. So that fuels our growth. We call our internal strategy called B to C to B. All those 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.
57:14 Speaker 01 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 B to B customers coming from prior personal users. And most of them are using notion for notes and doc in the first place. So take, well, at least we stumbled upon a use case, a horizontal use case to give us a large top of funnel that help us grow our more verticalized enterprise use cases. And that's the reason where we shipped a calendar product last year. Because which other category of software has one billion plus users? There's document notes, there's calendar, there's email, right?
57:58 Speaker 01 That's why we're also working on the email product right now.
58:01 Lenny Rachitsky? Oh, man, watch out, everyone. And then you mentioned AI, and 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.
58:17 Speaker 01 We definitely did not expect language model. It's such a gift for everybody building tools, right? Completely changed the material you can work with.
58:30 Speaker 01 One realization is you have a surface area that people spend daily work with, especially during writing and managing your tasks and projects. It's really easy to slice the language model, writing AI capability into it. So that's the first progress, though. That realization is AI is so good at reasoning and understanding and searching things. And it's you can do a much better job of finding and searching things if all the information are together. That's what I realized AI is really good with bundled offerings. AI is really good with horizontal tools. So that's the second phase we call it. The first product was our AI writer product. Second product is AI Q and A or connectors.
59:14 Speaker 01 Just to get all the information notion and give your answer, right? And then we also need to work with the external connector because there's things that are living in Jira, living in Zendesk that other customers still rely on. So we need to build AI connectors. But more and more information coming back to the notion core. I will say the third one, which is even more fascinating. It's for the longest time and it 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? There's always the builders and user with the Legos.
59:53 Speaker 01 But guess who is really good at piecing things together, assemble things, especially things like since Sana 3.5, AI is so good at writing code. Coding is just assemble things together. So now we're looking at, holy shit, we spent the last five, six year building all those Lego blocks for knowledge work.
1:00:14 Speaker 01 If we're just putting 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 need. So that's the most fascinating approach for me, and we did not expect this at all.
1:00:33 Lenny Rachitsky? Thank you, AI. Is there anything else along the lines of building horizontal products and bundling that you think is interesting to share or important? Otherwise, I have one last question I want to ask you.
1:00:42 Speaker 01 I think market is kind of like waves. There's like, who said this? There's two ways to build business, bundling and bundling, right? There's too much of zig into zag. Actually, my favorite version of this is like, in, there's a classic Chinese literature called Romance of Three Kingdoms. It's a great novel. It talks about the Three Kingdom era of China. And the opening sentence of this novel, it's, "Empires long united must divide, long divided must unite, as has always been." Bundling and bundling. It's one of my favorite books to read when I was a kid. But business works the same way, right?
1:01:25 Speaker 01 When there's too much, you can sort of see this. It's like, if we're computers, everything works on paper. Our knowledge work are done through papers. It's fully democratized medium. Then PC happens during the eighties. The first era of PC, there actually are so many applications. There is like, early database software like D-Base, it's quite famous, it started at D-Base 2, because it gives them credibility, or they have been stick around for some time, right? So that's the first unbundling phase of software computing. Then Microsoft bundled everything back into one suite in the nineties. Then SaaS unbundled it. Now we're sort of at the tail end of SaaS.
1:02:09 Speaker 01 There's so many verticalized SaaS, average company to use like almost 100 tools. It's not, it's kind of madness, right? So there's more, the market's shifting towards more of bundling approach. And with AI, and with the macro, so there's more value to be created through bundling. At least for now, but the market could shift again. So I understand this trend. I think helpful to see, should you build a vertical solution or should you build a horizontal solution? Because it does different things.
1:02:39 Lenny Rachitsky? I love that story. Okay, so last question, something that one of your early investors, Finn Barnes, suggested ask you. I'm curious where this goes. There's this kind of, and you've kind of touched on this a number of times, this 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 and humans and how we live in the world.
1:03:08 Speaker 01 Tools are extensions of us. That's why our office room, name out of time, those tools, they're just, they extend us a little bit, right? And once they extend us, once we shape them, once we bring them to world, they can come back to shape us.
1:03:29 Speaker 01 One of my favorite quotes, like the Marshall MacLean quote, like, we shape our tools thereafter, our tools shape us.
1:03:38 Speaker 01 I think this is 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?
1:03:52 Speaker 01 And are you extending the part, the so-called good part of human nature? Or are you extending the part that's, you know, might be more zero sum, might be more negative, right?
1:04:05 Speaker 01 For me, what is Legos? Lego is creativity, Lego is beauty. Software to me feels like lacking both. Definitely lacking a lot of creative, uh, creative, it's so rigid. So I believe both are human nature that worth amplify. You can build another business that amplify a different part of human nature, right? There was a, Sequoia famously invested in seven sins or seven human natures of, of human because they're so powerful. If you just latch on to them, you can create a business, you can create a product.
1:04:40 Speaker 01 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 at least shape that, shape the market, shape our user of our product towards the better part of themselves.
1:04:58 Lenny Rachitsky? It 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, I don't know, part of the ether of the world.
1:05:11 Speaker 01 Feels good, yeah, feels good that. Some of the most heartwarming thing is still, it never gets old, like when you walk by coffee shop and see people using Notion, oh, it feels good. And it feels good that we'll see people in our community can create a living selling Notion template, Notion apps, that they're not a software engineer. And going back to the original mission of when people create software. I think that's one of the most fulfilling thing, at least as a maker of tools can experience.
