How Notion Reimagined Productivity Tools | Ivan Zhao

Agent is a buzzword. Agent really hasn't happened in knowledge work yet. Notion is one of the few companies in the past 5+ years actually been consolidating those contacts and tools. This allows us to build knowledge work agents. The difference between your taste and ability to describe— there's a gap— and ability to make— there's another gap. If you're a software maker, you actually know what the bugs are. I know how things are roughly made, so I can describe it and I know how to fix it. Computing are just like reading and writing. It's a medium that you can shape. But until recently, computing is by and large the medium that only the programmer class can shape. When I learned about that idea, that got me to start Notion.

Welcome to Grit. I'm Juvin, partner at Kleiner Perkins, a show where we go beyond the highlight reel and explore the personal and professional challenges of building history-making companies. Today on the show, we have Ivan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Notion, the workspace that reimagines how millions of people organize, collaborate, and build. I would describe Ivan as an artist of technology, a deep thinker around systems and tools that I think really reflects the conversation that we had. Today. Enjoy the episode. You strike me as someone that generally does like— you look awesome. Like, I've seen videos of you before. Like, you always— your presentation is very thought through.

Oh, thank you.

So I'm surprised to hear you didn't care.

I care, but effort reward probably not worth it.

Yeah.

Like, I'm not fancy. I like fashion, but I'm not fancy. Like, I'm a burrito guy. If someone take me to a like 5-course Michelin style dinner, I prefer the burrito instead.

Why?

Just simpler.

Yeah.

All your food is one place rather than you have to wait for like 3 hours.

So it's the time?

Time is part of it. I would say a little bit too subtle, the flavor maybe. I prefer like simple food in front of you. You can just see everything. Maybe it's heavier flavor. But time is probably the best, the biggest difference.

It's time for me too. I'm not a Michelin. I like nice food, but I don't like fancy food. Generally, if there is a white tablecloth, it's already almost in my mind just too fancy.

You can have white tablecloth, but still fun. Like you go to a French restaurant, right? White tablecloths, but fairly— there could be simple kind, right?

That's true. But Sometimes it takes too long. Like usually—

We use white tablecloths at home.

You do?

Yeah, my wife trained me into it. White tablecloth.

At the dinner table?

Yeah, at dinner table we have proper tablecloth. White tablecloth, we have proper cutleries, and even when we order, we don't cook at home, but when we order DoorDash, we put it into a proper plate. And with proper napkins and eat on a white tablecloth.

What ethnicity is she?

She's Iranian.

I knew it. I'm Iranian.

Oh, you're Iranian?

I knew it.

How do you know?

That's such a Persian thing to do.

Why?

Well, like there's a, there is a formality in Persian culture, especially around food.

What's your last name?

Mirzadegan.

Mirzadegan.

Okay. Like, they're definitely like, food is a real ritual in Persian culture, as I'm sure you've now—

I actually don't like Persian food that much.

No way.

That's the joke that we just got married.

Congrats.

6 months ago. One of the jokes in the wedding speech we talk about is how much I don't like Persian food. And our CTO at Notion is also Persian too, so that become a company joke at this point.

So your wife is Persian, your CTO is Persian, and you don't like Persian food?

I don't. It's a little bit too bland. We go back to the brittle point, right?

The flavors aren't loud enough.

Yeah, like Indian food is like a louder version of Persian food, more flavorful.

There's no spice in Persian. There's nothing spicy in Persian food.

Pretty subtle.

Huh.

Yeah.

And so can I revisit the white tablecloth thing?

Go for it.

Yeah. Was that weird for you? Like when she first started putting white tablecloth down on the dinner table?

No, she's— it's like good evolution, right? Like I have to like go from college dorm room to working, then now like addoing a little bit. And that's— I see that's a step of evolution. Wasn't too weird. Like, she— I used to be an Airbnb person and she got me out of Airbnb, would become a hotel person.

Everything's come full circle.

Kind of, yeah. Well, before in college, like, I'm just Airbnb, right? So there wasn't a hotel before that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When you were— because you lived in Japan, right?

For a couple of summers, yeah.

Didn't pick up the language?

No, Japanese, it's— I wouldn't say necessarily too easy and it wasn't that long a time. Um, um, but the, the writing system, they share a lot of— I'm Chinese, uh, born and raised, so share a lot of writing characters with Chinese, and I can read quite a bit, like 20% of the time, 30% of the time.

Okay.

So you roughly could get a sense like, oh, what is this book about? Or what is the menu? Is it a chicken dish or is it a beef dish? No. That's useful.

Is your style inspired by any of these cultures?

You mean my personal style?

Your personal style. No.

How do I got into clothes? I was doing a lot of art in college, so I did science and art. So the art part, you hang out with art people. fashion and style be part of it. And during college, student budget, buying designer clothes on eBay, right? Yeah.

And it's just stuck. Maybe do people at work also think like, oh yeah, Ivan dresses pretty cool?

They do. People do. Yeah. And people also know that I'm a burrito person. So it's— I don't think it's contradictory.

What do you mean?

Well, you could care about style, but you also, you also simple, you could also be simple at the same time, right? You don't have to be, you care about style and fashion, but necessarily means you're, you like 5-course dinner.

I have heard, you can tell me if this is true or not, I can't remember, did I read it somewhere? You went to a meeting, I don't know if it was with a VC or somebody, And you started like feeling the table, like, is that true?

It's true, yeah. I think I was from Danny Fernandez. He was at Slack back then.

At Slack.

And he became— he went to Sequoia later. She went to Sequoia. I think I was commenting on their new office, Slack new office. And what, like, you actually felt Well, you pay attention to the surrounding, right? I like to touch things. So if it's a fabric, sometimes I just like to touch it, understand it. And here you can tell, okay, this is laminated. So it's an okay table.

Not the fanciest.

It doesn't need to be fancy, but it could be—

Oak?

It could be wood, right? Proper wood will make a difference.

Yeah, we need a new table.

Probably need a new table. A little bit dark here.

I like the dark.

Could be dark, but not gray. I wouldn't say— I guess Kleiner Perkins, probably grayish color.

Yeah. You know, it's actually funny. I was thinking like, I can't remember the last time I ever wondered before a guest walked in what the guest would think of the room until you were about to walk in. And I thought, I bet you Ivan's gonna like judge what the room feels like.

Judging a little bit, but it doesn't matter. Let me turn off my phone. Yeah, that's fine. We're in tech, so.

That's right.

Yeah.

When you walk into your office, the Notion office, it's right here, right downtown?

We just moved like a month ago, 2 months ago. Yeah.

When you walk into that office, do you have the same Judgment?

I do. It's still a work in progress, and I would say we're in the middle of renovating it. It's more polished than I would like. There's more gloss than— the quality is higher than I would like for it to be, or at least the glossy level.

What do you mean? Give me an example.

