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)

Summary

Lenny’s Podcast: Ivan Zhao (Notion CEO) on Lost Years, Staying Small, Building Horizontal, and the Joy & Suffering of Craft | Summary

Episode Theme:
A deep dive with Ivan Zhao, CEO and co-founder of Notion, exploring the philosophy, backstory, struggles, and triumphs behind building one of the world’s most beloved productivity tools. Topics covered include Notion’s “lost years,” the art and hardship of building a horizontal product, the importance of craft, leading a lean company, and Ivan’s high-level reflections on tools, values, and human potential.

---

Ivan Zhao’s Journey: Coding Roots and Creative Vision

[05:16–09:04]

• Early Life and Education:

  • Grew up in Urumqi (Xinjiang, China), a “small” city of 4 million, later moved to Beijing and then Canada.
  • Got into programming by winning a contest to secure a spot in a prestigious Beijing school, inspired by a love for computer games.
  • “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…” [05:40]

• Creative Influences:

  • Blended programming with an art education in Canada.
  • Realized that many artists struggled to create with software, which inspired the idea for a tool enabling anyone to build software.

• Philosophical Alignment:

  • Profoundly influenced by Douglas Engelbart’s vision (“Augmenting Human Intellect”), Alan Kay, and Ted Nelson.
  • “Augmenting Human Intellect—when I read that paper, it’s like, holy shit. If you know how to code or design, this is the highest leverage thing you can do for other people.” [08:23]

---

The “Lost Years”: Notion’s Search for Product-Market Fit

[00:00, 11:33–18:27]

• Initial Missteps:

  • Notion started in 2013 with an initial “developer tool for everyone” approach—did not resonate with most people.
  • “Most people… wake up, they have report due, they need to get their job done, they don’t care [about building custom software]…” [11:56]

• Broccoli and Sugar Analogy:

  • Decided to “hide the broccoli in the sugar”—offer a familiar productivity tool on the surface, embedding flexible, no-code “Lego” abilities under the hood.

“We call it a sugar called the broccoli. People don’t want to eat the broccoli, but people like sugar, so give them the sugar, hide your broccoli inside of it.”
— Ivan Zhao [00:31/13:46]

• Technical Resets:

  • Multiple total rewrites, including shifting from Google’s unstable Web Component technology to a more stable foundation.
  • “You can create progress through better abstractions and that compounds faster… you can catch up to all the things you’ve built much quicker.” [22:53]

• Lean Survival and Family Support:

  • Stayed afloat with minimal hires, founder sacrifices, and help from Ivan’s mother.
  • “Well, Chinese mom always can help… My mom helped me kickstart the company…” [15:24]

---

Product-Market Fit: A Gradual Realization

[25:07–27:33]

• No Single Breakthrough:
  • “It never hit us as a binary state. Just kind of like, oh good, we have people who care… It’s a very gradual ramp.” [25:20]
  • Signs included user revenue, VC inbound, and quirky moments such as investors sending dog treats to the office. [26:23]

---

Staying Small to Move Fast

[30:43–34:27]

• Philosophy of Lean Teams:

  • Notion runs with high talent density and minimal headcount:
    • “When you can do a lot at the same time or hire people who can, you naturally keep the company small.” [30:43]
  • Avoids bloated internal communication—favours competence, system design, and leveraging Notion itself for operations.
  • “Internally we use the metaphor: Notion is a small bus… the smaller, the easier to turn corners, accelerate, and maneuver.” [33:29]

• Culture and Environment:

  • Focus on a cozy, home-like office—careful attention to detail, comfort, and aesthetics.
  • “If the chair looks ugly, the wall looks ugly, it hurts.” [36:01]

---

Notion’s Core Principle: Craft, Values, and Trade-offs

[37:21–41:14]

• Emphasis on Craft:

  • Inspired by physical craftsmanship—“My wife refers to me as a wood cabinet builder…” [37:36]
  • Key company values: craft (skill, taste, trade-offs) and value (authentic principles and values).