1:05:39 Lenny Rachitsky? About last point, I think people don't realize, so people are making millions of dollars selling Notion templates on the internet, like on Etsy and other places.
1:05:48 Speaker 01 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 are domain expertise. They, they have, like they're YouTubers or creators, they have lifestyle brand, they know certain things, but they're not makers of software. And they can use Notion, package their workflows and expertise into Notion app and templates and make a living with it. It's awesome.
1:06:13 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, like millions of dollars, it's crazy. Ivan, before we get to an abridged 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 we get to our very exciting lightning round.
1:06:27 Speaker 01 I think people in tech, I wish more people look beyond tech to steal good ideas.
1:06:36 Speaker 01 It's like tech, Hacker News, Twitter are so focused on the now and what's in front of it, what happened six months ago. Versus humanity, if you just read books in other industry, you can look sideways. If you go back to history, there's a massive amount of patterns and shapes and trade offs you can steal from.
1:06:59 Speaker 01 And it can make what's in front of you much more interesting. It could 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 it would be a very interesting way for product makers, business maker to solve the problem in front of them by stealing outside of, from the domain of tech and business. So, at least it's very inspiring, very useful for me personally.
1:07:26 Lenny Rachitsky? Makes me think of the quote, "Good artists copy, great artists steal."
1:07:30 Speaker 01 Great artists steal, yeah. Picasso stole, or Steve Jobs stole that from Picasso or something. Who stole from somewhere else, probably.
1:07:37 Lenny Rachitsky? Well, this is actually an amazing segue to our very bridge lightning round. And the first question is, by the way, welcome to the lightning round.
1:07:43 Speaker 01 Oh, okay.
1:07:44 Lenny Rachitsky? The first question is just, what are a couple of books that you find yourself recommending most other people? Could be along the lines of what you just described, or it could just be generally.
1:07:53 Speaker 01 I think the domain that I'm interested in 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. Thinking a system, you know, complex system, when all the different things merge together, it creates emergent properties, talking about ants, talk about bees, talk about life itself. It's just so fascinating, right? How do, with few primitives, few like bricks, you can create a thing called life? Nothing just, it's sugar for me. So I love readings in that domain. And it's really helpful for create product, at least a horizontal product, because you're trying to channel the energy.
1:08:38 Speaker 01 Use smaller parts to create something that the sum is much larger than its parts.
1:08:43 Lenny Rachitsky? Is there a specific book that comes to mind, or is it just generally, that's a cool?
1:08:47 Speaker 01 I would be more that's a cool area to attention.
1:08:50 Lenny Rachitsky? Uh, next question, do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?
1:08:55 Speaker 01 I like to watch old documentaries. Maybe this is another area or category too. There is quite a few on YouTube, like people make a really good documentary in the eighties, in the seventies. That's like, all the old BBC ones, they're just excellent. And they have a strong opinion in them. It's no longer just like general education thing, you know? They have a, they have a direction, they have a, they have a taste. Go look it up, like, um. Oh yeah, one is a really good one to get started called Connections. I think it's called about the gentleman's name is Burke. It's about how different things from different domains inspire other domains.
1:09:37 Speaker 01 And usually he used thirty minutes or sixty minutes to chain together a bunch of connection of stories.
1:09:45 Speaker 01 It's really good for technologists to watch, highly recommend.
1:09:49 Lenny Rachitsky? I feel a very consistent pattern throughout all of these answers and your entire conversation of just emerging properties, connections, Legos, building abstractions.
1:10:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think I did Enneagram. My Enneagram is seven and eight. Seven is like, it's actually perfect with what we just talked about. Seven is like creative, finding connection. See the forest and tree. Eight is they call challenger. It's like competitive. AR optimizing, so true energy existing me.
1:10:23 Lenny Rachitsky? Oh, wow. This all makes sense. I gotta take this. Enneagrams comes up a bunch on this podcast.
1:10:27 Speaker 01 Right, yeah.
1:10:29 Lenny Rachitsky? 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?
1:10:41 Speaker 01 I like to think things as a craft. Just make it better, make for yourself. If it's unique enough for yourself and useful for others, things will follow.
1:10:51 Lenny Rachitsky? Ivan, thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to follow up on anything? And then how can listeners be useful to you?
1:11:00 Speaker 01 Probably find me on Twitter, Ivan H Z H A O.
1:11:05 Speaker 01 Just helpful. Give us feedback about Notion, about our product. That's the best, best help.
1:11:12 Lenny Rachitsky? What's the best way to do that? Is it like DM Ivan or is it?
1:11:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, just DM me.
1:11:15 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay.
1:11:16 Speaker 01 DM me. Yeah, that's probably the best way.
1:11:19 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, oh boy, here you go. And then you guys are hiring. Anything specific you're looking for, anything people should know if they're like, oh shit, I want to go work here?
1:11:29 Speaker 01 We're trying to hire misfits. So if you think you're a misfit, if you're exceptional at many things, especially, you want to build Lego for software, you want to take interesting spin on AI with Lego for software, then DM me.
1:11:45 Lenny Rachitsky? Amazing. Ivan, thank you so much for being here.
1:11:47 Speaker 01 Thank you for having me.
1:11:49 Lenny Rachitsky? Bye, everyone.
1:11:50 Speaker 01 Bye.
1:11:53 Lenny Rachitsky? Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating 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 lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
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