#514 - VO - Ivan Zhao - Notion - The software toolkit that beats them all

What the fuck is Notion?

How would you describe it? It's hard.

At the same time, it's everything, and at the same time, it's nothing.

Notion is like the Lego for software. Computing should almost be like reading and writing. You ask me, should you teach your kids how to program? It's as if you ask me, should I teach my kids how to read and write French? You don't ask me that question. Yeah, right.

How much did you raise total? Hundreds of millions.

It's the most All the money still in the bank, cash flow positive for several years now. We're not AI labs, we're AI application company, but we spend a lot of time building infrastructure to unlock the best in the models. The better part is because now you don't have to use 5, 6 tools, you save time. And even better, you have one place to deploy AI to help you do all the work. Most Japanese people don't speak English, but just eat. Work, work. Very productive.

What does Simon today?

He's still coding.

Yeah, okay.

Man, that guy's lucky.

Are you jealous?

I'm jealous. Oh, I like what I do too, but coding gives you a different flow state.

We are the average of the people we spend the most time with. My name is Mathieu Stéphanie, and I invite entrepreneurs, athletes, An artist to raise my average and yours. Just before we begin this episode, I'll switch to French for a brief moment to thank my sponsors. Yeah, let's go. Thank you, Clémence. Welcome on board, Ivan. Are you okay? Are you still jet lagged?

I'm pretty jet lagged, but the tea will help, I hope.

Well, we are both jet lagged at some point because you're coming from the US, from like 9 hours away, but we're coming From what, seven hours away? But on the other side, so you were in the you're in the middle of the night, and I'm in in the middle of the afternoon right now. It's it's fun. Welcome, and generation do it yourself. I'm so happy to to have you here, and the team was really happy actually because you're you you don't know that, but notion and what you've done in the past ten years is like. the backbone of all of our work. Like, like it's very exciting to, to, to understand how did it start and what are your views, what is going to be the future. It's going to be a lot of fun. May I ask you to introduce yourself?

I'm Ivan. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Notion.

Yeah.

And I've been working on— like you talk about, I've been working on this for more than a decade. To me, it's a product, it's a business, it's a company, it's a project, it's our piece, it's my life. Happy to talk about it today.

So what do you do for Notion now? What does that mean being a CEO? Do you still think about the product? Are you still on the product?

Oh yeah, I'm like, I spend most of my time on product. Like this morning I was sending out an internal message to talk about we have a customer dinner last night.

Yeah.

And what are the top 3, 4 requests from the customer? And, and, and especially the top request is about database, is about permissions. How do we improve the permission of Notion databases? And I explained to the team why is this important, gave some context and meaning to it and proposed some solution.

All right. Are the other demands from the customers different in France or are they all the same? More or less. They're very—

consumer enterprise are very different. I would say for business enterprise, customers are actually kind of similar across different regions. France, I noticed we have somewhat sizable of a government or just like infrastructure energy company using Notion.

All right.

And those companies tend to hire some office workers, but even more non-office workers. And those people have a different behavior of using Notion than office workers. So this is some pattern I pick up.

People on the field, people on the field. Yeah.

Like they want to read their Notion page and projects and they might not want to edit, but they want to be able to access on their phone and offline and all other kind of requirement that's not typical from, you know, office worker with a laptop or computer.

While we were preparing this episode, I was like wondering, what the fuck is Notion at the end of the day? You know, you're like, you're like, well, how would you describe it? It's hard because it's, you know, At the same time, it's everything, and at the same time, it's nothing. You know what I'm saying? It's like it's not replacing spreadsheets. If you're like a hardcore Excel user, you're like, "What the fuck is Notion? What can I do with that?" If you're a hardcore PowerPoint or whatever. So these are the original uses of of software in a company, right? We had like probably three pillars which were. Microsoft Suite, so Office. So I would say Docs, I mean Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. And we've been completely, I don't know, brainwashed or I don't know, you know, how do you say, blindside? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So we would use those 3 and that's it. And then came some CRM. So you would add some Salesforce or Pipedrive or whatever. And then you would add some things, but each one had a very specific use, right? And when you go and you start with Notion, you're like, okay, yeah, it's fun. I like the feeling. I like the design. It's a— it's— but what am I going to do with it? And I'd go even further. I believe like if you go to your CFO with Notion, you would hear like, You already have Slack, you already have this and that and this. And it must be pretty hard to, to implement it in some companies.

I guess it depends if the company is tech savvy.

Yeah, it's a lot easier if you start with it.

Yeah, it's a startup. Like, I have no problem running on Notion and the— we call Notion hard to describe, but we call Notion— Notion is like the Lego for software.

I love it. It's exactly like—

Lego is kind of hard to describe. What is this kind of toy? It can be any toy, but that feeling is what we want to give people in terms—

The Lego for software.

Yeah, they can create their tools. The tools is theirs. It's just beautiful. It's fun. It's just like you can make most any other toys out of Legos. So you can make most other any kind of productivity software or collaboration software out of Notion. Legos.

Plus it's very easy to start with. It's not like you don't have to be trained.

You don't need to be trained. You don't need to be a programmer and you almost have the programmer power. And that's why we started a company. And what inspired me to start Notion like a decade ago, because software is pretty rigid. If you think about the first generation of software you describe, right, which is document spreadsheets, maybe email and presentation. They're pretty general purpose, right? Then that's until the '90s, until the 2005, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. Then SaaS happened.

Yep.

Point solution happened, starting with the moving from spreadsheet to CRM to any kind of point solution, project management tools. And there are so many SaaS proliferation in the past 20 years become too fragmented, too rigid. And that's the problem. We feel like, oh, we can do something different here. We can give people instead of many rigid tools they have to piece together, which is give them Legos. And Lego could be their document tools, it could be their project tracker, it could be lightweight CRM, it could be most things you need for your work.

Interesting. I want to go much deeper into that, but Before that, if you if you're okay, I'd love to understand your entrepreneurial journey, right? Because as I said earlier, we got back from China. I it was my first time in China. Wow! And and I wow!

It's your first time too, Clemence?

Yeah yeah.

Okay.

Yeah most of us well actually we're five. Three of us were the first time. Axel lived in China for a while. And and Christopher had been there a few times already, but it was yeah, it was sorry. Yeah, well, we kind of fell in love with China.

What's your favorite things? What are your favorite things?

Um, the what Shanghai? Yeah, Shanghai is amazing, but because the the yeah, which part of Shanghai? Actually, the French area is amazing.

Oh yeah, yeah, it's it looks very kind of a little bit like some part.

And it's— I think Shanghai is more, not European, but most of the other cities we've seen, they're so modern. It misses— it lacks a soul.

I know what you're talking about.

Yeah. Like you go to Shenzhen and you're like, wow, it blows your mind. Literally, you get drones everywhere. You get like self-driving cars, you get like— and the streets are clean. Well, people are really riding their scooters on the, on the sideways. So it's kind of weird at the beginning. No noise. At all, like no noise.

Electric everywhere.

Yeah, everywhere. So it's, it's, it's really, I mean, wow, different. You have— we've seen Brazil, we've seen Africa, we've seen— and this is like the future, literally. But this is not China at the end. We've seen also the back office of China, right? But— and it was, it was fun too. But the speed also blew us. The speed of the country, the speed of the people, the Business mind, the business spirit. I don't know. I was kind of—

Yeah, people work hard. People hustle.

Yeah, people are smart and they love it. I mean, a lot of Chinese put it that way for like maybe in Europe, a bit in the US, but in Europe we like also to not to chill but to enjoy life, right? For some of Chinese people, enjoying life is working hard. It's like, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, it's like Who said this? America is live to work. Europe, it's work to live. China probably is work to work.

Yeah, somehow. So it's hard to understand because sometimes from here we believe it's like unequal or they work too much and they make people work too much. And but it's not. I mean, it's the way of life. Some people say if you get workers, you tell them to work 40 hours, they'll go work into another factory for 25 hours. if they can, because to get more money and that's their choice. But yeah, so we love that. What I was about to say is that how long did you live in China for?

Until I was 16, 17.

Oh, wow.

Pretty late. Yeah. Yeah.

I thought it was 12 or—

wow. No.

Okay.

I went to stay until middle school.

Okay. So you're Chinese or—

Chinese.

Okay. Still Chinese. And you, you, you work and live in the US, but with green card?

Oh no, I'm Canadian passport. So I moved to Canada when I was—

I remember in Vancouver.

Yeah, Vancouver.

And but you live in the US?

I live in San Francisco.

Okay. So when you have a Canadian passport, you can have a Canadian passport with no Canadian nationality. You're not citizenship?

I'm citizenship Canadian.

So you're not Chinese anymore?

Not Chinese anymore.

Okay.

Lost my passport.

Okay. Was it a big deal?

A big deal losing it? Yeah.

I mean, not being changing nationality.

Well, you have to. In China, for China, you have to— you can only be one.

Yeah, I know.

That's so—

but internally for you, was it a big deal?

I was so young, I wasn't thinking too much about it. Just following my mom.

Okay. Just your mom. Okay. What for? Like, just for work?

For better education? To, you know, be away, further away from my dad.

All right.

And Yeah, just to change scenery a little bit.

Okay. Yeah.

So she took me to Vancouver, Canada when I was 16, 17, a couple of years high school there.

Can you tell me a bit about that? How did it go for you? What is it for? Where were you in China?

Oh, I was born in and raised in this northwest part of China called Xinjiang Province.

All right. That's very—

it's in the desert. Yeah.

Where the Uyghur Muslim Region part of China is northwest, so it's up north, North Korea.

Up north by west. North Korea is in northeast.

Oh, sorry, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Northwest.

Sorry, sorry. Afghanistan touching Russia and Kazakhstan, all the Stans countries.

And you were raised in a big city, or?

It's a it's the biggest city of that region, but it's a small city in China.

It's a small town of eight million people.

It's a small city of four million people.

Okay, I see. It's bigger than Paris, but yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

Okay. And so what is it coming to Vancouver from there?

Well, no, I— and then I went to a different part of China. So I grew up in many different parts of China, stayed in that Xinjiang province until I was 8 years old.

Mm-hmm.

Then traveled to Hainan province, which is South, the Big Island, for a little bit, then to Qingdao Province, Qingdao, the city where the beer come from.

All right.

Yeah.

Qingdao.

Okay.

Yeah.

Then a little bit other places. Eventually settled in Beijing.

All right.

Did you guys go to Beijing?

No, not this time. We had to choose. We chose. We chose. You're going to think these guys are fucked up, but we are. We are. Yeah. Well, Chongqing was there.

Did you go to Chengdu?

