The way you described the early years of Notion, you described the first three to four years as the last years.
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 years and learned that actually most people just don't care.
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?
Productivity, 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.
I hide your broccoli inside of it.
What other elements do you think are key to you finding something that actually ended up working?
What is building a product or business?
One 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 an art project.
And too much for 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 world, they can come back to shape us.
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.
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'snewsletter .com.
With that, I bring you Ivan Zhao.
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Ivan, thank you so much for being here.
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 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?
I think a small town in China, the definition, it's actually 4 million people.
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 a good school in the capital, you need to win some kind of competition.
And there's a different path.
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.
And I win some competition and come into a good school.
So that's how I got into programming.
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.
It's art and science.
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's circle.
So I made three or four websites and realized, oh, actually people don't know how to create with the software media, computing media.
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.
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 well did you actually do this kind of in beijing so in beijing okay pretty big beijing is a big city so okay incredible another stat i uh or a story i heard is that you learned english by watching SpongeBob SquarePants.
Is that real? Yeah, it's real.
I moved to Canada pretty late, 16 years old.
What I learned is, yeah, 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't understand jokes, right?
Watching cartoons is probably the easiest way to do that.
Yeah, that's amazing.
And there's another kind of seminal moment in your path.
I don't know if it was this point or later, but the Douglas Engelbert paper ended up being a very meaningful moment for you.
So while I was in Canada in the last year of school, working on trying to build a 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 1960s and 70s.
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 Englebar, Alan K., Ted Nelson, those first generation pioneers, for them computing, there shouldn't be a separation between builders and users.
It's the same media.
Englebar's original paper called Augmenting Human Intellect.
When I read that paper, it's like, holy shit.
But 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.
It's 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.
Makes me think of Steve Jobs' famous line of how the computer is the bicycle for the mind.
You know what? Steve Jobs is actually at the fault of this in some strange ways.
So the story is like, actually the fact, it's not just a 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 malleable.
You can change the tools, right?
So when Steve Jobs, the famous story is when he went to Xerox PARC.
to demo with Alto, 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 that everything could change, but he did not see the power of it.
Even when people would demonstrate, like, hey, Steve Jobs said, I don't like this direction of scroll bar direction.
When you scroll up and down, it shouldn't scroll the opposite reverse direction, then people just instantly change the scroll bar direction for him.
And 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 mid -PC personal computing popular, and they sort of stuck with this kind of application framework rather than this small talk object -oriented framework.
And that has all the apps we have today and has the SaaS sprawl we have today.
That vision of how products 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 in 2013 and some over 10 years ago at this point, you described the first three to four years as the last 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 a hundred million ARR 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 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? The vision is, the dream is there, but the product is very, there's so many paths.
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'll try that like a couple of years and learn that actually most people just don't care.
The majority of people, they wake up, they have report due to get their job done.
They don't care of creating software to optimize whatever they're doing.
They don't care. So we give to our friends, give to investors.
Yeah, it did not resonate with people.
But we really want to build that tool.
So we just keep going.
And 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?
Productivity software.
So that's why I came to Notion today.
If you use Notion, Notion is more understood as the productivity suite, but our intent, and if you use Notion more, you're going to discover intent, which 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 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 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 world to realize that people just don't care I love the way you phrase that you kind of have to hide your vision behind
something that people understand and know know how to use and we call the sugar called the broccoli people don't want to eat the broccoli but people like sugar so get them the sugar I hide the broccoli inside of it wow yeah 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.
That's true. It took us four years to get somewhere.
First two years is that you build too much developer product, nobody cares.
It took us two years to realize we need to build a productivity tool.
Then it took another a year to build this out, but in the middle of it, I realized we built it on the wrong technical foundation.
So like eight, 10 years ago, there's competing before, 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 realize because it's so new, it's just so unstable.
It don't know where the bug comes from.
It's from your source code, from the underlying libraries.
