Opinion certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Simon Last: Most Enterprise Software Companies Build Terrible Search Indexes

Simon Last · From Note-Taking App to AI Workspace: The Simon Last Interview · Mar 12, 2026 · at 5:04

Notion co-founder Simon Last discusses the technical challenges of indexing third-party enterprise data with Sarah Guo.

0:00 / 0:04exact quote · 4.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“But it turns out that most of the companies are pretty bad at making their indexes.”

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 Simon Last

Insight
Simon Last: Companies Must Redesign AI Software Harnesses Every Six Months
“I think this is honestly a really key thing and something that a lot of companies get wrong is just like doing one thing and then just like sticking with it. You really do have to keenly aware of what the current state of the models and the technology is, and …”
Simon Last Mar 12, 2026 ▶ 7:37 From Note-Taking App to AI Workspace: The Simon Last Interview
Insight
Simon Last: AI Coding Agents Can Build More Robust Software
“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.”
Simon Last Mar 12, 2026 ▶ 9:30 From Note-Taking App to AI Workspace: The Simon Last Interview
Opinion
Simon Last: Current AI Tools Enable 100x to 1,000x Engineering Leverage
“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.”
Simon Last Mar 12, 2026 ▶ 10:46 From Note-Taking App to AI Workspace: The Simon Last Interview
Disclosure
Simon Last: AI Agents Now Write All Pull Requests at Notion
“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…”
Simon Last Mar 12, 2026 ▶ 12:09 From Note-Taking App to AI Workspace: The Simon Last Interview
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Simon Last: AGI Will Essentially Be a Coding Agent
“I think of coding agents as, like, the kernel of AGI. AGI will be a coding agent.”
Simon Last Mar 12, 2026 ▶ 15:10 From Note-Taking App to AI Workspace: The Simon Last Interview
Disclosure
Simon Last: Notion Now Uses Cheaper Chinese Open-Source AI Models
“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.”
Simon Last Mar 12, 2026 ▶ 16:50 From Note-Taking App to AI Workspace: The Simon Last Interview
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 100 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.