Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder)

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Ivan Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Notion. Ivan shares the untold story of Notion, from nearly running out of database space during Covid to finding product-market fit after several “lost years,” and the hard-won lessons along the way.—What you’ll learn:1. Why you sometimes need to “hide your vision” behind something people actually want—what Ivan calls “sugar-coating the broccoli”2. How Ivan and his co-founder persevered through multiple product resets and complete code rewrites3. Why Notion prioritized systems over headcount, keeping the team small and focused even at scale4. Why Ivan believes in craft and values as the foundation for product development, balancing technical excellence with aesthetic sensibility5. The surprising story of how Notion nearly collapsed during Covid when their single database almost ran out of space with only weeks to spare6. Community-led growth tactics7. Ivan’s unique journey from a small town in China8. Much more—Brought to you by:• Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments• Airtable ProductCentral—Launch to new heights with a unified system for product development• Sinch—Build messaging, email, and calling into your product—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-notion-ivan-zhao—Where to find Ivan Zhao:• X: https://x.com/ivanhzhao• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanhzhao/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Ivan Zhao(04:41) Ivan’s early life and education(07:46) Discovering the vision for Notion(10:49) The lost years of Notion(13:56) Rebuilding and perseverance(17:14) Layoffs and company morale(18:53) Advice for startup founders(25:08) Product-market fit(29:56) Staying lean and efficient(34:27) Creating a unique office culture(37:20) Craft and values: the foundation of Notion’s philosophy(38:44) Navigating tradeoffs in product and business building(41:24) Leadership and personal growth(49:11) Challenges and crises: lessons from Notion’s journey(51:08) Building horizontal software: joys and pains(01:02:40) Philosophy of tools and human potential(01:06:17) Lightning round and final thoughts—Referenced:• Ürümqi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi• Notion: https://www.notion.com/• SpongeBob SquarePants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpongeBob_SquarePants• Augmenting Human Intellect: https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Engelbart/Engelbart_AugmentIntellect.html• Alan Kay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay• Ted Nelson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson• Steve Jobs on Why Computers Are Like a Bicycle for the Mind (1990): https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-for-the-mind-1990/• Xerox Alto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto• React: https://react.dev/• Simon Last on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-last-41404140/• Magna-Tiles: https://www.magnatiles.com/• Design on a deadline: How Notion pulled itself back from the brink of failure: https://www.figma.com/blog/design-on-a-deadline-how-notion-pulled-itself-back-from-the-brink-of-failure/• Bryan Johnson on X: https://x.com/bryan_johnson• Tobi Lütke’s leadership playbook: Playing infinite games, operating from first principles, and maximizing human potential (founder and CEO of Shopify): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/tobi-lutkes-leadership-playbook• Smalltalk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#:• Lisp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)• DeepSeek: https://www.deepseek.com/• Shana Fisher: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/shana-fisher• LAMY 2000 fountain pens: https://www.jetpens.com/LAMY-2000-Fountain-Pens/• Macintosh 128K: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K• Toshiba rice cooker: https://www.toshiba-lifestyle.com/us/cooking-appliances/rice-cooker• Transistor radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_radio• Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/• HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/• Zendesk: https://www.zendesk.com/• Misattributed McLuhan quote: https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/we-shape-our-tools-and-thereafter-our-tools-shape-us/• Phin Barnes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phineasbarnes/• Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/• Pablo Picasso quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/629531-good-artists-copy-great-artists-steal#:~• Connections with James Burke on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.484e32c5-60bd-4493-a800-e44fd0940312• The Enneagram Institute: https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/—Recommended book:• The Romance of the Three Kingdoms: https://www.amazon.com/Romance-Three-Kingdoms-Luo-Guanzhong/dp/024133277X—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

The way you described the earliest of Notion, you describe the first three to four years as the lost years. We'll try many different versions. The first version, okay, everybody can make and create their software. So let's just build a developer tool that's so easy, that more people can do that. We try that a couple years and learned that actually most people just don't care. Our realization is actually let's hide our vision, which is everybody can create our software, in the form factor that people do care. So what kind of tool do people use every day?

productivity software. It took us two years to realize we need to build a productivity tool. We called a broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli, but people like sugar. So give them the sugar. The hydrogen broccoli inside of it. What other elements do you think are key to you finding something that actually ended up working? What is building a product or business? One user, you want revenue. That's a product business. And building for something you want the world to have is building for your value. You have some taste, you have some aesthetic. There are different energy. You need to create a balance. Too much of yourself, then there's no users, you're just doing our project. And too much for business, you're building a commodity.

The way you think about Notion, it's almost like a philosophy of how to work and be versus just a productivity tool. And so I'm just curious how you think about the relationship between tools and human potential. Tools are extensions of us. And once they extends us, once we shape them, once we bring them to world, they can come back to shape us. Today my guest is Ivan Zhao. Ivan is the co-founder and CEO of Notion. Ivan is a really unique and also a deeply philosophical founder who doesn't do a lot of podcasts, so I'm really excited to share a glimpse into how he built one of the most beloved and most popular products in the world. We talk about the first three to four years of Notion that he describes as the lost years,

how he was able to get into a great school in China by winning a programming contest, the joy and suffering of building a successful horizontal product, plus his approach to staying lean and craft and making tradeoffs and also leadership. Also, a wild story about how Notion almost died during COVID, because the one database that everything lived in almost ran out of space. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become a paid annual subscriber of my newsletter, you now get a year free of Notion Pro and Perplexity Pro

and Superhuman and Linear and Granola. Check it out at Lenny's newsletter.com. With that, I bring you Ivan Zhao. This episode is brought to you by Epo. Epo is a next generation AB testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and Draft Kings rely on Epo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth

and for understanding the performance of new features. And EPO helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous, deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I left most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all in my own.

Epo does all that and more, with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time and accessible UI for diving deeper into performance and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytics cycles. Epo also makes it easy for you to share

experiment insight with your team, sparking new ideas for the A-B-testing flywheel. Epo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Epo at getepo.com slash lenny and 10x your experiment velocity. That's get-EPPO.com slash lenny.

This episode is brought to you by Airtable Product Central, the unified system that brings your entire product org together in one place. No more scattered tools, no more misaligned teams. If you're like most product leaders, you're tired of constant context switching between tools. That's why Airtable built Product Central after decades of working with world-class product companies. Think of it as mission control for your entire product organization. Unlike rigid point solutions, product central powers everything, from resourcing to voice of customer, to road mapping, to launch execution.