Like the wood. If you go to come to our office, We, it's like an, I'm going after a 19— early 1900 craftsman style, a lot of wood, and there's wood paneling, wainscoting up to this high, and there's little shelves coming out. You can put play, you can put books, you can put interesting things on top. So it feels like not typical, like a tech office. And The wood material, it's shinier than I would like. Back then, the wood, it doesn't— it wasn't as shiny as today's wood. It wasn't as much premiere, right? So that's a difference. And it's another difference is like, I prefer things to live in a little bit. So it feels like a little more low-key. If you have a too— I believe you have too good an office, your business goes down because you're not focused on the right thing. Right? So the feeling that the office should be lived in, should be malleable. You can— you should be able to move things around. You don't take the office space too seriously, even though the materials are honest. The vibe is good. Yeah.

So— Can I play this forward a little bit?

Go for it.

You have all these observations about the office. It's a new office. It's not to your It's not exactly what you want.

We are renovating it, so it's our responsibility.

Right. But like, are people in the company that are responsible for this not like, how is Ivan care— like, does he not have other things to care about right now?

Like, how is he commenting on the specificity of the veneer of Well, first of all, I was the one who picked the wood initially. So I think there's a difference between production and sample, right? And people do know I care a lot about this. And it doesn't take too much of my time. This is something I can make judgment just like I walk in here, I can make— it doesn't take you too much time for you to decide whether you like a bar when you walk in or not. Right. So doing judgment of choice of materials takes that amount of time for me. So, and at some point I can't help it. It's just like you can't— if there's a loud noise, you can't help but to hear it. If there's aesthetically not a great environment, but you can't help but to see it. And but when you make the room good, people feel it, right? Most people Before they join Notion, we try to invite candidates and work from our office or come to our office and meet more people in person. And oftentimes that's one of the selling features for joining the company because people do see we do care so much about a lot of details, a lot of craft, including our people, including our environment.

And if the wood doesn't get fixed, Does it drive you nuts?

No, I'll just get used to it. I think it's too late to fix it. So because we already put out the wood on 3 floors, that's gonna cost a lot and takes a lot of time. So.

So you can just move on past that?

Yeah.

It won't drive you nuts?

I'm pretty pragmatic.

Okay. And in the product, in the Notion, 'cause the Notion product itself is I don't know. There's got to be awards that you've gotten for design and beauty and aesthetics. Like it's, it's well, it's, it is the defining feature of the product, in my opinion, is in many ways it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful product. It's beautiful software. Are you even more attentive in software?

Probably, yes. Probably. I'm good at picking up bugs. Like, like when things are off a little bit, I can sense it and feel it. Right before taking the car here, I was filing a bug about when you're typing in the title of a page, it's a little bit laggier than when you're typing in the body. It's so— I just— it's common because when you're typing a title, the title probably needs to render into different, many different places in Notion. So you trigger more rendering somewhere, therefore laggier than when you're typing in the body of the page, right? And there are probably like a couple hundred, 100 millisecond difference. But when you just use the product every day, you live in it just like you live in the office, you notice those things.

If like in a bizarro world, some random great CEO came in off the street and was using the product knew it, do you think they would be able to feel in the way that a founder does?

In aggregate, people can feel. They might not be able to articulate. Just like when you walk in a nice room, you'll be able to feel it. You like a bar when you walk in. When you like into a restaurant, you like the ambience, but you cannot say why you like it, right? The difference between your taste and ability to describe, there's a gap. And the ability to make, there's another gap. So I would say if you're a software maker, you actually know what the bugs are. Like, I know, oh, probably because in the title you're going to render in more places, therefore that caused the bug. I know how things are roughly made so I can describe it and I can hopefully know how to fix it. For furniture, like for office, you probably know it feels great, but you don't know why. But if you pay attention to interior, to architecture, you can tell the why, right? But I cannot make furniture. I'm not a furniture maker, but I can sort of tell which style I like, why I like it, which style I want my office to feel like.

Is there a world where, going back to your burrito comment, maybe like you need some form of deep simplicity when everything else is so consuming for you? Like when you think about such depth of detail about the world, whether it's your company, the physical spaces that you occupy.

That's a good point. I never thought that way. Yeah, you have to make some tradeoffs. Food is the place I like. I like food, but I'm not very like fancy, fancy foodie.

Yeah.

What else do I make tradeoffs? Food is definitely one. At the same time, it's not everything is like, you mentioned Notion care about craft. We're pretty pragmatic. We're not a 10 out of 10. Like we are probably a 7 out of 10, 6.5, 7 out of 10. And I'm happy with that. Like happy zone for me probably is 7.5. But if you push that too far, at least I believe you push that too far, you're optimizing too much for the craft and maybe beauty. But not enough for the business and utility. So there's a balance here.

Is that balance scientific or is it all taste?

Well, scientific are going to reflect in your revenue and growth. Yeah. And the taste part is more personal. Like you just— I wouldn't be proud putting something that's, you know, 1 out of 10 in terms of craft and detail, but great business. Um, yes, the notion, it's like there's a balance there, right? I want to put out something I'm proud of.

Are there other, maybe just using this framing that I just came up with on the simplicity around food, do you have other areas of life that maybe you've never thought about it this way, But that counterbalance some of these other things?

Like, I'm not a super organized person by default. Like, I'm a very detailed person, but I prefer not to do the organization.

Give me an example.

Like the way I use Notion myself, people must think I have a very elaborate database related to the other database that track everything. I'm just at one page with checkboxes. I'm not a productivity person. Yeah, let's keep things rather— I still use paper notebooks to write down things, but it's not in the most organized way. That's one example.

Are there companies, other software that you think when you use them, That they deeply care about craft?

Yeah, there are ones that are better than Notion. I would say Linear is a good one, the issue tracking, bug tracking for engineer product. It's pretty specific in terms of use cases, but they put a lot of— they care a lot of detail, care a lot of detail, right? It's fast, It feels good. The vintage Apple, definitely. It's like the OS of Apple, the phone, is still one of the best-crafted detailed products. Even still is. I think it becomes really tricky when you have to take care of a large surface area and having high craft. It's easier to create jewelries. Like designers love to mention this to-do app called Things. It's like a German-made to-do app that can only do like 10 features in the product. Not a lot, but everything feels great, right? Relatively speaking, it's easier to build that than build something much more complex like Notion, like Linear, which is much larger surface area to take care of. So how do you make that trade-off? It's really tricky.

I'm curious, and not because I play for the home team, but like, where would you put Figma in that spectrum? Because in many ways, Figma's scope continues to increase.

Yeah, I would say Figma similar to Notion. So maybe like if Notion is like a 7, 6.5, Figma is probably a 7. I'll put Linear in terms of graph on like 8.5. A, Figma has a lot of scope.

Yeah.

The surface area keeps expanding with the new products, but I think Dylan and the team will have some— have a similar trade-off problem, right? You need to ship features, you need to refactor your features. It's a lot of surface area versus just make everything really detailed, delightful. Yeah, if you go on design Twitter, there's endless complaints. How can you make it better?

And do you think that it's just like a natural evolution of life where if Notion is still around in 50 years, it will just be uglier?

Entropy erodes everything, including software. Like if you open like one of the most used ubiquitous living software is probably Microsoft Word, right? If you open it on the Windows version, there's just so much in there. There's layers of layers of functionality and people's needs and wants packed into that thing, right? There's almost so much you can do with it. So reset is very necessary. If you don't reset, it's really hard to build something that's simple, shrink the surface area, then still provide the utility and still provide high craft. Otherwise, you probably increase your surface area to continue to provide feature and utility, you drop your craft, something like that. Yeah, it's tricky.