Then we have to restart a company.
Otherwise, rebuild the whole thing.
Otherwise, we're going to run out of time.
So that's reset the code base, reset the company so we can build on a run more orthodox technology foundation.
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 or four years?
I know there's a story of your mom loaning you some money during that time.
Well, a Chinese mom always can help when 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 register a company.
So my mom helped me with the initial and raised the money.
I sort of returned the money to her.
Then we run out of the money.
So, hey, mom, can I borrow that just to bridge us?
Which she did. I'm really grateful for that.
How do you bridge? How do you last so long?
Because the thing you want to create does not exist.
With Callies 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 playing legos it's 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 sam feels the same way lego is the only thing he liked i wanted for every christmas have you guys seen magnetiles though i have i have a one and a half year old and magnetiles are quite delightful it's like a i think it's like a pre -lego i like the chile capital yeah it's like uh they're a 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
i'm having a blast oh i see it it's kind of like uh -huh it's like a different version of lego's i like that you're in real time looking it up you're like okay we're our new vision magnet tiles for software now most people know like oh magnetile ideas but saying modular 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 rebuild phases um during the we know what the product should look like it should be a productivity software with a lego power hiding inside
of it we build on the 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 5 people but later I brought it back to me and Simon 2 people 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. And then San Francisco.
So we did that for a while.
We actually traveled around the world for a while just to change it up.
Me and Sam are just coding every day and design every day.
That's some of the happiest moments.
Birthday every day.
I saw a stat you were coding 18 hours a day.
Here's the quote I heard.
We just code, code, code, then hey, let's go out 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 each other people are thinking and you can just cross through the problem space really quickly, the technical product space, design space, and just non -stop of 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 someone kind of lucky that high is never too high low is never too low for us so somehow as 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 work 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 um 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 lot of business.
It's almost like a sports.
The market is the arena.
Then you'd want to optimize the scorecard where 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 have is building for your value.
You have some taste, you have some aesthetic, you have some value, so you want the world to have more of that they're different energy I realized actually fairly recently they're really different, depends on which day I wake up am I in a different mood but building for value it's more lasting and more fulfilling looking in the thing we're building today and looking back I find most proud of things 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 ocean and still every day for me.
It's interesting you say that because there's also 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 go back and forth.
Here's what the business means and here's the thing I'm excited about.
You're really a Q, almost like a therapist, right?
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 doing an art project.
You're just doing a research project, right?
And it's too much for a business.
You're building a commodity, right?
So where is the spectrum?
Yeah, it's a never ending spectrum, spectrum.
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 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 code base.
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, Toby Lutke was on the podcast.
He said the same thing.
Just be comfortable with some 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, it can catch up to all the thing you build much quicker than you ever thought, right?
Or humans are not thinking, not good at thinking in terms of abstraction or the exponentials.
We're thinking in terms of linearly.
And if you just reset and you found a better way to do it, you can't get all the thing you have to send costs recovery really quickly.
So actually going back to the computing pioneers part, and like small talk, one of the first system and a huge influence for Notion was a really tiny code base.
And inspired by Lisp, which was another problem with languages, and probably like a hundred lines of code or something, right?
So the kernel of things could be really small, but just like math, it can compound.
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 things you did.
You are free to lose really quickly.
So I think that's the kernel of why Reset 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 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.
Yeah, like trying to cut up the U .S.
really quickly. With DeepSeek, yeah.
The point you also made about momentum, like be weary of momentum taking you in a direction and moving in a different not being stuck to that direction is exactly the way 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 rethink is this actually the right path or should I start again?
So I feel like AI has almost figured out exactly what you're describing Interesting Oh man Okay, last question about the early years.
Everyone's always wondering, what does product market fit feel like?
You've worked on it for three to four years.
What was kind of the moment?
What would it look like?
What was different when you're like, oh, okay, this is gonna work?
I think going back to me and Sam, high is never that high, low is never that low.