• Balancing Business and Vision:

  • Must combine personal vision with user needs—a constant tension.
  • “If you build too much for yourself… there’s no users; too much for business, you’re building a commodity.” [21:41]

• On Trade-offs:

  • “There’s no free lunch. You have to give up something… Are you giving up the right thing?” [39:13]
  • Adapting to new tech (like AI) is like gaining a new “material” to work with, demanding new trade-offs. [41:14]

---

The Joy and Pain of Building Horizontal Products

[51:55–58:17]

• Horizontal Platform Challenges:

  • Hard to serve many use cases—most customers want pre-packaged solutions (“Lego boxes”), not loose abstractions (“Lego bricks”).
  • “Only hardcore LEGO fans care about LEGO bricks. Most people care about LEGO boxes.” [52:38]

• Advice:

  • Segmentation is key—find a broad entry point (notes, docs) and let users discover depth.
  • Notion’s growth rooted in B2C2B: users adopt for personal notes/docs, then bring it to work (and up-market).

• Bundling and Market Trends:

  • “Empire long united must divide; long divided must unite.” (Romance of the Three Kingdoms)
    • Business cycles oscillate between bundling and unbundling.
  • “With so many SaaS tools, there’s madness… now the market’s shifting towards more bundling, and with AI and macro[trends], more value created through bundling—for now.” [60:43]

---

Leadership, Growth, and Missteps

[41:31–49:10]

• Leadership Style:

  • Ivan describes himself as direct, not the archetypal loud tech CEO.
  • “I wouldn't say I’m the most soft interaction person at work… Notion’s etho is probably more East Coast than West Coast.” [42:17]

• Personal/Organizational Growth:

  • Ivan had to learn storytelling at scale (one-to-many), and balance delegating with maintaining values.
  • Realized the dangers of optimizing too much for business at the expense of first principles, especially during an unsuccessful foray into “hardcoded” project management features.
  • “If [the product] isn’t built according to your values, there’s organ rejection with your employees, with your customers.” [46:13]

• Brush with Collapse:

  • Covid-era near-death: Notion almost failed when their one Postgres database ran out of space—solved by urgent, company-wide sharding.
  • “There was a doomsday clock… in weeks we’d run out of space and Notion would completely shut down.” [49:31]

---

AI, Notion’s Future, and the Power of Tools

[58:17–64:58]

• AI as Platform Opportunity:

  • AI enables reasoning, searching, and assembling—makes Notion’s “loose Legos” more accessible, as AI can assemble workflows and tools from components.
  • “Guess who is really good at piecing things together… AI is so good at writing code, assembling things together.” [59:21]

• The Philosophy of Tools:

  • “Tools are extensions of us… We shape our tools; thereafter our tools shape us.” [63:08]
  • Ivan prefers to amplify creativity and beauty through Notion: “That’s aligned with my values… and it shapes our users towards the better part of themselves.” [64:03]

---

Notable Quotes & Stories

• On “Sugar and Broccoli”:
  “People don’t want to eat the broccoli, but people like sugar, so give them the sugar, hide your broccoli inside of it.” — Ivan [13:46]

• On Craft:
  “My wife often refers to me as a wood cabinet builder… That’s my mindset toward building Notion.” [37:36]

• On Product-Market Fit:
  “It never hit us as a binary state. Just kind of like, oh good, people care now…” [25:20]

• On Organizational Design:
  “Notion is a small bus… The smaller the bus, the easier to turn corners.” [33:29]

• On Dog Treats Signalling Investor Interest:
  “One day… dog treats sent to our office. Someone hustled into where we are—just to reach out.” [26:23]

• On Tools Shaping Humanity:
  “We shape our tools; thereafter our tools shape us.” [63:08]

---

Books, Media, and Final Advice

[67:44–71:00]

• Book Recommendations:

  • The “complex systems” domain—how simple primitives can combine into emergent phenomena; e.g., Connections by James Burke (documentary series).

• Life Motto:

  • “Think of things as a craft—you just make it better for yourself. If it’s unique enough for yourself and useful for others, things will follow.” [70:41]

• Final Thought:

  • “I wish more people look beyond tech… There’s a massive amount of patterns you can steal from history and apply to your problems.” [66:27]

---

Key Timestamps for Reference

• 00:31 / 13:46 — “Sugar and broccoli” analogy
• 05:40 — Ivan’s programming contest story
• 08:23 — Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect” effect on Ivan
• 22:53 — The value of abstraction and resets
• 25:20 — The vague, gradual reality of product-market fit
• 26:23 — Dog treats from investors, a quirky sign of traction
• 33:29 — “Notion is a small bus” metaphor for company structure
• 37:36 — Craft, woodworking, and product philosophy
• 49:31 — Near-collapse during COVID database scaling crisis
• 52:38 — “Lego boxes vs. bricks” and horizontal product lessons
• 59:21 — AI as the assembler of “Lego bricks”
• 63:08 — Marshall McLuhan: “We shape our tools; thereafter our tools shape us.”