Very tricky.

Yeah.

Probably why there aren't that many companies that you would put in the pantheon of—

We look up to hardware, we look up to— so if you come to our Notion office, our conference rooms are named after physical tools. So iPhones being one of them, one of the greats, right? The original BMW 3 Series, right? Toshiba rice cookers. Sony transistor radio, Singer sewing machines, like those tools, they, at least the class of those tools last decades, sometimes 100+ years. And they don't change their form factor too much because they really find something that really works for people. And like Toshiba rice cooker changed 100 million+ people, how do they eat rice every day, right? Sony transistor radio, they figure out how to shrink transistor into something small so they can provide portable sound. for people in the late '50s and '60s. It's the same thing to figure out Walkman, it's the same story. So it's like figure out interesting trade-offs with the new material and create a form factor. And usually that form factor can last 2 decades, 3 decades, 5 decades sometimes.

Do you think you're born with a certain taste or do you think taste is learned? Meaning, I'll give you a specific example, like If someone joined Notion 10 years ago, would they have a similar taste to you 10 years later?

There are designers at Notion been working there like 4 or 5 years, they pick up, we pick up similar things. Like Notion design team looks like we all, many of us like Lemaire's clothes, like pick up similar fashion. You influence that, that osmosis, I like that word a lot. So definitely can be learned. How fast you're learning depends on probably on you and the culture, right? How much is born?

Like when you were a kid, would your parents have described you as having taste?

I was born and raised in China. Not much taste there. Yeah, I think I wanted to I wanted to be— I know I'm a little bit different growing up. Like, I play sports. I was good with school and—

Or not?

Yes, doing both.

You were good at school and sports?

Yes. Yeah. And do a lot of different things outside the classrooms, right? So, but I wouldn't say I had an aesthetic growing up. I did a lot of watercolor paintings. I did Chinese calligraphy. but it was not like fashionably dressed or something.

Right.

And after moving to Canada when I was 17, and at first I realized my— I don't know the language, so I need to really soak up. Like, you learn how to read and write English in China, but you did not learn how to speak or understand the context. So I have to watch a lot of TV to understand the context, like SpongeBob and Simpsons. That's one.

Great.

Once you understand the joke, you truly understand the language and the culture. So language, number one, and another realization is like, I don't know much about the Western culture. So there's this book called allmusic.com or something, you have all the ranking of class— good albums throughout like past maybe 100 years. So I just went down this book and all the 5-star rating albums, I just find them on the internet and listen to them. Not all of them, but many of them, right? Going through the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Eric Claptons of the world, from classic rock to different jazz.

To understand culture, American culture.

Understand music. So I went down this list of the past many decades music, all the 5-star, many of the 5-star rating albums. Did that. My first-year college roommate was— she's really into jazz. She actually properly introduced me to jazz.

Huh.

So I did the same thing for jazz albums. I also had a roommate, she's a film major, a film study major. So we went down all the Criterion Collection, the movies. So dude, all the— In some sense, like a pre-training for yourself, going through all the greats in terms of music and movies. Movies actually give you a lot of aesthetics, like, because you can watch how people dress, how they behave, the details, the architecture. I was doing photography at the time, so learning a lot of how to take photos from movies and pick up a lot of, you know, aesthetic stuff from movies. So those are roughly my pre-trains for aesthetic side of things.

When did you come stateside?

12 years ago, 13 years ago, 12 years, yeah. How old were you?

So you did college in the—

In Canada.

In Canada, and then you came after that?

Yes. So a couple of years high school, college at UBC in Vancouver. So my mom took me to Vancouver, then the last year of college wanted to start Notion essentially. Didn't know what it's called back then. Not exactly the same product, but idea is the same. And in order to move down here, because I'm Canadian, I need to figure out my visa. So I work at a company for about a year and a half.

Inkling.

Inkling.

Pat McKinnis's company.

Yes, he's my first boss, my only boss.

McKinnis?

McKinnis.

Quite the first boss to have.

Yeah, his first check into Notion too.

You're kidding me.

Yeah, I was telling him like, hey, I'm like—

McKinnis, for those that don't know, is the now COO of Rootplane, right?

So before he started a company called Inkling, which is about publishing, desktop publishing, and 'cause the, Last year of college, I was sort of like, okay, I want to start a company and I want to move to the United States because this is where people start companies. And I put my portfolio on Hacker News and a lot of people reached out, including Matt. And I came down here, interviewed a bunch of companies, decided to join Matt because Inkling, because it's the closest to Notion. And I also tell him, like, told him, hey, I want— I'll work here for a year or two, figure out my visa, and I'll start my own. And he's very supportive, actually. He put on the first check into Notion. He introduced me to all the investor connections, like, make you really understand how Silicon Valley works. So people just pay it forward.

Wow.

Yeah.

And you told him, When you were moving here, hey, I have this idea of this company. Wasn't called Notion, but it was in the general direction of what you thought the company would be. You thought Inkling was the closest, one of the closest comparisons that you could find to what that business was doing, to what you wanted to do. And you said, hey, I'm gonna do a tour of duty here, and then I'm gonna go start Notion.

I wouldn't call tour of duty. I'm, it's like I'm trying to figure out my visa here. It's harder to raise money than harder to figure out the visas than to raise money. Yeah. So I figured it took me a while to write a business plan, a fake business plan to get the visa. But then eventually I did. Then he helped me to start a company.

And during that time, that year and a half, how was your English at that point?

Oh, it was fine. Yeah.

Did you not consider staying at Inkling? Like, did you not think, okay, now that I've seen Inkling, there's all these other companies that are interesting. I'm meeting all these cool people that are doing other things. Like it's, it strikes me as a little bit strong-willed to move from China, not speaking English, learn our culture through movies and music basically. And then your friends that you met there. And then basically put your flag in the ground that you're going to start this company and then stick to your word that you're going to use Inkling basically as a way to get your visa and then see that through.

Yeah.

You weren't tempted to deviate from the plan? I mean, how often does somebody have a plan? They had just It turns into reality.

What the intention is never to join a company or start a company. The intention is to build a thing that doesn't quite exist. That's the intent. And the only way to do it is to start your company to build it.

And what were you using in, I guess, college that made you feel like there needs to be more?