It never 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 reaching out to us or paying us and it's kind of very gradual ramp 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 it's less of a milestone way of thinking about things, it's more just like can we do the thing that's in our head and better than we did last week way of thinking about things So there's a such movement in the product market, boom, milestone achieved.
Didn't feel that way.
I've heard that from a lot of founders, actually.
Was there like a moment at 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 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 dog treats sent into our office so first of all office was in public the 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 and the dog treats were trying to 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 how we just hire someone in the office as a dog then we I think we post on Twitter or something And then, I said, why did this show up to our office?
Someone really hustled into where we are, our office address, and follow us on Twitter, so.
Did you end up taking their money?
Not the first time.
Yeah. Okay, later. Okay.
It's a long game. No. Awesome.
So, that's, I've never heard that before.
Signed product work fit as VCs are starting to, you start getting a lot more messaging and cold outreach from VCs.
actually I had one of our investors really helpful because all those years you sort of just like there's no feedback loop you just go for it then the feedback will gradually show up then for a while oh VC started knocking on the door so I should talk to those people that people like what we're doing I did some meetings quite a good meeting maybe it doesn't and one of our investors saying like Ivan what are you doing?
Like you clearly don't need money.
Do you just trying to feel good to 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.
And the truth is with our, what customers tell us.
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 realized.
Oh, you mentioned this investor, they said it was really helpful is you want to give them some cred or do you want to keep oh shana fisher she's in new york 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.
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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, yeah, 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?
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, 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't do that, naturally keep the company small.
And you all know you're doing product management.
The overhead is actually more from internal communication.
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.
Notion itself is a meta tool to build out a tool.
So we pretty much run everything on Notion.
We use the same mindset to build our company.
And accidentally that keep our hack on low, keep our company profitable, 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 can just focus on building.
And also because your team is small, we have this internal notion called talent density, which we don't try to track a 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 compounding move.
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 it will die.
Do you think that was like a formative experience to inform how you want to operate or is that always something?
I wouldn't say where Notion is like a cost -saving first company.
Like I like fancy chairs.
I like furniture. 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.
It's much better than brute force through people.
When people hear this idea of staying lean and staying small, it sounds great.
Yeah, we're going to be super efficient and lean and smart with our money and talent 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?
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 Peck on curve, right?
Linear. We internally help other people understand this.
Internally, we use the metaphor, the notion is a small bus.
The bus, 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, slow down.
Now, 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 pick your roommate, you pick your seatmates.
That metaphor clicks with people inside a company and overall help us optimize the make the bus type, make the bus lean.
I've never heard that metaphor before.
Probably came up somewhere.
or no 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 tried 30 different uh shades of warm white on the walls before you chose just why is that important to you why is it important to be so thoughtful about the office experience maybe there are two dimension part of it one is um one is the the pragmatic part you just want office to be a pleasant experience to be
at um therefore most office a top line feels like hospital i just like 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 top -class evil.
The office feels cozy, so people spend more time, you feel more creative, more at ease in the office space.
The visual we have is, she feels like an artist's studio, or she feels like your home.
That's why most of our office furniture are home frontiers.
It just feels cozy.
So people spend more time, it feels more creative, juices flow better.
The other one is, 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 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 to not have a thing that hurts you also have a really interesting naming convention for your uh conference rooms yeah the true yeah we name our conference room after timeless tools in history so there are um give you an example, iPhone's the obvious one, original Macintosh.
There's different form of chairs, Lamy's 2000 pens, Toshiba rice cookers and other ones.
Because their 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 100 million tens of 100 million people right the Sony transistor radio is the first one to shrink semiconductor to something small and useful for people and those things change people's life and last for decades what it's 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 12 month cycle they don't we don't think enough about create something that lasts iCare creating something that's at least the form factor lasts longer
than how we team on.
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 hear that?
Yeah, I think the key word here is craft.
