Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder)

The way you describe the early years of Notion, you describe the first 3 to 4 years as the lost years.

We tried many different versions. The first version, okay, everybody can make and create their software. So let's just build a developer tool that's so easy that more people can do that. We tried that like a couple of years and learned that actually most people just don't care. The realization is actually let's hide our vision, which is everybody can create their software in the form factor that people do care. So what kind of tool do people use every day? Productivity software. It took us 2 years to realize we need to build a productivity tool. We call it sugar-coated broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli, but people like sugar. So give them the sugar, hide the broccoli inside of it.

What other elements do you think are key to you finding something that actually ended up working?

What is building a product or business? You want users, you want revenue. That's a product business. And building for something you want the world to have is building for your value. You have some taste, you have some aesthetic. There are Different energy. You need to create a balance. Too much of yourself, then there's no users. You're just doing an art project. And too much for a business, you're building a commodity.

The way you think about Notion, it's almost like a philosophy of how to work and be versus just a productivity tool. And so I'm just curious how you think about the relationship between tools and human potential.

Tools are extensions of us, and once they extend us, once we shape them, once we bring them to the world, they can come back to shape us.

Today, my guest is Ivan Zhao. Ivan is the co-founder and CEO of Notion. Ivan is a really unique and also a deeply philosophical founder who doesn't do a lot of podcasts, so I'm really excited to share a glimpse into how he built one of the most beloved and most popular products in the world. We talk about the first 3 to 4 years of Notion that he describes as the lost years, how he was able to get into a great school in China by winning a programming contest, The joy and suffering of building a successful horizontal product, plus his approach to staying lean and craft and making trade-offs and also leadership. Also a wild story about how Notion almost died during COVID because the one database that everything lived in almost ran out of space. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a paid annual subscriber of my newsletter, you now get a year free of Notion Pro.

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With that, I bring you Ivan Zhao.

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Ivan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

I know you don't do a lot of podcasts, and so I'm very honored that you are here. I wanna start with the story of Ivan. Your background is quite unique for a founder of a $10 billion plus tech company, and I don't think a lot of people know it. For example, you grew up in a small town in China, and the way you got out of there, the way you got into tech is pretty interesting. Can you, can you just walk us through that early years of Ivan and how you got out of there?

I think a small town in China, the definition, it's actually a 4 million people city. So the city is called Urumqi. It's in the northwest desert part of China. So I grew up there and then I moved into, my mom took me to Beijing, the capital of China. And that's actually how I got into programming, coding, because I'm from somewhere else. And in order to go into a good school in the capital, you need to win some kind of competition. And there are different paths. You can get good at math there, or you can get good at programming, like Information Olympiad. I was really into computer games at the time. So of course I picked the programming one so I can play with computers all day long. And I win some competition and got me to a good school. So that's how I got into programming. Later then I moved to Canada. When I moved to Canada, got into college, did not study computer science since I already know how to code, play a lot of video games. Did a lot of art, actually, art and science. By the time I graduated college, I realized most of my friends are artists. They need to make their websites, get web portfolio made, and I'm the only nerd in my art friend circle. So I made 3 or 4 websites and realized, oh, actually people don't know how to create with this software medium, computing medium. So that got me to want to create a product like Notion today, which would allow more people to create tools, create software for their daily work and life.

Okay. So going back to, you, you, to get into a great school and to kind of leave this small town, not so small, you had to enter a programming contest and you, you placed first or second or how well did you actually do in the—

Second in Beijing.

In Beijing. Okay.

Pretty big. Beijing is a big city.

So, okay. Incredible. Another stat I, uh, or a story I heard is that you learned English by watching SpongeBob SquarePants. Is that real?

Yeah, it's real. Um, I moved to Canada pretty late, uh, 16 years old. And what I learned is, yeah, in China you can learn English, but it's typically just grammar and doing exams. What you're missing is the context, the culture. So you have to watch SpongeBob or Simpsons to get a sense of humor, essentially. You can understand jokes, right? Watching cartoons, it's probably the easiest way to do that.

That's amazing. And there's another kind of seminal moment in your path. I don't know if it was at this point or later, but the Douglas Engelbart paper ended up being a very meaningful moment for you.

So while I was in Canada in last year of school, working on trying to building website from our friends and building a creative tool for them. And then you just look into the history of creative tool for software for computing. You eventually arrive at 1960s and '70s. So you realize the first generation of computing pioneers, which is around San Francisco, Stanford area, South Bay, they actually had the best ideas. For them, people like Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, those first generation pioneers, for them computing, there shouldn't be a separation between builders and users. It's the same medium. Engelbart's original paper called Augmenting Human Intellect. When I read that paper, it's like, holy shit, if you're making software, if you know how to code or design, this is the highest leverage thing you can do for other people. So giving them the ability to use computing to augment their problem-solving ability or their intellect. That just got me obsessed with this problem and I want to start a company like Notion.

Makes me think of Steve Jobs's famous line of how the computer is a bicycle for the mind.

You know what? Steve Jobs is actually at fault of this in some strange ways. So the story is like, actually the fact is not just story. Xerox PARC has working on the first generation personal computers called Xerox Alto. Alan Kay was one of the main persons behind it. Alto runs on the system called Smalltalk, which is there's no separation between users and users. There's no thing called application. Everything is malleable. You can change the tools, right? So when Steve Jobs, the famous story is when he went to Xerox PARC to demo with Alto, he does not— it's the first time he sees graphic user interface. One of the first times, and it's also, they present them with this Alto system that everything could change, but he did not see the power of it. Even when people would demonstrate like, hey, Steve Jobs say, I don't like this direction of scrollbar direction. When you scroll up and down, it shouldn't scroll the opposite reverse direction. And then people just instantly change the scrollbar direction for him. That's the power of the original Smalltalk Alto system. He only saw the graphic user interface. He did not see the underlying object-oriented environment power. As the generation of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates made PC personal computing popular, and they sort of stuck with this kind of application framework rather than this Smalltalk object-oriented framework, then that has all the apps we have today and has the SaaS sprawl we have today.