The one that really inspired me was discover the early ideas of computing, like where this industry came from. Most people don't know. Most people working in tech, they don't know where tech come— modern tech come from. Modern tech come from This group of people, the hippie generation, '60s, '70s, not far from here on the West Coast, San Francisco, Stanford area. Those are the people who took drugs, acid, and that same generation applied the same thinking to this device we call computing. So back in the context, computers, computing are room-sized calculators. There are people who are not— don't use much beyond calculating taxes or even before that, ballistic missile trajectories. That's what it's used for. And this hippie generation say, wait a second, if you just put a monitor in front of this room-sized computers, which back then they were only printing out papers back and forth, there's no displays, there's not interactive, you can create a new medium out of this. You can make this thing be interactive. And that's why this mouse was invented in that generation. And that created this computing industry, this like multi-trillion, tens of trillion dollar industry that drives the world today. It wasn't like that, right? And so this is our industry. Most people don't know the history of it, and even fewer people understand the intent of that, the original generation's intent. Their intent was computing are just like reading and writing. It's a medium that we can pick up, we can shape it. Just like you can write out your English sentences, you can phrase it however you like. Some really good people can be a poet, some people can be a novelist. Or you can use for business work. It's a medium that you can shape. Computing could be a medium that everyone can shape too. And, but today, by and large, we're in the AI era. So the story changed a little bit in the past few years, but until recently, computing is by and large the medium that only the programmer class can shape. Almost programmers are kind of like the scribes of the modern era. Only a few people can read and write. So that's not the original intent. The intent of the '60s, '70s generation is computing software is a medium that everybody can shape and create whatever tools they need to do, solve whatever problem they want, just like you can use English too for all kinds of purposes. When I learned about that idea, I remember reading those early papers by people like Alan Kay, who was one of the inventors of the first personal computers, or Douglas Engelbart, who was more famous for inventing the mouse, but his intent is actually the purest. I realized this is one of the most powerful things yet to be realized, and I want to build a product company, whatever that is, to work on this idea. That got me to want to move to Silicon Valley to start Notion.

It's kind of like Steve Jobs is part of that generation. And, you know, when his daughter first writes Lisa on the Mac and he goes, he gets delighted because she's expressing what he wants the computer to do, which is that a little girl can write her name, I guess with a mouse.

Probably, yeah, from the movie or something?

Yeah.

Yeah. The Macintosh and the Lisa before that was— it's one of the first graphic user interface-based computers for mass market. And the idea come from Steve Jobs, almost 10 years ago before that, visit Xerox PARC. A lot of the people I described, Engelbart, Alan Kay, they are— those people work at PARC at that time, not Engelbart, but Alan Kay's people. And when Steve Jobs saw it, he said, wow, computer should be interactive, computer should be graphic-based, right? So he took a lot of this idea and wanted to create Macintosh or creating Visa with, but even he admitted he did not copy the whole thing. So the famous story is they show him 3 things. First is graphic user interface. He thinks that's the best thing ever invented. He also, he saw that and took that. They show him networking computer, PARC computer network together. Maybe there's like Dozens or low hundreds of them together. He didn't see that. So Macintosh was standalone floppy drive. The most, I would say, nuanced one is object-oriented environment. He didn't see that too. That's the intent I was expressing earlier, is allow computer to be like Lego-like, object-like. People can take it apart, put it back together without being programmers. He didn't see that one. So in a sense, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates generation popularized computer by putting PC on every desk at home, but they lock computing, lock software into this application prison that's easier for people to understand in some ways, but a lot more rigid, capped the ceiling of how far you can go with your software. So that created a dual class of Application software makers, which are programmers, and application users, which are the rest of us.

And do you think, you mentioned 3 years ago with the AI stuff, things have changed. Do you think now we're going back to the original essence of what the hippies would have wanted, which is, you know, like I am in whatever, Replit, Lovable, building stuff in natural language.

It's hard to say that's the 60th, 70th generation original intent. It's—

Well, do you think we've gone back to the accessibility that the industry was Technically, yes, it opened up more, like more people can vibe coding.

And I think it's more important to think, I think it's more profound than that. I think, and I don't think anybody sort of knows the right answer. What I mean by that is we always have an interesting relationship with the tools and medium we use. So right now we're in this transition from one major medium of the classic computing to this new medium of this more squishy, more language model-based, more AI-based computing. We're right in the middle of this. And when you do this medium transition, you sort of— people tend to use the new medium like the old medium. Let me give you a couple of examples. Like when TV just happened, people are sitting on the television to do radio speech, treat it like the old medium radio. When telephone just happened, which replaced telegram, people initially only used telephone as a very parsimonious short speech notes, just transmitting information. Like they don't do gossip, they don't chitchat with their friends. They put a telephone in a very formal place in their house. If someone rang the telephone at nighttime, someone died, right? It's very formal, right? When car just invented, people don't know what to do with it. Put a flag, someone with a flag in front of a car, right? It's a very— we tend to use the old medium like the old media, tend to use the new medium like the old media in the beginning. I think we're in the same phase with AI. Like if you put together side by side ChatGPT's UI next to a Google UI, it's kind of similar. Search box and give you some answers, right? But there's way more you can do with the language model, with AI. We just haven't fully figured out how yet. And the best way we can do that is through the lens of the old medium, which is generating the answer. For generating the code, your codegen examples, maybe take us half a decade, a decade to figure out how to use this, but we're in that interesting transition point. And I think this language model started AI medium. It's probably as revolutionary as the computing medium. So my bet is a different question and answers that the original computing pioneers were thinking about with the computing media. What that is, I don't know, but I feel they're close to same order of magnitude and they're different.

I remember when the public cloud first came about, that was the industry that I was in my whole career until I I joined Kleiner and in the beginning it was the same feeling of, oh my God, like look at all the advantages that we can get as a business, right? You're not racking and stacking servers and data centers, but everybody was porting their preexisting applications with all of those dependencies. And trying to shove them into AWS. And, you know, like it took years, but eventually folks kind of realized, oh, we need to rewrite these things from the ground up. And then there's an entire ecosystem built around that that needs to be born. And, you know, I think if you believe that, In this analogy, and maybe that pull of technology is even stronger in this case. I also think that's probably why on the one hand there is like more entrepreneurship and excitement about starting new companies. And on the other hand, there is more fear that you're going to be one of those old applications that's about to be rewritten because fundamentally all of your dependencies are a native or a foreign language to what's happening moving forward.

Yeah, the entire chessboard is redrawn, right? The ingredients we use to build tools, there's a brand new alien type of ingredient, type of wood show up on our doorstep. Everybody trying to figure out what to do with it, right? That's the exciting part.

Is it exciting for you or is it nerve-wracking? Meaning if the world continued to exist 3 years ago in the same way that it did, there wouldn't be an existential risk for Notion of somebody building the entire stack from the ground up. Now, I think the question for you, like any incumbent, which is weird to think of you as an incumbent, but nonetheless an incumbent in this era, Can you refactor yourself? Do you need to? If you did, what would that look like? The existing UX paradigms that you've been building on, do those need to change?

I think a lot of things will change, but probably most things will change. And the question— different companies will answer this question differently. I would say Notion, classic SaaS, vertical SaaS company will answer this question very differently from, let's say, like us, Notion, because our starting position, our intent is very different from just vertical cloud-based SaaS companies. So maybe think about what's our strategy, right? Because we were inspired by early computing pioneers, we wanted to make software malleable and tinkerable for end users. In the past 5, 6 years, we've been consolidating different vertical SaaS into one tool. So start with document editing, knowledge, project management. Most those Lego blocks for knowledge work, we're taking them out one by one and putting into Notion. So did, and most recently calendar and mail, right? So by and large, we have most knowledge software building blocks for SaaS. So our SaaS era strategy is consolidating those tools into one platform. And it turned out this is really good for AI because AI needs the context and tools to be together. We've been spending 5+ years consolidating it onto one place. Now allow us to build automated, no longer just providing tools for our customer, but automate the work for our customer, providing those building blocks in the form of knowledge work agents that actually do the work for them.