No, we've been. So it was Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Chongqing going through the countryside, and then Shanghai. And in Shanghai, we went to Hangzhou and Mingguo.

Hangzhou school. Yeah, Hangzhou school.

To meet with Unitree. Maybe you've heard of the humanoid robots.

Okay.

We've seen dark factories. It's going to be soon on my YouTube channel. It's going to be very cool. Very cool.

Shanghai has history. Yeah, Chongqing has history.

Yeah.

Hangzhou definitely has a lot of history. The lake. You bike around the lake or something, right?

Yeah. Well, no, because we've been there for like just half a day or just— and how did you speak English when you arrived in Vancouver?

Not much.

Not much.

Like Chinese school exam written English.

Well, we see what's the Chinese school English. It's not— it's not very— and What were you good at? Were you like a very good student or?

I was a quite good student.

Yeah.

Yeah. Top 10, but not top 5.

All right.

In my class.

In Vancouver or before?

In China.

In China.

Yeah. So that means top 1 in Vancouver.

That's the PIG level.

Yeah. But I played a lot of sports. I played a lot of video games. It got me into Some special school for because I win some programming competitions.

All right. Okay. You were already in programming?

I got start programming when I was grade four.

Grade four?

Yeah.

What age is that? It's eight, nine.

Maybe eleven.

Eleven. Okay.

Ten, eleven.

Would you reckon it's still a good thing to put my my ten years old son into programming right now? Is it a good idea or?

It's useless. I haven't thought about much. Yeah, I think so. The language speaking language of machine, probably a little bit unnecessary, but think structurally about a system, like how roughly understand how the machine works.

Python?

That doesn't matter.

Okay.

Yeah. AI can write all the codes, most of the simple codes now. So your son doesn't need to learn how to actually write the syntax, but by making something he has to think it through himself, helping have empathy towards the machine.

Yeah. Empathy towards a machine. That's—

yeah.

Yeah.

So what else is he learning?

Is he learning? Yeah, he's learning a lot of What do you say? Roblox. Yeah. Which is interesting still. But, and no, a lot of tennis. What martial arts into is not judo, but jiu-jitsu. Jiu-jitsu. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah.

Tennis big in Paris?

Yeah, it's pretty big. It came back in France recently. Tennis, it was kind of old school, but— Why did it come back?

I'm not sure because we don't even have Real champions.

It's been like, like the last time a French champion on the women's side, girls are pretty good, but on the guys' side, the last time we won not ATP but a Grand Slam, it was like in 18.

Yeah, I'm learning tennis this year.

It's a lot of fun.

It's a lot of fun.

But the thing here is padel.

Here you've tried to play the first time. I played twice so far. Pretty fun.

It's growing. Yeah, yeah.

More respectable than pickleball.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. More respectable, definitely. And so when you got there, I'm just trying to understand how— because at 17, 16, 17, it's probably pretty hard. You're already— your mind, your— yeah, the French. Yeah.

You're trying to pick up language, trying to pick up culture. I'm like, first impression is like, where's everybody? There's so few people in Vancouver compared to China, right? You've been to China, so packed with people and energy.

Yeah, yeah.

I would think the largest culture shock is actually the how to gain the context about American culture. Like it's less about language, more about like the context behind the language to understand jokes, for example.

It was hard?

Yeah, I find that I forced myself to watch, not force, but I watched a lot of Simpsons and SpongeBob, like to understand, oh, SpongeBob, why is it funny? Oh, because this is funny. You know, it helped a lot. I played a lot of, I tried to make friends 'cause Vancouver has so many Chinese people. You could just get by without speaking a word in English if you want to. But I forced myself to hang out with non-Chinese kids and just pick up language faster, pick up culture faster.

That's the thing. What you just said about the humor is that because we're a lot about second degree, you say second degree humor. You understand what I'm saying? Sarcasm. Sarcasm. And in France, it's a lot of, you know, you You make a joke that first appears as not a joke, so you're like, "The fuck is he saying?" And then you understand it's a joke. And people said, "Don't do that in China," like a lot. And it's very French typical.

Oh, that's I never thought about this. Yeah, I would say Chinese humor—it's a bit less than West. It was Chinese people as more straightforward. Yeah, okay. Right? You guys did not go to Beijing. That's actually I. My one of my favorite city because people have more humor in that. All right. North has more humor than the south. South is like straightforward, do the work, hardworking, straight, just like get to get stuff done energy. It's interesting.

I would say it's the opposite in France, where the north is more about working and south about jokes and—

oh, but it's the same then because you say south is more about joke in France.

In France, yeah.

Hmm. Oh, interesting, because usually the warmer climate. So in southern China, it's slightly warmer, more port cities, right?

Yeah. Okay. And so what happened with the programming and how did you get into entrepreneurship? Did you— before that, actually, I had one question is, were you raised in that Very competition way of raising kids in China.

Not really, no, because my mom was she doesn't. I was always pretty good at school, so she did not pay too much attention to my school. She did not force me to learn. Usually kids learn piano or violin when they are young. She did not force anything to me, which I kind of appreciate. I got into programming through competition because I was born and raised in that far west region of China. In order to get to a good school, I need to win some competition.

Oh, wow.

So that pushed me to like get better at something. And the thing I want to get better at is computers, which programming, because I can play video games on the side of it. So I got good at that. I always played sports growing up, so The sports sense of competition. All right. But it's more self-motivated, I guess, than from your parents. Yeah, she didn't force much. Okay.

It was inside you, probably somehow.

It's probably inside me, but I never want to— I want to be the top, but I don't want to. I know that if I be number 1, number 2 in the class, I will be losing a lot of my— I'll be like a nerd. I wouldn't be able to play sports as much. I wouldn't be able to, like, chase girls. I wouldn't be able to play video games. So I'm happy with top 10 in my Class rather than top one. Yeah, I get that.

I can see that with my older daughter actually. She's she's probably exactly that. She doesn't want to be the nerd top one, top two, right? Yeah, yeah, I get that. You kind of get excluded when you're even if you don't want to when you're the number one. No, you kind of get what excluded by the rest of the class, you know?

No, I guess so. Yeah, I was quite popular. Yes, in China, like I don't know. you notice on the street there is like the— there's a— each class has their leader, a master. So they have— they wear badges. It's kind of like a communist vibe.

So I didn't know that.

Okay. You probably notice people wear— the kids wear their red necktie, right? Because the necktie symbolizes a corner of the flag. And each class has their class leader. Master usually wear 2 bars here. Okay. And, and Each row have their row leader master, which is one bar, one red bar here. So I was elected to be my class master when I was really young.

It's not that communist if you were elected though, because I was popular.

Well, popular. The teacher picked me also. So I'm— so I always wear this. And even though I moved to different cities, I try to be like— I oftentimes end up as a class master and And yeah, so it's like popular with school friends, play a lot of sports. You need to also be good at school to be respected in your class. So you need to be in top 10, top 5, but you don't need to be top 1. And when was that you came into Vancouver? 17, 18.

When I was 17. Okay. When was that? What year? I mean, 2003, 2004. Yeah. So it was prior to all of the cameras in China and all of the tracking systems you have everywhere now.

I think the beginning of that.

Yeah.

So yeah, a bit earlier.

Yeah. Because this, this is kind of weird when you go there now. It's something big, right? The kind of—

The surveillance system.

Yeah. The Big Brother way of life.

I guess you surrender to it. It's just convenience also, right? Like even when I go back to China, I don't have a Chinese ID, so it's hard for me to like register a lot of apps. Yeah, yeah, right.

You can't pay with your face. Yeah.

So like I have to use cash, but less people are using cash. Don't you use Alipay and WeChat? But I need to set it up with certain IDs and—

well, we did actually quite easily now. Yeah, yeah. Maybe it's quite recent, but When you know what the fun fact is, actually, when I came back to Paris on Sunday, I went out for shopping with my wife and daughter and I went to this place called Les Galeries Lafayette, which is quite famous. And I said I was buying Lego, actually Lego for my, my sons. And, and I said, can I pay with Alipay? And she said, sure. And I did pay with Alipay in Paris and I was like, what the fuck?

Just to prank them? Yeah. That's so funny.

Yeah. Yeah, it was quite funny. So yeah. Okay. And so explain to me, how did you go from, yeah, those first years in Vancouver to, to Notion? What happened in between?

Starting to college, I went to UBC, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and I study cognitive science, cognitive systems. So I was thinking, should I do computer science, cognitive science? Cognitive systems. I think cognitive systems more fitted for me back then because I already know how to code.

Can you explain what it is?

It's, it's a combination of neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, and computer science, AI stuff.

That moves you quick.

Yeah, it's like a— that's why it's called cognitive systems. It's a combination of all different disciplines.

Wow.

I like it because it touched so many different things. Right.

So that's in Vancouver, the university?

Yeah, university.

Okay. And that was like for the whole thing was for 5 years or—

4 or 5 years.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So I did that initially. I wanted— actually, I got into photography the first year, first couple of years. I was like, I got a camera the summer that I graduated high school. So start taking photos.

What camera was that?

Oh, it's a Nikon Rebel X, like one of the earlier digital full frame. No, this is SLR, like some earlier generation SLRs. Full frame expensive. I couldn't afford it. I was working at a bussing table in restaurant trying to, and then bought a camera for myself. Right. And so I did a lot of photography then.

I'm listening to you. I'm going to show you something.

Oh, go for it. Got a camera for myself. Then the so first couple years in college feels like wow, I'm good with. I take a lot of photo. I'm good with cameras. Good with photography. Is a Leica? Yeah, you like this? You know that? I'm not a Leica person. Just feels like a too analytical. Well, it's this one. Sorry, sorry. I'm more like a Carl Zeiss. Contax. Do you know that brand Contax? It's like a Japan body, German lens brand. I'm more of a Contax guy. Most of my film camera are Contax. Leica is like too engineered, too precise to— yeah, no, I respect it, but it's not my style.

It wasn't my style for a long time. I was really into like Canon or actually most recently all of the Sony things easy, but with good lenses. But what I've discovered with this one, it's a— so it's a Q2 monochrome. So it's a fixed lens, you say? Yeah. And black and white only.

Black and white only. Wow. Okay.

And so it's a lot of constraints, like a lot of— you can't do much. Like it's a lot of— but the black and white is much, much better than what you do with color photography. SLR. And yeah, it's pretty cool.

Let me show you my camera.

So we get a camera competition here. It was unexpected. Camera nerds, when you like this. I was just so you know, I was into— raised into photography with my parents also. And it was before— it was before digital. So we were a lot— I was shooting and developing in the lab. With my father, actually, in the house. Okay.

It's a GR, one of the GR3 or something.

It's a Ricoh. Okay.