---

For Listeners: Who Should Work at Notion?

• Ivan: “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… DM me.” [71:28]

---

Tone:
Curious, self-effacing, philosophical, and practical—a blend of product builder’s candor and craftsperson’s pride. Ivan Zhao’s approach is about creating durable, beautiful tools that enable creativity, grounded in deep respect for history, abstraction, and human potential.

Transcript

[Lenny Rachitsky]

The way you describe the early years of Notion, you describe the first three to four years as the last years.

[Ivan Zhao]

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 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, so what kind of tool do people use every day? Productivity software. It took us two years to realize we need to build a productivity tool. We call it a sugar called the broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli, but people like sugar, so give them the sugar, the hydro, broccoli inside of it.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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

[Ivan Zhao]

What is building a product or business? You want user, 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 our project. And too much for a business, you're building a commodity.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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.

[Ivan Zhao]

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

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

A lot of podcasts.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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 three to four 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. Pleza's 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.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Subscriber of my newsletter.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

You now get a year free of.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Notion Pro Pro and Perplexity Pro and.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Superhuman and Linear and Granola. Check it out@lenny's newsletter.com with that I.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Bring you Ivan Zhao. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp and draftkings reliantepo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features, and EPO helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time and accessible UI for diving deeper into performance and out of the box reporting that helps you avoid annoying prolonged analytics cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product growth, machine learning, monetization and email marketing. Check out [e-mail] Lenny and 10x your experiment velocity. That's get eppo.com Lenny this episode is brought to you by Airtable Product Central the unified system that brings your entire product. Org together in one place. No more scattered tools. No more misaligned teams. If you're like most product leaders, you're tired of constant context switching between tools. That's why airtable built Product Central. After decades of working with world class product companies, think of it as mission control for your entire product organization. Unlike rigid point solutions, Product Central powers everything from resourcing to voice of customer to roadmapping to launch execution. And because it's built on Airtable's no code platform, you can customize every workflow to match exactly how your team works. No limitations, no compromises. Ready to see it in action? Head to airtable.comlenny to book a demo. That's airtable.comlenny.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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

[Ivan Zhao]

Thank you for having me.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

I know you don't do a lot of podcasts and so I'm very honored that you're here. I want to 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, 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?

[Ivan Zhao]

I think a small town in China, the definition, it's, it's actually a 4 million people city. So the city is called Yurumuki. It's then the northwest, that 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 good school in the capital, you need to win some kind of competition. And there are different path. You can good at math there or you can get a programming like information Olympia. I was really into computer 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, he 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 three or four websites and realized, oh, actually people don't know how to create with the software media, computing media. So that got me to want to create a product like Notion today, which allowed more people to create tools, create software for their daily work and life.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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. How well did you actually do in.

[Ivan Zhao]

The second in Beijing?

[Lenny Rachitsky]

So in Beijing, okay.

[Ivan Zhao]

Pretty big. Beijing is a big city. So.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Okay. Incredible. Another stat I or story I heard is that you learned English by watching SpongeBob SquarePants. Is that real?

[Ivan Zhao]

Yeah, it's real. I moved to Canada pretty late, 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.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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 Engelbert paper ended up being a very meaningful moment for you.

[Ivan Zhao]

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 a creative tool for software for computing eventually arrive at 1960s and 70s. So you realize the first generation of computing pioneers, which is around San Francisco, Stanford areas, South Bay, they actually had the best ideas for them. People like Douglas Engelbar, 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 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.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Like notion makes me think of Steve Jobs famous line of how the computer is a bicycle for the mind.

