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I'm Akshay Kothari. I'm the co-founder and COO of Notion.
Notion is a productivity software company.
And what we're trying to do is essentially
provide you one simple medium where you can essentially
do all your work, everything from note taking
to having a knowledge base for a company,
managing your projects all in a single medium.
We've done this by giving people building
blocks for what these apps are built from.
Before this, I was at LinkedIn for many years
when they acquired my previous startup Pulse.
I'm excited to chat with you today.
I was really good at math and physics,
and I studied electrical engineering when I came to the US.
And I actually did a lot of engineering internships.
It turns out that I didn't enjoy it that much.
I found the engineering work
to be a bit too sort of granular.
I haven't really coded in a long time.
I'm much more interested in product
and business and the intersection of that.
I wanted to sort of take a step back
and think about maybe more larger, higher level sort
of product business things that I could be working
on in between my bachelor's degree,
in my master's degree, I spent a year in venture capital.
That's actually for me was a very important year
because I got to meet a lot of entrepreneurs.
After hearing the pitches for about a year,
I realized that I wanted to be on the other side
and not hearing the pitches as an investor,
but actually wanting to start something of my own.
That took me to Stanford.
So I went to Stanford for two years every quarter,
tried to start a company.
Many of them failed, but in my last quarter I started Pulse,
which was a essentially like a news
application built for the iPad back in 2010.
We built this as a class project at Stanford.
We built this pretty fast.
We had to, in the whole class was 11 weeks,
so we built this sort of hacked up version
of Pulse in about six weeks,
and we sort of put it out in the App Store; not sure how it would do.
In a couple of weeks.
It sort of went up to the top of the App Store.
A few weeks later,
Steve Jobs talked about it and the WWDC in 2010.
And again, let me just show you some of the the latest
apps that have been out, Pulse,
which is a wonderful RSS reader, if you haven't seen it.
And overnight it went from like a class
project to being a company.
I think the big learnings one is that when you're
building something, I think you sort of my
natural inclination was to like not release publicly.
I wanted to make things better.
I think if I had done that, I think I probably would
have never released, I think the professor in the class.
I remember Michael Deering pushed me to like release
even the beta version of the product we had.
And by putting it out there,
we got so much feedback, we improved it,
we got in the market, we became a company.
So I think sort of bias towards action
of actually shipping something quickly.
It was worked out really well for us.
I think the second thing that I learned was
that many times like we are much more
interested in becoming an entrepreneur or starting a company
rather than actually solving a problem.
And if I think about Pulse versus the previous things
I had done, Pulse was actually solving a real problem
that existed, which was that it was
impossible to read news on your phone back in 2010.
I think if you build something that people want
that people are struggling with,
I think they will come and actually use the product.
And then probably the last thing I would say
that I think product is only half of the puzzle.
I think you have to think about distribution
and how you take the product to market.
You know, that's something that we use
that I think a lot about Notion like we could be building
the best possible product in this office,
but if we don't figure out a way to distribute our product,
like people will never know what we've built.
In college.
I studied cognitive science, how a human brain works,
and a little bit computing a little bit philosophy.
But I really got into fine art as well, photography.
At the end of my school years,
most my friends are artists.
I'm the only person who know how to code in my friends circle,
so I start building web pages for everyone.
After making those three, four or four
or five websites, those people are creative.
They can build their own websites
if they know how to do that.
Computing as a medium, they don't know
how to speak that media.
With Spotify as a tool, everybody can play music.
At that stage, I was very much thinking about how can
I help other people to create their websites.
Ivan was based in Canada and he decided
to come to the Bay Area in San Francisco In 2011.
He put out a simple post in Hacker News which basically said like,
Hey, I'm a designer, I'm looking for a job.
I want to work in San Francisco.
And I essentially wanted to hire him as a designer.
And we actually gave him an offer to join Pulse back in 2011,
but he ended up joining another company.
But we kept in touch, and after I had sold Pulse
to LinkedIn in 2013, he was about to start Notion.
Notion ended up being my first investment.
I had no intentions to joining full time.
I think that happened five years later.
I think even before he started Notion,
I think he was thinking about this problem for many years.