It's a pocket camera and it's a lens. You cannot change it. Yeah. So you have to move with your feet.

So you cannot zoom or— Okay.

Zoom. Okay. I think that's the—

it's better that way. And I hope— I mean, you could ask the same question with the Leica, but I think it's bigger and How much better is it than a phone camera?

Quite a bit better because the lens is good and this is like, I think it's a full frame.

All right. Okay.

More important is the lens sensors and I guess most cameras, I don't know too much about modern camera. They're all kind of good. But there's this one, there's the Fuji makes some interesting cameras.

Yeah, very interesting. Panasonic.

Yeah, but I'm never prime lenses, like the fixed lenses. Thank you. Shall we take a photo of you too?

So we're shooting each other right now. Okay. And— oh yeah. So go back to our main thread.

What all of these—

so cognitive science and camera, do you— have you ever thought about what it gave you more if you hadn't been through that? Would you lack of something for Notion?

I think I will lack. Yes, the answer is yes, because the art part, the first couple of years of college doing a lot of art just sort of help you understand the— cure your taste, you know, help you understand the art world a little bit. Like I do a lot of party and I was working in a bookstore at that time. Like usually when it's not busy, I just flip art books and try, oh, this is that painter, pattern recognizing the painter. So they help you improve your taste, understand humanity at large. The art world help you understand like, oh, how the social dynamic behind every scene, right? Music scene, art scene is— a group of people and there's, there's status, there's like connection, there's relationships. And, and that's the only— also the reason why I did not end up doing— want to do art, because it's too much about relationship, not enough about the thing you're making. It's not a meritocracy, right?

Yeah, I get that. I didn't see it that way though before. It's interesting.

It's too man-made. It's too like Man-made. It's too artificial. Not in the bad way. It's just like too less objective.

Yeah, it's true.

You have to be to you have to get some I don't want to say chaperone or some people like yeah, you have to putting you yeah and it's about who um which party do you go to you know which DJ are you friends with yeah like I think like the art I'm more probably more of a nerd than the than a social person.

I would say, though, that the internet at large changed that a bit. You can get very famous, maybe in movies or in music or maybe in photography, just going with your camera and your website and your stuff and your community on your Instagram. Then before, you used to have to know this movie director, this screenplay, I don't know, whatever. And you had to get that, you know, if you were the son of—

Yeah, I think that's true. Like it's like allow you good stuff to be discovered through the internet. I think that's generally true.

Okay. How, how, how did you go actually for that? How did you get into that, into photography, into all of these art things? Was it your mother or was it—

I'm not sure because when I was young, I've been doing Chinese watercolor painting. When I was really young, that's like then I did some Chinese stamp carving in elementary school. You know, you carve the stamp, you can. Boy, yeah.

Did you guess that I did my first stamp carving on Sunday back in France because I bought some stamps and I bought the knife to carve the Chinese ones?

Yeah, sure.

Here? Yeah, here in France, in my—

I'll teach you.

It's not easy. No, no, but it was it was shit. What I did was just shit, but I have to learn on YouTube.

But this why do you want to learn this? I don't know.

We went to that shop in in in Shanghai, and the guy convinced me and said, "Look, you do that. You go on YouTube. You learned how to do that." And and I came back. I was jet lagged. I was in my my kitchen. So you got a stone too? Yeah, I got the stone, and I started flattening it. Yeah, my God. Yeah, yeah. I want you to teach me.

That's more of a oh my my crap. like elementary school level. But it's very— it's a type of art form that not too many people do because it usually ranks as calligraphy, probably number 1, watercolor painting number 2, then a bunch of other things. Then it's the stone carving.

That's very niche.

Yeah, very niche. Yeah. So I did that. I play a lot of video games. But I guess doesn't relate too much to art. I think photography was easy because it's like the lazy man's art, right? You can just click, click, click and you can just frame, use your foot and eyes to frame things.

It's kind of like Notion. What I'm saying, I was saying earlier on, it's like it's easy to access. But then if you want to become a Notion master or photography master, there's a lot of work. I mean, a lot of things to understand.

I haven't thought that way. Yeah, it's easy and it helps you get into good parties, you know, and with girls. No, it's like it's, it's an art form. At least I pick up fairly quickly. I would— my photo was got exhibited in New York Photo Festival one year. Holy shit, I'm good at this.

When was that?

Like 2007, 2008.

So you sold photos?

I sold photos. Yeah. The first time I went to New York because my photo was exhibited in some gallery there, and that was early college. I said, oh, I want to do art. And but it's got tired from the party scenes. So maybe I should do something more meritocracy-based.

So is there a place where we can see those photos?

Yeah, you go to my You go to my Twitter, there's a link to the website. I think it's ivan.zhou.notion.site. Okay. And there are some photos there. So once you read about China, because I spent a summer, 2 summers with my dad traveling road trips inside China where the places you guys went to. All right. Take a lot of photos.

All right. So you got back here with your dad at some point? You didn't?

Okay. During college, I went back to Visit my dad during summers. Then we road trip many part of China. I took a lot of photos.

So he still lives over there?

He still lives in Shanghai.

In Shanghai. Okay. Yeah. Is it? It must be kind of weird now. You got like very separate maybe way of life thinking or yeah.

It feels like I'm kind of stuck in the either side, right? Like my My, my taste in food and poetry and language is a lot of Chinese. All right. My understanding of business, all the new things I learned, philosophy, every history, it's more in English. And culturally, my wife is Iranian. So like, it's all different cultures mixed together.

Interesting.

Yeah, I like that. It's like a very I prefer to be different than to be the same.

Man, you have kids? No. Okay. Thinking about it. Yeah. They're going to be half Iranian, Chinese, North American. My God, it's going to be a mess.

It will be a good mess.

Yeah. Do you still shoot?

Not as much as before. Okay. Yeah.

No exhibition anymore.

It's just for you or my Instagram? I haven't updated for a few years, but before I saw maybe I update my Instagram every time we go for a trip, right? Yeah. Running company, like you have to think about your business all the time. So but to be a good photographer, you have to like really focus on observing the world. It's zero sum in that regard.

I believe all of this makes me understand how I think the Notion UI— I don't know, you explain me how did it start? Maybe we'll go briefly into the this period in between the exhibits and the start of Notion. But it makes me understand how different was the design of Notion because it was very different than everything and it was kind of very— it's always been very simple, like back to basics at some point. Yeah. Was it influenced by all of these things, you believe? Was it you or was it someone else's influence?

It was me. What's the influence? We try to be, we try to be very orthodox.

It is.

Yeah, we try to be not innovative because there's different way you can push idea into the push new design into the world. Like if you push too much, then people. can absorb all of it. So then the version of Notion that's running online right now, it's like it took us 4 or 5 years to get there. Like in the earlier version, we tried a lot of innovation, a lot of differences, different ideas. It's too new, it's too different. So as we keep iterating on this, we get better at, okay, let's just make the core thing, the core UI very simple and very familiar. very unorthodox, very orthodox. So if you look at Notion today, there's a left sidebar, just looks like your Mac Finder's left sidebar. Yeah, yeah. Right. And but that's— but behind the scenes, there's somewhat innovation. It brings all your content, your data in your company, your business, one place. Yeah, that's sort of the new invention back then. Newish.

It was the idea, the original. The idea?

Yeah.

Was that the idea to put everything from the company That's one of the ideas.

Well, the idea is actually bigger than that. The idea, it's about computing. It's going back. So maybe going jump back to the— Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in college, start doing art, did some science. And then last year, my school at UBC, at college, I started learning about the history of computing. So like the way I got into it, it's like we are all graduating college, right? So I need to make website for my own photos. I need to make website for my then ex-girlfriend's website. She's a fashion designer. She needs to make portfolio websites. Her friend needs portfolio websites. So I start making website for a lot of my friends. I'm the only nerd in my friend circle.

Was that WordPress or—

No, just clean HTML. Yeah. And then the realization is like, oh, maybe I need to make a tool so other people can make websites because WordPress is kind of limited. Not limited. It's like more, more for blog. Then there's like Weebly and Wix back then. It's like, I think Wix is still around. It's kind of constrained. You cannot make very freeform websites. Right. And So I started looking to— let me build a tool for you all.

Kind of a Squarespace.

Kind of Squarespace, but more free.

Okay.

Right. It's like a Figma meets Squarespace.

Okay.

I want to build that. And from building that, I realized, wait a second, let me learn more about the history of the web. Right. And from learning the history of the web, wait a second, let me learn about history of computers.

Well, that's a very deep way of thinking. Yeah, it's interesting.

Right. So like, And then realized, holy shit, that's not a very American way of thinking.

I would say it is not. I would say it would be more like a problem solution, you know, whatever. Not like, what's the history of the whole thing? You know? Yeah, I'm kind of like history.

I like the— yeah, the looking history side of things. But looking at the history of computing, you realize those people back in the '60s and '70s has the best ideas. the best ideas about what to do with that machine. And somehow we messed it up in the '80s.

Okay.

Yeah.

What were those best ideas like?

It's the computing should almost be like reading and writing, should be like a medium.

Mm-hmm.

Right. Like you asked me, should you teach your kids how to program? Right. It's like— it's asking me— it's as if you ask me, like, should I— should I teach my kids how to read and write French? Mm-hmm. You don't— you don't ask me that question.

Yeah, right.

So in the first generation computing pioneers in the '60s, and they thought about making computing as if it's writing, it kind of makes it simpler and simpler. So but you still require learning, still require people to anticipate, participate. But once you master the medium, you can do anything you want with the computers. Yeah. So that's why if you think about Notion, if you understand the base of Notion, a company, a person, a business can use Notion to make some of the most powerful software for their business. Right.

From Notion.

From Notion. It's inspired by those ideas. And what inspired them, that generation, is like, if you think about, right, trace back to time, computers back then was like room-sized calculator in the basement of like you put a punch card in, go grab a sandwich, come back, the number plus 2, 4.

But it took you like, yeah, 3 days.

But you can do really fancy calculation, but it's only just numbers for calculation, counting things, right? And this like '60s generation, a lot of them on the West Coast, they like that. They took acid. They're that hippie generation in San Francisco, right? Then they say, oh boy, Wait a second, let's put a display, a TV, a radar display actually next to this big machines. Now the computer can talk back to you without you have to wait for the printing card. Yeah. And it could be real time. And that's why people invented the mouse.

Okay.

