9-Year Hustle to Achieve a Single GoalㅣNotion's Cofounders

I'm Akshay Kothari. I'm the co-founder and COO of Notion. So Notion is a productivity software company, and what we're trying to do is essentially provide you one simple medium where you can essentially do all your work, everything from note-taking to having a knowledge base for your company, managing your projects, all in a single medium. We've done this by giving people building blocks for what these apps are built from. Before this, I was at LinkedIn for many years when they acquired my previous startup, I'm excited to chat with you today. I was really good at math and physics, and I studied electrical engineering when I came to the US and actually did a lot of engineering internships. It turns out that I didn't enjoy it that much. I found the engineering work to be a bit too sort of granular. I haven't really coded in a long time. I'm much more interested in product and business and the intersection of that. I wanted to sort of take a step back and think about maybe more large larger, higher-level sort of product business things that I could be working on. In between my bachelor's degree and my master's degree, I spent a year in venture capital. That's actually, for me, was a very important year because I got to meet a lot of entrepreneurs. After hearing the pitches for about a year, I realized that I wanted to be on the other side and not hearing the pitches as an investor, but actually wanting to start something of my own. That took me to Stanford. So I went to Stanford for 2 years. Every quarter I tried to start a company. Many of them Failed, but in my last quarter I started Pulse, which was essentially like a news application built for the iPad back in 2010. We built this as a class project at Stanford. We built this pretty fast. You know, we had to— I think the whole class was 11 weeks. So we built this sort of hacked up version of Pulse in about 6 weeks and we sort of put it out in the App Store, not sure how it would do. In a couple of weeks, it sort of went up to the top of the App Store. A few weeks later, Steve Jobs talked about it in the WWDC in 2010.

And again, let me just show you some of the latest apps that have been out. Pulse, which is a wonderful RSS reader if you haven't seen it.

And overnight it went from like a class project to being a company. I think the big learnings, one is that when you're building something, I think you sort of— my natural inclination was to like not release publicly. I wanted to make things better. I think if I had done that, I think I probably would have never released. I think the professor in the class I remember Michael Dearing pushed me to release even the beta version of the product we had, and by putting it out there, we got so much feedback. We improved it, we got in the market, we became a company. So I think sort of bias towards action of actually shipping something quickly worked out really well for us. I think the second thing that I learned was that many times we are much more interested in becoming an entrepreneur or starting a company rather than actually solving a problem. And if I think about Pulse versus the previous things I had done, News Pulse was actually solving a real problem that existed, which was that it was impossible to read news on your phone back in 2010. I think if you build something that people want, that people are struggling with, I think they will come and actually use the product. And then probably the last thing I would say that I think product is only half of the puzzle. I think you have to think about distribution and how you take the product to market. That's something that we use that I think a lot about Notion. Like we could be building the best possible product in this office, but if we don't figure out a way to distribute our product, like You know, people will never know what we've built.

In college, I studied cognitive science, how the human brain works, and a little bit of computing, a little bit of philosophy. But I really got into fine art as well, photography. At the end of my school years, most of my friends are artists. I'm the only person who knows how to code in my friend circle. So I started building web pages for everyone. After making those 3, 4, or 4 or 5 websites, Those people are creative. They can build their own websites if they know how to do that. Computing as a medium, they don't know how to speak that medium. With Spotify as a tool, everybody can play music. At that stage, it's still very much thinking about how can I help other people to create their websites?

Ivan was based in Canada and he decided to come to the Bay Area in San Francisco in 2011. He put out a simple post in Hacker News, which basically said like, hey, I'm a designer. I'm looking for a job. I want to work in San Francisco. And I essentially wanted to hire him as designer, and we actually gave him an offer to join Pulse back in 2011, but he ended up joining another company. But we kept in touch, and after I had sold Pulse to LinkedIn in 2013, he was about to start Notion. Notion ended up being my first investment. I had no intentions of joining full-time. I think that happened 5 years later. I think even before he started Notion, I think he was thinking about this problem for many years. He sort of deeply believes that everyone can be a creator and that computing devices are built for creation. not just consumption. To me, that felt like a really compelling mission because if you can actually make it happen, then you can unleash a lot of creativity in the world. In many ways, when you're investing in early stage, I think you're sort of like betting on the person much more than the idea because the idea can actually change. For that specific thing, it was very easy to bet on Ivan because you could see the passion and sort of deep thinking he had done before, even before he started Notion.

