Notion

“I think signups in China are up three X. Signups in Korea is up two, three X in just in the last week.”

“And Notion was my first investment.”

“I recently talked to a 30 person startup that was already using 75 different pieces of software to do their work.”

“It's allowed as a company to be profitable over the last two years.”

“Notion as a company, we're only 40 people, so we very much focused on building this small team in our small office in San Francisco, and we had never really worked distributedly before.”

“Even if our business were to go to zero tomorrow, we now have about a ten-year runway to kind of continue Building notion.”

“Because we're a small team, we actually put almost half of our team working on features that allows people to be more productive in this unique environment.”

“And for many years, I thought I lost all my money in Notion because it hadn't launched a product for, I think, four years. And then when it did in 2017, it took off.”

“And our view is that notion is really the third great collaboration platform.”

“When I joined, I think a lot of Notion that you and I play with today was built by just three engineers on the team.”

“If Slack was the flow of information, Notion was the stock, or if Slack was kind of synchronous communication, then Notion was the place for asynchronous communication.”

“Christina's an example of, like, someone we've been trying to hire for 18 months, and it finally came together in the last month”

“I think the exact first one might have been Naval. I think he was the first one who put money in the company and then, but then a lot of other individuals were very close to him.”

“We were thinking about maybe raising a small round in the summer, and we just pulled it up about four or five months earlier, tried to get ahead of the macro.”

“Interestingly, the number one thing that individual users ask, the personal users ask, And the number one thing that large enterprise asks right now for notion is our API.”

“Their approach is like, it's got to be really intuitive for every user who comes in. Let's play to the lowest common denominator. You shouldn't really have to change your way of thinking to use Notion.”

“I still believe that there needs to be specialized solutions for highly specialized use cases. And just like with Excel, like Microsoft Access, I don't know whether you remember, remember, but you would build your CRM in a spreadsheet or in Microsoft Access, r…”

“Figma and Notion. Community first. Welcome sales assist. Impassioned user base.”

“Only 15% of those companies who are growing at over 60% as they reach a hundred million ARR Are able to maintain that growth.”

“Ops is really about connecting end-to-end how functions work together. I mean that very respectfully, Respectfully. You can have amazing functions in a company, but if they're not working in lockstep with each other, you can have tremendous amount of friction,…”

“Do not make that higher out of deep necessity, and think that you're just going to solve it. It's actually better to go a little longer and wait for the right talent, even though it's hard to operate in that environment. But in the long run, it's the right dec…”

“That's what the forecast call is for, so that we are truly understanding what's happening in our business. It's not just, like, a set of traffic lights that are red or green, and we move on.”

“I view interviews as Highly, highly likely to get a false positive. Less likely to get a false negative.”

“Ivan still interviews everyone, which I deeply, deeply respect.”

“It's almost better to just cut off the branch and say, you know, that was a great entry. That gives us a great halo. We'll actually just offer that for free now, but we're not going to try to resuscitate this piece of the business back up to a 110% growth when…”

“You never want to make decisions as you're Building to optimize for revenue. You really, really have to be careful not to do that. In fact, I would almost recommend that you take away things that pull you in the direction of something that would make you optim…”

“At a certain point, you're never owning a piece of work yourself, because that then takes away from your ability to coordinate and look forward and think strategically.”

“People know that all of the good things they said about the person aren't credible if they really can't note a weakness.”

“I do believe in more of a flat structure, so a span of control of eight I feel is very comfortable, especially in my role where I'm really not trying to do the job of any one of the functional leaders on my team, right?”

“You operate as a cohesive engine, but actually you do isolate out who is driving what outcome.”

“That's why I beg founders not to use notion and board meetings. I begged them to force everyone to make slides to spend the time because we all love notion and Coda. We just put our stuff in our Google docs. It's so efficient, isn't it? But not only did I thin…”

“It probably something will come and destroy Notion and Google Docs and all of them with a totally new paradigm that is made possible by AI, and certainly these incumbents won't do it.”

“Something that we do at Notion that I think generally is tried and true is to ask someone what they're here for. Many businesses will actually cast or assume or segment that a user is a certain kind of user. Maybe they sign up with a Gmail account, and one mig…”

“Well, just last week, my growth team at Notion launched a template gallery, relaunched our template gallery, and released more than 4500 new templates for what you can do on Notion. This is a pretty big change for us. We had only about 500 before the launch, a…”

“There's a difference between missing a goal because your hypothesis was disproven and missing a goal because you didn't execute well. So in the first case, you've actually learned something really valuable that a hypothesis that you held in building a product …”

“In this case, I actually, I don't think it will be 9505. I think there is diversity of interest and preference and passion that we will celebrate.”

“One I'll pick is is, is Notion. I think they've done an incredible job of building a very large multi-pronged community based growth strategy, which I haven't seen a lot of companies do that. I think they're, it's very impressive.”

“Probably something will Come and destroy Notion and Google Docs and all of them with a totally new paradigm that is made possible by AI.”