That— and that's this gentleman, Douglas Engelbart. He invented the mouse because now you have a display, you need to be able to point to things on the display. He tried so many different things. He tried like light pen. He tried like different type of touching devices. The mouse is the best because your blood flows downwards. You can do this for hours at a time. If you do a light pen, you get tired. There's so many other— they do a lot of real research to figure out what's the good form factor. HCI, human-computer interaction. What are, what are the good ways the human computer can interact? to, to so become a very medium-like back and forth. That bandwidth is high. I get it. Yeah. And, and they create computing system in the back in the day, in the '60s, '70s. It's like everybody can change the software they use.

But it was not very consumer. I think it was, it was still very niche, right?

It was just for I mean, it's actually the original one of the— some of early idea designed for kids.

All right.

Yeah. So the other gentleman, Alan Kay, he, he wrote a paper in the late '60s, '70s, talk about how do you create a medium, allow kids to learn while they're young so they become a mind amplification medium for them as they grow up. Okay. Just like you learn to read French or English or Chinese when you are, you know, grade 1, grade 2. And once you learn to become— you can be a poet, you can be a businessman, you can be anything you want with the language. What is that with another medium like that's called computing? Wow. It's very—

you know, that's amazing.

Those ideas are very fundamental and quite powerful, right? It's like it's not natural that we go through a school system to learn, sit down there for 5 years, 6, however long in French education system, and to learn how to write. It's not normal. It's, it's very unnatural.

Yeah, yeah, very unnatural.

But it's very powerful. But what is that for another medium? Right. And that's the big idea of that generation.

Coming back to what you said is when I ask you this question is, did you say that how to create empathy with the machine? Was that what you use?

Yeah, yeah, but that's, um, yeah, that's, it's less profound then. Okay. Yeah, but, but that the big idea here is that you— that we had the opportunity to create a medium that's in general net good. You can say that reading and writing in general, it's, um, it's net good for humanity. You can say that, right? It's like very disruptive. You create a lot of different things, but In general, it's something that makes humans more full. And computing could be something that makes humans more full. Yeah. And, and so they create computing systems that's very easy to modify, just like reading and writing are very easy to modify. Early days, there wasn't such a strong notion of applications because we are so used to applications.

Yeah, yeah, you're right.

Right. This is largely an invention of the '80s. Before, one of the first computing systems, Xerox Alto, they run operating system called Smalltalk. It's a programming language slash operating system slash application all in one. And its network has all the, almost most things that modern computer has, if not more. And there's a famous demo. When you probably heard Steve Jobs went to Xerox PARC.

Yeah.

To learn about the first— borrowed a lot of ideas, right? So that's where the Alto computer was. So when he went to Xerox PARC and he doesn't like the scrollbars direction, so, oh great, this graphic user interface is amazing, but I wish they scroll the other direction, right? So, and while he was asking the question, researcher at Alto just changed the direction of scrollbar live. All right. Because everything is so malleable, right? Software is really easy to change. Right now, if you want to change something, it's really, really difficult.

Yeah.

So that's the big idea of the '70s. And the '80s generation happened, which is the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs generation, in order to make computer mainstream. And the notion is like that, what is a Microsoft's mission was put a computer on every desk in every home, right? They have to simplify a lot of things. And through that simplification, a lot of good ideas lost. So computing become more of an application-driven system. That means in order to use computer, you use software, you have to— largely there's a user of application and maker of application. Maker application are programmers, user application are users. A user can only click the buttons. Maker can do programming. So there's a separation. The separation back to reading and writing, almost like there's a priest, there is the scribe. They know how to read and write French or English, and there's the rest of people can only go to Catholic church and listen. Right. Wow. We're stuck in that world. We're still in that world.

We're still in that world. Yeah. It's, it's, it's interesting how I mean, all of those reflections, all of your talk, what you're talking about right now, you were thinking about that prior to creating Notion.

That was what inspired me to create Notion. All right. Because I want to create the product that brings back some of those original ideas because they're so powerful and so good. And there should be some kind of internet-based Software that brings some this kind of malleability and creativity of computing back to as many people as possible.

This is so powerful, even. I think it's interesting because in France at least, I'd say it's not 100%, but most of the if you go to an engineering school, like if you go to at some point excellence Polytechnique Centrale and so on. Those schools, like would be in the in the in the in the U.S. What is it? You get MIT or stuff like this. Maybe you don't learn so much about art philosophy, and and probably you don't go back too much into this history of computing and what was it made for, and and you know, and I think you're. Background, probably from China, probably from, I mean, bicultural origins, photography and everything really gave birth to something like quite new. But that was the idea, the original idea. It's interesting.

That was the original idea. It's— you touch a good point, like if you go to study computer science.

Yep.

Right. That most people don't know. If you ask people who is Douglas Engelbart, who is Alan Kay, who is John McCarthy, they're like those pioneers. They don't know. They don't teach as much. They just briefly— one slide in their present, like Computer 101, not even 201 or something like really one slide, quickly jump over. They don't talk about their idea. Why is it important? Where the fuel come from? So computer science is less of a science. It's more— it's as if you go to physics and you— who's Isaac Newton? They don't talk about Isaac Newton at all. They don't talk about Einstein at all. Then you study physics. It's like, oh, of course you're not studying physics. You just learn how to like follow formula and do some problem solving, but you're not learning the why behind what— why you solve problem this way.

It's true.

Right. So And that's, that's in some sense translate not just computer science to the rest of the tech industry, like the modern tech industry built on top of computing. But by and large, most people have no idea where computing come from.

And it got lost at some point. That's what you're saying. I mean, you would have some— it was very efficient still. I mean, you would have a lot of apps. I mean, it got lost in the '90s. It was even more lost because you would have to be trained on everything. Every time you would try to be onboarded on some new, maybe device or new app, you would have to get 5 days of training. Then it got better because with UX and some application was easier and easier. But what you're saying is that you would have one use for this, one use for this, and there was no more creativity.

And yeah, it's kind of like there's a path in history that computing could go down, become like reading and writing. Today computing has become more like kitchen appliances. Yeah. Okay. Like each one does one thing, right? And it's like you can't— there's not much creativity with your fridge. You can only use your fridge or toaster in a certain way.

Well, if you start from there, I mean, okay, interesting where I get the starting point and probably the endpoint. And today you'll explain me because I don't have the the big picture of all of what you're doing. But the path is insane because, I mean, starting from there and saying, I'm going to build something that's going to be— that's going to solve that issue, it's like, well, where do you start?

I mean, yeah, that's why we like got locked for like 5 years, right? Trying to like, what, what is this? Actually funny, a friend of mine asked me, I wrote a like an essay for myself or for a few people when I— right before I started Notion and talk about this idea we just talked about. And a friend of mine recently read it. So, wow, it's not online. It's like somewhere private. And it's like, it's interesting because like the idea is pretty fleshed out, right?

Would you, would you give it to me?

Oh, I'll give it to you.

Can I publish it?

Yeah, you can publish it. It's on Internet Archive now. So archive.org/something.

Okay. Yeah, yeah.

It's like there's the idea space is the entire computing industry, right? Entire software computing industry. We try many things and we tried making a developer tool really easy so more people can make software. So from the software maker side to make it really easy. We try making like website publishing, make it very diverse so you can start making web apps. That didn't go anywhere. Eventually the realization is let's start from a place that people recognize, understand, and use every day, which are the, the so-called productivity software, like the tools that you mentioned, like the next generation of the spreadsheet, project management, document tools, and make them better. and hide the computing ideas that secretly inside of it. We call it like sugar-coated broccoli. Sugar, sugar, sugar-coated broccoli. Broccoli is those computing ideas that take me like 2 minutes to explain, right? Nobody cares. And then this YouTube generation, people just— people don't pay attention. But those ideas are important and useful if you want to get to it. And we want people to care about it, to take advantage of those ideas. But the way to do it is to wrap in the surface and utility that people care every day, which are how to get their job done using those productivity software.

My, my, my mind is blowing because I'm like, how do you get to a VC with such an idea? Look, mate, I'm going to explain because sometimes it has to be, look, this is a problem, this is my solution. I'm going to blow the world, right? Yeah. Okay, I'll give you $3 million.

Well, we did a very good demo, so I built a prototype. Took me like 2 years, a year and a half, 2 years to build a prototype. And that's very compelling. Okay. It actually has a lot of like touches on all different things we talk about. Yeah, that raised the first round of money.

So it took you almost 2 years, you said? By yourself? How many people?

Initially by myself. So I was in Canada, right? So like Canada, graduate school, and I wanted to build something around this idea. Doesn't have a name yet.

Did you work at the same time? Did you work on that or—

I graduated school and I know I want to move to San Francisco to start this thing, but in order to move to San Francisco, I need to figure out my visa. Because I'm a Canadian. And so I work at a different company in the United States, in San Francisco, for about a year and a half. And I told the CEO of the company, I'll be joining you, figure out my visa and start my own company. And he's very helpful. He's actually the first investor into this.

Who's that?

Matt McGinnis. He's the CEO of Rippling.

All right.

Yeah. All right.

He's the number 2 guy at Rippling. Well, he probably made more money out of Notion than everywhere else. Probably. He was the best intern. Oh no, you were not intern, you were employee. But it was the best employee.

Yeah, but he's like, help you understand how the magic of Silicon Valley, right? People support you, help you, you pay, you pay forward to this. How much did he invest? Oof. $50K, $100K. Not sizable. Yeah, but he's the first check. Interesting. Yeah, but we're still friends. We're very like— we— he's actually speak perfect Chinese. It's the guy who speak— he's, he's from Canada too, but he's not Chinese. He speak really good Chinese. All right. Yeah. Interesting. It's good. Yeah. He's, he's a Chinese tutor every Sunday or something. Fun. Yeah.

And so you, you moved to the US You've been working in— while you were working in his company, you were working on Notion already?

On the weekend. Yeah. Trying to like building a prototype that took me about, like I said, a year and a half. The prototype's ready. My visa, I figured it out. That actually took— of all everything, raising money, building prototype, visa is actually probably the hardest thing to figure it out.

So, so it was a green— is it a green card?

No, it's called an E-2.

Okay.

So it's kind of like, I mean, I believe it's meant for people open corner store, like small businesses.

Right.

So I need to write a business plan. It's like, what is business? Like, it's like a 5-year plan, learn some basic accounting, rent, need to show the proof of business. I need to rent. I rent a coworking space, took some photos, Then hire some of my friends as the first employees. I've given them job offer letters and, you know, and buy stuff from Amazon. So just, you know, we are buying things that were— this is a real business now. And, and I spent some money to prove like, oh, this is a real business so we can get a visa. Papers, staples. And yeah, yeah, my mom helped me with the first Chunk of money as well.

So okay, before we raise any money, does she have shares? She's Chinese mom, so she is. She's your main, your number one shareholder. Okay, I get that. All right. And how long did it take to go from these these days to? I understand you've been in in Japan in between.