Like internally, our company philosophy we call crafts 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 an interesting world.
It's 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.
And just keep doing that.
My wife often refer me as a wood cabinet builder.
That's how I, at least in my mind, I'm training towards building Notion.
It's like, oh, can I make this wood cabinet more beautiful and more useful and feels nicer on your hand?
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 to get there.
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 and the way you think about building this company is this balance between practical, useful things people need and business and practical stuff, and then the value of building something you're proud of and craft.
And there's always this trade -off almost of 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.
There's no free launch.
You don't get something for free.
You have to give up something.
Then what do you give up?
it's essentially you give up the right thing that market or your user wants at that given space and time it's kind of just the craft of building a business or building a product and the market is so dynamic especially now with AI era the optimized function of the market changes so then you need to make new trade -off and new technology emerges I always feel like AI language model feels like a new type of wood It's filled 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 support this, right?
At cost. And 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 need to balance the technology trade -off with human behavior trade -offs.
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 in a variable.
And every generation picks up some new thing but after you're 16 years old you don't want to learn new things.
So those are like, there are people trade -offs, technology trade -offs, 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 business, then what is that?
And I think a product maker, a business maker's job is to find that sweet spot of all the multiple dimensions and create something that 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 that is unlocking some cool new ideas.
But before I get there, I want to talk about just you 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 a soft -spoken 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.
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 learn to do that didn't come naturally to you?
Yeah, I guess you've never been in a business meeting or brainstorm session with me.
I haven't seen that side of Ivan yet.
Yeah, I would have the most soft interaction person at work.
Actually, the reverse is true, because I grew up in China.
People are way more direct.
People just say what they want, say what they think, right?
And you move to California, move to the U .S., move to the West, wow, everybody says everything's wonderful, everything's nice, but that's not true.
I will say notions ethos is probably more like the east coast rather than west coast so somewhere in between it's more direct what do I need to learn a bunch of things I think the early days is like we talk about that the world is not like you the world don't care about you so you it's like you sort of have to shave off the idealistic part of you to build something that's like the world actually cares the stripper coat the broccoli, you have to hide your broccoli within some kind of sugar pills, right?
So that's one, that's more self.
That's about myself.
As a company grow, you realize I'm pretty good at storytelling, so that's like a one -to -one influence, but as a company grow, you realize you need to be one to many storytellers.
That's a skill. One reason I try not to do podcasts and all those things, oh, it's actually drains energy in different ways, 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 the company, the business I'm building.
I treat it like a craft.
There's some things, some video games.
You need to pick up something to unlock something else and make a new demand.
You would kind of treat it off with yourself and the business.
That's kind of fun, though.
Every 12, 18 -month notion is like a new company or at least it requires different kind of skill set coming from me.
So I need to pick out 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 frame it 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 land in people's head?
That's what marketing and positioning are for, right?
So you need to find the sweet spot to get in.
And also be truthful.
It's not just deceiving.
Deceiving is not truthful.
You can fool other people once or twice, then there's no future.
It has to be actually tied back to something genuinely, the value creating or the exchange with the other person.
So, yeah, it's a craft.
Market storytelling is a vast dimension of making trade -offs.
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 again 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 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 a bunch of things that's not so great like two years ago, right?
Because actually last year, 2024, is the year that I can say we ship good stuff at good velocity and good quality and align with our values.
We sort of 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 Notion as Lego for software.
We're sort of ship non -Lego pieces into our product.
It's still there. We're still cleaning up part of it.
That's a realization.
And so going back to the value part, it's like if you create this thing called a product or a business, you attract people who are value aligned to it.
Then if you're trying to optimize too much on this competition, revenue side of things, is forced to introducing something anti -value, then the system, it's like there's organ rejection with your employees, with your customers, right?
Like to give you a concrete example, for a while, and still it is, project management is one of the most important use cases for Notion.