And because it's built on Airtable's no-code platform, you can customize every workflow to match exactly how your team works. No limitations, no compromises. Ready to see it in action, head to Airtable.com slash Lenny to book a demo. That's Airtable.com slash Lenny. Ivan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. I know you don't do a lot of podcasts, and so I'm very honored that you're here. I want to start with the story of Ivan.

Your background is quite unique for a founder of a $10 billion plus tech company, and I don't think a lot of people know it. For example, you grew up in a small town in China, and the way you got out of there, the way you got into tech, is pretty interesting. Can you just walk us through that early years of Ivan and how you got out of there? I think a small town in China, the definition, it's actually a 4 million people. city. It is called Yerunuki. It's in the northwest desert part of China. So I grew up there, and then I moved into, my mom took me to Beijing, the capital of China. And that's actually

how I got into programming, coding, because I'm from somewhere else, and in order to go into good school in the capital, you need to win some kind of competition. And there are different path. You can get a math, or you can get a programming, like information Olympia. I was really into computer games at the time, so of course I picked the programming one, so I can play with computers all day long. And I win some competition and come into a good school. So that's how I got into programming. Later then I moved to Canada.

When I moved to Canada, got into college, did not study computer science since I already know how to co. But a lot of video games, did a lot of art, actually, art and science. By the time I graduated college, I realized most of my friends are artists, they need to make their websites, get web portfolio made. And I'm the only nerd in my art friend's circle. So I made three or four websites and realized,

oh, actually people don't know how to create with the software media, computing media. So that got me to want to create a product like a notion today, which is a lot more people to create tools, create software for their daily work and life. Okay, so going back to, you two get into a great school and to kind of leave the small town, not so small, you had to enter a programming contest, and you placed first or second, or how well did you actually do in this? I can in Beijing. In Beijing, okay.

Beijing is a big city. Okay, incredible. Another stat I or a story I heard is that you learned English by watching SpongeBob SquarePants? Is that real? Yeah, it's real. I moved to Canada pretty late, 16 years old. And what I learned is, yeah, in China you can learn English, but it's typically just grammar and doing exams.

What you're missing is the context, the culture. So you have to watch SpongeBob or Simpsons to get a sense of humor, essentially. You can understand jokes, right? Watching cartoons, it's probably they use this way to do that. That's amazing. And there's another kind of seminal. moment in your path. I don't know if it was this point or later, but the Dungles-Anglebert paper ended up being a very meaningful moment for you. So while I was in Canada, in last year of school,

working on trying to building website from our friends and building a creative tool for them, and then you're just looking into the history of a creative tool for software for computing. eventually arrived at 1960 and 70s. So you realize the first generation of computing pioneers, which is around San Francisco, Stanford areas, South Bay, they actually had the best ideas. For them, people like Douglas Angobar, Alan K, 10 Nelson, those first generation pioneers,

for them computing, there shouldn't be a separation between builders and users. It's the same media. Anglebar's original paper called Augumenting Human Intellect, I read that paper, it's like, holy shit, if you're making software, if you know how to code design, this is the highest leverage thing you can do for other people. So given them the ability to use computing to augment their problem-solving ability or their intellect. That just got me obsessed with this problem and I want to start a company like no shit. Makes me think of Steve Jobs' famous line of how the computer is a bicycle for the mind.

You know what? Steve Jobs is actually at fault of this in some strange ways. So the story is like, actually the fact, it's not your story, Xerox Park has working on the first generation personal computers called Xerox Auto. LNK was one of the main person behind it. Alto runs down the system called Small Talk, which is there's no separation between users and users. There's no thing called application. Everything is magical.

You can change the tools, right? So when Steve Job, the famous story is when he went to Xerox Park, to be demo with the alt-tool, it's the first time he see graphic user interface, one of the first time, and it's also, they present them with this L-toe system that everything could change, but he did not see the power of it.

Even when people would demonstrate like, hey, Steve Jobs say, I don't like this direction of scroll bar direction. When you scroll up and down, it shouldn't scroll the opposite reverse direction, then people just instantly change the scroll bar direction for him. That's the power of the original small-talk auto system.

He only saw the graphic user interface. He did not see the underlying object-oriented environment power as the generation of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates bring-made PC personal computing popular, and they sort of stuck with this kind of application framework rather than does a small-talk object-oriented framework. Then that has all the apps we have today and has the SaaS bra we have today.

that vision of how products should be sounds very familiar, and we'll talk about that later of how you think about Notion. But let's zoom to the beginning of Notion. When we were chatting earlier, the way you described the earliest of Notion, you started Notion 2013 and so over 10 years ago at this point. You described the first three to four years as the lost years of Notion. And I think this is actually a really big deal for founders to hear about because there's all these companies these days.

you hear these stats, they had 100 million ARR in like two years, under two years now. And you don't hear a lot of stories of companies of your scale and success that took three to four years to find product market fit essentially. What went on during these last years as you described them and just how did you stick with it? That's a long time to stick with something that isn't working. Because the goal is always building a computing tool, it's like what product is this? it's really hard to shape the product, right? The vision is the dream is there, but the product is very, there's so many paths.

We'll try many different versions. The first version to take, okay, everybody can make and create their software. So let's just build a developer tool that's so easy that more people can do that. We'll try that a couple years and learn that actually most people just don't care. The majority of people, they wake up, they have report due to get their job down, they don't care creating software to optimize whatever they're doing.

They don't care. So we give to our friends, give it to investors. Yeah, did not resonate with people. But we really want to build that tool. So we just keep going. And our realization is actually, let's hide our vision, which is everybody can create our software

in the form factor that people do care. So what kind of tool do people use every day? Productivity software. So that's why it came to notion today. If you use notion, notion are more understood as the productivity suite, but our intent, and we use more your owners to discover intent,

which is Zahash has a no-cold developer power into it. You can create almost any kind of productivity software using notion itself. That took us two plus year to realize. So actually, the world is not like you. The world are not like developed, developer, designer, mind that the world is, they only care what's in front of them, and it's so noisy. There's a quote that this makes me think about where you said the first version of notion

was more about what I wanted than what people wanted. Very much so. It's like a sense of maturation is you don't see the world just from your perspective, but from outside your perspective, right? It takes, we were young, took us multiple years, it hit your head straight into the water to realize that. People just don't wear. I love the way you phrase that. You kind of have to hide your vision behind something that people understand and know how to use. We call the sugar called the broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli, but people like sugar.

So give them the sugar. A hide the broccoli inside of it. Wow. Yeah. The other thing I've heard is that you threw away your code every time. So you rebuilt it many times. You threw away the code each time. That's true.

It took us four years to get somewhere. First two year is that you built too much. like developer product, nobody cares. It took us two years to realize we need to build a productivity tool. Then it took another year or two to build this out, but in the middle of it,

I realized we built on a wrong technical foundation. So like, eight, ten years ago, there's competing, right now, all the web app runs on React. Before React wins, there's a competing technology called Web Component from Google.