No, yeah. So. Those 4 or 5 years is like really long, right? It's like, it's not because the problem space is huge. Yeah. And towards the end of it, we realized, okay, we need to build— the best way forward is to build a productivity software but hide those kind of broccoli computing power inside of it.

You say competitive computing? Okay. Yeah. Okay. Productivity software.

That's productivity software on the outside, but Lego of software, Lego for computing on the inside. side. Okay. Right. And so, but we need to rebuild the product again. This is probably rebuild number 3 or number 4.

From zero.

From zero. Yeah.

Why is that? Was that— was it because language or just—

Just the language technology ideas are different, product ideas different, and the technology also evolved. You can use a better technology for it.

I've heard— I think it's Elon Musk saying somewhere, The hardest, hardest part is to rebuild from zero because, I mean, when you've been working on, on something for 6, 8, 9, 10 months or even more, saying I'm just trash it all.

I actually disagree. I think that's— well, I guess hard, hard from— do you need to manage your psyche, your team psyche? So throw everything away. But it's really liberating. It's like you should— if it's actually fun because you take all your lessons from the past, you know how to do it better and faster. Yeah, much faster. It's like to me it's usually worth it because the curve, if you build a really elegant system, you can catch up the old system really quickly.

Do you believe at some point it's impossible? Would you— would it be doable today on Notion and like trashing everything and do it all over again?

Not saying no. I'm not saying no to that. It's like I think the art of it is how do you keep the old notion going, remain the same, but build it from the inside and swapping out a new thing, right? So it's doable too, especially all the online businesses like required to be online to support all the 100 million people. You have to do that. Like Facebook did a complete rewrite, right? So a lot of good product does complete rewrite while still remaining fully online.

There's this myth of legacy IT, right? You know, some big companies, they have their— all of their backbone is from the '90s, from the '50s, from '60s.

Cobol is running. Yeah.

Cool. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so, so you rewrote and rewrote. Did you find clients?

Did you make money at some point? At that point, the Japan time, we did not have a client. So why Japan? Because we laid off everybody to do the rewrite.

All right.

Because like at the time was like 5 people would be running out of money if going with a team of 5. It's a lot easier to stretch or stretch our cash if just go back to me and my co-founder Simon, 2 people. So we went back to 2 of us and said, oh, let's just go. We're like, of course morale is low. Let's like, let's just go somewhere that's like We've never been so exciting. It's like brand new star. All right. And we've never been to Japan. So it was kind of intentional saying like, very quick, which is, oh, let's go to Japan. Decided really quickly.

And you move in like together in the same place. And yeah, we did.

So we actually initially were trying to do Tokyo, obvious reasons, right? So but you went on Airbnb and you find all the places in Tokyo that are very small.

Yeah.

And because I love my co-founder Simon, but I don't want to squeeze into a small place with him for a month. So, so we look in Kyoto. Kyoto, it's a different city, but the house is much nicer and bigger there and it's cheaper. So we actually make money by renting out our place in San Francisco. All right. I live in Japan, so it's a good story. We're cash flow positive, not from software, from Airbnb.

At least. Yeah. Yeah, that's not too bad. And then I guess when you're just kind of stuck, obviously voluntary stuck, it's a good point for just deep work, right?

It's very good for deep work. Yeah. Like, like I'm Chinese, so I can read kanji, I can read the menu, I can read the sign of street signs. Most Japanese people don't speak English. So we're just eat, work, eat, work. Very productive.

Someone told me about Chinese that they're obsessed by two things is eating and working. And I was like, yeah, that's kind of true, actually. That's kind of true. I didn't say it, but you just said it.

Oh, I never thought of it that way. I think that's kind of true. Yeah. People love food. People love working. So, you know, Simon's not— he's not Chinese. He's from Maryland, Baltimore. All right. But we did this for—

Did you like it?

Some of my best memories. It's like, because the flow state.

Yeah.

When you are building something, you sort of know what you're trying to build, right? But you're just like making the system better because you built it like 2 or 3 times before. You just straight flow state. Music, headphone, programming and design.

Have you ever lost faith during that time?

Yeah, not much. I think I would say almost never. Multiple reasons. You know what you want to design can be built because people built in the '70s. So people built better systems back then, right? So if you study it, It's the mountain exists. It's far there. It's on the same continent. If you just— all you need to do is find a path to get to the top of the mountain. So it's there. You can see it. I would say number 2 is like Simon and I, our personality are pretty— we're pretty optimistic. We're very optimistic. It will kill you if you start a company, if you're not optimistic. And low is never that low. High is never that high for us. So And we had fun building this. Yeah, we're pretty close to running out of money a couple of times, but yeah, but we know we can build something. We can get to the mountain. We know that the mountain is valuable. We know that the mountain, the new product we're building, the sugar-coated broccoli product, will be used by other people.

When, when was the aha moment? When did you shift to when? Yeah, all of the things. Did you get like new customers? People understand your art at the end?

Gradually, I would say. So we've been building in public. We just release each version online and you see like people, more and more people coming. And we launched 1.0 on this online place called Product Hunt. All right.

Right. So Product Hunt is a, is a very famous— I mean, a lot of French even startups use it. I'm just explaining for people listening. It's just a website where you're releasing a product and if you're like number one or—

Yeah, it's like a form of like what's new product in the world, right? We launched there. That becomes like a jumping point. And a lot of people that we helped us. Like, we— I was doing customer support at the time also. So a lot of people I did customer support interacting with, like, came here, support us on Product Hunt and made us like the product of the week, of the month, of the year. And it's very touching. It feels like, oh, you're building for the things that you— for other people you have interaction with and they come even though you never met them. They come help you. They tell a good story about you.

It's wonderful. It had to have this story to, to, to get there because, you know, while we're talking, I was thinking about like my daughter, she's, she's using more and more her computer. And while organizing her life or her, I don't know, bat mitzvah or something like this, she would— she didn't use Notion, but I believe it's the best tool she should use. And I didn't even think about telling her that. What I'm saying here is that it's not that easy to make people vote and— sorry?

Shift.

Shift and understand how big it is. You know what I'm saying? It's a Lego. It's as you said, it's a Lego. So it's fun. You play with it. So to make it the best product of the year on Product Hunt, it had to have this past you just described, I believe. I don't know if it's clear, but just to give you the use we have of Notion on the podcast. So I'm, to be 100% honest, I'm not the biggest user of the team because I do record WhatsApp call meetings and so on. So, but I love the way we use it and we're working a lot on it. So what we do is mainly hold on, I'm in the application. So we got everything. It's a backbone of what we're doing now. So it starts with a page or probably see we get this. Oh, it's pretty. Yeah, it's pretty Notion. Yeah. So here, where are you? Even Zhao. So You're booked, so you're booked. Okay. You're not recorded yet, so you're going to move from that to that this morning. And then where are you? We're here. You will be probably online, on air on December 28th. Okay. And then when we move you here, then a lot of things happen. Then you see we got different views, the calendar, so I can see So this was read of mine number 500. I get all of these things. Mingpo, this was like last Sunday. And then I can find you here. So it's going to be— and you have all of the views. And then when we get there, when we change you on the— how do you call that column? We'll get all of those things. Hold on. I'll try to get here.

Just click it. Yeah. Yeah.

And then I get all of the things, the YouTube that's going to be released tonight, the Drive, the photos, the notes Clem made, the notes I made, the books you're talking about, the references. See, so you were talking about the place where we can get your photos, for example.

Oh yeah, let's do that.

It will go here and then it will be automatically published in our— on our website. We get the transcription here.

Are you using the meeting transcription from Notion?

No, actually we're using Scribecast, but we could transcript already on Notion.

I mean, yeah, that's a new product we launched 5 months, 4 months ago.

Okay, we should try that.

And you can click the, the meetings button on the left. Where's that?

Left. Far less here. Okay. Meetings. And would it be able to transcript the whole podcast?

You can. Yeah. Okay. You can transcribe the whole podcast. Yeah, it's a, it's a pretty good setup. Like what you're showing, that's okay. There's a document part, there's a project management, there's a scheduling calendar part. Usually those has to be 3 different software.

Yeah.

Yeah. Now here is one place because you can glue the Lego together, your information can relate to each other, and this translates into you use fewer tools, less context switching, your information makes sense together. Always have context, and in today in AI, this is quite powerful because allow your AI to have all the same context to work for you.

Yeah, that's interesting. That's a point where I want to talk about. But so for people listening to to us, the main idea is that what I showed to Ivan is that we start with an idea which is a guest, and we put Ivan Zhao then. You'll be somewhere like in the prospection list, like the people who we want to invite. And then you get from the people we want to invite to the people we've booked, then the people we've recorded, and from— and then it goes from an idea to dissemination of everything from, you know, the title we chose all together to the description of the episode to the LinkedIn post, whatever post. Instagram and everything. And it—

That's the constraint we set for ourselves when we designed the version of Notion. It's like you have to capture from the smallest information bit, which is idea on a piece of paper, right? Just write down the one word, a bullet list, all the way to a system which is a database and interconnected system of records, different— your accounts, your Notions, your CRM, in this case, your episodes, your the schedules, all those things, how to scale the whole thing.

Hmm.

That's the constraint, because computing is like English or French, right? You can write a to-do list, a laundry list for yourself. You can write, you know, Proust, you can write, you know, engineer handbook all in French. French can— English can scale all the way. That's the power of media. That's not the case for typical software application, you can only do part of it.

Yeah, the problem, or if I want to be— and well, this, this is what everybody tells you every day, I believe, but is that if I get there and I'll say this is not as good as a CRM, this is not as good as Excel, this is not as good as, you know, so you'll tell me probably yes, but maybe if I want to get like this prospecting list and get a, how do you say, an email automation and so on. I probably can do that on Notion, but it's probably not as easy as if I start from Pipedrive or something, is it?

Well, the goal is it's as good as a CRM, right? CRM is not a category we're going specifically after, but CRM is just made from software building blocks. Yeah, right. So if we just design Notion building blocks as well designed as the underlying software building block, there's no reason they shouldn't be as powerful as a typical CRM. We just haven't put enough engineering system in to unlock the power of it. Spreadsheet is a little bit tricky. Spreadsheet is like 50 years of specific needs of baking. We don't want to go after that market too specifically.

No. Or Never.

Definitely not now. It's like there's already— our finance team still runs on Excel, right? You can't even— Google Sheets doesn't.

Yeah. When you talk to an Excel nerd, they just— even after 15 years of Google Sheets, he will tell you there's no way I'm moving to this.