And you can get your project management, a better project management tool just by hard coding things like sprints, milestones, all those things into your product, right?
Or you can do it in the way that notion has been through Lego pieces.
Okay, what is a sprint?
Sprint's a cluster of a task that group together.
So it's the new Lego.
So introducing Lego is much harder, slower.
You can instead we hard core the sprint concept into the product and this doesn't quite fit, right?
And took me at least a year, year and a half to realize that's not the way we should continue building Notion.
We should go back to the original Lego way of building the product.
So, we changed quite a bit internally.
Now, it feels good now.
And building according to your value is the meta point, at least for me.
Okay. I got a follow -up thread.
What is it that you changed that allowed you to come back to your first principles?
Was it like, is it founder mode was the answer?
Is it people, personnel shift?
What allowed you to change in the way things were going?
I would say all of that evolved, but especially just released a spring product to our community and customers, then they're 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, like Osset.
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 your heart code too much into it.
From all the dimension, technical front calling a customer and when you use the thing it just doesn't feel right so um there's another saying that if you're building a legal way inside notion in the code base or product the system work for you if you're building non -legal way the system work against you so in some sense we're creating a tool that has emergent behavior you need to channel in that emergent behavior to unlock more values 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 and that took like nine nine months 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 on awesome all the time and we're 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.
One of the bleakest ones is when we during COVID we just couldn't scale up our infrastructure.
For the longest time, like Simon's really good at don't do premature optimization.
So for the longest time, Notion runs on one instance of Postgres database.
and then we find the beefiest machine, we keep scrolling, find the beefier machine to scale our user base, but then we're running off even the largest instance there is for 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 will completely shut down.
So we stopped building any new features, all hands on deck, almost every engineer in the company trying to solve that problem.
Eventually we did, but it was a close call.
Like, how close are we talking about?
If I recall correctly, you're probably in weeks, running out of time.
And then as you approach the limit of what PostWords can do, behavior becomes sporadic.
You just, you really don't know which day gonna hit you, but you just need to go as fast as you can to become a sharding problem.
Yeah, I was gonna ask.
So the solution is sharding the database.
Yeah, sharding. Okay, cool.
Yes, don't do premature optimization, but plan ahead a little bit don't worry how long did you have from when you launched this doomsday clock to time running out was it like a few months maybe a bit longer yeah in a month less than six but more than three something like that the bitter sweetness of covid just ramping up certain businesses yeah people just like they have to use online productivity software right collaboration tools 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 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 optimized for that vision.
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 it 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 or do their risk.
That's Lego box, it's not a Lego brick.
Segmentation is related to that.
So you need to shift your mindset as you more towards B2B, more towards move up market.
it. I wish would have done it earlier.
For the longest time, I'm still too much in the Lego brick mindset, not in the solution Lego box mindset.
That's such a good metaphor.
I feel like even if you're not building Legos for business, just this idea of what is the box that you are selling to people?
How is 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 know you have one or two persona you're selling into, pretty straightforward that your market constrains you.
And no judgment. People like, you can go that way, but then you hit the wall of the market.
The advantage building horizontal, there's no wall, at least for in our space.
We shouldn't go after the entire software market.
But then you need to create a wall yourself to make your go -to -market distribution, to create the spot in people's mind, your customer mind more clearly for them and for your go -to -market teams.
That's why I work. Solution is one of my favorite words internally to rally the sales team or the product team.
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 pigeonholed yourself into the bad spot like what we did with project management Sprint's features.
So speaking of that, so I don't know if 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've got 6 ,500 people filling out the survey.
And Notion, more than any other company, placed very highly in many categories.
For example, 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 is known for Docs.
And it's interesting.
That was the lowest one, actually.
And then it was third in CRM, just behind Salesforce and HubSpot.
Yeah, we did not intend to build CRM, but what is a CRM?
It's a relational database.
That's why we give people that break.
That's a relational database, and they can build CRM themselves.