[Ivan Zhao]

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 your story. Xerox PARC has working on the first generation project personal computer. It's called Xerox Alto. Alan Kay was one of the main person behind it. Alto runs down the system called Smalltalk, which is there's no separation between users and users app. 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 Power to in demo with Alto, he does not it's the first time he see graphic user interface. One of the first time. 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 scroll bar direction. When you scroll up and down, it shouldn't scroll the opposite reverse direction. And then people just instantly change the scroll bar 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 application framework rather than this small talk object oriented framework then that has all the apps we have today and has the SaaS broad we have today.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

That vision of how product should be sounds very familiar and, 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 2013 some over 10 years ago at this point, you described the first three to four 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 AR and like two years under two years now. And you don't hear a lot of stories of companies of your scale and success that took three to four years to find product market fit. Essentially what went on during these last 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.

[Ivan Zhao]

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 try 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 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. Creating software to optimize whatever they're doing, they don't care. So we give to our friends, give to investors, did not resonate with people, but we really want to build that tool. So we just keep going and 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 we use Notion more you honors discover Intent, which is Zara Hash has a no code developer power into it and you can create almost any kind of productivity software using Notion itself. That took Us two plus 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.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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.

[Ivan Zhao]

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 took, we were young, took us multiple years, hit your head straight into the, into the wall to realize that.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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.

[Ivan Zhao]

And we call it a sugar called the broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli, but people like sugar so give them the sugar hydro inside of it.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Wow.

[Ivan Zhao]

Yeah.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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

[Ivan Zhao]

That's true. Actually it took us four years to get somewhere. First two years is that you built too much like a no code, like developer product, nobody cares. It took us two years to realize we need to build a productivity tool. Then it took another a year or two to really to build, to build this out. But in the middle of it realize we're building on the wrong technical foundation. So like eight, 10 years ago, there's competing before re. Right now all the web app runs on React. Right before React wins, there's a competing technology called Web Component from Google. And it makes sense. Web Component feels like a Lego like, like the building block like and we're betting on that technology. And then we realize because it's so new, it's just so unstable, you don't know where the bug come from. It's from your source code from the 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 code base, reset the company so we can build on our more orthodox technology foundation.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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

[Ivan Zhao]

Well, Chinese mom always can help when 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 register a company. So my mom helped me with the initial and 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 really grateful for that. How do you bridge? How do you last your so long? Because the thing you want to create does not exist with always call notions. It's a Lego for software. It doesn't quite exist. Right? There's a LEGO for Lego. You can see that in furniture sort of access. 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 lacked wanted every Christmas.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Have you guys seen Magnetiles though? I have. I have a one and a half year old and Magnetiles are quite delightful. It's like a. I think it's like a pre Lego. I like the chili tile. Yeah. It's like they're little magnetic plastic planes and then you can build little. You can build much bigger things really quickly. It's more for babies, but I'm having a blast.

[Ivan Zhao]

Oh, I see it. It's kind of like, huh, Like a.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Different version of legos. I like that you're in real time looking it up. You're like, okay, we're our new vision. Magnetiles for software.

[Ivan Zhao]

Now most people know like, oh, Magna tile idea is the same modular, right?

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Yeah.

[Ivan Zhao]

Creativity.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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?

[Ivan Zhao]

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 LEGO power hiding inside of it. We built on a wrong technical foundation. And if we continue to build on a round once, we're going to run out of money. Company won't exist. So we decided to lay off everybody. At that time, notion was five people. We lay off everybody back to me and Simon, two 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 up. Me and Sam just coding every day and design every day. That's some of the happiest moments. Birthday every day.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

I saw a stat, you're coding 18 hours a day. 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.

[Ivan Zhao]

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 non stop of shipping stuff.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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, have 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. 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.

[Ivan Zhao]

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 be afraid to reset. I think courage is quite important because 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 the building a product or business. You want user, you want revenue. That's a, that's a product business. It's almost like a sports. The market is the arena. Then you want to optimize the Scorecard work. It's a building for winning. And I grew up playing sports. I. I like to compete. So I like that I'm building for something. You want the world to expand to, to have is building for your value. You, you have some taste, you have some aesthetic, you have some values. You want the world to have more of that. There are different energy. I realized actually fairly recently, like they're really different. Depends on which day I wake up. I might, 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 prouder thing. 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.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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.

[Ivan Zhao]

You're really a cue, almost like a therapist. Right? So it's true. 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 our project. You're just doing a research project. Right. And too much for a business. You're building a commodity. Right. So where's the spectrum? Yeah, it's never ending spectrum. It's interesting.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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 I love that you said just get sleep. Very Brian Johnson of you. Just like get some sleep when it's a real down day. There'll be another day tomorrow. Really simple.