He deeply believes that everyone can be
a creator and that computing devices are
built for creation, not just consumption.
To me, that felt like a really compelling mission
because if you can actually make it happen,
then you can unleash a lot of creativity in the world.
In many ways, when you're investing in early stage,
I think you're sort of like
betting on the person much more than the idea,
because the idea can actually change.
For that specific thing, It was very easy to bet on Ivan because you could
see the passion and sort of deep thinking he
had done before, even before he started notion.
At your environment.
Those are the documents you have in motion.
If we try to reorder stuff,
you just drag it where you think it should be.
The very first version of Notion is a web page builder.
That's the prototype.
And from there evolve into a web app builder.
That's pretty much the first few years of Notion.
It took me several years to realize
that people don't want to build apps.
Very few people want to do that.
It's kind of collaborative building apps.
It's kind of like a document editing.
It's kind of like Xcode for the web.
It's very confusing.
On top of that, we're building on top of some
technical foundation that wasn't stable,
so it was very hard to tell whether it's our own bug
or it's the bug come from the platform we're using.
So fundamentally, we have to rewrite the whole software.
We're going to run out of time
if we don't reset the company.
I think the most important one is about yourself.
It's about are you building something for yourself
or are you building something that the world wants?
The first person notion very much what you
think the world wants, what you want.
So notions first approach was essentially to create
this platform where you can build software.
So it gave you all the building blocks and it basically said,
okay, now you can take these building blocks
and build whatever software you can dream about.
The challenge is that people don't
wake up wanting to build software.
People just wake up to do their job.
At that time team is about four or five people.
Me and Sam and my co-founders would probably most
likely going to run out of money, unfortunately,
layoff everybody and go to somewhere small and interesting
and quiet and we can just focus on coding.
Look out of Japan, because neither of us has been
to Japan and we always want to go to.
And the reason for Kyoto is if you look at on Airbnb,
Tokyo and Osaka or other major cities,
the rooms are fairly small, the apartments are fairly small.
But for Kyoto, probably because during
World War Two it wasn't got bombed
and a lot of older houses are still there.
They're quite a bit bigger.
And the pace of life in the city is slower as well.
So for folks, I'm working on things
and it's a much cheaper city than San Francisco.
So rebuild the Notion that everybody is
working on today is rebuilt from that stage.
So in 2018 summer, Ivan and I got
together for breakfast just to catch up.
I was at LinkedIn then I was itching to get back
into the garage and build again and I thought I would
probably leave LinkedIn and start my own company.
But as you were having breakfast heat,
I haven't talked a lot about the 2.0 release
which introduced the database.
The tipping point for us was when we moved away
from asking you to build software to providing you
simple templates that allow you to do your job.
We came in and said, Hey, here's a knowledge base
so you can collaborate with all your friends.
Now, underneath that product,
all the capabilities still exist.
Like you can still modify it, you can still build
your own software, but my marketing to you is less
about that and more about specific things that you need
to do your job and how notion fills that gap.
And so as we were talking, Ivan was at that time looking
for a COO who could really help scale the business.
The company was about eight people then,
and he offered me that role, which was a really interesting role.
I think everything that I had done up until that point
was more on the product side,
and this role was basically a role that was trying
to do everything inside the company except product.
I think his thinking was that if he could get
a product counterpart to really help build our
go to market and the foundational teams here,
I think it would allow him to stay focused on product.
And for me this felt like a really interesting
opportunity where I joined well before.
I think most people knew about Notion
and I got to take something that had just hit
product market fit and take it to the masses.
After a lot of thinking, I decided to join
in the fall of 2018 and it's been amazing to watch.
I think we were eight people then
and we are close to 500 people now.
Just in the four years business has
grown over 100 fold in that time frame.
As the first Notion consultant in Korea
I believe the key to Notion’s global success is Notion’s user community worldwide.
I discovered Notion on ProductHunt
during the release of Notion 2.0.
After using the product I fell in love with Notion's database function.
I then took to social media posts to share my knowledge, knowhow,
and templates and guides to contribute to growth of
the Notion community in South Korea.
Today the community has 43K members.
