Ivan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Notion, discusses an infrastructure scaling crisis during COVID-19 when user growth nearly exceeded single-instance PostgreSQL capacity.
“For the longest time, where Notion runs on one instance of Postgres database, and then we find the beefiest machine, we keep scrolling, find a beefier, beefier machine to scale our user base. But then we were running off the, even the largest instance there is for Postgres. So there's a doomsday clock that when we kind of truly run out of this space to store everything in Notion and Notion got completely shut down. So we stopped building any new features, all hands on deck, average, almost every engineer in the company trying to solve that problem.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ivan Zhao
Opinion
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…”
Ivan ZhaoMar 6, 2025▶ 10:20Notion's lost years, near collapse during COVID, staying small to move fast, building horizontal
“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.”
Ivan ZhaoMar 6, 2025▶ 13:47Notion's lost years, near collapse during COVID, staying small to move fast, building horizontal
Disclosure
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…”
Ivan ZhaoMar 6, 2025▶ 32:08Notion's lost years, near collapse during COVID, staying small to move fast, building horizontal
Opinion
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.”
Ivan ZhaoMar 6, 2025▶ 37:05Notion's lost years, near collapse during COVID, staying small to move fast, building horizontal
Insight
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.”
Ivan ZhaoMar 6, 2025▶ 52:25Notion's lost years, near collapse during COVID, staying small to move fast, building horizontal
Insight
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.”
Ivan ZhaoMar 6, 2025▶ 55:14Notion's lost years, near collapse during COVID, staying small to move fast, building horizontal
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.