I think the good advantage is if a customer use Notion, they can address those three or four use cases in one place, especially for our startup, mid -market companies, their need for each of the vertical use cases.
It's 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 we did not expect until recently.
And save their costs, which is more and more people care about the bundling purchase nowadays.
And our approach for that is like, yes, we're number two in project management, number four in CRM, but we're going to introduce in more bricks to make us never 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.
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 like do this if you want to find any success with a horizontal tool?
First, I wouldn't recommend it.
But you wouldn't do it differently?
I wouldn't do it differently myself, but I wouldn't recommend it.
It's probably in the problem space too large to have a best practice.
But I can share something that's relevant for us.
Like, we always want to build a meta tool, a tool to build the leg 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 1 billion plus people use this use case every day so that feuds our growth we call our internal strategy called B2C2B 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 and then they realize 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 come from prior personal users.
Most of them use Notion for notes and docs in the first place.
At least we stumped upon a use case, a horizontal use case that gives us a large top of funnel that helps us grow our more verticalized enterprise use cases.
That's the reason we shipped a calendar product last year because which other category of software has 1 billion plus users?
There's document notes, there's calendar, there's email, right?
That's why we're also working on an email product right now.
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.
We definitely did not expect language model.
Uh, it's, it's such a gift for everybody building tools, right?
You completely changed the material you can work with.
Um, one realization is you have a surface area that people spend daily work with, especially during writing and managing your tasks and project.
Uh, it's really easy to slice the 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 we 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.
The first product was our AI writer product.
Second product is AI Q &A or connectors.
Just to get all the information in Notion and give you an answer.
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 you need to build AI connectors.
But more and more information coming back to the Notion core.
I would say the third one, which is even more fascinating, it's for the longest time and it still is one of the biggest weaknesses of building for Legos it's hard to piece together it's not everybody can put together the Lego set from scratch right there's always the builders and users with the Legos but guess who is really good at piecing things together assemble things especially things like since Sonnet 3 .5 it has so bad writing code coding is just assembling things together so So now we're looking at, holy shit, we spent the last five, six years building all those Lego blocks for knowledge
work. If we're just putting AI coding agent on top of it, you can have 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.
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.
I think market is kind of like waves.
Who said this? There's two ways to build business, bundling and bundling, right?
There's too much of a zig into zak.
Actually, my favorite version of this is like there's a classic Chinese literature called Romance of Three Kingdoms.
It's a great novel.
it talk 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, unbundling.
That's one of my favorite book to read when I was a kid.
But business works in the same way.
When it's too much, you can sort of see this.
It's like, before computers, everything works on paper.
Our knowledge work are done through papers.
It's a fully democratized medium.
Then PC happens during the 80s.
The first era is a piece there.
Actually, there are so many applications.
There's like early database software like DBase.
It's quite famous. It started at DBase 2 because it gave them credibility.
Oh, they had been sticking 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 90s.
Then SAS unbundled it.
Now we're sort of at the tail end of SAS.
There's so many verticalized SAS, average company to use like almost 100 tools.
It's kind of madness, right?
So there's more the market shifting towards more of a bundling approach and with AI and with a macro.
So there's more value to be created through bundling, at least for now.
But market could shift again.
So understand this trend, I think, helpful to see, should you be a vertical solution or should you be a horizontal solution?
Because it does different things.
I love that story. Okay.
So last question. Something that one of your early investors, Finn Barnes, suggested to ask you, I'm curious where this goes.
And you've kind of touched on this a number of times is 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.
Tools are extensions of us.
That's why our office room named Out of Timeless Tools, They are 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.
One of my favorite quotes, like the Marshall McLuhan quotes, like we shape our tools, thereafter our tools shape us.
I think that's probably too philosophical for building product or business, but there is a sense thinking like, what are you bringing to the world that will come back to bite you or shape you?
And are you extending the part, the so -called good part of human nature or are you extending the part that might be more zero -sum, might be more negative, right?