Right.

So if you think about this, like the agent is a buzzword. Agent happens essentially software that do work for you, right? Agent happened first in customer support vertical and most recently in last year or so happened in coding vertical. Agent really hasn't happened in knowledge work yet. Why is that, right? Because the tools and context for knowledge work are really spread out. Tools and context for coding is actually, if you think about it, fairly self-contained, right? Most for coding agents, all the contexts are in the GitHub repos in one place, plain text files, easy to read and write, and the tools it needs to use are reading and writing those files. So it's very self-contained, so easier to create coding agents. Extremely difficult to create knowledge work agent because knowledge work today Are those a dozen different tasks that you and me do across a dozen different apps? And Notion is one of the few companies in the past 5+ years actually been consolidating those contexts and tools, right? And so you no longer need to like go to different places to do different things. All the Lego blocks in one place. This allows us to build knowledge work agents, and this is what we're working on right now and give us quite a good head start.

But then they have to be bought into the Notion ecosystem end to end. Otherwise the agent will probably struggle to hop out of the documents that it can't see.

Not necessarily. Like we have, we work with external context too, right? Which last month we just launched our enterprise search product. So right now Notion integrates with 10+ different external contexts. From the Google stack to Microsoft stack, Atlassian stacks, right? We work across all of them. You can search across them and you can aggregate and do knowledge work across all of them.

And when you think about the organization of your company relative to the product that you want to deliver, has your thinking evolved over the last few years? Around the organization of the company?

I think many organizations need to— like how to build AI products is fundamentally different from building classic software. The analogy I like to use, it's more like, it's more akin to brewing beer than building bridges. The classic software, it's you sort of can engineer anything you can imagine. So like the— how do people build software in the past 20 years? You either do the Y Combinator style, follow your customers, or you can do the Steve Jobs style. You have a vision, you don't listen to customer because you know better, right? They both start with some kind of end. Then you spec out what the design is and engineer build it. Language model actually work differently. You cannot build everything you can imagine. Oftentimes take you 70, 80% there and never close that gap of remaining 20%. We actually learned this, the hard lesson, right? We tried to build a knowledge work agent a year and a half ago where all the ingredients are there on the Notion Lego side, but the language model doesn't fully— the model wasn't fully ready. You can't really force it, right? So it's more like brewing beer that you have to create the right environment, just channel the yeast to let them do their work. And this changes the sequence of how the software development process, in a sense. So you have to experiment a lot. You put design engineers side by side together and with the data, with the right context, and just keep trying things and see what sticks versus the old ways, more like waterfall-ish from your vision where customer need work backwards. And I think a tick Took us a while to realize this. I think many other companies are also realizing this, even larger companies. Like, it's really hard for them to— once the company gets large, hard to shift this way of building software.

And with the beer analogy, I actually really like that, the beer versus the bridge. If you're brewing beer, what you're basically saying is, look, there's some ingredients that go into this. They're not ever exactly the same. And then, or maybe they are. And then what comes out is a slightly tasting different tasting beer. Is that what you mean by the beer analogy?

Beer analogy, that means it's organic, therefore you don't fully control it. You cannot tell the yeast, hey yeast, please taste that way, right? You cannot force it. You have to channel the model, the wisdom and capabilities inside this model. Sometimes it does, can build the thing that in your head, sometimes it doesn't. But the best thing you can do is just try and see if you can channel towards it. You cannot force it versus classic way of building software. You can pretty much build anything in your Figma file. Maybe it takes 3 months, might take 6 months, but you can get there. For beer, you might never get there. That's why if you go on Twitter, There's so many cool demos, but that's not— now we're harder to find real product because to be a real product, you need to close the gap of remaining 20, 30%. That's the biggest difference.

Is there a world where you're right, we've done some of the lower-hanging fruit use cases today, coding, customer success. Is there a world where we're overestimating In the near term, moving into some of these other periphery agentic-like systems that we would like to automate is just going to take longer and it's going to be harder than what we thought?

Probably. Like, who did— like Andrej Karpathy talked about, he saw a self-driving car 10 years ago, right? Took 10 years to go through all the corner cases and system bureaucracy or human bureaucracy to get there. Likely we'll be in the same— not likely, but very likely we'll be similar with knowledge work agents. But when you play with this language model, the underlying capability, you know, it's just so powerful. It's just so different. It's a— there's a human in there. It can do more and more of the things than we do. And then it's trying to figure out the tooling around it, the stack around it, how to unleash this capability. And then there's the organizational side of things, go-to-market side of things. How do you help your customers to understand this so they can adopt it, they can evolve their organization for it? That's probably even slower, right? But you know that the nucleus of this, the capability is there. And the capability— the funny thing is the capability gets better every 3-ish months. Doesn't see no trends to stop. It's pretty interesting.

What do you mean there's a human in there?

I think this is the largest shift for all software companies, like a SaaS cloud software company. It's transitioning from selling tools To facilitate work, to providing the work itself. The tools is providing the tools for other person to use to do some business needs. But now language model is having more and more of a human capability to reason, to think, to understand, right? Through largely through text. So software company, what they can do, Is to not only providing the tools, but providing the human sitting behind the tool as a package. You sort of see this in customer support, right? It's no longer just make your support agents more efficient, it's actually doing the support. You see this in coding agents, right? It's no longer just like IDE to help your developer tab completion, but actually to provide a final output. We haven't seen this for knowledge work yet. We haven't seen for many other sectors of knowledge work yet, but we're going to see more and more of them. Like we're building product for this, right? Like last— you can see early shape of this. Last month we launched 3 AI products. Enterprise search is one of the things I mentioned, right? It's pretty—

Baby hop.

Pretty straightforward. You don't have to find re— 20 articles to find answers, generate answers for you. Research, so you don't have to synthesize and write a report, draft a report based on all your internal content and data. Used to something can take you hours, now you can down in 5 minutes. That's another baby half of knowledge work. And the third one is meeting notes. You don't have to type all the meeting notes. Now piece together the notion like also of a calendar, and documents, and with some AI Lego of transcription and summary, you can have the notes better than any human can write. So those are some of the most fundamental knowledge work chunks that used to take people a lot of effort. Now AI can do this, not only providing the tool, but providing the work that humans used to do.

And those 3 products, how much easier did it feel for you to build those 3 products in the last year than it would previously have to build, just to build the product?