And it makes sense. Web component feels like a Lego-like, like the building block like. And we're betting on that technology. And then we realize because it's so new, it's just so unstable. It don't know where the bug come from. It's from your source code, you're from the underlying libraries. Then we have to restart a company. Otherwise, we build the whole thing. Otherwise, we're going to run out of time. So that's, reset the code base, reset the company so we can build on a wrong orthodox technology foundation.

How did you actually stay solvent all this time? A lot of people want to keep working at an idea. Oftentimes they need to pay the bills. How practically we're able to keep working for three or four years. I know there's a story of your mom loaning you some money during that time. Well, Chinese mom always can help. And I'm a single child. Yeah, my mom helped me.

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 raise the money. I sort of return the money to her. Then we run out the money. So, hey, mom, can I borrow that just to bridge us, which she did? I really grateful for that. How do you bridge?

How do you last year so long? Because the thing you want to create does not exist. With the call-nought notions, it's a Lego for software. It doesn't quite exist, right? There's a Lego for Lego. You can see that in furniture, exists, but Lego for software at the usable

mass market adoption level doesn't quite exist. And you just want that thing to exist. And I grew up with Legos, the only toy I ever wanted, and I want the same feeling of creativity and playfulness to the tool that people can use every day.

And my co-founder, Simon, feels the same way. LICO is the only thing he liked wanted for every Christmas. Have you guys seen magnetiles, though? I have a one and a half year old and magnetiles are quite delightful. It's like a, I think it's like a pre-Lego. I like the Chileanningale. Yeah, it's like, they're a little magnetic plastic planes,

and then you can build little, you can build much bigger things really quickly. It's more for babies, but I'm having a blast. Oh, I see it. It's kind of like, uh-huh. It's like a different version of Legos. I like picture in real time looking it up. You're like, okay, we're our new vision, magnetiles for Sop. Now, most people know LICO.

Magnetown, ideas are saying modular, creativity. Okay, back to your story. So there's also a moment where you moved to Japan. What was that about? Is that just like escape and disconnect? Yeah, that was during the one of the review phases, during the, we know what the product should look like. It should be a productivity software with a Lego power hiding inside of it.

We built on a round technical foundation. And if we continue to build on the round once, we're going to run out of money. money, company won't exist. So we decided to lay off everybody. At that time, Notion was five people. We laid out, I brought back to me and Simon, two people. And morale obviously was really low.

You have to say goodbye to your teammates. And so we have the idea, let's just go somewhere that we've never been to to change the scenario a little bit. And Japan is always top on our list. So, you know, the funny thing is if we, and we sublease our apartment and office, we're actually making money living in Japan and then San Francisco. So we did that for a while.

We actually traveled around the world for a while just to like change it up. Me and Sam just coding every day and design every day. That's somewhat of the happiest moment. Birthday, every day. I saw a stat you're quoting 18 hours a day. Here's the quote I heard.

We just code, code, code, then hey, let's go for food, then we go eat, go back to work and do it again. Because me and him working so well now, even back then, it's like you sort of know what each other people are thinking, and you can just cross through the problem space really quickly. The technical product space, design space, and just nonstop of shipping stuff. So maybe just to close out this thread for people, for founders that are either struggling and just like can't find a thing that's working. I've been working on something for a long time. I'm curious what advice you'd share for sticking with it,

and I'll share things I've heard you say so far, and I'm curious if there's something you'd add. One is you just believe this needs to exist in the world, and you need to really feel this, I need this to be a thing. I think there's an element of staying lean, like you've let everyone go. It's just you and Simon again. There's also this element of disconnecting almost

and just like going to a different location and just like, let's just reset. What other elements do you think? think are key to you finding something that actually ended up working. I'm kind of lucky and Simon kind of lucky that high is never too high, low, or it's never too low for us. So somehow it wasn't feeling too down. Whenever I feel down, I just go to sleep. Then next day, I'm just reset. So that's kind of lucky for me. Definitely don't work. Don't be afraid to reset. I think courage is quite important

because oftentimes you're working on, and it don't matter, but momentum just took you there. Your first point of building something you want the world to have, what is the building a product or business? You want user, you want revenue. That's a product business.

It's almost like a sports. The market is the arena that you want to optimize the scorecard where it's a building for winning. And I grew up play sports. I like to compete. So I like that. And building for something you want the world to have is building for your value.

You have some taste, you have some aesthetic, you have some values, you want the world to have more of that. There are different energy. I realize actually fairly recently, like they're really different. Depends on which day I wake up, I might be in a different mood for it, thanks. But building for value, it's more lasting and more fulfilling. looking in the thing we're building today and looking back, I find most proud of the thing like, I create something authentic to myself

and happen to be also useful for others. And that just keeps you going. And that feels like a more durable energy source for all those dark years, lost years, during the ocean and still every day for me. It's interesting you say that because there's this aspect of it wasn't working initially because you're building it for yourself

and not for people, but what I'm hearing is it's still important to build the thing that you are still excited about but also have you go back and forth. Here's what the business means and here's the thing I'm excited about. You're really a cue, almost like a therapist, right? It's true. You're building too much for your own self and value without realizing at the end of day, if you're building a product and tool has to be used by others,

you need to create a balance too much of yourself, then there's no users. You're just doing art project. You're just doing research. project, right? And it's too much for a business, you're getting a commodity, right? So where's the spectrum? Yeah, it's never-ending spectrum. That's interesting. Yeah. Okay, so I'll summarize some of those things you shared have just how to stick with it and stay with an idea and not give up. So I love to just get sleep. Very Brian Johnson of you. Just like get some sleep when it's a real down day. There'll be another day tomorrow. Really simple. But,

It's like a daily personal physical reset, right? You can reset your co-based. You can reset your mental model. Okay. And then there's also, I love these points. Don't be afraid to kind of reset, as you just said. Toby Lutkey was on the podcast. He said the same thing.

Just be comfortable with sunk cost. I have done all this already, and I will throw it away and start again, and that's okay. Yeah. I think it's not just like a self-help way to say, don't be afraid to reset. That's like, that's okay. That's fine. I think the more interesting point here, it's like you can create progress through better abstractions. And that compounds faster can catch up to all the things you build much quicker than you ever saw.