Your environment. Those are the documents you have in Notion. If we try to reorder stuff, you just drag it where you think it should be. The very first version of Notion is a web page builder. That's the prototype. And from there evolved into a web app builder. That's pretty much the first few years of Notion. It takes me several years to realize that people don't want to build apps. Very few people want to do that. It's kind of collaborative building apps and it's It's kind of like document editing. It's kind of like Xcode for the web. It's very confusing. On top of that, we're building on top of some technical foundation that wasn't stable. So it was very hard to tell whether it's our own bug or is the bug come from the platform we're using. So fundamentally, we have to rewrite the whole software. We're going to run out of time if we don't reset the company. I think the most important one is about yourself. It's about are you building something for yourself or are you building something that the world wants? The first version of Notion, very much what you think the world wants, what you want.

So Notion's first approach was essentially to create this platform where you can build software. So it gave you all the building blocks and it basically said, okay, now you can take these building blocks and build whatever software you can dream about. The challenge is that people don't wake up wanting to build software. People just wake up to do their job.

At that time, team is about 4 or 5 people. Me and Simon, my co-founders, we're probably most likely going to run out of money, unfortunately lay off everybody and go to somewhere small and interesting and quiet. And we can just focus on coding. Look at Japan, because neither of us has been to Japan and we always want to go to. And the reason for Kyoto is if you look at Airbnb, Tokyo and Osaka or other major cities, the rooms are fairly small, the apartments are fairly small. But for Kyoto, probably because during World War II it wasn't got bombed and a lot of Older houses are still there. They're quite a bit bigger and the pace of life in the city is slower as well. So good for folks working on things. And it's a much cheaper city than San Francisco. So Rebuild, the notion that everybody's working on today, is rebuilt from that stage.

So in 2018 summer, Ivan and I got together for breakfast just to catch up. I was at LinkedIn then. I was itching to get back into the garage and build again. And I thought I would probably leave LinkedIn and start my own company. But as we were having breakfast, he— Ivan talked a lot about the 2.0 release, which introduced the database. The tipping point for us was when we moved away from asking you to build software to providing you simple templates that allow you to do your job. We came in and said, hey, here's a knowledge base so you can collaborate with all your friends. Now, underneath that product, all the capabilities still exist. Like you can still modify it, you can still build your own software. But my marketing to you is less about that and more about specific things that you need to do your job and how Notion fills that gap. And so as we were talking, Ivan was at that time looking for a COO who could really help scale the business. The company was about 8 people then, and he offered me that role, which was a really interesting role. I think everything that I had done up until that point was more on the product side, and this role was basically a role that was trying to do everything inside the company except product. I think his thinking was that If he could get a product counterpart to really help build out go-to-market and the foundational teams here, I think it would allow him to stay focused on product. And for me, this felt like a really interesting opportunity where I joined well before I think most people knew about Notion, and I got to take something that had just hit product-market fit and take it to the masses. After a lot of thinking, I decided to join in the fall of 2018. And yeah, it's been amazing to watch. I think we were 8 people then and we are close to 500 people now. Just in the 4 years, business has grown over 100-fold in that time frame.

As the first Notion consultant in Korea, I believe the key to Notion's global success is Notion user community worldwide. I discovered Notion on Product Hunt during the release of Notion version 2. After using the product, I fell in love with Notion database function. I then took to social media posts to share my knowledge and know-how and templates. guide and contribute to growth of the Notion community in Korea. Today, the community has 43K members. It's amazing to see similar Notion communities popping up all over the world.