It's— there's too specific. And that's largely for financial modeling. Yeah. But the part of the spreadsheet that we care about is people create a list of things to organize. That part Notion does very well. Like just a database of things to organize, you can filter by different, like a database of your episodes, of your accounts. We care about that use case.

So if you understood what I just said, and hopefully you did, how we use it for Generation It Yourself for the podcast, what's amazing at the end is that it's literally our backbone. The regret I have, and we'll have to do that at some point, is that probably If you take, you're going to be like episode 510 or 515, something like this. And we've probably started that way like 100 episodes ago or something. So I have 400 episodes that are not exactly in the database, in the Notion database. I see. And that would be, if you're talking about AI, like getting the audio, the transcripts. Oh, that's so powerful. The whole thing. Like we could, I mean, it would be like— Where are they stored?

Stored today, the old episodes?

They're on probably Google Drive or Dropbox. Dropbox.

The audio are on Dropbox. And this transcription, it's in—

No, some of them are not transcripted, but it would be easy to do that.

Well, if you can try to connect to Notion and Notion AI can search Google Drive and a bunch of other sources and transcription, you probably have to figure something out. Then you can get transcription in or put them in Google Drive.

We would be able to do that.

Yeah, that's probably one of the more powerful thing for you because like it's becoming your second brain for your business. Yeah, right. You can ask for anything.

It's going to be the brain of my business, literally. I mean, I'm not the brain of the business. I'm the servitor or the, you know, the servant, right? I mean, we are several brains. It's going to be the central brain.

Central brain for your business.

Well, at least the central data. The brain is going to come with AI somehow, or—

Well, the brain We can talk about that later, but like a lot of agent products we launch, they can become mini brains to do repetitive work for you if the data is in one place.

I have to quote Shubham. You know Shubham? You've heard about Shubham Sharma? No, no. He's a French— like, he's one of your probably number one promoters in France.

Maybe I have.

Yeah. This guy's completely insane about Notion. Yeah. How do you spell the name? Shubham is S-H-U-B-A-M. Do you have his picture?

I recognize faces better.

Hold on. That's Shubham here. It's on the podcast, actually.

Oh, I think he's part of the community. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.

He's part of the community. Yes. And so yeah, I'm going to ask Shubham to help us do that. Probably he's a— he's the one. Okay. So, and how, how, how did you grow back then? Was it in the Valley? Was it in— where did it start? Who was your first customer? You remember? Just online.

Yeah, I was seeing those people through Product Hunt community and We were 2 people, just me and Simon. So generating some cash, we stayed very small for very long, still fairly small. But yeah, those people from Prada, that means you were profitable earlier.

We're profitable pretty early.

Okay. That's why like every time we raise money, we do not need to dilute too much and pretty efficient.

You're still profitable?

Yeah, cash flow positive for several years now, even though company is much larger today. Oh, wow.

How many people today? 900, 1,000. Yeah. Okay. What's, what's the split between Simon and you?

Different offices, you mean? Or— Well, no.

How do you— in the work, what does Simon do today? He's still coding.

Yeah. Okay. Hey, man, that guy's lucky. Are you jealous? I'm jealous. I like what I do too, but Coding give you a different flow state. It's some of the best flow state, right? Actually, that's not true. He's become more of a managing coding agent, right?

Mm.

So he still does engineering work. I do product, a lot of trying to like work with different product team, get idea to be coherent, looking at the details, doing visiting customer. That's why I'm in Paris right now. Did have a user conference, had dinner with a customer last night.

Who's the biggest consumer in France?

Biggest customer?

Customer.

So yeah, I would say a role model customer, probably the company Qonto.

Okay.

Yeah. I think they're, they're not the biggest by number of people, but they use Notion quite well.

Yeah. Like they're my major sponsor actually. Oh, I love them. Not just because they're my sponsor, but they're—

Yeah, yeah. I think they're 2,000, 3,000 people. Whole company runs on Notion. It's like what you did for your studio, but they do the whole, whole company. So everything, they track everything. Engineer team runs their bug issue tracking, marketing to-do lists, you know, all the documentation in the company. I visited their office last year. I think I'm going to visit tomorrow, I believe. So I visited their office last year and they have like yoga lessons, how to sign up for yoga lessons through Notion forms. Like everything's connected through Notion. It's like, wow, did they really get the best out of this kind of second brain?

I don't know if I'm right, but it's probably thanks to my— one of my former associate partners, Germain Michoud, that was like one of the earlier employees at Qonto when he, he was a complete Notion nerd, actually. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

It's like people who grow up playing Legos will have a really good time setting up Notion.

Is it hard to get to You said enterprises. So Qonto is not really enterprise. It's a startup. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, could you get to, I don't know, the Coca-Cola Company, like everywhere in the world?

We're getting to there. Like in France, L'Oréal, Accor, those are the traditional enterprise customers.

Okay. They're signing up.

They're signing up to Notion.

Not for everyone.

Not for everyone. In some other in the rest of Europe, like the Volvo of the world, Toyota in Japan. Those are thousands or tens of thousands of people running on Notion.

And when you— when they start with Notion, do they have to— do you have to get them a— how would you call that— transition from previous software, or is it start from zero?

Depends. So they could come from— replace their previous knowledge base or project management tool, consolidate them. Right. Actually, what we do a lot for our customers to help them save, instead of using 5 different tools, they can consolidate them together. One good example we usually share is like there's a finance company called Ramp. It's one of the fastest growing companies in the US right now. All right. Right. So there are 3,000 people to 3,000 people in Ramp. We came in to help them save, remove 5, 6 tools. all move into Notion. And for those 2,000-3,000 employees, each person, we save 50% cost of their tooling costs.

All right.

So that's one part. The better part is because now you don't have to use 5, 6 tools, you save time. And even better, you don't have to— you have one place to do AI, to deploy AI to help you do all the work. So those 3 things act together. It's the benefit for a larger company.

All right. And it's not like— because a lot of time, you know, getting rid of some tools was kind of a financial decision, but it was a larger tool, but that people were getting a lot of frustration inside. It's not what's happening with Notion getting deployed.

You mean people are happy we replaced larger tools?

Well, Probably you could be the kind of, you know, look, I am Microsoft, I get all of this shit, you know, or Google or, you know, they tried to do that with trying to replace Slack and Workspace and whatever, everything and say, you just sign with me, you get the emails, you get this, this, that, this, that. But at the end, you, if you had to be honest as a user, you would be like, this is halfway good as that. This is not as good as this. It is not. It's not the feeling people have when you go and say you're just Notion and you'll have to forget about the others.

Yeah, that's what we hope, right? People are happy to migrate towards Notion rather than, oh, I have to use it.

That's my feeling.

Yeah, it is. It is true. We, we don't compete with Microsoft or Google Suite, nor Slack. We're the layer sitting on top of Microsoft Office and Google's like we use Google Suite ourselves, like our—

we use— they're trying to compete with you though.

More towards like the space we're occupying are the competing with the point solutions, the SaaS fragmentation, the SaaS point solution in the past 15 years.

Am I wrong if I'm saying that Microsoft has tried to get its own Notion? Right.

Yeah. They're the similar protocol, Microsoft Loop, SharePoint, a couple of generations before, it's like a point solution on top of Office, right? Like our advantage is like we can consolidate those point solutions through our Legos. So you don't have to use a lot of point solutions. You still have to use email and calendar from Office or Google Gmail, but the rest of the company, the core collaboration productivity workspace could just be on Notion that can cover your project management, your simple CRM if your company is small, and a bunch of other things because we give you this kind of very flexible database and database can keep track of most things. And that's the Lego power customers have.

And why don't you go on direct messaging somehow? That would be interesting.

It would be interesting. Yeah.

You know why? Because what I'm saying is that— so I still work on— Oh, we need to get you over here. Google Docs. And why is that reason? Because I got all of the notes I got about you and the work we've done prior to the episodes. But then here—

Oh, there's a chat.

Oh, wow. And so I have everything on the same screen, but maybe it's too niche, but still. So I get—

So you can chat at the same time. Yeah. Interesting use case.

Yeah, I believe it's going to happen soon, probably.

Yeah, work like a Lego. Lego can be anything, right? And so if you have the right primitive, you can go after anything. You still have to trade, still have to make tradeoffs. Tradeoff is like one of my favorite words.

But what I think is that it would be very interesting for one reason, because we're going to get there. I have a question, a couple of questions before, but for AI and for the knowledge bases, because if you can stock all of the discussions we had, decision we've made, that would be very powerful.

You can do connect using Notion connected with other tools like Slack, Slack, Slack, Microsoft Teams. So you can your, your Gmail, your emails, you can get all the context in. So you can still using other tools, but AI is connected. And we do a lot of very dedicated work to map the permission, make sure the right information gets indexed, then you can find anything you ever said. It works better than Slack search. I like— I, I go to Notion to find the thing I, I remember. Is that in my email? Is it in my Slack? I just search Notion. Yeah, it's going to find it anywhere.

Anywhere. Yeah. All right. So let's get into that. I'll come back to— no, let's get back right The company almost died, right? At some point. Yeah. In Japan. Japan time. Yeah, Japan time. So right before you arrived or.

Well, the reason why I go to Japan so we can stretch out the money longer. So then we did Japan. We travel actually all over the places that's like cheaper than SF, basically, like places like Sicily. Right after Japan. Wow. That's actually highly recommended. Sicily too. Yeah, it's very nice. Very nice. Like a cappuccino running by the water, swimming and computer. Yeah, a good time.

Life is sweet over there.

Yeah. Yes. Slower. A lot of the gelato is big. A lot of pasta and gelatos. But we did— we'd rebuild maybe like a year and a half, but eventually it's almost like, oh, we'd be still— we'll be running out of money even just 2 of us. My, then my mom helped us bridge a little bit longer. Then we launched Notion on Product Hunt and then that has traction. Then investor did another round with us.

So they already did a round before that.

Okay. Yeah, we stretched that round for a long time.

All right. How much did you raise total today?

Yeah, I don't keep track of it.

It's like, like Hundreds of millions. Hundreds of millions.

It's the most— all the money still in the bank.

Okay. Yeah. So don't you tell me if you don't know what to do with it. I can, I can have good ideas if you want.

Buy some Bitcoin. Yeah.

I don't know if I would do that now.

Oh yeah. What would you do?

I don't know, actually. I do. I do. No, no. Yeah, we, we, we've raised a lot of money last year for— I have a VC firm, so we raised $60 million. And we're investing a lot in deep tech and we have a lot of very interesting places. Yeah, yeah. Things are going to go so fast. But yeah, yeah, probably I'd buy the next Q3 monochrome with the money. That would be a good investment. So if I go jump back today, $10 billion valuation, is that right?

Yeah.