I would say it's definitely a huge advantage going back to your question of how is Notion positioned in this, right? Because using that meeting notes as an example, we build a product in 2 months because we already have the building blocks. For this, we have a collaborative document surface area. That's one of the best building blocks. We have a calendar product, so we know your meetings, when you should start meeting, push notifications on that. That's another building block we have right now. We can bring in the building block of AI transcription and AI summary. Those 4 building blocks together allow us to ship one of the best-in-class meeting notes products under 2 months. Because we already have this and we have your contacts. So all your knowledge, the rest of your company knowledge also lives in Notion and this and work with enterprise search. After you finish the meeting or during your meetings, you can ask questions or, hey, what's the someone so-and-so talk about in previous meeting? You can do that again, compounding, right? We can consolidate tools. So in the SaaS area, we consolidate tools so their company could be more productive. Like customers, like one good example recently, Ramp fully moved on to Notion. We reduced their tooling costs by 70%. And but most importantly, it's not just the cost of the tools, the company can ship things much faster. Imagine each employee at Ramp has those 3, 4 AI agents out of the box, all work seamlessly with the rest of Notion and the rest of the Ramp employee. That's a lot of productivity gain, right? That's still a SaaS era value proposition, reducing tool costs and increase productivity. AI even, in my opinion, dialed this up even more because language model wants the context and tools to be together. It's no longer just human business buyer prefers this. The model itself will keep hearing the term context window, context window, because language model want the context to be together so they can start thinking and Problem solving for you together, right? So if you're— the context is fragmented like the SaaS era, it's like it sort of works because human is the glue, right? You go to your Slack, read some snippet messages, go to your Notion, go to your Google Docs, and go to your Jira and go to your email back and forth. All the context is stored in your brain. It's really hard for AI to do that, right? Human barely get it to work. So if anything, AI prefers the context to be together, tools to be together, and we have the context and tools together of one of the few platforms out there can do this. That's why I'm saying we're quite well positioned to build the knowledge work agent that yet to exist.

As you think about moving into this really next era of Notion, would you agree it feels like a Completely different step function moment in time for the company to move through. Like in the early days of the company, correct me if I'm wrong, but you were searching for product market fit for years.

4 or 5 years.

4 or 5 years. You hired a team, then you had to fire the team. Then you and your co-founder moved to Japan, which I guess everything comes full circle as you go back to Japan with an eyepatch. Is then you go hole up for a year in an apartment. A year? Is it a year rebuilding this?

Yeah. Maybe two years.

Two years. You two, three of you, two or three of you. Two of us are holed up in an apartment in Japan for two years.

Two. We holed up for two years, but we've been traveling. We spent the two summers in Japan. We went back to SF.

And that was to get from. one version of the product, which was maybe crappy, not good enough, wasn't getting adoption to what then became Notion. Right.

Mm-hmm.

I don't know. Like, do you, uh, when you went back to Japan, did you feel like, do I need to do that again? Like, do I, do I need to, how do I find clarity Especially now when, you know, like you raised at whatever, $10 billion, like you have how many, like thousands of employees?

No, it's close to 1,000.

1,000 employees. Yeah, it's like there's more to lose now. How do you, I don't know, do you think about like what it takes to maybe re-underwrite all of your mental models?

It's funny because I just got back from Japan and one of the Nintendo trip was we had an event with the mayor of Kyoto.

Cool.

Yeah, Kyoto was the city that Sam and I spent 2 summers in and Kyoto mayor heard about our story, so they set up a tech conference, then we did a fireside chat. with the mayor and we'll talk about how much is the full story. Come back to Kyoto. If you ask me one day I'll be meeting the mayor and talk about that story, I would say, well, that would be crazy. But here we are, right? In a sense, the same question for the— I would say the entire software industry, like the chessboard is different, the material is really different. The SaaS area is in some sense very boring, very steady, right? You figure out your product-market fit, you figure out your go-to-market, hire a sales team, done. AI era is— there's a lot of fog of war and that makes the game a lot more fun, a lot more exciting. You have— you can go all the dimensions. Nobody knows what the right answer is. I think we're in that position and we have one of the most unique hand of cards because what we did in the SaaS era by consolidating.

Sure.

And that allow us to do something really unique like we just talked about. And it's revigorating for myself in a sense to think about like what you can build with this, all the Legos in the SaaS era and this new type of Legos that's AI.

It's almost like, how long have you been building Notion for?

10+ years.

Like you probably can't admit this, To me. But like, you know, pre-AI, you're 8 years in, it's a slog, like 8 years of doing anything, basically your entire adult life. You're probably tired. Like, to your point, like it was kind of boring and you've been doing the same thing in a less dynamic game for a really long time. I wonder for a lot of founders that have been doing what you've been doing for the, in the SaaS era for as long as they have, for some they'll probably pack up and go home, but for others, maybe it's like a, you know, I wonder if it breathes new life into you. Like it gives you—

Notion's one of the, we built one of the first application for AI product. And we got this conviction pretty interestingly because Sam Altman and I were friends with OpenAI folks and we got early access to GPT-4. And that was late 2022. And when we saw it, it's like the world will be very different. There's a human package inside of this. And we actually locked ourselves into a hotel room in Mexico.

Wow.

And for a week and a half, built the first version of AI product. And we actually launched a month before ChatGPT happened. So, 'cause this is like when you build things, when the ingredient changes, there's just so much excitement. Like what new thing can you build with this, right? There's a lot of things become really hard, was really hard, impossible before, where you never thought about that before. Now you can think about that way. That's a lot of fulfillment for people who build tools.

So you did do your redo of Kyoto.

Yeah, we did the Kyoto thing in Cancún this time.

In Cancún? You two in the hotel room?

Yeah, us two in the hotel room.

Different rooms now.

Yeah, there's some funny photos because like in Cancún, in Mexico, you cannot drink tap water, right? So we're just coding for a week and a half during a company retreat, actually. So whole company was there for the week to do a retreat and we skipped all the events except the opening keynote.

Are you serious?

Yeah, because we were just like— because we thought everybody else got early access to GPT-4 too. It's like, holy shit, the race is on. Let's just get out as fast as possible. It turns out, no, we were one of the first ones to get access.

So the company is doing dinners, lunches, probably like Awards and celebrations, and you and your co-founder are nowhere to be found?

People know we're hacking on things.

Are you serious?

Yeah, I did a keynote. Of course, I need to give a speech.

The opening keynote.

I did an opening keynote and I did a closing dinner toast. But besides that, we're just coding for the entire week. We actually stayed longer because we want to finish the prototype. People know we're working on things.

Are you kidding?

No, it's understandable.

You would like come out, I assume you would come out of the hotel and check in with the team and then come back?

No, we're just in the hotel rooms.

Like you didn't leave the room?

Of course we need to leave for dinner or food or something, but most of the time we're just hacking on things. Yeah, there's an entire table packed with water bottles at the end of it, and we took a photo because it's so amusing.

And so you would go out for dinner on the hotel property or something, and then you'd come back and then you'd work into the night and then you wake up.

Do it again.

While everybody else is whatever. Like, I assume there are other partners there too. So everyone's partners are there.

Oh no, there wasn't. No, there wasn't partners.

So all the employees are there. They're all having fun. I imagine it's part work, part fun.

Part work, part fun.

Yeah. And you had no interest.

Yeah, because it's like the— once you see language from a GPT-4 level, it's just the world will be different, right? And that's the excitement.

That's incredible.

It's fun to build things with this.

It is fun. When you moved from Vancouver, went to Inkling, left McKinnis, McKinnis is going to get a good laugh out of this, left McKinnis, Actually, he's gonna be just fine. He's the first investor. He'll be fine.

Oh, so it's more than fine.

He was actually check number one?

It's check number one. Yeah.

Yeah, he's fine.

Yeah, he's fine.

Then you go to move to San Francisco for— with you, you meet your co-founder.

I think I started the startup by myself.

Yeah.