Or humans are not thinking, not good at thinking in terms of abstraction or the exponentials. We're thinking in terms of linearly. If you just reset and you found a better way to do it, you can't get all the things you have. The sound cost recovered really quickly. So actually going back to the computing pioneers part, like Smalltalk, one of the first systems and a huge influence for a notion was really tiny code base and inspired by LISP, which is another problem in languages,

and probably like 100 lines of code or something. The kernel of things could be really small, but just like math, it can compound, it can have complex behavior that unlock so much value and things for you. But if you just find those right, You can catch up to all the things you did. You are free to lose really quickly. So I think that's the corner of why reset is so powerful.

And we're seeing exactly what you're describing in LLM advancements these days. All these companies have been working on this for so long, and then they've cracked kind of an abstraction of how to think about scaling these systems, and now just people launch them and are immediately where the companies that have been working on us for decades are today. because they are building off these abstractions, as you described. Yeah, like how trying to cut up the US really quickly. With deep seek, yeah. The point you also made about momentum, like be weary of momentum taking you in direction

and moving in a different, not being stuck to that direction, is exactly the way I think the chain of thought models network actually, where generally LMs are like, next word, next word, next word, next word, and if they ever make a wrong turn, they're stuck, they keep going from that path. and these chain of thought models are now good to just like, wait, let me rethink. Is this actually the right path or should I start again? So I feel like AI is almost figured out

exactly what you're describing. Interesting. Oh, man. Okay, last question about the early years. Everyone's always wondering, what does product market fit feel like? You worked on it for three or four years. What was kind of the moment? What would it look like?

What was different when you're like, okay, this is going to work? I think going back to me and Sam, high, it's never that high, low. It's never that low. It never hit me, hit us as like a binary. It's 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 kind of very gradual ramp.

Maybe that's why early days when it's really the lost eras, it doesn't feel too low because it just, even for an ocean today, it feels like it's so small in terms of where it could be. and it just they keep going. It's less of a milestone way to thinking about things. It's more just like, can we do the same that's in our head and better than we did last week

way of thinking about things? So there's a such movement that product market for a milestone achieve. I've heard that from a lot of founders, actually. Was there like a moment at that point of just like,

oh, this is different or maybe it's going to work this time I think for a while, like, okay, once we start revenue, product grows faster now, investors start knocking on the door with like, I remember one day it's like there's a dog food, dog food, doctorate sent entire office. So first of all, office was in public the address and the doctorate. It's like, why do people want this so much, right? So that was a moment I paused a little bit. And I guess there's enough attraction for investors. And the dog treats were trying to, it was like a gift to be like, hey, you should talk to us.

We're setting this fun gift. Yeah, because of the way we're just hire someone in the office as a dog, then I think we'd post on Twitter or something. And so why did this show up to our office? Someone really hustle into where we are in our office address and follow us on Twitter. So did you end up taking their money? Not the first time. Okay, later. Okay.

It's a long game. No. Awesome. So I've never heard that before. Sign product work, Fitus VCs are starting to, you start getting a lot more messaging and cold outreach from VCs. So actually, I had one-hour investor. It's really helpful. Because all those years, you sort of just like, there's no feedback loop.

You just go for it. Then the feedback will gradually show up. Then for a while, I said, oh, V-C started knocking on the door. So I actually talked to those people, that people like what we're doing, right? I did some meetings, quite a good meeting. Maybe it doesn't. And one of your members are saying, like, Ivan, what are you doing? Like, you clearly don't need money.

Do you just trying to feel good to do external validation about this? And I said, oh, that's so true. It's like, I don't, there's, it doesn't help us make a better product. And the truth is with our, what customer tell us. Then we, then sort of like, we just went back to building, I went back to hardcore building no meeting modes. That's where the dog food story came about and realized. That's interesting. You mentioned this investor.

They said it was really helpful. You want to give them some credit? Or do you want to give them? Oh, Shana Fisher. She's in New York. Okay. Cool. Yeah.

She's like another therapist, right? This episode is brought to you by. Cynch, the Customer Communications Cloud. Here's the thing about digital customer communications. Whether you're sending marketing campaigns, verification codes, or account alerts, you need them to reach users reliably. That's where Cynch comes in. Over 150,000 businesses, including eight of the top 10 largest tech companies globally,

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Plus, you get features like interactive carousels and suggested replies. And here's why this matters. US carriers are starting to adopt RCS. Cynch is already helping major brands send RCS messages around the world, and they're helping Lenny's podcast listeners get registered first before the rush hits the U.S. market. Learn more and get started at cinch.com slash Lenny. That's s-in-c-h.com slash Lenny. I want to shift to talking about Notion today and the way you've approached it.

And a good segue is what you've been talking about right now is how lean and efficient you've been and how that's been a big priority for you. So a few stats I've seen. one is that you guys are profitable you've been profitable for a couple years now you haven't I don't know if you've spent even the money you've raised like I think most of it is still in the yeah yeah still in the bank

you're nodding if you're on YouTube you didn't have a salesperson until you hit over 10 million ARR you hired your first PM at like 50 people you've always kept the team generally really small why has that been important to you it's like very cool now everyone's like of course that's how it should be but for the past decade

that has knocked in the case you've always been that way. Why has that been so important? I think going back to the abstraction system way of problem solving. I think we're lucky that me and Simon and

Akshay, we have the skill set. You probably can run a whole company, which is a couple of us. I can co-I-can design. I can do marketing, storytelling, talk close sales deals.

So you sort of realize you don't need a lot. But when you can do a lot at the same time, or hire people who can do that, naturally keep the company small. And you all know, you're doing product management. The overhead is actually more from internal communication. It's really hard to get people of 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, through better tools. Like, Notion itself is a meta tool, to build out a tool. So we pretty much run everything on Notion. We use the same mindset to build our company. And accidentally that keep our headcount low, keep our company profitable,

which then puts you on a positive treadmill of you don't have to go for the next 1824 month to find money. You can just focus on building. And also, because your team small, we have this interesting. notion called talent density. Right. Which we don't try to track a 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 compounding group. I wonder how much of this is actually from being around for so many years without success. We just have to

stay very lean and save our cash because otherwise we'll die. Do you think that was like a formative experience to inform how you on operate? Or is that always something? No, I wouldn't say we're notions like a cost-saving first company. Like I like fancy chairs. I like furniture.