We're a lot about AI. So my question is that we have— we don't use that much yet Notion AI. On what AI is it based? Is it your own technology or is it your AI based on OpenAI?

Yeah, we use other models.

Okay.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini. We're model agnostic. If you open to the AI menu. Yeah, there's a picker.

Okay, where is that? So we're going to— okay, Notion AI, and then I can plug it.

Those are all the models.

Okay.

You can use, but that's less important. The more important is like at this point, especially if you build an AI application, the model capability, it's not the largest bottleneck. The bottleneck is actually the infrastructure around it, the plumbing, the pipe around it to get your data and context to be in one place so the model can think over the context. You probably heard the term context window.

Yeah.

It's like the model wants all the context to be in the same window so it can think over it and do things with it. And that turns out to be as hard, or if not harder problem. And the second brain idea of Notion you talk about, actually kind of lucky to solve this problem because we've been consolidating the context in before AI because we want all the place to be in the same Lego box. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it turns out it's a very good position architecture to be for building an application because all the plumbing and the context already there.

Interesting. So if I use a For example, I put GPT-5.1. Will it use my GPT, my OpenAI account?

No, it used our enterprise version of GPT. And but it will have all your personal data, your work Notion data and work. If you connect with your Slack, with your Microsoft Teams, with Google Drive, all those data will be in the same context. So you can ask questions, you can ask your AI to do work for you based on those information.

And can I connect still my ChatGPT account so it gets all of my context outside of the—

That doesn't work yet.

Okay.

Interesting. What kind of context do you want from your ChatGPT side?

I don't know. My ChatGPT knows everything about me.

Your chat history?

Yeah. Yeah. Like all of my, you know, I don't know, the way of thinking somehow, the way of writing. And yeah, actually I have a wrong use of ChatGPT that I've discovered probably here because I do share my account, which is not a good use.

Oh, wow. With your family?

Yeah, well, my daughter, because I want her— she's young. I don't want her to have her own GPT, which would be a black box. And I'm not very happy with that. Also, because I've been working a lot on it, part of my team here. So my ChatGPT is a big mess in its head. A bit very confused, right? Yeah, somehow. It's fun how it understands who is talking to it. So Louise, my daughter, she's 13. And she said, when I say coucou chat, means say hi, then you have to understand it's Louise. And it always understands it's her talking. mix, yeah, several compartments, I would say. But yeah, it would be interesting that some of the projects we're working on on ChatGPT, maybe we should start them on Notion and do it the other way around. But the project mode on ChatGPT is just fantastic. I don't know if you use it, but so it would be interesting to get that content on Notion probably at some point. Well, another usage. So another feedback. And so do you have your own AI models or AI?

No, no, no. We use them.

Okay. So you're not an AI company?

We're not AI labs. All right. Yeah. AI company. We're an application company. AI labs. There's only a few labs in the world, right? Like Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, xAI. We don't build our labs because we want to be agnostic of all the models and we want to use what's best. But we spend a lot of time building infrastructure around our customers' data and workflows to unlock the best in the models.

And so when I use AI on Notion, then if it uses your relation, your accounts or your— then I have to pay extra each time, or is it a credit-based? How does it work?

It's a flat fee. At the moment. Yeah. It's like you probably already pay Notion business plan. In that case, it has all the AI you need. You don't need to pay extra. You probably already—

I think we had to pay extra. That's why you don't know. Can you ask the team? Yeah, that's what they said. Yeah.

Like right now there's no limitation. There's— Notion does not make less and less sense without AI at this point. Like all our engineering team, if not most engineering team, are building With language models.

Sorry, the 2 things I had about Notion, I still use, you're going to laugh at me, but I still use Evernote. Oh my God. Why is that? I think it's from the, how do you say, asynchronous? I think it works very well when you're out, when you're not connected.

Oh yeah.

Offline mode. Offline mode. Yeah. And I've had in the early days of Notion a lot of troubles in the offline mode. Is it something that you've—

We fixed this year finally. So one of the— it's our number one requested feature from customer, from both business customers and personal customers. We launched it this year and yeah.

So I'll have to send— yeah, I should try. Then I'll have to send my whole back catalog to Notion. Yeah, you try to import it.

So if you have trouble, let me know. I'll help you. Cool. Cool.

And I'd say the other reason that was hard at the beginning was that we had several accounts because I was running several companies and going from one to another was pretty hard. Is it easier now or is it something you've heard about?

Working on it? Yeah, we heard about it, especially if you have a lot of different studios, you've been working with many agents. We made it better, but there's still one or two levels we can make a lot better.

Yeah, and it's probably not high priority because there are not so many people working on so many companies or spaces as I do. I don't know if it's okay. What's your mission now? Where are you going? Where are you heading to?

It hasn't changed. Okay. Like, how do we create beautiful tools for people to do work? Right. That's always from the beginning. We call it help people build beautiful tools for their life's work.

To my understanding, what's going to change is the whole AI thing, world that is coming to us. Because when you talk to, you know, I think, you know, Anton Osika quite well. I mean, if you've got all of these things, I'm trying to think what we could do with all of the back catalog we have over that. We could get like, I want to create a website with all of my episodes with the knowledge of of all of those guys from, I don't know, photography or e-commerce or— I mean, the whole— it will know everything about the history of a company. So it will change a lot.

It will change a lot. Fundamentally, it's changed Notion. AI was— we saw the potential of technology 3 years ago now, almost, me and Simon. Like we're living in the San Francisco neighborhood called Mission. So a lot of AI researchers live in that neighborhood. Some of our friends said, wow, this new technology called language model can completely change computing, change knowledge work, and it works— could potentially work really well with what we have, the Lego set we have. So we bet really early onto this. We actually launched our first product before ChatGPT happened.

All right.

Yeah, because like, whoa, this is a great technology for us, right?

Did you— well, that must be deep because when you do that, you could go back to Kyoto for a year. I mean, thinking about—

We actually— I did. The story was that we were in Cancun, Mexico. We're in a company retreat and we got early access to GPT-4 preview. It wasn't released to the world yet. Then we thought everybody have access to this now. We need to rush really quickly to create an early product with it. So we were in the company retreat, me and Simon, we lock ourselves in the hotel room for a week, a week and a half, and just building the first version.

So I wasn't wrong. You did it again.

We did it again. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, actually it's another version of Kyoto, but small in Mexico, eating tacos this time.

Eating and working all the time. Eating, working.

Yes, actually you have some photos. Yeah, would be fun. It's like in Mexico.

What phone do you have? It's Google Pixel?

No, it's the new iPhone. Oh, wow. Single camera. Yeah, I don't recommend. Yeah, that's why you need this camera. The phone is bigger, but the camera is not great. This is the At the end, after our week and a half hackathon, me and him, we finished it with all the water bottles. In Mexico, you cannot drink the water from the tap. So we just keep hacking with the two of us with a lot of water bottles.

Look happy.

Yeah, it's fun though. It's like it completely changed. It's like a new type of material for you to build software with. It's squishy. It's like it's smart. It's a different property.

I think it's an interesting way of working because I think I'm thinking about Jeremy Cléda, a guy from a company called Welcome to the Jungle. They do like they're in HR tech and he's rethinking the whole company, but it's going to take them like probably a year or two. And because they understood that the whole AI and LLM are going to change the HR world forever, and he needs to just revamp the whole thing. And I'm thinking sometimes we should stop every 6 months now, or maybe a year, but— and try to rethink about the whole way we're working. Because, because probably to do everything we're doing right now without AI would I would need probably 5, 10 people on top of what we're doing. Can you imagine just typing the speech to text, listening to the thing? I mean, that's, that's probably done since a long time, but it would be very hard.

Yeah, it's like knowledge work will be very different. You sort of can see this in some categories, right? Like it's using Simon as an example, like he's still one of the most productive programmers in the company. Like in Silicon Valley, people call those people like 10x engineers.

Yeah, 10x engineers.

He's like 10x engineer. And but he doesn't actually code anymore. Like he hasn't coded for a month.

His agent codes for him.

His agent codes for him. So he become a manager. He hates management, by the way. He does. He wants to code, but now he has to manage a bunch of agents. But he can like, oh, I'm going for my lunch break and then tell my agent like, you do this, you do that. When I get back, get it ready for me. Well, before he go to sleep every night, he's like—

Did he show you? Yeah, of course. Yeah. Does it work very well? Is it insane?

Work very well for him. That's why another characteristic is the people who really understand the nature of agent and nature of programming can do very, very— they can become much better. They're not just become 10 times better, it's like 50x better or something.

Once you came from 10 to 50, you can go to 50,000. I mean, there's no reason you— I mean, there's a million.

50,000, that might be high, but you can go to like— it's not just linear, it's super linear, right? Like you understand the craft of the system, the architecture, you understand the limitation of the latest coding agents. You sort of figure out a sweet spot that can amplify yourself. All your trade-off is like, okay, spend more time to write the spec. maybe burn more tokens, but then you can really multiply yourself.

What part of Notion is coded by AI now?

All the new AI stuff coded by AI now. So most Notion teams are building language model powered features, but especially the new AI part of Notion, a large percentage are coded by agents.

And it's not just like Bill Gates said, like probably 6 months, a year before, he said it was mainly the code review. It was mainly like the 30% Microsoft used to— I mean, what's coded by agent was mainly, yeah, the review. And it's okay.

So the Microsoft one people are talking about is like GitHub Copilot, right? It's like an IDE, which meaning like programmer typing the text box of the codebase and The text can autocomplete.

Autocomplete.

That's still very much human in the loop, human in the driver's seat. Human have to say yes and no every single step. It's slow. It become much faster, become more agent-like. You have a class of intern that can just do work. Start with baby work, small work, but many of them, you don't have to look at them. The goal is not to say yes and no. The goal is don't look at them. them at all.

You look at the result.

You look at the result, you look at the— do they pass your exam or not? So in some sense, programmer's job becomes setting up the exams. So if you, if you set up, if you're really good at setting up exams, you will know that when your exam pass, you get the thing you want. You don't care how they are made.

How many programmers do you have at Notion?

300 programmers.

And how many would you reckon you would have if you didn't have AI?

If I don't have AI? Yeah. Well, if we do have AI.

Well, if you wouldn't, if like, would you need 3,000 or 30,000?

I mean, I think people can do a lot more. Yeah. Like each of— because our space is so large, right? So each person can do much more, become more Simon-like, so we can build many things in parallel.

Would you tell me the most insane things you've seen on Notion? Some examples. Do you have some coming to your mind?

Like what people use it for? All different kind of things. Like I was in Australia last month. Last— yeah, there's like— I was in customer meeting. There's customers running a chicken farm.