Then there's another person, Toby. My mom actually helped with initial funding to get the visa, 'cause you need some, like, put down some cash to get the visa, right? She helped with it. Then Toby joined, then Simon joined, and Toby left after a year. Then just me and Simon, and we went up to 5-ish people, went back to 2, then me and Simon for a while.

Then you went to Tokyo.

Then 2 of us went to Kyoto.

Yep.

And we did that, we traveled Kyoto, Sicily, Hawaii. Simon loves to swim, so we usually go to a place that he can swim, Cancun included. We did that for like a year and a half, 2 years, and finished rebuilding Notion.

And you were equally as convicted during those years that this had to exist?

I think earlier your question is like, how does it feel working on something like a same thing for over and over again for so long? First of all, it has to exist. So if it doesn't exist, there's a joy and focus to help you just working on that thing. And second, if you're just building this thing, there's like... It's fun building things. You get lost in the flow state. You just— it's somewhat repetitive, but it's also really fun, right? And that can just keep going as long as there is. Like, the funny is like, if you look at Spotify annual report, right towards the end of year, Spotify give you how many hours of music do you listen that year. Sometimes it shows like how how many hours you listen previous year, right? So if I look at mine and the years that I was coding and designing in the weeds with Simon during those Kyoto, Japan years, I spent, I listened to so much music 'cause I would just be coding and listening to music. Nowadays when you run a company, you have to be in meetings all the time. So that bar is actually a lot lower. Different type of flow states.

Do you find yourself craving the flow state of what it was like listening to music?

Oh, definitely do. Yeah. Like, I haven't properly coded or designed for many years now. I think it's easier to get in a flow state when you're coding, but I'm better at design. Yeah, it's— but it's like I don't have kids. People say when you have kids, it might be interruptive to your flow state, but it's very gratifying when you're zooming out a little bit, right? So building a company is probably like having kids. There's a lot of things coming at you, but in aggregate, the thing's really fulfilling.

Do you want kids?

Oh yeah.

You do?

Yeah, we're gonna have kids.

And do you worry about The trade-off of what that means for the company, for your first kid?

I have a really capable wife. We'll figure stuff out.

Yeah.

It will definitely— people say you get more efficient, more focused, right? Do you have kids?

Not yet. I will.

So we'll find the balance.

When you started it on your own, why didn't you have— why didn't you start it with somebody?

I had an idea already. I can code and I can design. I can write a business plan to get my visa, so I can do most things. I don't need other people. And sometimes Simon and I, 2 of us can do most things a company needs. So that allows us the notion to stay really small and we sort of hire people in that shape. So our designer can code because We want people to make holistic trade-offs in their head, both the design context and engineering context. That also helped the company to stay lean and stay small. So we're not thousands of people, we're high, high hundreds of thousands of people.

I cannot wait to see what you do. If I ask you a different question, I'm just fascinated. If Notion went public and you had the whatever, if Notion got bought, it doesn't matter. If you walked away from Notion, what would you be doing?

I would get bored.

But what do you think you would do to fill your time?

I might do architecture. Like, I would love to build buildings, creating physical products. It'd be fun. Probably architecture. Like my wife and I love interior designs for our offices or for our home. Architecture is like a more adult version of that.

I read somewhere that you get support tickets sent to your phone. Does that still happen?

Yeah, it's on my phone. So if you just like right here, send us tickets. Yeah.

Oh, it like actually pops up.

Mm-hmm. It's, uh—

How many tickets are there right now?

I don't know.

That looked like a lot. Like, meaning not that, oh, there's a bunch of people filing bugs, but every time if you were away from your phone for an hour—

There were tickets in my lock screen. It wouldn't send me Buzz push notifications.

I know, but when you open it, when you open your phone—

There'll be one-ish thing on the very top, So I got a rough impression of what's going on. It's like ambient, like you get, you care about your office, you care about your customer, you let the ambience in to come at you. It wouldn't buzz me, it wouldn't buzz my watch, but we're just passing by, you get something.

You strike me as someone that might have unique management styles.

I wouldn't say I have unique management style.

So you, do you have the patience for a one-on-one?

Oh, I do. Yeah, I do one-on-ones for like my staff team, but they're all very excellent, mature leaders. They're all much better manager leaders experience than I have.

Yeah.

So they're very, I don't need to manage them in that sense.

When you interview, how do you interview?

I do spend a lot of effort with interviewing. That's something I care and consider one of my crafts. First of all, having a normal conversation. So when usually people come to interview, they— we call it a business jacket that's on. You need to take off their virtual business jacket. You make sure the other person understands you are a human and you see them as a human. And you're here to find a match. It's not here to judge, it's not here to critique or examine. And because at the end of the day, it's like fundamentally it's a match, right? You have your value, you have your skill, your craft. We have— company has a value and company has to craft a skill for that role. You figure out a match. The best thing is to be very honest with each other. Both sides take off the business jacket and spend an hour to find a match. And so then a normal conversation, then we do a lot of references and a lot of back channels. Okay, so this is one hour where you have a panel of 4 or 5 people, that's only 4 or 5 hours. It's very like blind person touching elephant. You can't get the full picture. But if you have back channels, those people spend years with the other candidate, you have a better picture. Then they find a match.

And what are you— are you steering the conversation in a certain direction? What are you— where are you exploring with a candidate?

Depends on if I'm interviewing for their craft, And/or their values. Like if it's a product design intro, I usually go deep on the craft a little bit, just to get a sense, like from talking about craft, you get a sense of their value too, right? But if it's a value, then you would have a few values in the company. I want to probe around and see like, how does the person match with our values? There's not— It's not a procedural. It's usually just a bag of different questions or tricks, and you just follow your notes after that. It's otherwise, it's too checklisty. You don't get the real out of it. You don't get a realness out of it. Yeah.

That's how I feel about doing this podcast. People walk in with a business jacket and the goal is to take that off as quickly as possible, but actually have a normal conversation.

Like, I like to start just by don't telling me we're starting this. We'll just go right into it.

Right.

Yeah, it's very good.

Do you have other crafts? Do you have other things that you think of as a craft, personal or professional, whether it's in your job or in your home life or whatever it is that you also treat like a craft?

I like to think about going back to the why AI is so fascinating. Like philosophy, it's philosophy or history, those, the overlapping ground of both. It's something my wife and I spend time reading. Like we had a philosophy tutor during COVID Every weekend, if we're not working, we're usually reading books in history or philosophy. She's actually spent so much time in philosophy nowadays, it's almost like taking a like a master or PhD on it on her own, right? So I think that going back to the AI topic, it's like, you almost practice this, right? Like we're in this bridging ground from one type of medium, which is classic software, classic computing, to this new AI-powered computing. What do you do with that? You can read about how the past mediums Like I talk about the telephone telegram of the world transition. And now by building Notion, I have a front row seat to experiment to see what happens and to see what sticks, right? So I find that really satisfying. Going back to your like, hey, does AI make you be a different type builder? Yes, because it's finally we have this like shift. from old medium to new medium, and you can build with the new medium. And my interest for learning in the history and philosophy of the past allow you to apply that a little bit, not fully, otherwise it'd be too much like armchair philosophy, but you can at least guide your direction of company a little bit.

