Is Notion CEO Ivan Zhao Designing The Future of Software? Full Interview!

Have nothing in your home that's not beautiful nor useful. Notion today, I like to use the metaphor, is kind of like Lego for software. There's piles of bricks everywhere, but there's no boxes tell you what to do with that. Not completely true, but few boxes. We're doing a lot better, right?

You're doing great.

And if I was being provocative, is Notion for builders first or users first?

Yeah, it's definitely provocative.

So this is every customer query.

Every customer query.

Talk to me about—

I don't read all of them.

Sure, but you get a vibe.

I get a vibe. So we think 2025 is the year to invest in.

Hi, it's Simon. Welcome back to Better Creating. And today, something different. Ivan Zhao is founder and CEO of Notion, the block-based productivity software continuing to disrupt the industry. He was just named Entrepreneur of 2024, and from humble beginnings back in 2013, Notion recently hit over 100 million users and a valuation over $10 billion this year. So I figured Ivan is doing something right and that there is a lot that we can all learn from him. So from exciting new directions in Notion's future to designing tools for everyone and building a successful business, in this one-on-one cafe conversation at the Make with Notion London event, Ivan revealed to me his plans for Notion into 2025, how he continues to learn how to serve builders and users, enterprises and individuals, and the new vision Notion holds for our digital lives. Now, like many others, Notion now sits at the very heart of my business, and they are riding the new wave of people wanting to simplify their digital systems and apps right down into more consolidated options. From big companies to a lot of Gen Zs who are ditching old systems and flocking to Notion, we also discussed the power of good design to disrupt the software space. What's coming next for our Notion workspaces, and how this self-proclaimed Lego of software company wants to help us run our lives and businesses with less but more. Beautiful tools. This should be a really great listen. He's a humble and thoughtful chap, so grab a coffee, and I hope, like I did, that you get a lot from it. Let's start with some Lego.

We JB, Amy, and Lou, and I meeting up. These guys have come to the UK.

So there are Lego stores in London.

There's a massive Lego store, and I didn't—it's quite a kind of tourist trap, but it's great.

But we queued up, and we got a picture in front of the Lego Big Ben, which is quite impressive.

Oh, man. Right.

So anyway, they have the bits where you can kind of play and make stuff.

So we started messing around, and we got really excited. And then we thought— we kind of spent about 40 minutes hanging out, and we just got on something. So we got you a present. And we've also got a video that we'll show you later on that we took with a load of the ambassadors. So they've all been attached to this.

Oh.

So here you go. We made you a notion.

Oh, that's so kind. Thank you. There you go.

So like, you know, sometimes you got to get things done.

It's it's like the right bricks. It's like it's uh it's more thoughtful because of the rounded corner. It took a bit of work.

It's not bad. Like I feel good. I feel like we're slightly too long, but it's not quite square.

You know what? I have a Lego piece from my pocket. Nobody told me about this.

We were joking about you'll probably have you'll probably pull Lego from your pocket.

This is from um. launch event, we have Lego pieces that happen to have— do I have more?

Yeah, it's everywhere. We've been given Lego today. You're the, you're the Lego of software. So anyway, there you are, whack it in the bag if you like.

Let's put it back.

But, um, yeah, we just— it's really to say thanks for building the thing we've built our businesses around. It's a big deal.

Thank you.

Yeah, so thank you. So Ivan, let's talk about Notion. And actually what I wanted to do, because my first discovery of Notion was— when was it?

End of 2019.

Pretty early. Yeah, before I had 1 million users.

Yeah, yeah, it was, it was early. And I don't think I'd realized, and then kind of got addicted. It's like a computer game or a, you know, you know, anything that you can start playing with. And I think what drew me in was this, the design, the scent, the awareness of design. And, and as I've then come to get to know Notion, your team, like particularly like your offices, And then I walked in and went, they love the chairs.

The New York office or SF office?

We went to Dublin.

Okay.

And then we came to Make with Notion and saw all the stuff in there. And just that awareness and love of design was just, it just felt at home. So I kind of wanted to talk to you about design and software.

Okay.

You know, and I guess my first question is like, you've obviously given real thought to both the form and the function of Notion, and you talk about beautiful tools. So to what extent is that kind of— is there a personal love of design or a kind of awareness of what good design is that you feel gives you an advantage in the software space? What does it bring to productivity, to software?