That vision of how products should be sounds very familiar. And we'll talk about that later of how you think about Notion. But let's zoom to the beginning of Notion. When we were chatting earlier, the way you described the early years of Notion, you started Notion in 2013, and so over 10 years ago at this point, you described the first 3 to 4 years as the lost years of Notion. And I think this is actually a really big deal for founders to hear about because there's all these companies these days, you hear these stats, they had $100 million ARR and like 2 years, under 2 years now. And you don't hear a lot of stories of companies of your scale and success that took 3 to 4 years to find product market fit, essentially. What went on during these lost years as you describe them? And just how did you, how did you stick with it? That's a long time to stick with something that isn't working.

Because the goal is always building a computing tool. It's like, what product is this? It's really hard to shape the product, right? The vision is that the dream is there, but the product is very— there's so many paths. We tried many different versions. The first version to take, okay, everybody can make and create their software. So let's just build a developer tool that's so easy that more people can do that. We tried that like a couple of years and learned that actually most people just don't care. The majority of people, they wake up, they have report due, they need to get their job done. They don't care about creating software to optimize whatever they're doing. They don't care. So we give to our friends, give to investors. Yeah, did not resonate with people. But we really want to build that tool. So we just keep going. And the— our realization is actually Let's hide our vision, which is everybody can create their software in the form factor that people do care. So what kind of tool do people use every day? Productivity software. So that's why I came to Notion today. If you use Notion, Notion are more understood as the productivity suite, but our intent, and if you use Notion more, you'll understand our intent, which is that it has a no-code developer power into it. And you can create almost any kind of productivity software using Notion itself. That took us 2+ years to realize. So actually the world is not like you. The world are not like developer, designer-minded. The world is, they only care what's in front of them and they're so noisy.

There's a quote that this makes me think about where you said the first version of Notion was more about what I wanted than what people wanted.

It's very much so because like sense of maturation is You don't see the world just from your perspective, but from outside your perspective, right? It takes— we were young, took us multiple years to hit your head straight into the wall to realize that people just don't care.

I love the way you phrased it, that you kind of have to hide your vision behind something that people understand and know how to use.

And we call it sugar called the broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli, but people like sugar. So give them the sugar. A high-end property inside of it.

Wow.

Yeah.

The other thing I've heard is that you had, you threw away your code every time. Like, so you rebuilt it many times. You threw away the code each time.

That's true. Actually, it took us 4 years to get somewhere. First 2 years is that you build too much like a no-code, like developer product. Nobody cares. It took us 2 years to realize we need to build a productivity tool. Then it took another, another year or 2 to really, to build to build this out, but in the middle of it, we realized we built on the wrong technical foundation. So like 8, 10 years ago, there's competing— before we— right now all the web app runs on React, right? Before React wins, there's a competing technology called Web Components from Google. And it makes sense. Web Components feels like a Lego-like, like the building block-like, and we're betting on that technology. And then we realized because it's so new, It's just so unstable. You don't know where the bug comes from. It's from your source code, from underlying libraries. Then we have to restart the company, otherwise rebuild the whole thing. Otherwise we're going to run out of time. So that's instead reset the codebase, reset the company so we can build on our own more orthodox technical technology foundation.

How did you actually stay solvent all this time? A lot of people want to keep working on an idea. Oftentimes they need to pay the bills. How practically were you able to keep working for 3 to 4 years? I know there's a story of your mom loaning you some money during that time.

Well, Chinese mom always can help. And I'm a single child. Yeah, my mom helped me. Actually, my mom helped me kickstart a company because I'm Canadian. In order to move to US, you need to like register a company. So my mom helped me with the initial and then raised the money. sort of return the money to her. Then we run out of money. So, hey mom, can I borrow that just to bridge us? Which she did. I'm really grateful for that. How do you bridge? How do you last here so long? Because the thing you want to create does not exist. We always call Notion the Lego for software. It doesn't quite exist, right? There's a Lego for Lego. You can see that in furniture sort of exists. But Lego for software at the usable mass market adoption level doesn't quite exist. And you just want that thing to exist. And I grew up with Legos. It's the only toy I ever wanted. And I want the same feeling of creativity and playfulness to the tool that people can use every day. So, and my co-founder Sam feels the same way. Lego is the only thing he like wanted for every Christmas.

Have you guys seen Magna-Tiles though? I have, I, I have a 1.5-year-old and Magna-Tiles are quite delightful. It's like a, I think it's like a pre-Lego. I like the chili skin operator.

Magna-Tile.

Yeah. It's like, uh, they're little magnetic plastic, uh, uh, planes. And then you can build little, you can build much bigger things really quickly. It's more for babies, but I'm, I'm having a blast.

Oh, I see it. It's kind of like, aha.

It's like a different version of Legos. I like that you're in real time looking it up. You're like, okay, we're our new vision, MagnaTiles for software.

Now most people know Lego, MagnaTile, idea is the same, modular, right? Creativity.

Okay, back to your story. So there's also a moment where you moved to Japan. Just what was that about? Is that just like escape and disconnect?

Yeah, that was during the one of the review phases. During the, we know what the product should look like. It should be a productivity software with the Lego power hiding inside of it. We built on the wrong technical foundation, and if we continue to build on the wrong ones, we're gonna run out of money. Company won't exist. So we decided to lay off everybody. At that time, Notion was 5 people. We laid off everybody back to me and Sam and 2 people. And morale obviously was really low. You have to say goodbye to your teammates. And so we have the idea, let's just go somewhere that we've never been to, to change the scenery a little bit. And Japan is always top on our list. So, you know, the funny thing is if we, and we sublease our apartment and office, we're actually making money living in Japan and then San Francisco. So we did that for a while. We actually traveled around the world for a while just to like change it up. Me and Sam just coding every day and design every day. That was That's some of the happiest moments. Birthday every day.

I saw a stat, you were coding 18 hours a day. So like, here's the quote I heard. We just code, code, code, then hey, let's go out for food. Then we go eat, go back to work and do it again.

Because me and him working so well now, even back then, it's like, you sort of know what each other people are thinking and you can just cross through the problem space really quickly. The technical product space, design space. And just nonstop of, uh, shipping stuff.

So maybe just to close out this thread for people, for founders that are either struggling and just like can't find a thing that's working, I've been working on something for a long time. I'm curious what advice you'd share for sticking with it. And I'll share things I've heard you say so far. And I'm curious if there's something you'd add. One is you just like believe this needs to exist in the world. And you need to like really feel this. I need this to be a thing. I think there's an element of staying lean, like you've let everyone go and it's just you and Simon again. There's also this element of disconnecting almost and just like going to a different location and just like, let's just reset. What other elements do you think are key to you finding something that actually ended up working?

