00:00 What we do at work, what we do in life, has fundamentally come to our values.
00:05 What do we want to bring more into this world? I was truly inspired by
00:10 the early computing pioneers like Enkelberg, their wish to using computer to augment human intellect.
00:17 Hi everyone, I'm Kenric Kai. I'm a staff writer at Forbes and I'm here with Ivan Zhao, the co-founder
00:27 and CEO of Notion. Ivan, thanks for taking the time to chat with me. Our pleasure. Absolutely.
00:34 So we're talking about Notion, which is making our AI50 list of the most promising artificial
00:43 intelligence startups for the first time, I believe. So tell me about Notion. It's this
00:50 productivity software that I go on YouTube, I go on TikTok, there are thousands and thousands of
00:56 tutorials of people explaining what is Notion, how to use Notion, how to use Notion without going
01:03 crazy. There's so many different ways to use Notion, it seems like. But how would you describe
01:10 what Notion is fundamentally underneath it all? We're generally known as a productivity software
01:15 that can do everything for your work and for your life. People use Notion for writing their
01:20 documents, keep track of their notes, manage company knowledge base, managing your tasks,
01:26 projects, you can use for a lot of different things. The reason why Notion is so flexible
01:31 because we did not start as a productivity software. We were inspired by early computing
01:38 ideas that we should allow everybody to create their own tools. Here I have a portrait
01:44 of early computing pioneer Douglas Engelbart. When I was in last year of my college, I read
01:51 one of his papers, Augmented Human Intellect. It was written in the 60s. He did a fabulous demo
01:58 to show how people can use a computer to do almost everything in their personal life and work life.
02:04 That inspired me to create Notion, which is like the Legos for software that people can use for
02:11 all different kinds of things in their business and in their personal lives. I want to go all
02:16 the way back to the very start before you even had a prototype for Notion. I was speaking to
02:24 Josh Kopelman, one of the founders of First Round Capital. You had a meeting with him
02:30 back in the day when he was like, I think, top 10 on the Forbes Midas list, one of the
02:37 top venture capitalists in the world. He told me that your pitch to him was very unique because
02:45 usually a founder will go to him to show a demo or a prototype or at least a screenshot of the
02:52 product. When you first met him, my understanding, you didn't have a prototype yet and you just had
02:58 a conversation with him about paper. What do you remember from that? What was the idea there? How
03:06 did that relate to the idea you had for Notion that was in your head but not in prototype yet?
03:10 Paper's interesting cut is so malleable and people can use for so many different things
03:16 and they're extremely approachable too. You can write things on it. If you have a zero copy
03:23 machine, you can copy a hundred different things to it. We cannot do that with software today.
03:30 We still can't after all those years, even when we talk about AI. We still cannot do that for
03:35 the software people use every day. It's not as versatile as paper.
03:41 The goal behind Notion is how do you make software like paper, be the container of
03:49 information, can scale up, scale down, can be modified by kids in the kindergarten,
03:56 all the way to bureaucrats using paper to run businesses. That's the spirit behind Notion.
04:05 I think what's got Josh and it's like, wow, someone actually thinking about a problem like that.
04:11 Gotcha. This was 2013, 2014, you raised from a number of angel investors and early
04:21 venture capitalists. I think what a lot of people might not realize is that
04:25 first couple of years of the company, by 2015, you guys were almost out of money.
04:32 You took a trip to Japan with your co-founder Simon last. In these months, 2015 going into 2016,
04:41 something changed there. By the time that you guys launched the 1.0 version of Notion
04:48 in the summer of 2016, suddenly there was this user traction and people really liked the new
04:55 product. What was the challenge initially and what changed during that period that allowed
05:00 the product to suddenly go viral? Like I talked about earlier, our mission is to allow people to
05:06 make and tinker their own software. It's to augmenting human intellect. Then the question
05:13 is what kind of product is this? Our realization, my realization is most people don't want to
05:20 create software. Nobody wake up tomorrow and say, "Hey, I want to create my own project."
05:25 Nobody do that. People want to solve the problem in front of them,
05:30 use the off-the-shelf software, maybe tinker that a little bit down the road.
05:34 The shift for me and for us, Notion at that point is we cannot give people a software
05:41 building software tool. We have the disguise notion as the general purpose productivity software,
05:48 like the document tool, like the spreadsheet, like the project management tracker people use
05:54 every day. Almost sugarcoat the broccoli a little bit. Once people get familiar with Notion,
06:01 see we're solving people's daily problem, then they realize actually this Notion software is
06:07 made from Lego pieces and people can tinker and modify just like all the kids can change
06:12 their Lego toy once they get used to the initial set. That's the aha for us. With that, we rebuild
06:19 the product with the latter philosophy and become a lot more approachable and can directly fit into
06:26 people's work and life really quickly. That's how we start getting some tractions.