But we're not like wasting money. I think it's more just from a taste or approach to problem solving. I just believe better system. It's much better than pull forth through people. When people hear this idea of staying lean and staying small, it's like, it's sounds great. Yeah, or we're going to be super efficient and lean and smart with their money and all intends. It's very hard to do, and it's very hard not to hire more engineers, more designers. What advice do you have for folks that want to operate this way? Like, what has allowed you to

actually be successful while staying lean and not having as many engineers as competitors, many designers, competitors? I think just understand abstraction or system is a better curve than peckon curve, right? Linear. And we internally help other people in our understand this. Internally, we use the metaphor, the notion is a small bus. The bus, the smaller the bus is easier to turn corners, easier to accelerate, easy to maneuver. The bigger the bus it is, it's just like bigger the boat, bigger the bus slowed down. And as a leader in the company, you decide who sit around you on the bus seats, right? That dictates how fast our overall bus moves. Dictate your work and life experience at this company because you're, you pick

your roommate, you pick your seatmates. That metaphor clicks with people inside a company and overall help us to optimize to make the bus type. I haven't never heard that metaphor before. I probably came up somewhere. Or it's, no. Small bus. So along these lines, actually, so I visited the office recently, and I noticed that it's just like a very cozy vibe. And I learned that you had a rule of no shoes in the office for a long time until the last office.

that you all ate around one table for a long time, that you try 30 different shades of warm white on the walls before he chose. Why is that important to you? Why is it so important to be so thoughtful about the office experience? Maybe they're two-dimensional part of it. One is the pragmatic part. You just want office to be a pleasant experience to be at. Therefore, most office is a top light.

It feels like a hospital. I just like, oh, man, and then the white is so pale, and the floor is so dark. Like, don't use white, use some kind of cream, make floor as a more friendly colors. And don't use top light, top light is evil. So just the office feels cozy, so people spend more time. You feel more creative, more at ease in the office space, right? The vision we have is she feels like artist studio or should feel like your home. And that's why most of office furniture are home furniture.

I just feel it's cozy. that's more of, so people spend more time, it's more creative, juices flow better. The other words, just like, at least personally for me, it hurts the eyes if you just see ugly things. It's more from a value aesthetic front. It's like, we talk about ergonomic chairs.

Does it hurt your back when you sit on bad chairs? But you have more visual input from, at least for me, from the eyes, if the chair looks ugly, the wall looks ugly, it hurts. So it's better not have a thing that hurts. You also have a really interesting naming mentioned for your conference rooms?

Yeah, true. Yeah. We name our conference room after timeless tools in history. So there are, give you away some iPhones, obvious one, the original Macintosh, there's different form of chairs, Lami's 2,000 pans, Toshiba rice cookers and other ones. Because they're inspirations, they're just like, at the end of they were creating a tool. We're creating a meta tool, a lot of people to create tools, software tools. And Toshiba rice cooker changed how people eat rice in Asia for tens of 100 million people, right?

The Sony transistor radio is the first one to shrink semiconductor something small and useful for people. And those things change people's life and last for decades. What is it like to create a software product like that? I want to inspire my team to think that way. Because it's like software and especially tech, it's just every six months, every 12 months cycle, we don't think enough about create something that lasts. I care creating something that's,

at least the form factor lasts longer than halve 18 months. There's a quote that you tweeted once that I think of as you talk about this from Steve Jobs. The problem is that there's just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product. I don't know if you remember tweeting that, but just what do you think of when you, when you hear that?

Yeah, I think the keyword here is craft. Like internally, our company philosophy called craft and values. Craft is like your skill side, your taste, value is like your personal value, and how do you see the world? Craft is an interesting world. It's kind of like about apply your value

to some technical know-hout and to make more clever treat-offs to create something new and useful. and just keep doing that at it. My wife often refer me as a wood cabinet builder. That's how I, at least my mindset training towards building an ocean. It's like, oh, can I make this wood cabinet more beautiful and more useful and feels nicer on your hand? And that's like you have aesthetic direction towards it,

and you have your technical know-how to actually make things happen. then you need to do permutation and trade off in your head or on paper and to get there. That's craft. And building product to me, at least to me, feels that way. Building business feels that way. Building company feels that way. It's interesting. And so much of this conversation is this and the way you think about building this company

is this balance between practical, useful things people need and like business and, you know, practical stuff. And then this, like, the value of building something you're proud of and craft. And there's always this trade-off almost of like speed and quality. And I know that's an important element for you, just like thinking about trade-offs between decisions. So talk about just trade-offs, just like how you think about making a trade-off. Yeah, I think this is quite relevant, especially for product makers and business makers. There's no free launch. You don't get something for free.

You have to give up something. Then what do you give up? it's essentially, then you give up the right thing that market where your user wants at that given space and time, it's kind of just the craft of building a business or building a product, right?

And the market is so dynamic, especially now with AI, like the optimized function for the market changes. So then you need to make new trade-off and new technology merges, right? I always feel like, AI language model feels like a new type of wood.

It's filled like aluminum. It's a new type of material. So you can make, like, mass air travel wasn't available until aluminum become cheap enough that people can make airplanes that support this, right? And it's like computer wasn't there until semiconductor becomes, like, reliable. It's like it requires new technology to unlock new way to making tradeoffs. And then you're, then you need to balance the technology. trade-out with human behavior tradeoff.

So we're not, as a human effort, ever since we got off Africa, we're sort of set, right? That's like a constraint, it's a variable. And every generation pick up some new thing, but after you're 16 years old, you don't want to learn new things. So those are like, there are people trade-off, technology trade-off, there's some kind macro, there's a different dimension of things just cooking together that come together as a product or it's more as like business, then what is that?

And I think a product maker, a business maker's job is to find that three spot of all the multiple dimensions, then create something has a right to exist, at least more durable to exist. And I'm hearing there's kind of this thread of just like with new technologies, what is now possible. And I know you guys are doing some cool stuff with AI that I'm going to get to you that is unlocking some cool new ideas. But before I get there, I want to talk about just you as a leader. At this point, you've been at this for 12 years, something like that. Not like that, yeah. And if you don't mind me saying, you're a soft-spoken leader,

which is not like, you're not like the archetype of what people imagine is like the CEO of a 10 billion. And I'm sure you guys are valued much more now. I don't even know that that was probably an old valuation. I think it's great for people to see leaders like you that are not necessarily the classic archetype of CEO. And I imagine there are things you've had to work on and build and lean into that aren't natural to you to step into this role of this increasingly growing high-scale business. What are some of the areas you've had to most build and learn to do that didn't come naturally

to you? Yeah, I guess you've never been in a business meeting or brainstorm session with me. I haven't seen that side if I've been there. Yeah, I would have the most soft interaction person at work. It's actually the reverse is true because I grew up in China. People were more direct. People just say what they want, say what they think, right? So, and you move to California, and moved to U.S. or moved to the West.