[Ivan Zhao]

But it's like a daily personal, physical reset. Right? You can reset your co base, you can reset your mental model.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Okay. And then there's also. I love these points. Don't be afraid to kind of reset as you just said. Like Toby Ludke 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.

[Ivan Zhao]

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.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Right.

[Ivan Zhao]

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 sound cost recovered really quickly. So actually going back to the computing pioneers part like Smalltalk, one of the first system and a huge influence for Notion was a really tiny code base and inspired by Lisp, which is another programming languages and probably like a hundred lines of code or something. Right. The kernel of things could be really small, but just like math, it can compound, 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 thing you did. You are free to lose really quickly. So I think that's the corner of why reset is so powerful.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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, 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 in these.

[Ivan Zhao]

Yeah, I'm trying to cut up the US really quickly with deep seq.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Yeah.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

The point you also made about momentum, like be afraid, be weary of momentum. Taking you in a direction and moving in a different direction, not being stuck to that direction is exactly the way 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.

[Ivan Zhao]

Interesting.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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

[Ivan Zhao]

I think going back to me and Sam and high is never that high. Low. It's never that low. It never hit me hit us as like a binary state. Just kind of like oh good we have people who care about this thing we make now. Oh good people are reach out to us or paying us. And it's kind of very gradual ramp. Maybe that's why early days when it's really the lost 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 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 never there's a such move in the product market. Milestone achieve didn't feel that way.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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

[Ivan Zhao]

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 entire center office. So first of all office wasn't public the address and the doctrine is 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.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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

[Ivan Zhao]

Yeah. Because of the way how we just hire someone in the office as a dog. Then 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.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

So did you end up taking their money?

[Ivan Zhao]

Not the first time. Yeah.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Okay. Later.

[Ivan Zhao]

Okay.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

It's a long game.

[Ivan Zhao]

No.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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.

[Ivan Zhao]

So actually I had one of our investor is 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. Then for a while, oh, VC started knocking on the door. So I should talk to those people. The people like what we're doing, Right? I did some meetings, quite a few meetings, maybe a dozen, I realized. And one of Emerson saying, like, ivan, what are you doing? Like, you clearly don't need money, do you? Just trying to feel good. Do 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 customer? 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.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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

[Ivan Zhao]

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

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Okay, cool.

[Ivan Zhao]

Yeah, she's like another therapist, Right?

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

This episode is brought to you by Cinch, the customer communications Cloud. Here's the thing about digital customer communications. Whether you're sending marketing campaigns, verification codes or account alerts, you need them to reach users reliably. That's where Cinch comes in. Over 150,000 businesses, including eight of the top 10 largest tech companies globally, use Cinch's API to build messaging, email, and calling into their products. And there's something big happening in messaging that product teams need to know about. Rich communication services or RCS. Think of RCS as SMS 2.0. Instead of getting text from a random.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Number, your users will see your verified.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Company name and logo without needing to download anything new. It's a more secure and branded experience. Plus, you get features like interactive carousels and suggested replies. And here's why this matters. US carriers are starting to adopt rcs. Cinch is already helping major brands send RCS messages around the world. And they're helping Lenny's podcast listeners get registered first before the rush hits the US market. Learn more at get [e-mail] Lenny that's s I n c-h.com Lenny.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

I want to shift to talking about Notion today and the way you've approached it. And 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 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. 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?

[Ivan Zhao]

I think going back to the abstraction system way of problem solving, I think we're lucky that me and Simon and Akshay, we have the skill set. You probably can run a whole company which is a couple of us. I can co. I can design, I can do marketing, storytelling, talk, talking 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. The company small. And you all know you're doing product management. The over overhead is actually more from internal communication. 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 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 keep our headcount low, keep our company profitable and which then put you on the positive treadmill of you don't have to go for the next 1824 month 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 when 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. It's a positive compounding loop.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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?

[Ivan Zhao]

No, I wouldn't say where 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 is much better than brute force through people.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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 dao 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.

