Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Zhao: Hybrid designers and engineers make superior product trade-offs

Ivan Zhao · No Priors Ep. 51 | With Notion CEO Ivan Zhao · Feb 15, 2024 · at 33:18

Ivan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Notion, discusses the advantage of having cross-disciplinary designers and software engineers.

0:00 / 0:34exact quote · 34.4s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 new user behaviors, That's valuable. But if you can do more things, you can more, make more interesting trade-offs that other people cannot make. As a designer, if you can code, you know how to change your design to make it easier to build. As an engineer, if you can design, you can like do the same thing, almost like squeeze the air bubble to whichever direction is easier to squeeze.”

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

Insight
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…”
Ivan Zhao Feb 15, 2024 ▶ 13:47 No Priors Ep. 51 | With Notion CEO Ivan Zhao
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Ivan Zhao Feb 15, 2024 ▶ 22:36 No Priors Ep. 51 | With Notion CEO Ivan Zhao
Insight
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…”
Ivan Zhao Feb 15, 2024 ▶ 23:13 No Priors Ep. 51 | With Notion CEO Ivan Zhao
Insight
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 …”
Ivan Zhao Feb 15, 2024 ▶ 2:18 No Priors Ep. 51 | With Notion CEO Ivan Zhao
Opinion
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.”
Ivan Zhao Feb 15, 2024 ▶ 3:35 No Priors Ep. 51 | With Notion CEO Ivan Zhao
Insight
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.”
Ivan Zhao Feb 15, 2024 ▶ 7:37 No Priors Ep. 51 | With Notion CEO Ivan Zhao
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.