It felt, wow, everybody says everything's wonderful, everything's nice. But that's not true. I would say notions ethos is probably more like a East Coast rather than West Coast. So somewhere in between, right? It's more direct. What do I need to learn? A bunch of things. I think the early days

We talk about that The world is not like you The world don't care about you So you just like You sort of have to shave off the idealistic part of you To build something that's like The world actually cares The strictly cold of broccoli

You have to hydroproccoli Within something like the sugar pills Right? So That's one That's more self That's about myself As company grow you realize

I'm pretty good at story telling So it's like That's like a one-to-one influence. But as a company grow, you realize you need to be one to many storytellers. That's the scale. One of the reason I try not to do podcasts and all those ways is, oh, it's actually a drain's energy in different ways, right? I prefer just building product and brainstorm sessions.

Then you realize it's a necessary craft for me to pick up in order to change the shape of this company, the business I'm building. I treat it like a craft. Like there's a thing skill, also a video game. You need to pick up something to unlock something else and to make a new demand. You kind of trade up with yourself and the business. That's kind of fun, though.

Every 12, 18 months notions like a new company. Or at least it require different kind of skill set coming from me. So I need to pick up new things. And it's an infinite game. And infinite games are more fun. I love this idea. I love that you keep coming back to this idea of there's like the idea.

and the values and the vision and what you're trying to do. And then you have to find the way to frame it and package it so that people actually understand and want it. And that's how you get in. Yeah, it's like human minds are resistant to change. And how do you live in people's head through my best word marketing and positioning are for, right? So you need to find the sweet spot to get in.

And you'll also be truthful. It's not just deceiving. So deceiving is not truthful. You can fool other people once or twice, and there's no future. It has to be actually tied back to something genuinely the value of creating or the exchange with the other person. So, yeah, it's a craft. It's like market storytelling is the vast dimension of making tradeoffs. Yeah, I love this where tradeoffs comes up again and again, too.

It's so interesting that there's these threads that have come up again and yet in our chat. Along the journey of becoming this leader that you've become, what would you say is maybe the biggest surprise or most unexpected part of the journey of something you've had to learn to do or something that didn't turn out the way expected just as a personal growth story? If you use the product in the past three years, you realize, Notion Product, you realize like, hey, we actually shipped a bunch of things not so great, like two years ago, right? It's actually last year, 24 is the year that I can say we ship good stuff at good velocity and good quality and align with our values.

We sort of get lost there for a year or a year and a half shipping something not according to our value, not according to my value. It's like notion we call notions Lego for software. We're sort of ship non-legal pieces into our product. It's still there. We're still cleaning up part of it. That's a realization. It's like going back to the value part, it's like, if you create this thing

kind of a product or business, you attract people, our 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 the system, it's like there's organ rejection with your employees, with your customers, right? Like, to give you a concrete example, for a while, And still is, project management is one of the most important use cases for Notion.

And you can get to a better project management tool just by hard-coding things like sprints, milestones, all those things, into your product. Or you can do it in the way the notion is our being through Lego pieces. Okay, what is the sprint? Sprints are clusters of a task that grouped together. So it's a new Lego. So introducing Lego is much harder. slower.

You can instead we hardcore the sprint concept into the product and this doesn't quite fit. And it took me at least a year, a year and have to realize that's not the way we should continue building motion. We should go back the original Lego with building the product.

So we changed quite a bit internally. Now it feels good now. And building according to your value is the matter point, at least for me. Okay, I've got to follow this thread. What is it that you change that allowed you to come back to your first principles? Was it like you step?

Is it founder mode? It was the answer. Is it people, personnel shift? Is it what allowed you to change the way things were going? I would say all of that above, but especially you just release the Sprint product through our community and customers. And it's like, what is this?

It's like underpowered compared to other competitor products to doing product management. And it doesn't work well with the rest of notion Lego set. And if you talk to engineers, it's like, okay, there's this part of notion you have to touch the co-base that's just weird, right? You harkle too much into it. From all the dimension, technical front, calling a customer, and when you use this, then it just doesn't feel right. So there's another saying that if you're building the Lego way inside notion in the code base or product, the system work for you. If you're building non-Legal way, the system work against

you. So in some sense, We're creating a tool that has emergent behavior. You need to channeling that emergent behavior to unlock more values. So I'm hearing as you launched it, it just didn't go well. Everyone's just like, what is this? This isn't feeling good. And there's a moment of realization of, I see, here's what we did wrong here. And we should come back to this original abstraction vision of what we're trying to build.

And that took like nine, nine months a year to realize sometime. Yeah. Along those lines, actually, people come on in some. podcast and they share all these stories of things are going awesome all the time. And like this was a great example of it didn't. I'm curious if there's another story of, let's say, a crisis that you all went through when things were looking pretty bleak for Notion along the journey of building Notion. Yeah, one of the bleakest one is when we, during COVID, we just couldn't scale up our

infrastructure. There's pretty, for the longest time, like Simon is really good at don't do premature optimization. So for the longest time, we're notion runs on one instance of Postgres database. And then we find a beefiest machine. We keep scrolling, find a beefier machine to scale our user base. But then we're running out

even the largest instance there is for Postgres. So there's a doomsday clock that when we're going to truly run out of this space to store everything in motion and notion of a completely shut down. So we stopped building any new features, all hands-on-deck, almost every engineer in the company.

trying to solve that problem. Eventually, we did. But it was a close call. Like how close we're talking about? If I recall, correct, you're probably in weeks, running all the time. And then as you approach the limit of what postwords can do, behavior becomes sporadic. You just, you really don't know which day is going to hit you.

But we just need to go as fast as you can to become sharding problem. Yeah, I was going to ask, to the solution of sharding the database. Yeah, sharding. Okay, cool. Don't do as late. Yes, don't do premature optimization, but plan ahead a little bit. Don't do what we did. How long did you have from when you launched this doomsday clock to time running out?

Was that like a few months? Maybe a bit longer. Yeah, in the month, less than six, but more than three, something like that. The bitter sweetness of COVID, just ramping up certain businesses. Yeah, people just run like they have to use online productivity software, collaboration tools. Yeah, blessing and a curse. Speaking of a blessing and curse, this is a great segue to where I wanted to go in kind of the final area I want to spend time on, which is building horizontal software and building software

that bundles together, a bunch of different stuff. Notoriously hard to build a horizontal platform that does a lot of things when there are often point solutions that are very, very good at that one thing. And it's interesting if you look at the timelines of companies that have built horizontal products, they all take a long time to build and finally find product market fits. So it's actually a really common pattern. and when we were talking about what would be fun to talk about, the way you described it is like the joy and pain of building horizontal products.

So let me just ask broadly, just what have you learned about what it takes to successfully build a horizontal platform type of product? First of all, no regret. And second, I wouldn't want to build anything else because, like, going back to the value, Lego for software doesn't exist, and Lego is a horizontal thing. So that's the thing we're going.

want to build. We always want to do that. So we did not start to optimize for a business, but we're optimized for that. Learning wise, I think segmentation is quite important because people can use Lego for different things. 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 unpacked box the set is there for you. Right. That's what we're learning. a lot, especially move up market. There's a this term. It took me a while to learn. It's called solutions.