[Ivan Zhao]

I think just understand abstraction or system is a better curve than curve. Right. Linear. I think we internally help other people understand this. Internally we use the metaphor. Notion is a small bus. The bus. The, the. The. The smaller the bus is easier to turn corners, easier to accelerate, easy to maneuver. The bigger the bus it is. It just like bigger the boat, bigger the bus. Slow down. And as a leader in the company, you decide who sit around you on the bus seat. Right. That dictates how fast our overall bus moves. Dictate your work and life experience at this company because you're. You pick your roommate, you pick your seatmates. Um, that metaphor clicks with people inside a company and, and overall help us to optimize the. Make the bus tight, make the bus lean.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

I've never heard that metaphor before.

[Ivan Zhao]

It probably came up somewhere. But no small bus.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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?

[Ivan Zhao]

Maybe there are two dimension 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 a top life feels like hospital. I just say, 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 floor. It's 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 creative, more at ease in the office space. Right. So the vision we have is should feels like artist, studio or should feel like your home. And that's why most our office furniture are home furnitures. I just feel it's cozy. That's more so people spend more time, feels more creative. Juices flow better the other more 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. It doesn't 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.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

So.

[Ivan Zhao]

So it's better not have thing that hurts.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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

[Ivan Zhao]

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. We name our conference room after timeless tools in history. So there are give you an example, iPhones obvious one original Macintosh, various different form of chairs. Lamy's 2000 pans, 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 tens of hundred million people. Right. The Sony transistor radio is the first one to shrink semiconductors. 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 like software and especially tech, it's just every six months, every 12 month cycle. We don't think enough about creating something that lasts. I care creating something that at least the form factor lasts longer than coating.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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 hear that?

[Ivan Zhao]

Yeah, I think the key word 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 interesting. World is 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 refer me like as a wood cabinet builder. Like that's how I at least in my mindset training towards building notion it's 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.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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.

[Ivan Zhao]

Yeah, I think this is quite relevant especially for production makers and business makers. 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 are you giving up the right thing? That market where 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 off and new technology merges. 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. It's like require new technology to unlock new way 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 pick 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 more as a 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.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

And I'm hearing there's a 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.

[Ivan Zhao]

Like that, yeah.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

And if you don't mind me saying, 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 was probably an old valuation. 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?

[Ivan Zhao]

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

[Lenny Rachitsky]

I haven't seen that side of Ivan yet.

[Ivan Zhao]

Yeah. I wouldn't say I'm the most soft interaction person at work. It's actually the reverse is true. Because 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, move to us or move to the West Felt wow. Everybody says everything's wonderful, everything's nice, but that's not true. I would say Notions Etho is probably more like the east coast rather than West Coast. So somewhere in between.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Right.

[Ivan Zhao]

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 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 stricter coat of broccoli. You have to hide your broccoli within something that sugar pills. Right. So 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. But as company grow, you realize you need to be one too many storytellers. That's the skill. 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 brainstorming 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 outside the video game. You need to pick up something to unlock something else and make a new demand. You kind of trade off with yourself and the business. That's kind of fun though. Every 12, 18 month notion is like a new company. 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.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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.

[Ivan Zhao]

Yeah, it's like human minds are resistant to change. And how do you land in people's head? 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. Or the exchange with the other person. So yeah, it's a craft market. Storytelling is a dimension. It's a vast dimension of making trade offs.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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 the 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.

[Ivan Zhao]

If you use the product in the past three years, you realize Notion product, you realize like hey, we actually ship bunch of things not so great like two years ago, right? Actually last year, 2024 is the year that we. I can say we ship good stuff at good velocity and good quality and align 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. Like Notion. We call Notion is Lego for software or 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 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 entire value, then the system. It's like there's organ rejection with your employees, with your customers, right. Like to 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 hard coding things like sprints, milestones, all those things into your product, right? Or you can do it in the way that Notion has been 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. Instead we hard code the Sprint concept into the product and 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 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 value is the matter point, at least for me.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Okay, I got to follow the 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? Was the answer? Is it people personnel shift? Is it what what allowed you to change the way things were going?

[Ivan Zhao]

I would say all of that above, but especially just release the Sprint product through our community and customers. Then they said like what is this? It's like underpowered compared to other competitor products to doing product management. And it doesn't work well with the rest of notion like O said. And if you talk to engineers, okay, there's this part of notion you have to touch the code base that's just weird, right? That's you harkle too much into it from all the dimension technical front calling a customer and when you use the thing, it just doesn't feel right. So there's another saying that if you building a Lego way inside notion in the code base or product, the system work for you. If you feel non likewise the system work 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.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

So I'm hearing as 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.