Yeah, since we're in London, one of my biggest inspirations was this guy William Morris, and one of the guys who started the Arts and Crafts movement. And he has a quote I really like. Have nothing in your home that's not beautiful nor useful. So I think when you think about design, you can think about the beauty of it, you can think about the utility of it, and the best of both are the ones that can do both well. And you mentioned Notion's Lego for software. That's how we call Notion internally. Lego is both beautiful to whoever the beholder who creates it, but also creative, useful, right? So, um, we try to make Notion in the same way. So it's both beautiful and useful. And to us, that means good design, um, across chairs, art like William Morris, interior wallpapers like William Morris, or DDRAM, the one phone you showed me, or software in terms of Notion.

Yeah. And, and is it— has it informed— are there any good examples of kind of choices you've made about the about the software you've built that kind of really specifically inform how it functions, or have they kind of just— you just been trying to balance the—

Yeah, maybe let's— let me find— let's take some kind of couple examples that's both beautiful and functional. For example, the left sidebar in Notion, right? We try to make it as we call dumb as possible. Yeah, it's just like you don't have to think. This is literally how many other software work this way. We're one of the pushers into an online SaaS product, but the left sidebar has been there forever. So let's just take advantage of that and use that to organize not just one page but multiple pages. And so it can become combining a document tool and knowledge base tool in one. So that's more, in my opinion, the functional part. And But then let's not just create a very lame lifestyle bar. Let's try to attach a little bit of humanity into it. So if you pay attention to the color, it's actually not just straight up gray. There's very light shades of cream in it.

Yeah.

It's a little bit warmer. So even though we try to be as functional as possible, we try to inject some humanity to it. Dieter Rams, Braun's utilities, Yes, it's very utility, very clean, but corners are well-rounded. The color, it's not just the cold shades of blue or gray, it's the warm shades of gray. And how can we do that for software? That's what we're trying to do.

It's so lovely to hear that. I think that there's something about that awareness of we are people just trying to do the things we've always done, and as the world has advanced, there's that And I think that's what's really lovely to hear about that design. Like, I feel that the other thing that Notion did for me, which I found other software didn't, is it made me feel calm. The kind of simplicity of that. Is that something that you've aimed at? I know you've talked about the pen and paper being the beginning of it, but—

You mentioned visiting our Dublin office, and we try to make the office feel calm.

Yeah.

If you visit it again, the wall is not white color.

It's that very precise cloud something. What is it?

Cream Frost. Benjamin Moore Cream Frost. There's a code, I forgot the name of the code, but the name of the paint is Cream Frost. So warmer. And the light, if you pay attention to the light we're using in the office, we'll try to go as warm as possible. So it should feel like home or feel like your art studio. It does not feel like office or hospitals. So then you just relax, right? You think better, you feel at home, you feel like you can put— same for writing in Notion, it feels like you can just go. There's little distraction, you're familiar with most things, but it does not feel cold at the same time.

Yeah, it's good, it's great, and I love that then you're shipping that into enterprises because people have to look at their screen 5 to 8 hours a day, right?

If we can make it a little bit better, it's like William Morris, make your home nice, you can contribute a little bit back to humanity. If we make the software better, even for enterprise customers, we add a little bit back to the thing that people experience every day.

I think it comes across. Maybe that's why I found it.

At the time, I was doing a Marie Kondo on my house.

Okay, it was a lot, you know, particularly when we went into lockdown, it kind of gave that And I think this feels like simplifying your digital spaces, giving you space to have ideas. You know, something I've done for a long time is build templates around that kind of idea of, you know, the second brain, David Allen, those things. And it really lends itself to that. So we're all very grateful for it.

Thank you.

Now, before we carry on and talk about what's coming next for Notion, the upgrades we can expect in '25, and Ivan's perspective on the challenge of making Notion accessible for new users, If you're enjoying this, make sure to hit that subscribe button and maybe even the like button, and I'll send you more great ideas, tools, and tech to help you build your best life here soon.

Okay, so we've talked about Lego for software. It gives us so much flexibility, customization. All of this stuff is fantastic about Notion. What I love about it is it's a place where you can create whatever you want. It's simple. On the other end of the scale, users, people that in my audience that will often come to Notion, can see its potential to be that, and then get overwhelmed really quickly with possibilities, potential. And there is real scope to make incredible complex systems. We've got individuals using it for personal knowledge, businesses running massive teams. How do you approach that as a, as a developer building something for people? And if I was being provocative, is Notion for builders first or users first?

That's hard. Yeah, it's definitely provocative. I think Lego actually did it. It's doing an excellent job of it. If anything, we need to— Notion needs to do a lot better and borrow pages from Lego. Notion today, I like to use the metaphor, is kind of like Lego for software but missing many of the boxes.