I'm kind of lucky and Simon kind of lucky that high is never too high, low is never too low for us. So somehow. I wasn't feeling too down. Whenever I feel down, I just go to sleep. Then next day I'm just reset. So that's kind of lucky for me. Definitely don't worry. Don't be afraid to reset. I think courage is quite important because like oftentimes you're working on things don't matter, but momentum just took you there. Your first point of building something you want the world to have. What is building a product or business? You want user, you want revenue. That's a product business. It's almost like a sport. The market is the arena, then you'd want to optimize the scorecard or it's building for winning. And I grew up playing sports. I like to compete. So I like that. And building for something you want the world to to have is building for your value. You have some taste, you have some aesthetic, you have some values, you want the world to have more of that. They're different energy. I realized actually fairly recently, like they're really different. Depends on which day I wake up, I might be in different mood for things. But building for value, it's more lasting and more fulfilling. Looking in the thing we're building today and looking, looking back, I find most proud of things like I create something authentic to myself and happen to be also useful for others. And that just keeps you going. And that feels like a more durable energy source for all those dark years, lost years during Notion and still every day for me.

It's interesting you say that because there's also this, there's this aspect of it wasn't working initially because you're building it for yourself. And not for people. But what I'm hearing is it's still important to build the thing that you are still excited about, but also have you go back and forth. Here's what the business needs and here's the thing I'm excited about.

You're really acute, almost like a therapist, right? So it's true that you're building too much for your own self and value without realizing at the end of the day, if you're building a product and tool has to be used by others, you need to create a balance. Too much of yourself, then there's no users. you're just doing an art project. You're just doing a research project, right? And too much for business, you're building a commodity, right? So where's the spectrum? Um, yeah, it's, it's a, it's never-ending spectrum. Um, it's interesting.

Yeah. Okay. So I'll summarize some of the things you shared of just how to stick with it and stay with an idea and not give up. So, uh, I love that you said just get sleep. Very Bryan Johnson of you. Just like get some sleep when it's a real down day. There'll be another day tomorrow. Really simple, but—

It's like a daily personal physical reset, right? You can reset your codebase, you can reset your mental model.

Okay. And then there's also, I love these points. Don't be afraid to kind of reset, as you just said, like, uh, Toby Lutke was on the podcast. He said the same thing. Just be comfortable with sunk cost. I have done all this already. And I will throw it away and start again. And that's okay.

Yeah, I think it's not just like a self-help way to say, don't be afraid to reset. That's like, that's okay, that's fine. I think the more interesting point here, it's like you can create progress through better abstractions and that thing compounds faster. It can catch up to all the things you build much quicker than you ever thought, right? Or humans are not thinking, not good at thinking in terms of abstraction or the exponentials. We're thinking in terms of linearly. And if you just reset and you found a better way to do it, you can get all the things you have, the sunk cost recovered really quickly. So actually going back to the computing pioneers part, like Smalltalk, one of the first systems and a huge influence for Notion was a really tiny codebase and inspired by Lisp, which is another programming language, and probably like 100 lines of code or something. Right. So the kernel of things could be really small, but just like math, it can compound. It can, it can have complex behavior that unlocks so much value and things for you. But if you just find those right, you can catch up to all the things you did. You are free to lose really quickly. So I think that's the, the kernel of why reset is so powerful.

And we're seeing exactly what you're describing in LLM advancements these days. All these companies have been working on this for so long, and then they've cracked kind of an abstraction of how to think about scaling these systems. And now just people launch them and are immediately where the companies that have been working on this for decades are today because they are building off these abstractions, as you described, and these—

Yeah, like trying to cut up the US really quickly.

With DeepSeek, yeah. The point you also made about momentum, like be afraid, be wary of momentum taking you in a direction and moving in a different Not being stuck to that direction is exactly the way, uh, I think the chain of thought models now work actually, where generally LLMs are like next word, next word, next word, next word. And if they ever make a wrong turn, they're stuck. They keep going from that path. And these chain of thought models are now good at just like, wait, let me think. Let me rethink. Is this actually the right path or should I start again? So I feel like AI has almost figured out exactly what you're describing.

Interesting.

Oh man. Okay. Last question about the early years. Everyone's always wondering, what does product market fit feel like? You've worked on it for 3 to 4 years. What was kind of the moment? What did, what did it look like? What was different when you're like, okay, this is going to work?

I think going back to me and Sam, high is never that high, low is never that low. It never hit me, hit us as like a binary state. It's just kind of like, oh good, we have people who care about this thing we make now. Oh good, people are, um, reach out to us or paying us and it's, it's a kind of very gradual ramp. Maybe that's why early days when it's really the loss eras, it doesn't feel too low because it's just, even for Notion today, it feels like it's so small in terms of where it could be. And it just steady keep going, right? It's a, it's a, it's a less of a milestone way to thinking about things. It's more just like, Can we do the same that's in our head and better than we did last week way of thinking about things? So it never is, there's such a moment in the product market, boom, milestone achieved. Didn't feel that way.

I've heard that from a lot of founders actually. Was there, was there like a moment, uh, in that point of just like, oh, this is different or maybe it's going to work this time?

I think for a while, like, okay, once we start revenue, Product grows faster now. Investors start knocking on the door with like, I remember one day it's like there's a dog food, dog food, dog treats sent into our office. So first of all, office wasn't public, the address and the dog treats. Like, why do people want this so much? Right? So that was a moment I paused a little bit. And I guess there's enough attraction for investors.

And the dog treats were trying to— it was like a gift to be like, hey, you should talk to us. We're sending this fun gift.

Yeah, because of the way how we just hire someone in the office as a dog, then we, I think we post on Twitter or something. And then it's like, why did this show up to our office? Someone really hustled into where we are, our office address and follow us on Twitter. So.

Did you end up taking their money?

Not the first time.

Yeah. Okay. Later.

Okay.

Fabrizio, no. Awesome. So that's, that's, I've never heard that before. Sign product market fit as VCs are starting to, you start getting a lot more messaging and cold outreach from VCs.