You need to be a solution for enterprise customer. You need to sit somewhere on a P&L to optimize for their business were due to risk. That's the Lego box. It's not a Lego brick. Related segmentation is related to that. So you need to shift your mindset as you

more towards B2B, more towards move up market. I wish what I have done earlier for the longest time. much style too much in the Lego brick mindset and not in the solution like a box mindset. That's such a good metaphor. I feel like even if you're not building Legos for business, just this idea of what is the box that you are selling to people? Like what is it being positioned? How do you picture it? What are the value props? Such a good metaphor.

If you're building vertical software and actually your vertical is the box, right? So you know you have one or two percent you're selling to. Pretty straightforward that your market constraints you. And no judgment people like, you can go it that way, but then you hit the wall off the market. The advantage of building horizontal, there's no wall, at least for in our space, no should go after the entire software market. But then you need to create a wall yourself, so to make your go-to-market distribution, to create the spot in people's mind, your customer mind more clearly for them and for your go-to-market teams.

That's why we're, solution is one of my favorite work internally to rally, the sales team or the product team, you think that way. But then you need to hold in your head make sure you're still building bricks behind a scene. Otherwise, you're pitching hold yourself into the bad spot like what we did with project management sprints features. So speaking of that, so I don't know if you know this. I ran a survey recently. We asked my readers what tools they use most, what tools they love most. And I went out to my entire subscriber base. We've got 6,500 people filling out the survey. And Notion, more than any other company, placed very, very, highly in many categories. For example, it was, I have the notes here, it was the second most

popular project management tool after Jira. It was the fourth most popular docs, which is interesting because you think Notion would be like Notion is known for docs and it's interesting. That was the lowest one actually. And then it was third in CRM, just behind Salesforce and HelpSpot. Yeah, we did not intend to build CRM, but what is the CRM-H relational database? That's why we give people with that brick, that's a relational database, and they can build CRI themselves. 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. So they can have all the information in one place, good for their teams. Good for AI, actually. That's a huge market change that's like we did not expect until recently, right? and save their costs, which is more and more people care about the bundling purchase nowadays.

And our approach for that is like, yes, we're number two in project management, number four in CRM, but we're going to introduce in more bricks to make us number, move out the categories ranking. So it just takes time, but that's our approach. Yeah, well, it's working whenever you're doing there.

So say someone is trying to build a horizontal tool like yours. There's a lot of founders that are trying to build something that can do a lot of things really well. Do you have any advice for that first use case, just figuring out something that initially works, like you're talking about segmentation? Is there something there of like do this if you want to find any success with a horizontal tool?

First, I wouldn't recommend it. But you wouldn't do it differently. I wouldn't do differently myself, but I wouldn't recommend it. It's a problem in the problem space too large to have a best practice. But I can share something that's relevant for us. Like, Notion, we always want to build a meta tool, a tool to build the lack of our software. We somehow stand upon document notes as one use case. And that just gave us a large top of the funnel.

There's a 1 billion plus people use this use case every day. So that fuels our growth, we call our internal strategy called B2C2B. All those consumers, personal user use notion, for the most, most simple way you can use a computer or your phone, which is note taking or document sharing, and then they realize, oh, Notion can do more of that. There's relational database power. You can do tasks. You can manage track other things. Then they bring Notion to work. Have our B2B customers coming from prior personal users. And most of them use the notion for nodes and doc in the first place. So pick, well, at least we stumble upon a use case, a horizontal use case,

give us a large top of funnel that help us grow our more verticalized enterprise use cases. And that's the reason where we shipped a calendar product last year, because which other is a category of software has a 1 billion plus user? There's document notes. There's calendar. There's email. Right? That's why we're also working on an email product right now.

Oh, man. Watch out everyone. And then you mentioned AI, and it's such a good point, that AI is best when it has data, and the fact that you have all of this stuff already in there gives you a lot of really interesting opportunities to leverage AI. We definitely did not expect Lagash model. It's such a gift for everybody building tools, right? Completely change the material you can work with. One realization is you have a surface area that people spend daily work with, especially doing writing and managing your tasks and project,

it's really easy to slice the language model writing AI capability into it. So that's the first progress, though. That realization is AI is so good at reasoning and understanding and searching things. And you can do a much better job of finding and searching things, if all the information are together, that's what we realized. AI is really good with bundled offerings. AI is really good with horizontal tools.

So that's the second phase. The first product was our AI writer product. Second product is AIQ&A or connectors. Just to get all the information notion of give your answer. And then we also need to work with the external connector because there's things that living in Jira, living in Zendes, that other customers still rely on. So you need to build AI connectors.

But more and more information coming back to the notion core. I will see the third one, which is even more fascinating. It's for the longest time, and the style is, one of the biggest weaknesses of building for Legos, it's hard to piece together. It's not everybody can put together a Lego set from scratch. There's always the builders and user with the Legos.

But guess who is really good at piecing things together, assemble things, especially things like AIS since Sonnet 3.5, AI has so bad writing code. Coding is just assembled things together. 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 AI a coding agent on top of it, you can have, create any kind of knowledge, customer software, customer agent for whatever your vertical use cases need. So that's the most fascinating approach for me.

And we do not expect this at all. Thank you, AI. Is there anything else along the lines of building horizontal products and bundling that you think is interesting to share are important? Otherwise, I have one last question I want to ask you. I think market is kind of like waves. Who said this? There's two ways to build business bundling and bundling.

There's too much of a zig into Zach. Actually, my favorite version of this is like, there's a classic Chinese literature called Romance of Three Kingdoms. It's a great novel. It talks about the Three Kingdom Era of China, an opening sentence of this novel. It's empires long united must divide,

long divided, must unite. That has always been. Bundling on bundling. It's one of my favorite book to read when I was a kid. But business works the same way. Windows too much. You can sort of see this. It's like, before computers, everything works on paper.

Our knowledge work are done through papers. It's fully democratized medium. Then PC happens during the 80s. The first error is a piece there. Actually, there are so many applications. There is like early database software like D-Base, it's quite famous. It started at D-Base 2 because it gives them credibility. they had been stick around for some time.

So that's the first unbundling phase of software computing. Then Microsoft bundled everything back into one suite in the 90s. Then the SaaS unbundled it. Now we're sort of at the tail end of SaaS. There's so many verticalized SaaS, average company to use almost 100 tools. It's kind of madness. So there's more the market shifting towards more of bundling approach. And with AI and with the macro.

