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 64 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Schoening: Human intervention in writing code should feel like a bug
“At least on the writing side, every time there is an intervention, a human intervention, it should feel a little bit like a bug.”
Schoening: All current AI agent architectures fundamentally resemble coding agents
“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.”
Schoening: Boasting about AI token spend is like counting code lines
“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.”
Schoening: Notion PMs Encouraged to Use Terminal UIs Over GUIs
“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…”
Schoening: Companies will confront uncomfortable AI ROI questions within 6-12 months
“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.”
Schoening: Some Notion Designers Are Using Figma Less
“On one hand, I do see like sort of a drop in usage of Figma in some designers at Notion.”
Wu: OpenAI managers use internal ChatGPT for employee performance reviews
“We're doing performance reviews right now, and it's actually really easy to use ChatGPT with internal knowledge, hooked up to GitHub and like our Notion docs and Google docs. To give a, get a really good sense of what this person has done over the last 12, 12 …”
Lemkin: Internal GTM AI agents become obsolete within a matter of months
“Don't build it yourself. You're not Vercel. You don't have a full-time wicked awesome engineer that wants to build this. Could all this stuff be built yourself? It's the same idea of building your own notion. You could do it, but don't do it. It's these produc…”
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.”
Community ubiquity de-risks enterprise adoption and enables upmarket expansion
“In terms of how I think about what it actually is, it's when your community helps you achieve such ubiquity and such name recognition that it actually allows you to start moving up market into the enterprise.”
Delaying early monetization protects user enthusiasm and word-of-mouth momentum
“I think if we look at a lot of the companies that have been just wildly successful from the start, they're people who have pushed off maybe monetizing every little thing. If it's going to really put a damper on that type of enthusiasm and momentum that people …”
Community succeeds when products generate shareable, self-expressive artifacts
“Like I think that community lends itself particularly well if you have something that your product creates that people want to share because it exhibits something about themselves.”
Ambrosino: AI apps must build native memory instead of user mind palaces
“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, …”
Schoening: Static mockups fail for AI interfaces because builders must feel the AI
“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.”
Schoening: Notion's early editor was flawed, proving core value matters more than polish
“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…”
Schoening: Notion designers and PMs are contributing to production code
“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”
MacInnis: Startups succeed based on founder idiosyncrasies rather than standardized playbooks
“The takeaway lesson is that every company succeeds on the foundations of the idiosyncrasies of the founder. The idiosyncrasies of the founder. Rippling succeeds for almost the polar opposite reasons that notion succeeds. But in both cases, the companies succee…”
Lee: Twitter marketing was not impactful for Gamma despite working for Notion
“For instance, Twitter for us, hasn't been that impactful. And I think for, Tools like notion. They've been really, really impactful.”
Zhao: Non-modular software development causes the system to work against you
“If you're building the Lego inside Notion in the code base or product, the system work for you. If you're building non-legal way, the system works against you. So in some sense, we're creating a tool that has an emergent behavior. You need to channel in that e…”
Zhao confirms Notion is actively developing an email product
“That's why we're also working on an email product right now.”
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: 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: Notion nearly collapsed during COVID running on a single PostgreSQL instance
“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…”
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: 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…”
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: 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: 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: Notion never intended to build a CRM product
“Yeah, we did not intend to build CRM, but what is a CRM? It's a relational database. That's why we give people that break. That's a relational database and they can build CRM themselves.”
Zhao: Half of Notion's B2B customers originate from prior personal users
“Half our B to B customers coming from prior personal users. And a lot, most of them use Notion for notes and docs in the first place.”
Rachitsky: Notion waited until $10M ARR to hire its first salesperson
“I think notion, I think at ten million ARRs when they hired their first salesperson.”
Character VC uses Notion over Slack and email to reduce urgency
“At Character, at our VC fund, we Had a conversation and decided we're going to try to have our main communication happen in notion so that if we're talking about something, it's in a form, it becomes a document, and the expectation of how you react and respond…”
Rachitsky: Notion team retrospectively concluded they should have hired PMs earlier
“In my Notion deep dive on how Notion builds product, one of the interview answers was just like, we should have hired product managers earlier.”
Rachitsky: Notion did not hire a salesperson until passing $10M ARR
“I was chatting with the founder of Notion for the series I'm working on, and Notion didn't hire their first salesperson until they were past ten million ARR.”
Net new website visitors is the most instructive brand awareness metric
“And the one that I found to be the most instructive was net new visitors to the notion website. So month over month, how many new people who had never been there before were motivated enough to come and actually learn about the product.”
The auditorium effect mutes participation when ambassador communities grow too rapidly
“If you grow to something like, you know, oh, we have 5000 ambassadors, which feels like really good to say, like on a website. The conversation is actually very muted. I think because people feel like they're speaking to an auditorium whenever they say anythin…”
Setting artificial social media posting quotas is a major marketing mistake
“I think that one of the biggest mistakes you can make on social media is giving yourself a quota that you have to hit and say, like, I have to say X number of scintillating things every week on these platforms. We've just seen so much more traction, even from …”
Ugarte: GrokBot team uses GrokBot inside GrokBot for QA testing
“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…”
Schoening: True Ventures pulled a term sheet when Notion pivoted to docs
“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.”
Schoening: Notion is dabbling in running and RL-training its own models
“Notion is dabbling in it as well. I use dabbling right now, but obviously at some point we might become more serious about it.”
Rauch: Notion uses Socket.io engine for real-time collaboration
“Which is a real time communication mechanism that powers, for example, every time you use Notion, I think you interviewed Ivan, when Notion is to broadcast messages in real time to other collaborators, they use a real time engine that I built for Socket.io.”
Zhao: Notion laid off its early team to downsize to two co-founders
“At that time, Notion was five people. We lay off, I brought it back to me and Simon, two people.”
Zhao: Notion was initially kickstarted and bridged by his mother's loans
“My mom helped me, well, actually, my mom helped me kickstart a company, because I'm Canadian. In order to move to U.S., you need to, like, register a company. So my mom helped you with the initial, and they raised the money, and I sort of returned the money to…”