So actually I had, um, one of our investors, uh, it's really helpful because all those years you, you sort of just like, there's no feedback loop. You just go for it. Then the feedback loop gradually show up. Then you, oh, then it, for a while, oh, VCs started knocking on doors. So, um, I actually talked to those people, the people that like what we're doing, right? I did some meetings, quite a few meetings, maybe a dozen. I realized, and one of the investors saying like, Ivan, what are you doing? Like, you clearly don't need money. Um, do you just trying to feel good through external validation about this? And I said, oh, that's so true. It's like, I don't, there's, it doesn't help us make a better product. Right. And the truth is with our, what customers tell us, then we, then sort of like we just went back to building. I went back to hardcore building no meeting modes. That's where the dog food story came about and realized, oh, that's interesting.

You mentioned this investor that you said was really helpful. You want to give them some cred or do you want to keep it?

Oh, Shanna Fisher. She's in New York.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, she's like another therapist, right? Okay.

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I wanna shift to talking about Notion today and the way you've approached it. And, uh, a good segue is what you've been talking about right now is how lean and efficient you've been and how that's been a big priority for you. So a few stats I've seen, uh, one is that you're, you guys are profitable. You've been profitable for a couple years now. You haven't, I think, I don't know if you've spent even the money you've raised. Like I think most of it is still in the—

Yeah.

Yeah. Still in the bank. You're nodding if you're on YouTube. Uh, you didn't have a salesperson until you hit over $10 million ARR. You hired your first PM at like 50 people. You've always kept the team generally really small. Why has that been important to you? It's like very cool now. Everyone's like, of course, that's how it should be. But for the past decade, that has not been the case. You've always been that way. Why has that been so important?

I think going back to the abstraction system, we have problem solving. I think we're lucky that me and Simon and Akshay, we have the skillset. You probably can run a whole company, which is A couple of us, I can code, I can design, I can do marketing, storytelling, talk, talk, sell, close sales deals. So you sort of realize you don't need a lot. And when you can do a lot at the same time, or hire people who can do that, naturally keep the company small. And you all know you're doing product management. The overhead is actually more from internal communication.

Yeah.

Right? It's really hard to get people's mind to be aligned on things, to see the world in the same way. And the part that you do need people, maybe you can solve better through system, through better tools. Like Notion itself is a meta tool to build other tools. So we pretty much run everything on Notion. We use the same mindset to build our company. And accidentally that keeps our headcount low, keeps our company profitable, and which then puts you on the positive treadmill of you don't have to go for the next 18, 24 months to find money. You just have to, you can just focus on building. And also because your team is small, we have this internal notion called talent density, right? Which we're not, we don't try to track number of people, but we try to track how talent dense revenue per employee, we are and people want to work with other more talented people. So it's a positive compounding loop.

I wonder how much of this is actually from being around for so many years without success of we just have to stay very lean and save our cash because otherwise we'll die. Do you think that was, that was like a formative experience to inform how you want to operate or is that always something?

No, I wouldn't say we're Notion is like a cost-saving first company. Like, I like fancy chairs, I like furniture, but we're not like wasting money. I think it's more just from a taste or approach to problem solving. I just believe better system, it's much better than brute force through people.

When people hear this idea of staying lean and, you know, staying small, like it sounds great. Yeah. Or we're going to be super efficient and lean and smart with our money and data intense. It's very hard to do. And it's very hard not to hire more engineers, more designers. What advice do you have for folks that want to operate this way? Like what has allowed you to actually be successful while staying lean and not having as many engineers as competitors, many designers competitors?

I think just understand abstraction or system is a better curve than Hecatoncheires, right? Linear. I think we internally help other people understand this internally. We use the metaphor, Notion is a small bus. The bus, the smaller the bus is easier to turn corners, easier to accelerate, easier to maneuver. The bigger the bus it is, it's just like bigger the boat, bigger the bus, slow down. And as a leader in the company, you decide who sits around you on the bus seats, right? That dictates how fast our overall bus moves. Dictate your work and life experience at this company because you pick your roommate, you pick your seatmates. That metaphor clicks with people inside a company and overall help us optimize to make the bus tight, make the bus lean.

I've never heard that metaphor before.

It probably came up somewhere, but it works.

Small bus. So along these lines, actually, so I visited the office recently and I noticed that it's just like a very cozy vibe. And I learned that you had a rule of no shoes in the office for a long time until the last office. That you all ate around one table for a long time, that you tried 30 different shades of warm white on the walls before you chose. Why is that important to you? Why is it so important to be so thoughtful about the office experience?

Maybe I think there are 2 dimensions part of it. One is, one is the pragmatic part. You just want office to be a pleasant experience to be at. Therefore, most office, the top floor feels like hospital. I just like, oh man, And then the white is so pale and the floor is so dark. Like, don't use white, use some kind of cream and make floors more friendly colors and don't use top light. Top light is evil. So just the office feels cozy. So people spend more time, you feel more, more creative, more at ease in the office space, right? So the vision we have is it should feel like an artist's studio or it should feel like your home. And that's why most of our office furniture are home furnitures. It just feels cozy. That's more of— so people spend more time, it feels more creative, juices flow better. The other one, just like, at least personally for me, it hurts the eyes if you just see ugly things. It's more from a value aesthetic front. It's like we talk about ergonomic chairs. Does it hurt your back when you sit on bad chairs? But you have more visual input from, at least for me, from the eyes. If the chair looks ugly, the wall looks ugly, it hurts. So it's better to not have a thing that hurts.

You also have a really interesting naming convention for your conference rooms.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah.

We name our conference room after timeless tools in history. So there are, give you an example, iPhone's obvious one, original Macintosh, various different forms of chairs, Lamy 2000 pens, Toshiba rice cookers, and other ones. Because they're inspirations, they're just like, at the end of the day, we're creating a tool. We're creating a meta tool, a lot of people to create tools, software tools. And Toshiba rice cooker changed how people eat rice in Asia for, for, for hundreds of millions, tens of hundreds of millions of people, right? The Sony transistor radio is the first one to shrink semiconductors to something small and useful for people. And those things change people's lives and last for decades. What is it like to create a software product like that? I want to inspire my team to think that way because it's like software and especially tech, it's just every 6 months, every 12-month cycle. They don't— we don't think enough about creating something that lasts. I care about creating something that's at least the form factor lasts longer than how big they are.