So there's more value to be created through bundling, at least for now. But the market could shift again. So understand this trend, I think helpful to see should you be a vertical solution or should it be a horizontal solution because it does different things. I love that story. Okay, so last question. Something that one of your early investors, Finn Barnes, suggested to ask you. I'm curious where this goes.

There's this kind of, and you've kind of touched on this a number of times, the way you think about notion, it's almost like a philosophy. of how to work and be versus just a productivity tool. And so I'm just curious how you think about the relationship between tools and human potential and humans and how we live in the world.

The tools are extensions of us. That's where our office room name out of timeless tools, they are just, they extends us a little bit. And once they extends us, once we shape them, once we bring them to world, they can come back to shape us. One of my favorite quotes, like the Marshall McLuhan quotes,

like we shape our tools thereafter our tools shape us. I think this is probably too philosophical for building product or business, but there is a sense thinking like, what are you bringing to the world that will come back to bite you or shape you? and are you extending the part, the so-called good part of human nature, or are you extending the part that's, you know, might be more zero-sum, might be more negative, right? For me, what is LEGO's? Lego is creativity, Lego is beauty.

Software to me feels like lacking both. It's definitely lacking a lot of creative. It's so rigid. So I believe both are human nature that works to amplify, you can build another business that amplify a different part of human nature, right? The Sequoia famously invest in seven sins or seven human nature itself of human because they're so powerful. If you just latch onto them, you can create a business, you can create a product.

But at least I prefer to amplify creativity and beauty in the domain of software. To me, that's aligned with my values. and I think at least shape the market, ship our user of a product towards the better part of themselves. It must feel so good to have a product that is so aligned with the way you want to see the world and actually working and growing at this rate and scaling and becoming this, I don't know, part of the ether of the world. Feels good.

Yeah, it feels good that some of the most heartwarming thing is still, And never gets old. Like when you walk by coffee shop and see people using Notion, that, oh, it feels good. And it feels good that we'll see people in our community can create a living selling Notion template, notion, that they're not a software engineer

and going back to the original mission of when people create software. I think that's one of the most fulfilling thing, at least as a maker of tools, can experience. About the last point, I think people don't realize. So people are making millions of dollars selling Notion templates on the Internet. on Etsy in other places. Consulting templates, yeah.

And they're not programmers. I think that's the, I would see that's the heart of that because their domain expertise, they have, like, they're YouTubers or creators, they have lifestyle brand, they know certain things, but they're not makers of software, and they can use Notion, package their workflows and expertise into Notion app and templates and make living with that. It's awesome, no. Yeah, like millions of dollars. It's crazy.

Ivan, before we get to an abridged lightning round, I'm curious if there's anything else that you wanted to touch on think might be useful for folks to hear before we get to a very exciting lightning round. I think people in tech, I wish more people look beyond tech to steal good ideas. It's like tech, hacker news, Twitter, are so focused on the now and what's in front of it

what happened six months ago. Right. So versus humanity, if you just read books in other industry, you can look sideways. And if you go back to history, there's a massive amount of patterns and shapes and trade-offs you can steal from. And you can make what's in front of you much more interesting. And you can give you, like, people figure out clever patterns in whatever domain in the past, you can just take in front of you. And I wish more people do that. And I think it would be a very interesting way for product makers, business maker, to solve the problem in front of them by stealing outside from the domain of tech and business.

So at least it's very inspiring, very useful for me personally. Makes me think of the quote, good artist's copy, great artist, steal. Great Art Steel, yeah. Picasso still, well, Steve Jobs spoke that from Picasso or something, who stole from somewhere else, probably. Well, this is actually an amazing segue to our very abridged lightning round. And the first question is, by the way, welcome to the Leyden Ground. Oh, okay. The first question is just, what are a couple books that you find yourself recommending most other people?

Could be along the lines of what you just described or could just be generally. I think the domain that are interesting the most is the complex system domain. It's like it's, you can look up the term. Like, I think more and more people talk about this, but thinking a system, you know, complex system, when all the different things merge together, it creates emergent properties, talking about ants, talk about beads,

talk about life itself. It's just so fascinating, right? How to, with few primitives, few Lego bricks, you can create a thing called life. That thing just, it's sugar for me. So I love greetings in that domain.

And it's really helpful for create product, at least a horizontal product, because you're trying to channel the energy, use smaller parts to create something that the sum is much larger than its parts. Is there a specific book that comes to mine or is it just generally that's a cool? That's a cool area.

That's a cool area too. Next question. Do you have a favorite, a recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? I like to watch old documentaries. Maybe there's another area or a category too. There's quite a few on YouTube. Like people make a really good documentary

in the 80s, in the 70s. That's like, all the old BBC ones, they're just excellent. And they have a strong opinion in them. And it's not longer just like general education thing, you know, they have a direction. They have a taste. Go look up. Oh, yeah, one is a really good one to get started called Connections.

I think it's called, but the gentleman's name is Burke. It's about how different things from different domains inspire other domains, and usually he used 30 minutes or 60 minutes to chain together a bunch connection of stories. It's really good for technologists to watch. How do you recommend? I feel a very consistent pattern throughout all of these answers and your entire conversation of just emergent properties, connections, Legos, building abstractions. Yeah, I think I did anagram. My anagram is 7 and 8. 7 is 7. like, it's actually perfect with what we just talk about.

Seven is like creative, finding connection, see the forest and tree. A, is they call Challenger. It's like competitive. They are optimizing. So through energy existing me. Oh, wow. This all makes sense. I got to take this enograms.

It comes up a bunch on this podcast. Right. Yeah. Final question. Do you have a life motto that you often think back to you, that you often repeat in your head of just like when times you're hard or just to keep going with something you're working on that you find useful. I like to think things as a craft. Just make it better. Make for yourself. If it's unique enough for yourself and useful for others, things will follow.

Ivan, thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to follow up on anything? And then how can listeners be useful to you? Probably find out me on Twitter, Ivan H-Z-H-H-H-A-O. Just helpful, give us feedback about our product. That's the best help. What's the best way to do that? Is it like DM-I-V-N-E, or is it? Yeah, just DME. Okay.

DM-E, yeah, that's probably the best way. Okay, oh boy, here you go. And then you guys are hiring. Anything specific you're looking for, anything people should know if they're like, oh, shit, I want to go work here. We try to hire Misfits. So if you think you're a misfit, if you are exceptional and many things, especially, you want to build Lego for Software.

You want to take interesting spin-on AI with Lego for Software. And DM me. Amazing. Evan, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Bye, everyone. Bye. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lenniespodcast.com. See you in the next episode.