Ivan Zhao, CEO of Notion, discusses his unconventional approach to building a $10 billion company, heavily influenced by his artistic background, particularly photography. He emphasizes Notion's core philosophy of creating tools that are both "beautiful and useful," drawing inspiration from Bell Labs. Zhao recounts Notion's early struggles, highlighting a period where they deviated from their modular "Lego block" architecture in pursuit of market competitiveness, which was met with "organ rejection" from users and the codebase. Notion is now strategically positioned to build effective AI "super agents" due to its consolidated context and modular design, which allows AI to easily learn and utilize its tools. Zhao envisions a future where AI agents act as teammates, dramatically amplifying human capabilities, and believes that "taste" and "agency" will become more critical than raw capability for knowledge workers. He advocates for a "craft mindset" and views company building as a continuous journey, not a destination, offering durable energy and personal growth. His meta-advice is to "think for yourself," as most advice is contextual and temporary, and he draws inspiration from historical figures like Mozart and Darwin rather than contemporary tech trends.
Notion's "Company Home" user interface, demonstrating its consolidated workspace for teams and policies.
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Ivan Zhao's Vision and Artistic Sensibility [00:00:01]
In its early stages (first 3-5 years), Notion struggled with product-market fit because it was "too much of art" and not appreciated by enough users.
An early Notion demo from around 2013, showcasing a minimalist page with text, representing its artistic early days.
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Around two years ago, Notion temporarily shifted towards building "hard plastic things" or specific point solutions to be more competitive, deviating from its modular "Lego" nature.
This approach led to "organ rejection" from customers, the community, the codebase (which is designed for modularity), and the product/engineering teams who preferred building "Legos."
Notion corrected course, returning to its fundamental "Lego way" of building a modular system.
An illustration of a person holding a yellow Lego brick, symbolizing Notion's modular "Lego block" architecture.
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Unconventional Company Building and Leadership [00:07:25]
Zhao acknowledges Notion's unconventional approach, particularly its focus on beauty in an industry often driven by speed, headcount, and fundraising.
He quotes computing pioneer Alan Kay, who viewed tech as a "pop culture" or "tinker culture" that often fails to learn from history or far-away disciplines like humanity and nature.
Zhao suggests treating a company like an art piece that also has a business model.
Misconceptions about Being a $10B Founder [00:09:21]
He aims to demystify his role, telling new Notion hires that he is "no different than you" and "just got here early," encouraging them not to take him too seriously.
He believes media often creates a facade and puts founders on a pedestal, obscuring the reality that they are not fundamentally different, perhaps just luckier or harder working.
Notion's architecture, built over five years to consolidate diverse data (structured and unstructured knowledge, documents, databases), provides a robust "context" for AI.
An illustration depicting individuals overwhelmed by numerous separate SaaS applications (e.g., Google Docs, Jira, Evernote).
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The "Lego block" nature of Notion (text editing, relational databases, different views) means that an AI agent trained to use these blocks can perform most knowledge work.
A blue Lego block labeled "Text," representing the foundational modular components of Notion's system.
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Specialized agents (e.g., customer support, coding) have seen success because their context and tools are in one place, and they often involve solo work.
A display of various specialized AI agent roles, such as "Gaming Strategy Agent" and "Bug Wrangler."
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A crucial component is the UI engagement layer, as humans still need to supervise and provide feedback to AI agents.
Notion AI's conversational interface, showing features like summarizing pages and drafting content.
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Notion is shifting from a design-driven to a more developer-first mindset, including embracing open APIs (like MCP), to create more value and remain open in a competitive AI landscape.
A Notion page displaying "Code Style Guidelines," illustrating its versatility for structured content like code documentation.
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A Notion database entry with a date property showing a calendar picker, demonstrating structured data management.
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His overarching advice is to "think for yourself" because most advice is highly contextual and temporal (e.g., go-to-market strategies quickly become saturated).
If he could have dinner with three people, he would choose Mozart and Darwin. He's not as interested in contemporary tech figures.
His message to the world would be: "The journey is the reward."