Okay.

You're going to imagine you're walking to a Notion Lego store. There's piles of bricks everywhere. But there's no boxes to tell you what to do with it, right? Few boxes. Not completely true. Not completely true, but few boxes. We're doing a lot better, right?

You're doing great.

We have templates, we have Marketplace, but it could still give people a lot more handholding if you are not a builder. We're getting a lot better, like you mentioned, Marketplace templates, but not everybody are Lego-minded from the get-go. They need to feel inspired. Maybe they prefer have a ready-to-make solution for them. Then if they feel like tinkering, then they can tinker later, right? Notion today, we can do a much better job for the people who don't want to build. But for people who do want to build, the sky's the limit. We are constantly introducing more advanced bricks for builders like automation, like AI.

Yeah.

They're truly tailored for, you know, in the Lego term, master builders. And we do a good job for builders, they can set out the boxes and templates back to people who doesn't want to build as much. I think we feel like there's a really good symbiosis between builders and non-builders.

I agree, and I'm being provocative, and I do actually think that Notion does a brilliant job of catering to both. And because you're taking that on, I also think it's the community that has really struck me about this, which is amazing. And actually, because you properly talk to us, you properly sit down with the users and the builders, we're then able to provide those out-of-the-box solutions to people. And I think things like layouts, buttons, these things have been incredible as a template builder. I've kind of done the same. I think we're following you because as a template builder, I've been doing the same thing. We've built something and gone, oh, it's great, but you had to be around when I built it to know what it was. And now we're focusing on user experience and it's all there. You can clean things up. So is there a sense of like a kind of a mode which can be simplified for UX and then one for— are you looking towards—

You mentioned the feature layout, right? Layout is kind of like this. It's great. Yeah. Well, it's like you as a builder set up Notion in a certain way and your customer, your users, or your, the people who buy your template, they don't have to go into layout mode. they can enjoy whatever workflow you set up for them. They don't have to shoot their foot, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Like, we need to make permission better so you can empower even more use cases. We need to make formula more powerful so they don't have to go into formulas. You can set it up for them. Automation, same reasons. Yeah, like there's layers of curiosity or desire to build. We need to tailor for For builders like you, we need to give more fancy bricks. For non-builders, we need to make Notion simpler.

Next, I had to ask Ivan what Notion's planning for 2025, and we get a pretty clear answer and some pretty wild revelations about how Ivan deals with customer feedback.

It's pretty impressive, to be honest.

Before that though, if you are interested to learn more about how my Notion templates and complete Life OS systems can help you fast-track to your perfect custom organization system in Notion, do jump over to bettercreating.com and join the 15,000+ plus other users already playing with my templates and digital tools. Back to the interview.

I spoke with Akshay a month or so ago. I don't know if you would echo this, but what's been really great is the speed, the approach to making it quick to use. Is that still a big focus for you?

It is still, yeah. In fact, in 2025, one of our top focuses is speed for larger and larger databases. Like you have tens of thousands of things, Notion can get slow for you.

Okay.

And speed, especially on your phone, right? Because many people, probably your customers, are buying your templates, might just use it on their phone, right? They need to work really well there. And related to that is, can you work in the low connectivity offline mode? So those are primary. And when we do a good investment here, it's Essentially, an investment in our technical foundation of the product and company allows Notion to continue building product at a fast velocity for many years to come. So we think 2025 is the year to invest in performance, offline mode, reliability, and scale on mobile.

I think so many of my viewers and the community are going to be so excited about that.

The basics.

Yeah, right. That's interesting. Yeah. Coming back to building a tool that allows us to build what we want and do what we want with it. That's that's a tricky balance. So it's good to hear. Well, should we talk finally about the customer a little bit more? Of course. I I love find I loved finding the Sesame Street characters everywhere. Are they are they like your avatar for the customer?

Yeah, they are. Yeah, in their office.

Yeah. Yeah. I think Notion gets it right compared to a lot of companies. There really does feel like a dialogue, and you can see it. Am I? The first little question is, am I right in reading? I think I read that you, you get all of the, all of the query reports to your phone.

Yeah, my— let me see, my phone should be here. So if you swipe up, all the Zendesk tickets come into my phone.

So this is every customer query?

Every customer query.

There's not many CEOs that are doing that.

I don't read all of them.

Sure, but you get a vibe.