There's a quote that you tweeted once that I think of as you talk about this from Steve Jobs. The problem is that there's just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product. I don't know if you remember tweeting that, but just what do you think of when you, when you hear that?

Yeah, I think the keyword here is craft. Like internally, our company philosophy called craft and values. Craft is like your skill set, your taste. Value is like your personal value and how do you see the world. Craft is an interesting world. It's kind of like about apply your value to some technical know-how and to make more clever trade-offs to create something new and useful. And just keep doing that at it. Like my wife often refers to me like as a wood cabinet builder. Like that's how I, at least in my mindset, trending towards building Notion is like, oh, can I make this wood cabinet more beautiful and more useful and feels nicer on your hand. And that's like you have aesthetic direction towards it and you have your technical know-how to actually make things happen. Then you need to do permutation and trade-off in your head or on paper and to get there. That to me, that's craft and building product to me, at least to me, feels that way. Building business feels that way. Building company feels that way.

It's interesting that so much of this conversation is this and the way you think about building this company is this balance between Practical, useful things people need and like business and, you know, practical stuff. And then this, like the value of building something you're proud of and craft. And there's always this trade-off almost of like speed and quality. And I know that's an important element for you, just like thinking about trade-offs between decisions. So talk about just trade-offs, just like how you think about making a trade-off.

Yeah, I think this is quite relevant, especially for product. makers and business makers is there's no free lunch. You don't get something for free. You have to give up something. Then what do you give up? It's essentially, then are you giving up the right thing that market or your user wants at that given space and time? It's kind of just the craft of building a business or building a product.

Right.

And the market is so dynamic, especially now with AI era, like the optimized function for the market changes. So then you need to make new trade-offs and new technology emerges, right? I always feel like AI language model feels like a new type of wood. It feels like aluminum. It's a new type of material, right? So you can make like mass air travel wasn't available until aluminum become cheap enough that people can make airplanes that's support this, right? At cost. And it's like computer wasn't there until semiconductor becomes like reliable. So it requires new technology to unlock new ways to making trade-offs. And then you're, then you need to balance the technology trade-off with human behavior trade-off. So whereas we're not, as a human effort, ever since we got out of Africa, we're sort of set.

Right.

That's like a constraint. It's an invariable. And every generation picks up some new thing, but after you're 16 years old, you don't want to learn new things. So those are like, there's a people trade-off, technology trade-off. There's some kind of macro, there's a different dimension of things just cooking together that come together as a product, whereas it's more as like business. Then what is that? And I think a product maker, a business maker's job is to find that sweet spot. of all the multiple dimensions, then Create Something has a right to exist, at least more durable to exist.

And I'm hearing there's kind of this thread of just like with new technologies, what is now possible? And I know you guys are doing some cool stuff with AI that I'm going to get to that is unlocking some cool new ideas. But before I get there, I want to talk about just you as a leader. At this point, you've been at this for 12 years, something like that?

Like that, yeah.

And if you don't mind me saying, you're, you're a, you're, you're a soft-spoken leader, which is not like, you're not like the archetype of what people imagine is like the CEO of a $10 billion, and I'm sure you guys are valued much more now. I don't even know that, that was probably an old valuation. Uh, I think it's great for people to see leaders like you that are not necessarily the classic archetype of CEO. And I imagine there are things you've had to work on and build and lean into that aren't natural to you to Step into this role of this increasingly growing high-scale business. What are some of the areas you've had to most build and learn to do that didn't come naturally to you?

Yeah, I guess you've never been in a business meeting or brainstorm session with me.

I haven't seen that side of Ivan yet.

Yeah, I wouldn't say I'm the most soft interaction person at work. It's actually the reverse is true because you grow up in— I grew up in China. People way more direct. People just like say what they want, say what they think, right? So, and you move to California, you move to US or move to the West, it felt, wow, everybody says everything's wonderful, everything's nice, but that's not true. I would say Notion's ethos is probably more like the East Coast rather than West Coast. So somewhere in between, right? It's more direct. What do I need to learn? Bunch of things. I think the early days, it's like we talk about that the world's not like you. The world don't care about you. So you, you know, it's like you sort of have to shave off the idealistic part of you to build something that's like the world actually cares. The sugar coat the broccoli, you have to hide your broccoli within some kind of sugar pills, right? So, um, that's one. That's more self. That's about myself. As company grow, you realize I'm pretty good at storytelling. So it's like, that's like a one-to-one influence. And, but as company grow, you realize you need to be one-to-many storytellers. That's a skill. It's like, I, one of the reasons I try not to do podcasts and all those things, oh, it's actually drains energy in different ways, right? I prefer just building product and brainstorm sessions. Then you realize it's a necessary craft for me to pick up. In order to change the shape of the company, the business I'm building, I treat it like a craft. Like there's some things, skill, also in the video game, you need to pick up something to unlock something else and to make a new demand, new kind of trade-off with yourself and the business, right? That's kind of fun though. Every 12, 18 months, Notion's like a new company, or at least it requires different kind of skill set. coming from me. So I need to pick up new things and it's an infinite game and infinite games are more fun.

I love this idea. I love that you keep coming back to this idea of there's like the ideals and the values and the vision and what you're trying to do. And then you have to find the way to frame it and package it so that people actually understand and want it. And that's how you get in.

Yeah, it's like human minds are resistant to change. And how do you land in people's head through, like, that's what marketing and positioning are for, right? So you need to find the sweet spot to get in. And you also be truthful. It's not just deceiving. So deceiving is not truthful. You can fool other people once or twice, then there's no future. It has to be actually tied back to something genuinely, the value you're creating. or the exchange with the other person. So yeah, it's a craft. It's like this, that market storytelling is a dimension, a vast dimension of making trade-offs.

Yeah, I love this word trade-offs comes up again and again too. It's so interesting that there's these threads that have come up again and again in our chat. Along that journey of becoming this leader that you've become, what would you say is maybe the biggest surprise or most unexpected part of the journey of something you've had to learn to do or something that didn't turn out the way you expected just as a personal Growth story?

