Notion

“I do that one too. That one's actually a very useful thing to do is you download grok bots for one of your bots. Mine is like a QA tester bot. And that way, if there's ever Bug report, or if we're kind of testing out a new build for example, example of the des…”

“In fact, until recently at Sastr, we basically had two and a half, three systems of record. We had Salesforce, we had Marketo, and we had Notion. We left two.”

“Grokbot works well on its computer and it can read stuff on yours, but I find myself falling into this trap of, okay, you know, generate a report and then put it on my desktop and then put it in notion. And I don't know if other people are like this, but you e…”

“The partner, Cam, I know when he wrote to his IC, because I've seen the screenshot of it, he said that if there's one company that I will bet my whole career on, this is probably.”

“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…”

“So seven years together, no complaints, Notion. You're cheap. You did a good job. You're cool. You're extensible when no one was extensible. We had a teammate that loved you so much. You invited him to a user conference to present, and we still churned with a …”

“The reason I realized we should cancel it, I haven't used it in months now, months, right? But I did get an email that says, hey, you haven't logged in here in a while, and I go, oh, hey, I gotta cancel it.”

“Every single company that I know, that I respect that even thought about these things for the long term, like imagine Palantir or SpaceX or Notion who really care about craftsmanship and really delivering for their audience for many, many years have struggled …”

“This is like the great fallacy of enterprise software that you can just sell to the users, and it's like it only ever worked for Slack and one other company. Maybe Notion, but even Notion has capped out.”

“Notion users tend, you know, all things being equal, are more, I'd say, tech-savvy and more agentic as builders”

“And I think memory is sort of in the shape where we've had a lot of people and a lot of people at other companies too are like, well, I set up an obsidian base or a notion area and I tell it how to basically build my mind palace and how to put, it's like, eh, …”

“Our attrition is extremely low, but the leaning into the async culture has helped because everything's written, everything's recorded, everything's captured in Slack or Notion, or one of our sales meetings is ingested into our warehouses, and this kind of solv…”

“All of these companies are building agents, intelligent systems that are performing specialized tasks for whatever use cases they have, and so all of them build evals that reflect how their systems are expected to behave in production. They're all following si…”

“First of all, for me, when I make apps, I look at what is the mode? What is something that I can do with my app that Notion cannot do or Figma cannot do? For me, that mode right now is the fact that everything is local.”

“Which essentially is, I mean, the static image of a chat is basically the dead fish here. You have to feel the AI. To some degree.”

“Now we have the same designers and PMs also just contributing to the production code base to a lesser degree, of course, but like you can see where the trend is headed”

“On one hand, I do see like sort of a drop in usage of Figma in some designers at Notion.”

“I do suspect in six to 12 months from now, a lot of companies are going to actually start asking questions around RRI, and I think that will be an uncomfortable conversation for a lot of folks.”

“I think there's a real danger in sort of making the token spend the metric to like boast about, which is the same as when people boast about how many lines of code they've written in a day.”

“At least on the writing side, every time there is an intervention, a human intervention, it should feel a little bit like a bug.”

“And I generally encourage them to not use the GUIs. And I encourage them to use the tweets because I just know that over time they're going to be curious and like pull at other threads. And one day they wake up and they're like, Oh, I understand more of the su…”

“All agents are also like, if you look at all the harnesses, whether it's the open source ones or the ones from the model companies ours as well they all resemble a coding agent now.”

“Notion is dabbling in it as well. I use dabbling right now, but obviously at some point we might become more serious about it.”

“The week that we were going to get a term sheet from True Ventures, Notion pivoted from website building to document collaboration, and so True Ventures was like, hey, sorry, we have a conflict, and we're like, yep, no, no worries.”

“The first version of the Notion editor was terrible. Like there was like no, it was all blocks. You couldn't even select between two blocks, but it turns out it didn't matter. And so I think that is like just working diligently on the wrong thing for way too l…”

“It was our most successful launch in terms of free trials and converting people and things like that.”

“It's probably the fourth or fifth time that we rebuilt that.”

“Before function calling came out, we were trying to fine tune with the frontier labs and with fireworks, like a function calling model on notion functions.”

“The big unlock was Probably like Sonic 3.6 or seven early last year. And that's when we started working on our agent, which we shipped last year.”

“Is really what will set notion apart for every new capability is we have like two skills that are crucial when it comes to frontier capabilities. One is not letting yourself swim upstream. So like quickly realizing if you're just pressing against model capabil…”

“Datadog could not exist without cloud storage, right? That it's kind of fundamental that that works. And AWS has like a cloud watch product, but Datadog is an expert on understanding how people want observability on the products they launch. And we're experts …”

“I actually think the failure of our team is when we focus too much on what are tools that are cool tools. I actually think that's when we make have the least velocity because you still need some sort of focus on a user journey.”

