Scaling Through Chaos with Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari

One of the beautiful parts of Notion is that it's a product that attracts a lot of builders. At the core of Notion, we have these building blocks that we create as a company, and people use these building blocks to create all sorts of different templates and software that they can put out in the world. And so we've been really fortunate to attract a community of builders all around the world that are building all sorts of interesting things with, with Notion. In fact, you know, 5 years ago I got my first flavor of this when I was in Tokyo. I went to my first community event. It was like a, you know, middle of a Sunday afternoon in Ginza, you know, 3 to 5 PM. And I was shocked to find that 50 people in the middle of a Sunday showed up with their computers just geeking out about each other's Notion setup. To see what they'd built sort of like, you know, it was really inspiring. You know, over time, one of the things we've realized is that Our community efforts is very much in service of these people. We're not trying to like shape it a certain way or push certain agenda that we have. We're really trying to like enable the community to do the things that they want to do. We've introduced a bunch of different grant programs. We've introduced a bunch of events that is very much designed to be in service of this community. In 2019, we had this interesting decision that we, we could have made. Where the Notion subreddit was just getting launched. I think we have sort of an opportunity to become one of the moderators. And I remember on our team, Camille, who used to run marketing, and she came up with a proposal for why we should not be a moderator, which I thought was very compelling but also counterintuitive. You sort of feel like, oh, I should be controlling what shows up in my subreddit. And the proposal was that if we don't become a moderator, we will create a space for more authentic conversations happening. And we can still be part of that community and we can still lean in and we can still answer people's questions and requests. But by not being a moderator, we're giving the space for this community to grow. I think Notion subreddit is amongst the largest subreddits out there today. It's probably one of the most unique subreddits for like a SaaS company. This recent rush to AI, we sort of just leaned into it. There was an AI writer product. Which is as you're writing a doc in Notion, it sort of assists you. Initially, we thought people would write full docs with it, but as we saw the usage, we found that people were using it as like a coach or like an assistant where you can essentially write something and just make it, you know, better. We sort of moved away from building an AI feature to more like AI is this transformative technology that can actually help us solve the problems that we've been trying to solve for the last decade. Can we like onboard people better with using this technology? Can we like introduce them to the different concepts inside the product using this? Making it this broad technology that each person inside the company can truly leverage. Culture is a little bit about rituals you have as a company. We have something called life stories, which actually started with Ivan as our CEO giving his life story, which is everything from, I think, his parents and grandparents all the way to today, like what has shaped him to who he is today and why he's working on it. It started off as like a, you know, it's like a casual thing, but it's actually picked up and pretty much every Friday or Thursday in different offices, you know, someone from the office actually tells their life story and you learn so much about them, which actually really effectively helps you in figuring out how to work with them. So that's one part of the Notion culture that I, that I really appreciate.