06:32 Can you tell me about what are the most common ways that people are using AI in Notion today?
06:36 There are primarily three different ways to use Notion with AI today. First,
06:42 these are our most popular use cases for writing. Notion is a document editor. Rather than you go
06:48 to an AI chat product, copy paste the information and back to your document or notes product,
06:53 Notion has AI baked in. It can give you the first draft, help you improve your writing,
06:59 help you do the translation, all the goodies right inside where you write. That's number one.
07:04 Number two, we also offer a database and spreadsheet product. AI can automatically
07:10 help you update and organize all the information in your databases. Number three, most recently,
07:16 we offer this product called AI Q&A. Notion is a knowledge-based product as well.
07:23 Instead of using search to find the related document and to read about it and find your
07:29 answer, Notion can give you the answer right away. We call this Notion Q&A is the perfect memory for
07:37 your team or ask if you have a perfect memory yourself. I no longer need to organize my
07:43 document notes in Notion. I just dump into Notion. If I have a question, I can just answer on my
07:48 phone, ask on my phone, and I got the answer instantly. They fundamentally change how I use
07:52 Notion, how many people use Notion in their work and life. >> You don't have to be so organized
07:58 and particular and neat about it because the AI can kind of do it. >> Yeah, that's the power of
08:02 language model, right? You truly understand what you put in there. It can help you summarize and
08:07 help you give the gist of things. You no longer have to read everything. It's truly magical. You
08:12 really have to try it. >> So you guys last raised funding in 2021 at a $10 billion valuation.
08:19 But famously, at least in Silicon Valley circles, for a couple of years before that, you sort of
08:27 had what you've described as an anti-VC reputation. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
08:33 How did that reputation develop? What was your approach to fundraising?
08:39 Why did you not want to raise funds? Why did that reputation develop in the first place? And then
08:45 what changed that led you to raise from some of these top investors such as Sequoia Capital
08:51 and Index Ventures? >> Yeah. The anti-VC reputation is unfortunate. I'm not anti-VC at all.
08:59 >> You don't agree with the reputation. >> In fact, my fiancée is a VC herself.
09:05 It came about because we realized my co-founder Simon and I can do a lot of the
09:14 thing ourselves. So like, he's a programmer, designer. I'm a programmer, designer.
09:20 I can do marketing. I can do brand. So notionally, we always keep the company very small.
09:24 Everybody does everything. We grow very slowly, try to hire really carefully and still is today.
09:31 Because we keep the team size small, we burn very little. We don't burn. We become profitable
09:38 really quickly. Once you become profitable, you control your destination. >> Yeah. Does that mean
09:45 everyone is working a lot harder, spending a lot more time on the product? Or is there a way to be
09:50 efficient without... >> Yes, for both. People need to work harder because we're small in the team
09:58 size, but it's also a lot more fun, a lot more creative. People can wear different hats. So for
10:04 example, our designers, most of them can code. Our engineers are very product-minded. When designers
10:11 can code, when some problem becomes really hard to design, you change their engineering architecture.
10:17 When something is really hard to build, you change the design. It's almost where can you squeeze the
10:21 air bubble to the easiest corner. When people can have multiple contacts in their mind, they make
10:27 better decisions. They move much faster. They come up with creative solutions. >> So I wrote a magazine
10:32 story about Notion, about you, and talked to a lot of people that have been familiar with the company,
10:39 familiar with the product, familiar with you for a couple years. One of the things that
10:43 came up over and over again was this idea of how the office, from the furniture to the aesthetics,
10:51 the design, is kind of an extension of the Notion software, the Notion product, or vice versa.
10:57 Can you talk to me a little bit about how you think about your philosophy with design and how
11:02 that applies to what you're building with Notion? >> I think at the end of the day, what we do at work,
11:08 what we do in life, has fundamentally come to our values. What do we want to bring more
11:18 into this world? I was truly inspired by the early computing pioneers like Enkelberg.
11:26 Their wish to using computer to augment human intellect. That's my value. That has been the
11:34 value of this company. I'm inspired. We're inspired by timeless furnitures created by
11:41 people like Alto. We want to create high-quality, timeless software, beautiful software as well.
11:49 All those values are connected. You can learn more through history, inspired through history
11:56 of what people did in the past or in other industries, in art, in science, in films.
12:03 You can steal from all over the places and find out what's truly what are your values and what
12:10 can you create to bring to the rest of humanity. That's what inspired me, inspired us at Notion
12:17 to building software, building a ubiquitous tool for next generation of people.
12:22 >> Ivan, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the thoughtful conversation.
12:26 >> Thank you.
12:27 >> Thank you.
12:27 [ Applause ]
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