If you use the product in the past 3 years, you realize Notion product, you realize like, hey, we actually shipped a bunch of things not so great, like 2 years ago, right? It's actually last year, 2024 is the year that we, I can say we ship good stuff at good velocity and good quality and aligned with our values. We sort of get lost there for a year, year and a half shipping something not according to our value. Not according to my value. It's like Notion, we call Notion Lego for software. We sort of ship non-Lego pieces into our product. It's still there. We're still cleaning up part of it. That's a realization. It's like going back to the value part. It's like if you create this thing called a product or business, you attract people who are value aligned to it. Then if you're trying to optimize too much on this competition, revenue side of things, forced to introducing something anti-your value, then the system, it's like there's organ rejection with your employees, with your customers, right? Like, give you a concrete example. For a while, and still is, project management is one of the most important use cases for Notion. And you can get to project management, a better project management tool just by hardcoding things like sprints, milestones, all those things into your product, right? Or you can do it in the way that Notion has been working through Lego pieces. Okay, what is a sprint? Sprints are clusters of tasks that group together. So it's a new Lego. So introducing Lego is much harder, slower. You can instead, we hardcode the sprint concept into the product. And it just become, doesn't quite fit, right? And took us, took me at least a year, year and a half to realize that's not the way we should continue building Notion. We should go back to the original Lego way of building the product. So we changed quite a bit internally. Now it feels good now. And building according to your values is the meta point, at least for me.

Okay. I got to follow this thread. What is it that you changed that allowed you to come back to your First principles, was it like you step— is it founder mode? Uh, it was the answer. Is it people personnel shift? Is it— what, what allowed you to change the way things were going?

I would say all of that evolved, but especially just released the sprint product to our community and customers. Then they're like, what is this? It's like underpowered compared to other competitor products and to doing project management. And it doesn't work well with the rest of Notion, like I said. And if you talk to engineers, they'll say, okay, there's this part of Notion, you have to touch the codebase. That's just weird, right? That's, you hardcode too much into it from all the dimensions, technical front, calling a customer. And when you use the thing, it just doesn't feel right. So, um, there's another saying that if you're building the Lego inside Notion in the codebase or product, the system works for you. If you're feeling non-likable, the system works against you. So in some sense, we're creating a tool that has emergent behavior. You need to channel in that emergent behavior to unlock more values.

So what I'm hearing is you launched it, it just didn't go well. Everyone's just like, what is this? This isn't feeling good. And there's a moment of realization of, I see, here's what we did wrong here. And we should come back to this original abstraction vision of what we're trying to build.

And that took like 9 months, a year to realize.

Mm-hmm.

Sometime.

Yeah. Along those lines, actually, uh, people come on this podcast and they share all these stories of things are going awesome all the time. And we have like, this was a great example of it didn't. I'm curious if there's another story of, let's say, a crisis that you all went through when things were looking pretty bleak for Notion along the journey of building Notion.

Yeah, one of the bleakest ones is when we, during COVID we just couldn't scale up our infrastructure. It was pretty, for the longest time, like Simon's really good at don't do premature optimization. So for the longest time, Notion runs on one instance of Postgres database. And then we find the beefiest machine, we keep scrolling, find a beefier, beefier machine to scale our user base. But then we were running out of the, even the largest instance there is for Postgres. So there's a doomsday clock that when we're gonna truly run out of this space to store everything in Notion and Notion got completely shut down. So we stopped building any new features, all hands on deck, every eng— almost every engineer in the company trying to solve that problem. Eventually we did, but it was, it was a close call.

Like how close are we talking about?

If I recall correctly, you're probably in weeks running out of time. And then as you approach the limit of what Postgres can do, behavior becomes sporadic. It just, you really don't know which day it's going to hit you, but you would just need to go as fast as you can to become sharding problem.

Yeah, I was going to ask. So the solution is sharding the database?

Yeah.

Sharding. Okay, cool.

But don't do it as late. Yes, don't do premature optimization, but plan ahead a little bit. Don't do it all weekend.

How long did you have from when you launched this Doomsday Clock to time running out? Was that like a few months?

Maybe a bit longer. Yeah. In the month, less than 6, but more than 3, something like that.

The bittersweetness of COVID just ramping up certain businesses. Yeah.

People just run like they have to use online productivity software, right? Collaboration tools.

Yeah. Blessing and a curse. Speaking of a blessing and curse, this is a great segue to where I wanted to go and kind of the final area I want to spend time on, which is Building horizontal software and building software that bundles together a bunch of different stuff, notoriously hard to build a horizontal platform that does a lot of things when there are often point solutions that are very, very good at that one thing. And it's interesting if you look at the timelines of companies that have built horizontal products, they all take a long time to build and finally find product market fit. So it's actually a really common pattern. And when we were talking about what would be fun to talk about, the way you described it is like the joy and pain of building horizontal products. So let me just ask broadly, just what have you learned about what it takes to successfully build a horizontal platform type of product?

First of all, no regret. And second, I wouldn't want to build anything else because like going back to the value, Legos for software doesn't exist and Legos are horizontal thing. So that's the thing we want to build. We always want to do that. So we did not start to optimize for business, but we optimize for that vision. Learning-wise, I think segmentation is quite important because people can use Lego for different things. Only hardcore Lego fans care about Lego bricks. Most people care about Lego boxes and they actually want the Lego box to be ready-made when you On package box, the set is there for you, right? That's what we're learning a lot, especially move up market. There's this term, it took me a while to learn, it's called solutions. You need to be a solution for enterprise customer. You need to sit somewhere on a P&L to optimize for their business or due to risk. That's Lego box. It's not a Lego brick. Really segmentation related to that. So You need to shift your mindset as you more towards B2B, more towards move up market. I wish we would have done it earlier. For the longest time, I was still too much in the Lego brick mindset, not in the solution Lego box mindset.

That's such a good metaphor. I feel like even if you're not building Legos for business, just this idea of what is the box that you are selling to people, like what is, how's it being positioned? How do you picture it? What are the value props? Such a good metaphor.

If you're building vertical software, naturally your vertical is the box, right? So you're, you know, you have one or two personas you're selling to, pretty straightforward that your market constrains you and no judgment. People like to, you can go that way, but then you hit this, you hit the wall of the market. The advantage of building horizontal, there's no wall, at least for in our space, we notionally go after entire software market. But then you need to create a wall yourself. So to make your go-to-market distribution, to create the spot in people's mind, your customer mind more clearly for them and for your go-to-market teams. That's why we're— solution is one of my favorite words internally to rally the sales team or the product team to think that way. But then you need to hold in your head, make sure you're still building bricks behind the scene. Otherwise you're pigeonholed yourself into— the best spot, like what we did with project management sprints features.