“So if I have to create the next notion, the next superhuman, the next figma, My bet is that it certainly is going to look completely different because before I would reach for what I would call like software one point no solutions.”

“I would doubt if opening eye goes and builds like an ocean competitor or an HR or Salesforce competitor or so on, they probably want to stay at the more generic level”

“We do a weekly date night, which we have scheduled on Wednesdays. We do also every Saturday, we have scheduled family priorities where we have a running notion doc of logistics, things that we argued about that we want to talk about, just dedicated time just t…”

“I think 94% of European corporates don't know what notion is.”

“We raised around two hundred and seventy million at ten billion.”

“We actually did this study recently, and we found that you know, something like 46% of our business in in, you know, it can be attributed back to someone using Notion in their personal life.”

“So I think I'll just talk a little bit about notions, very nuanced, but we got there pretty early. I think we got there like five years ago.”

“Some of the best salespeople They join because there is a quota, because they can hit a number, because they can outperform that number. And so actually not having that and not having, you know, the attribution really hurt us, I think the first year or two.”

“One of the, I remember one quarter where we missed our this was maybe like a year and a half ago or something where we missed a quarter where we sort of like missed our number.”

“I think there's essentially two to three percent ownership that we gave out. And so, you know, we were able to essentially not give out board seats.”

“After about, I think when we were 50 people, we actually, like, did the exercise of codifying the values. And we have four values. We are owners of a mission, We are pace setters, we are truth seekers, and we are kind and direct.”

“There's more cash in Notions Bank today than the history of its race. So it's like, in some ways, like, we've produced cash. We haven't spent any of it.”

“If I had to do it one function all over again, I would do sales. And the way I would do it is to not try to like overthink it, just do it the way it is run, like a proper sales machine. I think it would have saved three years in that journey.”

“Well, valuation matters internally, I think, to employees. I think they, it matters that, like, you know, the stock that they did get is able to be valued that much and continue to grow in value over the years.”

“We didn't have to hire as many support people. We did not have to hire a product ops person, and we also did not have research early days. In fact, all of these were given to the engineer directly to be able to tap into that feedback and actually solve that pr…”

“So Notion got to about a hundred million in ARR a couple of years ago”

“So we did we raised fifty million at two billion at the start of COVID like pretty much like a couple of weeks into COVID in 20, 20, 20, 20.”

“I think for up to about 500 people, we're about 700 people today, but up to 500 people, the last interview was always with Ivan or myself.”

“I think even if I think about today, like all of Notion, with all the different surfaces we have under 20 product managers, and we have about 12 designers.”

“Jeff Wiener, who was my old boss at LinkedIn. Ivan and I actually tried very hard to get him to be a board member at you know, our first board member at Notion, and he said no, because in deep down, he wanted to be, you know, the CEO's coach.”

“Majority of Enterprises, especially in Europe, do not know what Slack is, let alone what Notion is. So the fact that they're going to create their own verticalized AI tools is absolutely fucking moronic.”

“The easier one, I would say, is saving money, because that is cut and dry, but the long-term one, and where we want our customer success to really help them see the value, because otherwise, the risk is another competitor is going to come along and do the exac…”

“I will say, I believe it would work if it's a very transactional product. Like, if you're like, hey, we're a conference, and we are selling conference booths, this is the price. I think, like, an AI Seller can actually probably sell that quite well, but when y…”

“Status quo. We use a framework. Why change? Why your product? Why now? And it's not a competitor. It's the company isn't stuck in their ways. They don't see a big enough problem, and they don't do anything.”

“That's actually something that we've brought into our sales process here at Notion. So when you're building a sales process, it's very typical to think about the stages of the deal. Stage one, qualify the deal. Stage two, do discovery. Stage five is negotiatio…”

“We have both Gong, which records the calls and the video, but we also use Notion AI internally to transcribe those calls.”

“I would argue it's not a real champion if they're not willing to introduce you to more people. Because a real champion is putting you in front of the right people to get the deal done.”

“And at five hundred million in revenue, you could actually squint And see my ten billion dollar stock, which I have since it acquired some of my companies, reasonably being finally up to the watermark of ten billion dollars.”

“A 30% grower, I mean, Netscope and Navan, and well, Netscope has priced already, you know, it's seven, eight, nine times NTM, so something like that, four or five billion, maybe more if they afford growth rate is a little better, or if I'm underestimating the …”

“I suspect as the year goes on, we're gonna see the same thing at Slack, because most folks haven't used it, we're on it. The AI version of Slack for certain use cases is so much better. I don't love that they're not just charging another four bucks a month, bu…”

“Is your ARPU 50% or higher than it was pre-AI? It's a really simple test. Can you drive ARPU up 50% or more? It's very different at Salesforce or ServiceNow. It appears that Notion has done that, in which case they passed the test, right? But I want to see 50%…”

“My, me having churned, and Amelia having churned, we churned just not because, this is a tough one, Canva and Notion, both we churned, not because they're not great apps, we just no longer had any need for them in the agentic area, just no need. Canva and Noti…”