Ivan Zhao
Co-founder & CEO, Notion. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@ivanhzhao ↗LinkedIn ↗ivanhzhao.notion.site ↗
Ivan Zhao co-founded Notion in 2013, guiding the modular productivity and workspace platform from a near-failure into a profitable company valued at $10 billion. He previously worked as a product designer at Inkling before developing Notion's document, database, and AI tools.
2shows
2appearances
49statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
15said about them ↓ Everything Ivan Zhao said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Zhao: Jobs and Gates focusing on GUI over Smalltalk caused SaaS sprawl
“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 bring, make PC personal computing popular. And they sort of stuck with this kind of application framework ra…”
Zhao: SaaS is digital paper-pushing that LLMs can now perform
“Fundamentally, SaaS, software is all, we're all in the same information, people, paper pushing activity, right? It's like a piece of paper coming in front of you. A human, like, changed a couple bits, pushed to another human. Language model can do some form of…”
Zhao: People Will Communicate Less as AI Agents Handle Exchanges
“I probably feel it's probably less the agent side essentially bet on language model, that's the communication.”
Zhao: Embeddings and RAG are eliminating the need for manual organization
“I think organization might be, we might be moving away from the organizational world. Why do you need to organize because you can retrieve? Why do you have index? Like index initially are file cabinets and little index are sitting on top of so you can find thi…”
Zhao: Disguise ambitious product visions inside familiar everyday utility
“And we call it sugar called broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli, but people like sugar. So give them the sugar, hide the broccoli inside of it.”
Zhao: Notion tracks revenue per employee instead of total headcount
“We have this internal notion called talent density, right? Which we're 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 a positive co…”
Zhao: Tech industry focuses too much on short cycles over enduring products
“Software, and especially tech, it's just every six months, every 12 months cycle, they don't, we don't think enough about create something that lasts. I care creating something that's, at least the form factor lasts longer than half 18 months.”
Zhao: Enterprise buyers want packaged software solutions, not modular building blocks
“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.”
Zhao: Startups do not need complex vertical software solutions
“I think the good advantage is if a customer use Notion, they can address those three, four use cases in one place, especially for our startup mid-market companies, their need for each of the vertical use cases is not as complex.”
Zhao: AI coding agents atop modular blocks enable custom vertical tools
“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 it, AI coding agent on top of it, you can have any kind of knowledge, customer software, customer agent for whatever …”
Zhao: No-code originated from developer customization, not data unification
“No code is like coming from this kind of like power user developer angle of wouldn't be nice. Everybody can modify this underlying software they use every day. That's why I go there. It wasn't coming from the angle of the knowledge and data wants to be in one …”
Zhao: SF is expensive because it is the world's software factory
“Because there's a separation between people who can make software and people who use software. That's why SF's rent is so expensive, because we're the modern day Detroit or Manchester, right? We're the factory of the world.”
Zhao: Prompt engineering effectively makes anyone a real-time machine learning engineer
“Language prompt engineer language model sort of make everybody like a real-time machine learning engineer.”
Zhao: Notion bet the company on AI after seeing GPT-4
“And after that, we sort of just bet the company on it.”
Zhao: AI Language Models Are Driving the Next Software Bundling Wave
“Now the new technology happening is AI language model, and if you build more with it or just think more with it, language model wants information to be one place. Once the endpoints to be connected, so it's easier to, is it hard enough to like a conversion lan…”
Zhao: LLMs Demand Bundling of Information Rather Than Just Distribution
“I think there's bundling of distribution and bundling of information. What you're describing to me is more of Microsoft, more like bundling of distribution. Language model wants the bundling of data, bundling information.”
Zhao: Most everyday users do not care about creating custom software
“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.”
Zhao: Building solely for business creates commodities, not products
“Too much of yourself, then there's no users. You're just doing our project. You're just doing a research project, right? And it's too much for business. You're building a commodity, right?”
Zhao: Resetting around superior abstractions recovers sunk costs exponentially fast
“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, right? Or humans are not thinking, not good at thinking in terms of abstraction or the exponen…”
Zhao: Product-market fit is a gradual ramp, not a binary milestone
“It never hit me, hit us as like a binary state. It 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 a kind of very gradual ramp.”
Zhao: Organizational overhead stems mainly from internal communication alignment
“It's 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 systems or bett…”
Zhao: Smaller teams accelerate and maneuver faster than large organizations
“The bus, the smaller the bus is easier to turn corners, easier to accelerate, easier 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…”
Zhao: AI language models function like new raw materials enabling novel trade-offs
“I always feel like AI language model feels like a new type of wood. It's filled like aluminum as 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 support…”
Zhao: Violating core values for revenue triggers employee and customer rejection
“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 you, the system, it's l…”
The other half of the tape: Ivan Zhao's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 14 times in 7 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Sarah Guo 3Matt McGinnis 3Camille Ricketts 3Simon Last 1Lenny Rachitsky 1Guillermo Rauch 1Grant Lee 1Claire Butler 1
Statements about Ivan Zhao, by other people (1)
Simon Last: GPT-4 Proto-Interface Sparked Notion's AI Pivot
“It wasn't until I played with GPT-IV that it became really, really real. So, you know, we, when we got access to it was sort of like a proto-ChatGPT-like interface. And my co-founder Ivan and I both got access, and it was just immediately clear, like, I would …”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Lenny's Podcast 10
No Priors 4
2026 3 mentions in 1 episode
2025 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
- “I deliberately understaff every project” | Leadership lessons from Rippling’s $16B journey
- “Dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR: Inside the rise of Gamma | Grant Lee (co-founder)
- Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create 100 million builders | Guillermo Rauch
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 4 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ivan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Notion | 1 | 33 | 100% 4/4 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| NO PRIORSLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, Notion | 1 | 16 | — | full record on No Priors → |