It’s amazing to see similar Notion communities popping up all over the world.
It's kind of like art combined with technology,
it's very intuition driven.
So a lot of things that just feels right
and other things we try to keep things very,
we call it keep a extremely simple, the simplest.
We use the word dumb, like so dumb that you need
to pay too much attention to start picking
up and start using it because it feels really natural.
It should just feels like your extension of your body.
You know how to use your hands.
You know how to use very simple tools like a pen
or a cup because they're evolved so long with you.
A fundamental is about solving people's problems.
If we do so, then people should love us.
They will love us. And and there's a lot more room to grow.
You can do so many different things with Notion,
but it's built by just over 100 engineers.
And I think the reason that is possible is
because architecturally we have built the sort of the Notion product
in a way that is very modular and we sort of want
to expose these building blocks to other people.
For example, we are not building a CRM
or we are not building a specific project management software,
but we're giving you all
the building blocks so that you can build it.
And so similar to Lego, I think the engineers focus
on building the building blocks and then we have
the marketing team and the community that takes the building blocks
and creates templates that market specific use cases,
and that makes it a very efficient engine.
Engineers don't have to think
about building a very specific use case.
They focus on just building capability
and then marketing and other stakeholders build
a packaging that we can go out and sell.
I think that's probably one of the reasons
why a Notion has been able to stay
so lean as we've grown to scale so far.
Today we're introducing notion A.I.,
which brings the power of artificial intelligence
directly into your Notion workspace.
Let's say we're writing a blog post to introduce Notion AI.
It's a simple as asking AI assist for help
and clicking generate post.
Next, just sit back and watch
as artificial intelligence completes your first draft.
Notion AI allows people to essentially just tell what you're trying
to do and it sort of automatically generates a lot
of content or does a lot of things that you wanted to.
If you have a long doc,
you can ask it to summarize things.
If you are starting from scratch,
it's like a blank page.
You want some help, you can ask it to write a few things
so that you can get started with it.
I think AI itself is changing every week.
I'm excited to see how it evolves.
It's been quite a fun journey,
but at the same time it still feels like pretty early.
Like I think there's still a lot of work to be done
and we still feel like our best days are ahead of us.
So I'm excited to see
what the next couple of years hold for us.
We have four values at Notion.
We are mission driven owners of our mission.
So essentially our mission is to sort
of enable ubiquitous software tool making,
and we very much are owners of that.
The second value is that we are pacesetters,
obviously a startup, so we need to move fast.
I think that's one way we can win in the market.
The third value is we are truth seekers,
which is that we spend a lot of time rigorously thinking about
a specific decision before we actually move forward.
And the fourth one is we are kind and direct.
We want to be kind to our coworkers,
but at the same time we want to be able to be
direct and be honest with each other so that we're
pushing each other to do our best work.
I think these four values are
very much authentically us.
It's not aspirationally us,
but it's like who we are.
And we like that the second and third value, which is pace setting
and truth seeking fight with each other,
because in many cases some projects you want
to move fast and in some cases you want
to be able to take time and really rigorously think.
So we like that they fight with each other so that we find like,
okay, which projects can we move fast with?
Which projects to we spend more time thinking about?
The fourth value of being kind and direct is obviously
nice because we're not just trying to be nice with each other,
we're trying to really achieve our mission
and that requires us to be direct with each other.
This is these values have really
helped us hire the right people.
These values have really helped us make
being a good decision sort of rubric for us.
Like when we're making important decisions,
we think about like, does this represent the values we have?
And it's memorable.
I can say these four values in my sleep now,
which I think is nice because I don't have
to think about what the values are.
There was a long term sort of mission of the company is
to create ubiquitous software tool making,
which is the simple idea
that there's a billion knowledge workers out there.
And our hope is that all of them feel the power
to modify or create their own software.
In doing that, we hope that Notion becomes
the third generation of productivity software.
After Microsoft Office and Google Suite,
we're much more powerful in that,
people will be able to not just take notes
and manage projects, but we'll be able to create things
that sort of work the way their brain works.
So very excited about that.
It'll probably take us more than a decade to get there,
but we're excited to work on it.
Please play the YouTube video first