The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 70 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Expecting Ordinary Enterprises to Build Custom Vertical AI Tools Is Moronic
“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.”
A New AI Paradigm Will Displace Notion and Google Docs
“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.”
White-Sullivan: Notion caters to the lowest common denominator of users
“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.”
Lemkin's team churned off Canva and Notion due to AI agents
“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…”
Lemkin: Core AI products must drive 50% or higher ARPU growth
“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%…”
Rory O'Driscoll: Notion would price at $4B-$8B in an IPO today
“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 …”
Graves: AI sellers remain far from replacing enterprise sales reps
“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…”
Kothari: Omitting sales quotas hurt Notion's early growth
“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.”
Notion gave up only 2-3% equity and granted zero board seats
“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.”
Kothari: Reinventing Notion's sales machine cost the company three years
“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.”
Notion avoided hiring product ops and researchers early on via feedback automation
“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…”
Alex LeBrun: AI Paradigms Will Eventually Displace Notion and Google Docs
“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.”
Lemkin: Founders Should Require Board Slides Instead of Notion Docs
“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…”
Nottebohm: Offer slow-growing product lines for free instead of reviving them
“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…”
Kothari: Notion Was Profitable For Two Years Prior To $50M Raise
“It's allowed as a company to be profitable over the last two years.”
Kothari: 46% of Notion's business stems from personal use
“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.”
Kothari: Notion missed its quarterly financial target about 1.5 years ago
“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.”
Kothari: Notion holds more cash than its total funds raised
“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.”
Kothari: Notion reached $100 million in ARR around 2022
“So Notion got to about a hundred million in ARR a couple of years ago”
Kothari: Notion founders personally conducted final interview for first 500 hires
“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.”
Kothari: Notion employs under 20 product managers and 12 designers total
“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.”
Former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner declined offer to join Notion's board
“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.”
Seibert: OpenAI won't build direct Notion or Salesforce competitors
“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”
Isford: Missing product goals due to disproven hypotheses is a great outcome
“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 …”
Nottebohm: Only 15% of SaaS companies sustain 60% growth past $100M ARR
“Only 15% of those companies who are growing at over 60% as they reach a hundred million ARR Are able to maintain that growth.”
Nottebohm: Job interviews are highly likely to yield false positives
“I view interviews as Highly, highly likely to get a false positive. Less likely to get a false negative.”
Notion CEO Ivan Zhao still personally interviews every candidate hired
“Ivan still interviews everyone, which I deeply, deeply respect.”
Nottebohm: Companies should not make building decisions solely to optimize revenue
“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…”
Herzberg: Figma and Notion have executed the best recent sales strategies
“Figma and Notion. Community first. Welcome sales assist. Impassioned user base.”
Palan: Horizontal tools like Notion fail to deliver for scaling startups
“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…”
Kothari: Notion Has A 10-Year Runway Even At Zero Revenue
“Even if our business were to go to zero tomorrow, we now have about a ten-year runway to kind of continue Building notion.”
Cannon: Notion Is The Third Great Collaboration Platform
“And our view is that notion is really the third great collaboration platform.”
Cannon: Slack Is Synchronous Flow, Notion Is Asynchronous Stock
“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.”
Lemkin: Slack will achieve Notion-like ARPU growth from AI in 2026
“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…”
Kim Graves: Pitching cost savings closes enterprise sales faster than pitching innovation
“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…”
Kim Graves: Status quo, not competition, is Notion's top reason for lost deals
“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.”
Graves: Notion structures sales pipeline stages around seller mindsets
“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…”
Kim Graves: A prospect refusing internal introductions is not a real champion
“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.”
Kothari: Notion raised $270M at a $10B valuation in late 2021
“We raised around two hundred and seventy million at ten billion.”
Kothari: Notion became cashflow positive around 2019
“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.”
Kothari: High valuations matter internally for startup employee morale and stock retention
“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.”
Kothari: Notion raised $50M at $2B valuation in early 2020
“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.”
Stebbings: 94% Of European Corporations Do Not Know What Notion Is
“I think 94% of European corporates don't know what notion is.”
Corcos Manages Relationship Logistics With Wednesday Dates and a Notion Doc
“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…”
Rauch: Next-gen apps like Notion and Figma will look completely different
“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.”
Sri Batchu: Notion built a rare, impressive community-led growth strategy
“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.”
Isford: Onboarding should ask user intent directly rather than inferring from email domains
“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…”