Notion

“Groove was like a little bit of Dropbox, a little bit of Slack, a little bit of Notion. It was peer-to-peer platforms just a little early.”

“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…”

“In notion with most of our designer can code. Majority of, 80% of the designer can code”

“I personally, I have to admit, I slept on it. On GPT-III, even saw GPT-III, it feels like, what is this thing useful for? It's like, yes, for marketing, for content writing, for creative first draft. Didn't really click for me.”

“And after that, we sort of just bet the company on it.”

“We have somewhat a small team of search, but we don't have too many ML folks, almost nothing.”

“Our learning and pivot is instead of giving people those Software building tool, we have to package the software building blocks together as ready to use templates, as ready to use use cases that people can adopt really quickly.”

“You cannot make something too new. You have to be largely the same and change one thing and two things, right? Virtual ablo. The off-white guys, like, three percent difference. Just push the boundaries so people can accept it, but still also new, right? To me,…”

“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…”

“The moment you can, as a designer or as an engineer, you can code, you can design, you can make really interesting trade-offs, right? At the end of the technologies, at least in my opinion, is about trade-offs. What kind of trade-off you can make that unlock n…”

“Notion Q&A now runs on, on Pinecone, and they serve essentially question answering with AI to tens of thousands and probably hundreds of thousands of their own customers.”

“And so actually, we kind of advise people now, like, don't worry as much about organization. Just find a way to get it all piped in and like thrown in there.”

“We actually just released one of them in our agent last week, and we're gonna do all four for sure. They're actually quite good, and they're way cheaper than the Frontier models.”

“We created sort of a markdown dialect that looks like the default normal markdown, but it's sort of enhanced with All the notion blocks. And the models are really good at it. It works really well. So, so that's how it reads and writes the pages. And then for d…”

“Like, you know, you can't just apply a one-size-fits-all to, like, querying Slack versus querying Google Drive, let's say. They're completely different kinds of information, and we found that there's just a little bit of, like craft and love that has to go int…”

“I would say, I mean, the interesting thing is that with embeddings, it almost doesn't matter as much anymore, The AI doesn't really care what the tree structure is, for example. The, all, all the AI cares about is that there's a snippet of text that has the co…”

“You can be like a hundred or thousand x engineer for using the tools right now. I think the gap is much bigger. Like the minimum bar has not changed, but the maximum bar has extremely increased.”

“And you know, all the pull requests are now written by agents. They're often like larger and more complex. That's like the worst part. But the better part is that they're often like a much better tested and we can demand sort of a much better testing for the t…”

“Broadly speaking, before AI, our goal was to create the best tool for humans to directly perform their work. And then, now the goal is to create the best tool for humans to manage agents to do the work for them.”

“As soon as we got the Notion index working, it was obvious that, oh, okay, we should index everything else as well. And so we indexed, like, Slack and Google Drive, and we, we're launching new ones on a regular cadence.”

“The upshot is I think if you do it well, you can be much more ambitious about what you're building. And also make it much more robust than you could have done with humans writing it. And then the flip side is if you do it badly, it's all slop.”

“The people team's been amazing. They're actually one of the highest adopters of custom agents.”

“But it turns out that most of the companies are pretty bad at making their indexes.”

“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 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 …”