Chicken farm. Okay.

Yes. That's a business use cases. Personal use case. I last night dinner again, someone told me, hey, I love Notion at work, but I love it even more because I plan my wedding on it, right? So I plan my personal wedding on it. That's the typical personal ones all over the places that like Lego, you can do all different kind of things with it.

But if you think chicken farm, you would have like they would— would the chicken have like some chips or some stuff? Would you track each and every single chicken or—

I don't know. But the workflow that the The point is there's no software made for chicken farmers, right? There's no software made for very specific, like personal wedding planning software, maybe, but it's very specific, right? And, and because software are made by other developers, only the popular category has applications. But if we give our user Legos, they can make their own software.

Can you sell your Legos?

You can sell your Legos.

And I like my— sell my, my Notion wedding application.

You could. Yeah. If you get married again, you can.

Some people do sell stuff.

Oh, people make over $1 million a year selling their Lego templates or selling their Notion app template, doing consulting with these things. People make real business on top of it.

And when you sell it, it's not rigid. I can do my own Lego on the top of it.

Yeah, you can. It's like a Lego. It's almost like you buy a Lego set. You see the box when you open the box. the things made for you, but you can modify it, you can piece together with your other sets.

And you don't have to know how to code and everything.

You don't need to know how to code. Yeah, but AI can do another amazing thing about AI is you don't even know how to— you don't need to know how to use Notion Lego anymore. You can just tell AI what to do. It can do it for you. That's the magic part, right? Because we've been building this information system for 5 years, has like all the many important Lego pieces for knowledge work. And what we did in the past 2 and a half years with AI is we teach AI how to use those Legos. Now AI knows how to use those Legos. What it means, because Notion can do so many flavors of knowledge work, that means AI can do those so many different flavor knowledge for you in the Notion space. And we also connect with your Microsoft Teams, Slack, or other tools. So have all other contacts, you can still use other tools. But Notion becomes your workbench with AI to do a lot of work for you.

Amazing. It's— is it, is it like even an assignment too optimistic? Your AI, like, can it say, no, I can't do that?

Hard for me to say. It depends on the personality of the model. Yeah, like that's the fun thing. Well, weird thing about models, like different models have different personality. Of course, we'll try our best to make sure it says I cannot do certain things. It's getting quite good. It doesn't hallucinate anymore, right? But it's still sometimes like you have to try different, ask different ways for it to do the right thing for you. The better part is you set up those little agents. You should check your Notion afterwards. Like those agents can do work autonomously. You can just set up and they can work on the background.

You'll show him, you'll show it to me. I'll show you afterwards. Yeah. Okay. What's the most insane use of Notion you've ever made?

The agent part is quite interesting. Like, we have 1,000 people inside Notion. There are 700 agents running inside Notion on Notion. All right. Right. So then they do all different kind of things.

Can you explain one?

The basic one, daily summary of all my emails and what should I pay attention to from my email and Slack. which is like the daily brief.

Okay.

A lot of people use that one. All our internal tickets, like, like HR team receive a lot of tickets. Oh, the office too hot. You know, it's like, where should I get— what's the password of this? All those are taken care of by the agent today. Now, all right, all the engineer design team, they have a lot of customer feedback. The feedback coming, you don't have to manually organize them. Agent organize for you. daily brief, daily standup, like all the teams or different teams say, hey, what do we— what is everybody working on this week? And you send out a memo to everyone. Agent can write that as good as human. So those are the basic use cases that apply to almost every single team.

Do you have any competitors?

Many. Yeah, that our whole competition still largely compete with the point solutions, right? It's not with one competitor. Many different competitors from different parts, and we compete by consolidating many of the use cases into one Lego box.

You've bought companies? We have. Yeah. How many?

More than five, less than ten.

Somewhere between there. Did you like that part of business? Buying companies? Yeah. It's pretty fun.

Yeah. Stressful because there's so much emotional. You know, and then you need to figure out it's a good match with the people, is a good match with technology, sometimes both, sometimes one of them. And yeah, it's a craft. It's how you can see that's like a different company have this department called corp dev, right?

For this, for that reason, no matter what the size of the company, it's a craft. It's a craft. Yeah. Yeah. What was the most expensive company you bought?

Oh, we bought the, the email company. It's called Skiff, then now become Notion Mail. That's more expensive. It's a team of more than a dozen people.

What's the idea behind the— what was the price? Is it public?

It's not public, but it's expensive-ish.

No, more than $100 million, something like that.

Well, I can't remember. I can't remember the detail here.

I like those details. What's the idea behind this? Do I, do I need to switch from Gmail? It's based on Gmail, if I understand.

It's based on Gmail. The idea behind it is like we have Notion can do most of knowledge work, right? So we don't. And but there's 2 important parts, surface area knowledge work we care about, which is your time, which is your calendars and your email, your communication. And we want to have the best apps in those categories so that the context could be shared with your rest of Notion. So when I have a daily brief, I want the context from my email go to my Notion's AI to figure out what should I do based on my project in Notion, based on what I— my personal to-do in Notion, based on what's my email and Slack information. When I start meeting notes with you, if I do a recording, my Notion calendar will know, oh, who am I having a meeting with? Where should the meeting note live? And when I finish the meeting, send out the notes to the person or give me a brief before. What should I prepare for? All those contexts matter, right? So now calendar and mail, those 2 most important contexts for the person. That's why we, we care about those 2 categories.

I'm going to go all in on Notion, I think. Yeah, sure.

Let me know how it goes.

You convinced me. What are your frustrations, Ivan?

First, traffic in Paris is the best.

I get that. That's a small one though.

Well, I think it's actually quite beautiful. Like, you can stuck in traffic in an ugly city or you stuck traffic in a beautiful city. So I was thinking about it like the traffic, I give a 0 out of 10, but the city is beautiful. So I give it like plus 3 points, plus 4 points.

Other frustration in your life?

Other frustration. I'm generally pretty content. No, building company is not easy, but I treat it like a craft. It's like you play sports, you get better at tennis, building company, you get better at building companies, building product, you get better at building the next version of product. The fun is in the journey of it.

Are you very organized? No, no.

Okay, organized. But consider I work on Notion. I'm very surprisingly not organized. My, my personal organization system, just a page of to-do list. Okay. And then what I remember with my head, with my emails. Yeah.

Okay. And how— what's your— like, what time do you wake up? 7. 7?

Yeah, I wake up. The first thing I do is to make tea for my wife and I.

All right.

Yeah. She said that's the only way I say love you, love you to her. Then try to do some exercise and head to work.

Which is far away from home?

Not too far. 20 minutes Uber. Yeah, it's pretty close. I go to work every day and, yeah, go home, dinner with my wife, back online for a bit.

You work again after dinner? Yeah, I like to work.

It's just, it's very lucky that work to me, it's, it's play. Yeah.

Yeah. Very lucky. Same here. Yeah. Yeah. And weekends, do you work still?

Yeah, we'll work on weekends. I try to do some reading on weekends. I try to read before I go to bed, but I try to flip some picture books on Saturday morning, Sunday morning, try to play tennis, get better at it. Yeah, I like routine. That's why sometimes travel, different time zones throw me off my routines.

Yeah, yeah, I reckon I like— but you travel much more than I do. But what I don't like in travel is going too fast. Like my wife today is in Milan. She left this morning and she's coming back tonight. And why don't you stay one night?

You know, Europe is so, so compact. You need to—

I mean, you need to enjoy the place you stay. I think I need to enjoy the places. I liked being in China for 2 weeks.

2 weeks is great. Yeah. You get a feel of the cities, right?

It's the only way you understand. If you want to go on a movie, you know, to create that on our YouTube channel, it's the only way it's going to work. You were talking about readings. Do you have a book, like the book you would tell me and say?

The book. I would say there's a class of class type of books I like to read and recommend other people to read. There is a category called complex systems.

Okay. Complex system.

Yeah, it's like a startup, I would say, in the late '80s and still popular. I would say maybe popularity wanes a bit and centered around like Santa Fe Institute in the US about— it's really hard to explain the modern world. Like, it's easier to explain when things are few, when things are really a lot of them. When things are few, you can use algebra, you can count, you can know how the behavior on the bill— billboard table. You can figure out everything with Newtonian physics. When things are really large, you can use statistics. But things in the middle, it's really complex.

Mm-hmm.

Things in the middle are economics, life, biology. Building a company, organizations. Is there's no science for it, and complex system trying to solve this.

So that's there is a name for the that's the name for the book Complex System, or it's just a category. Okay, okay. There's a bunch books introduction to the theory of complex systems Stefan Thunder Rudolf Mannel. I have a few. That's a complex intro. Yeah, okay.

It's interesting because kind of like similar what I studied in college, it touched on different domains. It's trying to look at the edge, the connection of things, not just at the leaf, the nodes of things. And it's through the connection, you know, the value, you know how to make trade-offs, how nature makes trade-offs. I'm fascinated by those things.

Do you have a spiritual background or history?

No, I'm born and raised in China, so communism kills everything there. But yeah, the ways of life. My wife and I, especially her, getting really into philosophy in the past few years. Look at different people's value systems, ways of lives. Not like I just said, I like this. In the past few years, I realized I'm more of a journey person than a destination person. I enjoy the journey. Like journeys give me meaning, right? It's like, it's like give you meaning of the people around you, the make yourself a little bit better rather than just focus on the number. And that's kind of like— it's like I apply the same thing to exercise, to building a company, building a product. Yeah, enjoying the moment a little bit more.

Wow. We leave everything on everybody on this. I think it's a good way to end that discussion.

Yeah.

I want to say I love your sensitivity. I love that meeting, that, that talk. I love your style. And so that's the first thing I— This is my— Yeah, I like shoes. And I think you're very— you can tell when, when, when I saw you, I was like, oh, okay. I wasn't expecting, I don't know, whatever, you know? So that was great. And I understand— I understood a lot of things around Notion today, and it was very inspiring. Thanks a million. Yeah, thank you for having me.

This is very chill.

I enjoyed it. We'll follow you on LinkedIn. Is it the best place?

Oh, I don't use LinkedIn. Twitter is better.

Twitter is better. Okay, we'll go on X. Ivan Zhao. How do you pronounce it?

Ivan Zhao. So Twitter is Ivan H. Zhao. Okay. Thanks a million. Thank you. Yeah. See you later.

Congratulations. You've made it this far despite my French accent. And chances are you'll enjoy a few of my previous episodes in English. So we've picked a couple of them just for you, and you'll find the links in the description. If you like this one, feel free to share it with a few friends, 2, 3, or even 10. I'd love to have more English listeners. Don't forget to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever you're listening, and see you next time.