For me, what is Legos?
Lego is creativity.
Lego is beauty. So software to me feels like lacking both.
It's definitely lacking a lot of creativity.
It's so rigid. So I believe both are human nature that are worth to amplify.
You can build another business that amplify a different part of human nature.
Sequoia famously invested in seven sins or seven human natures of human because they're so powerful.
If you just latch onto them, you can create a business.
You can create a product.
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 that shape the market ship our user of a product towards the better part of themselves 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?
Feels good. Yeah, it feels good that some of the most heartwarming thing is still, it never gets old, like when you walk by a coffee shop and see people using Notion, that feels good.
And it feels good that when you see people in our community can create a living selling Notion template, Notion apps, that they're not a software engineer, right?
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.
But 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.
Consulting templates, yeah.
And they're not programmers.
I would say that's the heart of it because their domain expertise, they have YouTubers or creators, they have lifestyle brands, they know certain things, but they're not makers of software then they can use Notion, package their workflows and expert team into Notion app and templates and make a living with that.
It's awesome. 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 I think might be useful for folks to hear before we get to our very exciting lightning round.
I think people in tech, I wish more people looked beyond tech to steal good ideas.
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.
Right. Versus humanity, if you just read books in other industries, you can look sideways.
and if you go back to history, there's a massive amount of patterns and shapes and trade -offs you can steal from.
And it can make what's in front of you much more interesting, people figure out clever patterns in whatever domain in the past you can just take in front of you, right?
And I wish more people do that.
I think it will be a very interesting way for product makers, business makers, to solve the problem in front of them by stealing outside from the domain of tech and business.
So at least it's very inspiring, very useful for me personally.
Makes me think of the quote, good artists copy, great artists steal.
Great artists steal.
Picasso stole, well, Steve Jobs stole that from Picasso or something, who stole from somewhere else probably.
Well, this is actually an amazing segue to our very abridged lightning round.
And the first question is, by the way, welcome to the lightning round.
Oh, okay. 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.
I think the domain that I'm interested in the most is the complex system domain, because like it's 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 things merge together, it creates emergent properties.
Talking about ants, talk about beads, talk about life itself.
It's just so fascinating, right?
How to, with few primitives, few Lego bricks, you can create a thing called life.
That thing just, it's sugar for me.
So I love reading in that domain.
And this is 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 sum 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 a cool area to attention next question do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed I like to watch old documentaries maybe there's 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 the old BBC ones they're just excellent and they have a strong opinion in them and it's no longer just like general education thing you know they have a they have a direction they have a taste go look it up oh yeah
one is a really good one to guest start called connections I think it's called the gentleman's name is Burke it's about how different things from different domains inspire other domains and usually he used 30 minutes or 60 minutes to chain together a bunch of connection of stories is really good for technologists to to watch right highly recommend i feel a very consistent pattern throughout all of these answers and your entire conversation of just emergent properties connections legos building uh abstractions yeah i think i did enneagram my enneagram it's seven and eight seven it's like uh it's
actually perfect with what we just talk about.
Seven is like creative finding connection, see the force and tree.
Eight is they call challenger.
It's like competitive, AR, optimizing.
So true energy exists in me.
Oh, wow. This all makes sense.
I got to take those Enneagrams comes up a bunch on this podcast.
Right. Yeah. 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.
You just make it better.
Make it for yourself.
If it's unique enough for yourself and useful for others, then we'll follow.
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?
Probably find out me on twitter ivan h zhao um just helpful from give us feedback about notion about product that's the best best help what's the best way to do that is it like dm ivan or is it yeah just dm me okay dm me um yeah that's 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 shit i want to go work uh we're trying to hire misfits so if you think you're a misfit if you are exceptional at 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 Ivan thank you so much for being here thank you for having me bye everyone bye 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.
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You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's Podcast .com.
See you in the next episode.