So speaking of that, so I don't know if you know this, I ran a survey recently where I asked my readers what tools they use most, what tools they love most. And I went out to my entire subscriber base. We've got 6,500 people filling out the survey and Notion more than any other company placed very highly in many categories. For example, it was, I have the notes here, you know, it was the second most popular project management tool after Jira. It was the 4th most popular docs, which is interesting because you think Notion would be like, Notion is known for docs and it's interesting. It was, that was the lowest one actually. And then it was 3rd in CRM just behind Salesforce and HubSpot.

Yeah, that's, we did not intend to build CRM, but what is a CRM? It's relational database. That's why we give people that brick. That's a relational database and they can build CRM. I think the good advantage is if a customer uses Notion, they can address those 3, 4 use cases in one place, especially for our startup mid-market companies. Their need for each of the verticalized use cases is not as complex, so they can have all the information in one place. Good for their teams, good for AI actually. That's a huge market change that's like we did not expect until recently, right? and save their costs, which is more and more people care about the bundling purchase nowadays. And our approach for that is like, yes, we're number 2 in project management, number 4 in CRM, but we're kind of introducing more bricks to make us number— move up the categories in ranking. So it just takes time, but that's our approach.

Yeah, well, it's working, whatever you're doing there. So say someone is trying to build a horizontal tool like yours. There's a lot of founders that are trying to build something that can do a lot of things really well. Do you have any advice for that first use case? Just figuring out something that initially works, like you talked about segmentation. Is there something there of like, do this if you want to find any success with a horizontal tool?

First, I wouldn't recommend it.

But you wouldn't do it differently?

I wouldn't do it differently myself, but I wouldn't recommend it. There's, it's, it's a problem, the problem space too large to have a best practice, but I can share something that's relevant for us. Like Notion, we always want to build a meta tool, a tool to build the leg of our software. We somehow stand upon document notes as one use case, and that just gave us a large top of the funnel that there's 1 billion plus people use this use case every day.

Right.

So that fuels our growth. We call our internal strategy called B2C2B. All those consumers, personal users use Notion for the most simple way you can use a computer or your phone, which is note-taking or document sharing. And then they realize, oh, Notion can do more of that. There's relational database power. You can do tasks, you can manage, track other things. Then they bring Notion to work. Half our B2B customers coming from prior personal users and most of them using Notion for notes and docs in the first place. So pick, well, at least we stumbled upon a use case, a horizontal use case, give us a large top of funnel that help us grow our more verticalized enterprise use cases. And that's the reason where we shipped a calendar product last year because which other category of software has 1 billion plus users? There's document notes. There's calendar, there's email, right? That's why we're also working on the email product right now.

Oh man, watch out everyone. And then you mentioned AI, and it's such a good point that AI is best when it has data. And the fact that you have all of this stuff already in there gives you a lot of really interesting opportunities to leverage AI.

We definitely did not expect language model. It's such a gift for everybody building tools, right? It completely changed the material you can work with. One realization is you have a surface area that people spend daily work with, especially doing writing and managing your tasks and projects. It's really easy to slice language model writing AI capability into it. So that's the first product we built. Then the realization is AI is so good at reasoning and understanding and searching things. And, and it can do a much better job of finding and searching things if all the information are together. That's what we realized. AI is really good with bundled offerings. AI is really good with horizontal tools. So that's the second phase we call it. The first product was our AI writer product. Second product is AI Q&A or connectors. Please look at all the information in Notion and give you an answer, right? And then we also need to work with external connectors because there's things that are living in Jira, living in Zendesk that other customers still rely on. So we need to build AI connectors, but more and more information coming back to the Notion core. I will say the third one, which is even more fascinating, it's For the longest time, and still is, one of the biggest weaknesses of building for Legos, it's hard to piece together. It's not everybody can put together a Lego set from scratch, right? There's always the builders and users with the Legos. But guess who is really good at piecing things together, assemble things, especially things like, since Sana 3.5, AI is so good at writing code. Coding is just assembling things together. So now we're looking at, holy shit, we spent the last 5, 6 years building all those Lego blocks for knowledge work. If you're just putting an AI coding agent on top of it, you can have— create any kind of knowledge, customer software, customer agent for whatever your vertical use cases you need. So that's the most fascinating approach for me, and we did not expect this at all.

Thank you, AI. Is there anything else along the lines of building horizontal products and bundling that you think is interesting to share or important? Otherwise, I have one last question I want to ask you.

I think market is kind of like waves. There's like, who said this? There's 2 ways to build business, bundling and unbundling, right? There's too much of a zig into zag. Actually, my favorite version of this is like in the There's a classic Chinese literature called Romance of Three Kingdoms. It's a great novel. It talks about the Three Kingdoms era of China. And the opening sentence of this novel, it's, empires long united must divide, long divided must unite, as has always been. Bundling, unbundling. It's one of my favorite books to read when I was a kid. But business works the same way, right? When there's too much, you can sort of see this. It's like before computers, everything works on paper. Our knowledge work are done through papers. It's a fully democratized medium. Then PC happens during the '80s. The first era of PC, actually there are so many applications. There's like early database software like dBASE. quite famous. It started as dBASE II because it gives them credibility. Oh, they have been sticking around for some time, right? So that's the first unbundling phase of software computing. Then Microsoft bundled everything back into one suite in the '90s. Then SaaS unbundled it. Now we're sort of at the tail end of SaaS. There's so many verticalized SaaS. Average company to use like almost 100 tools. It's not It's kind of madness, right? So there's more— the market is shifting towards more of a bundling approach and with AI and with the macro. So there's more value to be created through bundling, at least for now, but the market could shift again. So understand this trend, I think helpful to see, should you build a vertical solution or should you build a horizontal solution? Because it does different things.

I love that story. Okay. So last question, and something that, uh, one of your early investors, Finn Barnes, suggested I ask you. I'm curious where this goes. There's this kind of, and you've, you've kind of touched on this a number of times, this, the, the way you think about Notion, it's almost like a philosophy of how to work and be versus just a productivity tool. And so I'm just curious how you think about the relationship between tools and human potential and humans and how we live in the world.