“We'll all sit down every Friday and look at the P. 99 of like the most token exhaustive custom agent transcript and just look at why it didn't do well and cut a bunch of tasks.”

“I manage, ah, the team that's what we'll call like core AI capabilities and infrastructure. That's about 50 people. But then we have, I partner teams that do packaging, so how it shows up in the corner chat versus custom agents versus meeting notes, that's ano…”

“Our design team made a whole separate GitHub repo called the design playground. And it's basically just to create a bunch of like helper components and for quickly throwing together UIs and it's become like actually quite sophisticated. Like it has like an age…”

“I think it's put a big pressure point on us to have really strong product conviction, because if anything can be demoed, You really need a strong filter of making sure that if, you know, you're doing X amount of work, you're making the, you're focusing on one …”

“We maintain the eval framework. Every team owns their own evals and a lot of them we've integrated to opt into CI or we run them nightly and we have a team, a custom agent that triggers to a team to look at the major failures.”

“We've definitely noticed, particularly for some providers that things are slower during working hours.”

“Companies that say they're selling the same model through different vendors, whether it be through first party or Bedrock, Azure, et cetera, we do see different qualities sometimes, and that's not necessarily what's advertised.”

“Like they have shipped models that were not the snapshots that we wanted, and they have changed the snapshots that they shipped based on the feedback that we give, because our feedback tends to be more enterprise work focused and not coding agent focused.”

“And then what we have, what we call Frontier Headroom evals, where we actively want to be at 30% pass rate. And that's actually been a effort that we took in partnership with Anthropic and OpenAI in the past maybe two or three months, because we actually hit a…”

“And so, we have, like, very firm conviction And we have had for a number of years now that that is its own career path, and we have always welcomed the misfits, so to speak. So we really firmly believe that you don't need an engineering background to be the be…”

“Every software engineer in Notion this summer went through like this sheer one of our engineering leads at the company called it like, every software engineer is going through the identity crisis that every manager goes through, where all of a sudden they real…”

“There's a critical difference To being a manager, which is that like, it is actually very deeply technical. The problem of, you know, humans are very like fuzzy and you can't like treat a team of humans like a rigorous system where like, you know, PRs like fle…”

“One of our biggest use cases is bug triaging. So if someone posts something in Slack and you just have a custom agent that lives there that has its own routing constitution of what team this belongs to. Creates a task in your task database and then posts in th…”

“So I think it's actually not released yet. Releasing it like next week is in the settings for an agent, you can give it access to invoke any other agent. So you can have them just talk directly.”

“Another example of this is we have no built-in memory concept. Memory is, is just pages and databases. And so if you want to give it memory, just give it a page and give it access to that page.”

“So we will always support our MCP insofar as other people are using MCPs, right?”

“And so if we can have our agents properly execute code that calls on CLI deterministically, it's a one time cost, right? Versus constantly having a language model integrate with an MCP over and over and over and paying those like repeated token fees.”

“There are a lot of things where we choose not to use MCP because we want to add more high touch to quality. I think search and agentic find is like the largest instance of that, where we have slack and linear and JIRA search and notion that is not using necess…”

“MCP is a really great way to gain access to tools. Works really well. But you just looked at the trigger UI, for example, there's no trigger protocol. And so those are things we had to build ourselves.”

“I mean, that was, I would say that was a big learning is just, you know, really be savvy and really careful thinking about what the model wants in terms of, you know, its environment and cater around that and really try so hard not to expose it to any complexi…”

“When we went away from few shots to describing the goal of the tool and like goal driven, basically moving from a DAG to like a true system with feedback, that's when we could distribute tool ownership to the teams much better.”

“Sonic couldn't handle two tools with the same name in OpenAI, GPT, 5.2. It was like, ah, I can figure this out. So that was an interesting one that we learned by accident through a SEV.”

“So there's now like over a hundred tools just for all, all the crazy notion stuff.”

“I'd actually say we don't try and make it as easy as possible to use because the more we do that, the more we abstract away that interpretability that Simon's talking about that basically nerfs the model or nerfs the agent from being super capable.”

“Obviously we should build product of self-healing. That's next on our roadmap.”

“The database autofill feature will soon be agentic. That will be associated with usage based pricing”

“It's not Opus, that's for sure, because a majority of the tasks people are doing aren't Opus level intelligence.”

“Everyone's clustered in capability, where everyone's clustered, I mean, Haiku's not that much cheaper. No one's really in the middle. Like, people really tend to cluster around two. Like, this is really capable, and it's really fast, but it's really expensive,…”