Again, it's kind of like art combined with technology. It's very intuition-driven. So a lot of things, it just feels right. And other things, we try to keep things very— we call it keep it Extremely simple. The simplest. We use the word dumb, like so dumb that you don't need to pay too much attention to start picking up and start using because it feels really natural. Right. It should just feel like an extension of your body. Like, you know how to use your hands. You know how to use very simple tools like a pen or a cup because they evolved so long with you. Fundamentally, it's about solving people's problems. If we do so, then people should love us. They will love us. And there's a lot more room to grow.

You can do so many different things with Notion, but it's built by just over 100 engineers. And I think the reason that is possible is because architecturally we have built the sort of the Notion product in a way that is very modular and we sort of want to expose these building blocks to other people. For example, we are not building a CRM or we are not building a specific project management software, but we're giving you all the building blocks so that you can build it. And so similar to Lego, I think the engineers focus on building the building blocks. And then we have the marketing team and the community that takes the building blocks and creates templates that market specific use cases. And that makes it a very efficient engine, right? Engineers don't have to think about building a very specific use case. They focus on just building capability and then marketing and other stakeholders build the packaging that we can go out and sell. I think that's probably one of the reasons why Notion's been able to stay so lean as we've, you know, grown to scale so far.

Today we're introducing Notion AI, which brings the power of artificial intelligence directly into your Notion workspace. Let's say we're writing a blog post to introduce Notion AI. It's as simple as asking AI Assist for help and clicking Generate Post. Next, just sit back and watch as artificial intelligence completes your first draft.

Notion AI allows people to essentially just tell what you're trying to do and it sort of automatically generates a lot of content or does a lot of things that you want it to. If you have a long doc, you can ask it to summarize things. If you are starting from scratch, it's like a blank page, you want some help, you can ask it to write a few things so that you can get started with it. I think AI itself is changing every week. I'm excited to see how it evolves. It's been quite a fun journey, but at the same time, it's still feels like pretty early. Like, I think there's still a lot of work to be done and we still feel like our best days are ahead of us. So I'm excited to see what the next couple of years hold for us. We have 4 values at Notion. We are mission-driven owners of our mission. So essentially our mission is to sort of enable ubiquitous software toolmaking and we very much are owners of that. The second value is that we are pacesetters. Obviously a So we need to move fast. I think that's one way we can win in the market. The third value is we are truth seekers, which is that we spend a lot of time rigorously thinking about a specific decision before we actually move forward. And the fourth one is we are kind and direct. We want to be kind to our coworkers, but at the same time, we want to be able to be direct and be honest with each other so that we're pushing each other to do our best work. I think these 4 values are very much authentically us. It's not aspirationally us, but it's like who we are. And we like that the second and third value, which is pace setting and truth seeking, fight with each other because in many cases some projects you want to move fast and in some cases you want to be able to take time and really rigorously think. So we like that they fight with each other so that we find like, okay, which projects can we move fast with? Which projects should we spend more time thinking about? The fourth value of being kind and direct is obviously nice because we're not just trying to be nice with each other. We're trying to really achieve our mission and that requires requires us to be direct with each other. These values have really helped us hire the right people. These values have really helped us make— been a good decision sort of rubric for us. Like when we're making important decisions, we think about like, does this represent the values we have? And it's memorable. I can say these 4 values in my sleep now, which I think is nice because I don't have to think about what the values are. The long-term sort of mission of the company is to create ubiquitous software toolmaking. Which is the simple idea that there's a billion knowledge workers out there, and our hope is that all of them feel the power to modify or create their own software. In doing that, we hope that Notion becomes the 3rd generation of productivity software after Microsoft Office and Google Suite, way much more powerful in that people will be able to not just take notes and manage projects, but will be able to create things that sort of work the way their brain works. So we're very excited about that. It'll probably take us more than a decade to get there, but we're excited to work on it.