The tools are extensions of us. That's why our office room name is Timeless Tools. They are just, they extend us a little bit, right? And once they extend us, once we shape them, once we bring them to the world, they can come back to shape us. One of my favorite quotes, like the Marshall McLuhan quote, is like, we shape our tools. Thereafter, our tools shape us. I think this is probably too philosophical for building product or business, but there is a sense thinking like, what are you bringing to the world that will come back to bite you or shape you? And are you extending the part, the so-called good part of human nature, or are you extending the part that's I know, might be more zero-sum, might be more negative, right? For me, what is Legos? Lego is creativity. Lego is beauty. Software to me feels like lacking both. It's definitely lacking a lot of creativity. It's so rigid. So I believe both are human nature that worth amplify. You can build another business that amplify different part of human nature, right? Sequoia famously invest in 7 sins or 7 human natures of human because they're so powerful. If you just latch onto them, you can create a business, you can create a product. But at least I prefer to amplify creativity and beauty in the domain of software. To me, that's aligned with my values and I think can at least shape the market, shape our user, our product. Towards the better part of themselves.

It must feel so good to have a product that is so aligned with the way you want to see the world and actually working and growing at this rate and scaling and becoming this, uh, I don't know, part of the ether of the world.

Feels good. Yeah, it feels good that some of the most heartwarming thing is still, it never gets old. Like when you walk by coffee shop and see people using Notion, oh, it feels good. And it feels good that, that When I see people in our community can create a living selling Notion templates, Notion apps, that they're not a software engineer, right? Going back to the original mission of more people create software. I think that's one of the most fulfilling things that at least as a maker of tools can experience.

That last point, I think people don't realize. So people are making millions of dollars selling Notion templates on the internet, like on Etsy and other places.

Consulting templates. Yeah. It's like, And they're not programmers. I think that's the, I would say that's the heart of it because their domain expertise, they, they have like they're YouTubers or creators. They have lifestyle brand. They know certain things, but they're not makers of software. Then they can use Notion, package their workflows and expertise into Notion app and templates and make a living with it. It's awesome. Yeah.

Like millions of dollars.

It's crazy.

Ivan, before we get to an abridged lightning round, I'm curious if there's anything else that you wanted to touch on, think might be useful for folks to hear before we get to our very exciting lightning round.

I think people in tech, I wish more people look beyond tech to steal good ideas. It's like tech, Hacker News, Twitter are so focused on the now and what's in front of it, what happened 6 months ago, right? So versus humanity, if you just read books in other industries, you can look sideways. If you go back into history, there's a massive amount of patterns and shapes and trade-offs you can steal from. And it can make what's in front of you much more interesting. It could give you— like, people figure out clever patterns in whatever domain in the past that you can just take in front of you. Right. And, and I wish more people would do that. And I think it would be a very interesting way for product makers, business makers to solve the problem in front of them by stealing outside of the, from the domain of tech and business. So, uh, at least it's very inspiring, very useful for me personally.

Makes me think of, uh, the quote, good artists copy, great artists steal.

Great artists steal. Yeah. Picasso stole, well, Steve Jobs stole that from Picasso or something who stole from somewhere else, probably.

Well, this is actually an amazing segue to our very abridged lightning round. And the first question is, by the way, welcome to the lightning round.

Oh, okay.

The first question is just, what are a couple of books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? Could be along the lines of what you just described, or it could just be generally.

I think the domain that interests me the most is the complex system domain. It's like, it's, you can look up the term, like, I think more and more people talk about this, but thinking system, you know, complex system, when all the different things merge together, it creates emergent properties. Talking about ants, talk about bees, talk about life itself. It's just so fascinating, right? How do, with few primitives, few Lego bricks, you can create a thing called life? That thing just, it's, it's trigger for me. So I love reading in that domain. And this is really helpful for creating product, at least a horizontal product, because you're trying to channel the energy, use smaller parts to create something that the sum is much larger than its parts.

Is there a specific book that comes to mind or is it just generally that's a cool area?

That's a cool area to pay attention to.

Next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

I like to watch a Old documentaries. Maybe this is another area or category too. There's quite a few on YouTube. Like, people make really good documentary in the '80s, in the '70s. That's like all the old BBC ones. They're just excellent and they have a strong opinion in them and they're no longer just like general education thing, you know. They have a, they have a direction. They have a, they have a taste. Um, Go look it up. Like, oh yeah, one is a really good one to get started called Connections. I think it's called, but the gentleman's name is Burke. It's about how different things from different domains inspire other domains. And usually he used 30 minutes or 60 minutes to chain together a bunch of connection of stories. It's really good for technologists to watch. Highly recommend.

I feel a very consistent pattern throughout all of these answers and your entire conversation of just emergent properties, connections, Legos, building abstractions. Yeah.

I think I did Enneagram. My Enneagram is 7 and 8. 7 is like, uh, it's actually perfect with what we just talked about. 7 is like creative, finding connection, see the forest and tree. A is they call challenger. It's like competitive. They are optimizing. So true energy exists in me.

Oh, wow. This all makes sense. I got to take this Enneagram. It comes up a bunch on this podcast.

Right. Yeah.

Final question. Do you have a life motto that you often think back to that you often repeat in your head of just like when times are hard or just to keep going with something you're working on that you find useful?

I like to think things as a craft. As you just make it better, make for yourself. If it's unique enough for yourself and useful for others, things will follow.

Ivan, thank you so much for being here. 2 final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to follow up on anything? And then how can listeners be useful to you?

Probably find me on Twitter, Ivan H Z H A O. Um, just helpful for Give us feedback about Notion, about our product. That's the best, best help.

What's the best way to do that? Is it like DM Ivan or is it?

Yeah, just DM me.

Okay.

DM me. Yeah, that's probably the best way.

Okay. Oh boy, here you go. And then you guys are hiring. Anything specific you're looking for? Anything people should know if they're like, oh shit, I want to go work here?

We're trying to hire misfits. So if you think you're a misfit, If you are exceptional at many things, especially, you want to build Lego for software, you want to take interesting spin on AI with Lego for software, then DM me.

Amazing. Ivan, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

Bye everyone.

Bye.

Thank you so much for listening.

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