[Ivan Zhao]

To build and took like nine, nine months a year to realize sometime.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Yeah, along those lines actually people come on this podcast and they share all these stories of things are going awesome all the time. And like this was a great example if 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.

[Ivan Zhao]

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

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Like how close are we talking about?

[Ivan Zhao]

If I recall correctly, you're probably in weeks running out of time. And then as you approach the limit of what postwords can do, behavior becomes sporadic. You really don't know which state going to hit you. But we just need to go as fast as you can to become sharding problem.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Yeah, I was going to ask. So the solution of sharding the database. Yeah, sharding. Okay, cool.

[Ivan Zhao]

Don't do it late. Yes. Don't do premature optimization, but plan ahead a little bit.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Don't worry. How long did you have from when you launched this doomsday clock to time running out? Was that like a few months?

[Ivan Zhao]

Maybe a bit longer. Yeah. In the month less than six, but more than three. Something like that.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

The bittersweetness of COVID just ramping up. Certain businesses.

[Ivan Zhao]

Yeah. People just run like they have to use online productivity software, collaboration tools.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Yeah. Blessing and a curse. Speaking of a blessing and curse, this is a great segue to where I wanted to go in 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 off. 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?

[Ivan Zhao]

First of all, no regret and second, I wouldn't want to build anything else because like going back to the value LEGO for software doesn't exist and LEGO is a 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.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Right.

[Ivan Zhao]

That's what we're learning a lot. Especially move up market. There's this term 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 and L to optimize for their business. Where you turn risk. That's LEGO box. It's not a LEGO brick related segmentation related to that. So you need to shift your mindset as you more towards B2B more towards move up market. I wish we have done it earlier. For the longest time I felt too much in the Lego brick mindset, not in the solution LEGO box mindset.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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, how's it being positioned, how do you picture it, what are the value props? Such a good metaphor.

[Ivan Zhao]

If you're building vertical software, naturally your vertical is the box, right? So you know you have one or two Persona you're selling to pretty straightforward that your market constrains you and no judgment. People like you can go it 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 notion to 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, you 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 pigeonhole yourself into the best spot. Like what we did with project management, sprints features.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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 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. It was the second most popular project, maybe management tool after jira. It was the fourth most popular docs, which is interesting because you think Notion would be like. Notion is known for docs and it's interesting. That was the lowest one actually. And then it was third in CRM, just behind Salesforce and HubSpot.

[Ivan Zhao]

Yeah, 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. And I think the good advantage is if a customer use 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 vertical use cases 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 two in project management, number four in CRM, but we're kind of introducing more bricks to make us number move out the categories in ranking. So it just takes time. But that's our approach.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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.

[Ivan Zhao]

I wouldn't do differently myself, but I wouldn't recommend it. It's a problem. The problem space too large to have 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 lack of our software. We somehow stand upon Document Notes as one use case and that just gave us a large top of the funnel. There's a 1 billion plus people use this use case every day. Right. So that fuels our growth. We call our internal strategy called B2C2B. All this consumers personal user use notion for the most simple way you can use a computer or your phone which is notetaking 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 use Notion for notes and doc in the first place. So pick. Well, at least we stumble 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 ship a calendar product last year because which other category of software has 1 billion plus user? There's document Notes, there's calendar, there's email. Right. That's why we're also working on the email product right now.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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.

[Ivan Zhao]

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 during writing and managing your tasks and project. It's really easy to slice the language model writing AI capability into it. So that's the first product we've built. Then the realization is AI is so good at reasoning and understanding and searching things and can do a much better job of finding and searching things if all the information are together. That's what realized. AI is really good with bundled offerings. AI is really good with horizontal tools. So that's the second phase. The first product was our AI writer product. Second product is AI Q&A or connectors. Please look at all the information notion of give you an answer, right? And then we also need to work with the external connector because there's things that living in Jira, living in Zendesk, that other customers still rely on. So we need to build AI connectors. But more, 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 user with the Legos. But guess who is really good at piecing things together, assemble things. Especially things like as synth 3.5. AI is so good at writing code coding is just assemble things together. So now we're looking at. Holy shit. We spent the last five, six years building all those LEGO blocks for knowledge work. If we'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.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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

[Ivan Zhao]

I think market is kind of like waves. There's like. Who said this? There's two ways to build business. Bundling and bundling. Right? There's too much of a zig into Zack. Actually my favorite version of this is like in the Is A classic Chinese literature called Romance of Three Kingdoms. It's great novel. It talk about the three kingdom 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 book to read when I was a kid. But business works 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 is fully democratized medium. Then PC happens during the 80s. The first era is a PC actually are so many applications. There's like early database software like Dbase so quite famous. It started at Dbase 2 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 bundle 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 shifting towards more of 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 vertical solution or should you be a horizontal solution because it does different things.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

I love that story. Okay, so last question. Something that 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 kind of touched on this a number of times. This 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.