I get a vibe. A lot of it's billing related, right? But at the same time, there's a lot of product features requests. So I get a sense of what's going on. When I have an urge to go on Twitter or Instagram, open this up a little bit and get a sense of what customers are asking for.

And how has that informed—

can you give some examples of how that might have informed central principles or Or decisions that you've made in just seeing that picture of the users?

This tends to more translate into the vibe that you're talking about. And in order to make proper decisions, we need to tally up into, okay, what kind of keyword, what kind of product surface area has upshoot in feedback? Then that we use a more systematic way to translate into product roadmap. I think you were interviewing Akin earlier. So yeah, he's on the product team. We do a lot of translation, product team, product operation team, and translate that into Ruma. And a lot of it's like you all can message our team directly, right? So a lot of feedbacks and you talk with engineers on the team. I know there's some engineers talk to this community really closely. That's like another channel for feedback, but that's more for builders.

Yeah, well, we quite enjoy that because we can sometimes go, we've created a problem. Go, oh wow, that's a new one. Why? Because we're testing it, you know, we're testing it.

up to us to balance this out, right? Sometimes you all might push the product too far into like power feature, power user features. Yeah. And we need to make sure it's also simple for the vast majority of Notion users who might not be power users. So, but that's our craft.

That's great. And yeah, craft being right back to the idea of design and building, right? It really comes across, I think. So we have to do the obligatory quickfire round. Finish off. Is this okay?

One piece of advice to a from-scratch first-time Notion user.

Oh wow, tricky question. First-time Notion user, watch YouTube. Watch YouTube.

Thanks for the recommendation.

It's a meta answer. It's a meta answer.

Yeah, yeah, get— yeah, speak to people. Yeah, actually Ekin had a good one, which was just pick one use case and then just That's a good one.

Actually, you probably, if you get stuck, watch YouTube, watch our tutorials, then you probably can build most things you want to build at this point.

Play.

Yeah, and then you will be having fun with it.

Yeah, yeah, right.

You'll probably learn how a relational database works if you're not a computer science degree.

Yeah, totally. I'm a theater director that got drawn in.

And so now you know how relational database works.

Yeah, it took me an hour and a half to build one when I first did it, and now it's like—

You have an engineering degree now, so—

Yeah, it's coming. Thanks.

Okay, early bird or night owl?

I'm probably— I sleep at 12 o'clock, 12 at night. So middle, probably.

Eames or Wegner?

Oh, Eames.

If you had to, form or function? Oh no. I know it's cruel.

Commerce function. I think my bone structure is forms. No, my bone structure is function. So naturally I'll do something very functional, and I need to remind myself to inject the delay beauty to it. And software sort of lack— most software lack beauty, so we can do better there.

Yeah, make space to play a bit, right? Okay, yeah, okay. Pour-over or espresso?

Um, I like drip coffee, so it's kind of like easy, no-fail version of pour-over.

Nice. Yeah, okay, quicker. One book everyone should read? One book everyone— maybe that's influenced you really strongly?

A lot of books.

Yeah, it's a tough one.

I'm in the middle of reading this book, Land and Sea by Carl Schmitt, I believe, talking about— actually related to UK. Okay, yeah, yeah. Britain is the land of sea people, so compared to contrast with Germany and France, they're a land of land people.

We have to have a conversation about the sound of language, by the way, as a theatre person. It's amazing you talk about all of that, you know, like the Welsh accent and then the Dutch accent. It's really good. Okay, last one. One designer everyone should study?

One designer? This is more probably more on the beauty front. Joseph Hoffmann. Yeah, a Vienna, Austrian designer. Turn of the century.

I need to look them up.

Beautiful, so diverse. More people should look it up. Amazing.

Well, look, it's been an absolute pleasure. I just want to get into more conversation about design and building, but we've run out of time. So thank you.

Thank you for having me.

So nice to meet you.

Well, I had a great time meeting Ivan, and I hope that you did too. Let me know your thoughts and comments and where you want to see Notion go next down below. And how do you use it? What is stopping you if you don't use Notion? I'd love to hear from you. And while I was at the Notion event, I also spoke with Ekin, Notion's head of product, core, and AI. So get subscribed to see that interview soon. And in the meantime, listen, I know that Notion can seem overwhelming until you actually learn how to really make it work personally for you. So if you want to level up your Notion workspace, I recommend you watch this video next for some tips and ways in, or watch this one if you're more interested in just some other well-designed tech that I'm loving outside of software. It would be great if you hit the like button below, and I'll see you soon. Bye.