And maybe just one or two more, like on the personal side, I'm very fascinated with like How do you run a day? Like, how are you organizing your days? Do those days have a specific shape around a time, an end, a start, physical activity, food? Like, how do those things all—

Yeah, it's not too fancy. I'm more on burrito side than the Michelin star side. Like, we have staff meeting.

What time are you awake?

7, 6:30, 7-ish.

What time are you in bed?

Last night I was jet-lagged, but typically 11:30.

Okay.

I sleep 7 hours. I usually try to do some exercise in the morning. I was running this morning. Like this morning, for example, I woke up, I try not to let my Slack notification, I turn off notification on my Slack and emails. I go to them, don't let them come to me. Really important thing will come through my text messages. And this morning I was trying to do some writing. I flushed out some of these ideas we just talked about, right? And I did a couple hours writing, did not finish it, then went back to Slack and emails and did a run for 2.5 miles. And took a shower and got here.

You wrote first. You woke up, wrote, then you ran.

I woke up, make a tea for myself, make a coffee for my wife. Then I try to write.

And are you like, do you like, do you need to turn your brain off at night to go to sleep? Like, do you have to do something to get away from work?

It's usually my— I'm on My phone all the time. I try to read before I go to bed.

You read some philosophy or history?

That's on weekends. I'm trying to read, like last night we were learning about this Japanese woodcut master from early 1900s. So how woodcut blocks are made and it's pretty complex procedures. We're watching a little bit of YouTube videos and we're looking at the Books and yeah, we talk about it, then we fall asleep. I think there's more con than— more pro than con because fundamentally it's— we're living in Silicon Valley. South Park is one of the center of this place, right? It's a human endeavor and a lot of the craft of trade, like the practice you learn from other people. Like how do you work with language model? Nobody knows. tell where to start to figure out how to work with this new thing. You learn from talking with other founders, talking with people who are building with this, how to build a company. We sort of know this a little bit more through the SaaS era now. Now it's a completely different game with the AI era, right? You learn from other people. They happen to all live in San Francisco. There's no other way to live in the city, so you have to hang out with them too, right?

Isn't it crazy? Like, I don't know if you experienced this when you were in Japan, but I was in the East Coast for the 4th of July. And I was with friends and, you know, one afternoon some question came up and I opened up ChatGPT and I just started talking to it. And everyone's like, what are you doing? And I'm like, just hold on a second. And then, you know, starts talking back and they're like, what is that? And I'm like, oh, it's OpenAI. And they're like, yeah, but like you talk to it? And I'm like, yeah, all the time. And right then and there I realized like, oh, we live in this crazy, like they're not from like outer space. This is like, I'm on the East Coast of the US, you know? And they were like, and somebody was like, so I can just talk to— I'm like, yeah. And by the way, the more you talk to it and the more information you give it, the more thoughtful it'll respond to you. And I just had almost like an outer body experience, no pun intended, because sometimes you forget what kind of world we live in, in this 7 miles of a city.

Yeah, probably plus a little bit more Berkeley and Stanford.

That's true. Yeah.

Well, technology is never distributed evenly. They dissipate, right? And the epicenter is here and we are— people self-select to be living in this region, so they tend to pick up new things quickly. To my earlier point, like we're in this very interesting shift of new tools and old tools and new tools. And we're in the new camp because we're the fact that we're here, we're working and living in tech. Yeah, the world will be very— I think it'll be very, very different. It's just sort of can— like a knowledge war. This is the thing I've been reading and thinking a lot. It will be very different. It might take some time for the technology to truly dissipate. to get into organization for them to talk. But like, if you think about, you can sort of see this in coding agents a little bit, right? Like Simon, my co-founder, in the past few months, he still codes every— he's still one of the most productive programmers in the company, but he doesn't manage. He just likes to build things. But in the past few months, he hasn't coded For a few months now. So if you walk by his desk, he's kind of like managing 5, 6 different windows of coding agents do the work for him, right? And it's like our relationship with information, with work is changing, evolving towards that. Like you no longer do the work, but you're managing agents to do the work. But that, I think that's one part. I think the bigger part is The scale that information and work can go through a person and company will also increase. It's almost like you go into a small town or small— no, go into a very packed European city like Florence, where everything is packed in that small part. You can walk from one end to another in 20, 30 minutes versus a larger city like—

New York.

No, Dallas or Houston. It's made for cars. Much further, you cannot walk anymore, but scale and speed is much grander. And sometimes our relationship with information is moving towards that, right? Someone like Simon can go in through, manage, output way more things than just if he hand-coded, handcrafted everything by himself. I think we're— this region is probably the first to realize that, and coding is probably one of the first to realize that too. And we'll go to your friends on the East Coast working in different industries, different sectors. How long that take, I don't think anybody knows, but it's the shape of things to come.

This is why I think timing matters so much, and so often things can be right, but mistimed that come from Silicon Valley. Because, you know, let's take the example that you shared of getting the early version of the GPT model. You thought, oh my God, I'm late. So you spent a week and a half in Cancun, holed up. You realize not only are you late, nobody even has access to this thing yet. You know? And so it is a good reminder that Boy, are we early. We're still so, so early. And so many of these tools, like, like whatever the expression is, the redwood falls in the forest and nobody hears it. Better make sure that when there's tools, people are ready when the tools are ready.

Well, if people are not ready, Sometimes bureaucracy is a good thing because it can slow down things, allow the rest of the world to digest, to take time, right? Silicon Valley people are so open-minded. Hippie starts here, tech boom starts here. We're just taking the new things like no tomorrow, but that might not be the best thing. It's like it's— by the time you are 20-some, 25 years old, you sort of don't want to learn new things. And that could be good, could be bad, right? But all organizations, all personnel, they need to adopt the new tools going through these things to have personal or system bureaucracy against new things. I think with this AI wave, we don't know, but it will be— it could slow things down a little bit, but it might be necessary. Yeah.

Thank you for doing this. Are you hiring?

Yeah, always hiring.

Anywhere? Where?

Kyoto? We have a Tokyo office. We don't have a Kyoto office yet, but Tokyo office for sales. So if you're product engineering design, we have office in SF and New York and Hyderabad, India. So we're hiring those locations for product engineering design. Other offices, we have Dublin, Ireland for sales. Sydney, we just opened an office recently. Tokyo. So we're opening Paris, Munich, and London this year too for sales.

You're going to be busy.

Well, our customer base, it's 80% international, so we have— that's why we have to travel a lot to meet them.

Yeah. When you hear the word grit, what do you think of?

Grit. I really like the word grit.

Why?

It's generally a positive human characteristic that you go through things, doesn't matter the ups and downs, you allow whatever you believe to compound. Usually it takes many years, a long time to compound and create something unique out of the other end, right? Grit is the characteristic to allow that happen, to allow compounding. A company creates something beautiful, usually useful.

I love that answer. I love this. I love this conversation.

Thank you. Oh, I'm glad.

This is delightful. I appreciate you doing this. That's it for now. If you like the episode, please leave us a review or go back into the archives where we've done more than 200 episodes with some fantastic folks. This podcast is a Kleiner Perkins production. And I'm Juvin. Thanks for listening.