[Ivan Zhao]

The tools are extensions of us. That's why our office room name our 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 world, they can come back to shape us. One of my favorite quotes, like the Marshall McLuhan quote is 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 so called good part of human nature or are you extending the part that's, you know, might be more zero sum, might be more negative.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Right.

[Ivan Zhao]

For me what is Legos? Lego is creativity. Lego is beauty. Software to me feels like lacking both. Definitely lacking a lot of creativity is 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 seven sins were seven 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 at least shape the market ship our user over product towards the better part of themselves.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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, I don't know, part of the ether of the world.

[Ivan Zhao]

Feels good. Yeah. It feels good that some of the most heartwarming thing is still and never I guess. Oh like when you walk by coffee shop and see people using notion. Oh feels good. And feels good that when I see people in our community can create a living selling notion template notion apps that they're not a software engineer. And going back to the original mission of more people create software I think that's one of the most fulfilling thing at least as a maker of tools.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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.

[Ivan Zhao]

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, no?

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Yeah, like millions.

[Ivan Zhao]

It's crazy.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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 a very exciting lightning round.

[Ivan Zhao]

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 six months ago.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Right.

[Ivan Zhao]

So versus humanity. If you just read books in other industry you can look sideways. If you go back to 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 you can just take in front of you. Right. And I wish more people do that. I think will be a very interesting way for product makers, business maker to solve the problem in front of them by stealing outside of the from the domain of tech and business. So at least it's very inspiring, very useful for me personally.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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

[Ivan Zhao]

Great artists steal. Yeah. Picasso still. Well Steve Jobs bought that from Picasso or something. Who stole from somewhere else probably.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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.

[Ivan Zhao]

Oh, okay.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

The first question is just what are a couple 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.

[Ivan Zhao]

Generally I think the domain that I interest 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, complex system when all the different things merge together, it creates emergent properties. Talking about ants, talk about beads, talk about life itself. It's just so fascinating how do with few primitives, few LEGO bricks, you can create the thing called life. That thing just it's trigger for me. So I love readings in that domain and this is really helpful for create 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.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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

[Ivan Zhao]

That's a cool area to attention.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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

[Ivan Zhao]

I like to watch over old documentaries. Maybe there's another area or category too. There's quite a few on YouTube. Like people make a really good documentary in the 80s, in the 70s that's like all old BBC ones. They're just excellent and they have a strong opinion in them and no longer just like general education thing. They have a direction, they have a teeth go look it up. Oh yeah. One is a really good one to get started called connections. I think it's called 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. Rec highly recommend.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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

[Ivan Zhao]

Yeah, like thing I did enneagram. My enneagram. It's 7 and 8. 7 is like it's actually perfect with what we just talked about. Seven is like creative finding connection. See the forest and tree A it's they call challenger. It's like competitive AR optimizing. So true energy exists in me.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Oh wow. This all makes sense. I gotta take this enneagram. It comes up a bunch on this podcast, right?

[Ivan Zhao]

Yeah.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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?

[Ivan Zhao]

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

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Ivan, thank you so much for being here. Two 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?

[Ivan Zhao]

Probably find out me on Twitter ivanhzhao. He's helpful from give us feedback about notion about our product. That's the best help.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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

[Ivan Zhao]

It yeah, just DM me? Okay, yeah, me. Yeah, that's probably the best way.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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.

[Ivan Zhao]

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 and DM me.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

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

[Ivan Zhao]

Thank you for having me.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Bye everyone.

[Ivan Zhao]

Bye.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast, podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating.

[Lenny Rachitsky]

Or leaving a review as that really.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

Helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.

[Ivan Zhao]

Com.

[Podcast Host / Announcer]

See you in the next episode.