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Akshay Kothari

lines on the record: 64
first: 2024-09-18
most recent: 2024-09-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“One of the things that I've been reflecting on is a little bit sort of like that Steve Jobs speech around how you connect the dots looking back. I didn't appreciate it when I was growing up in the small city in Gujarat in India, how sort of growing up there and surrounded by friends and family there, how it would have shaped the things that I do today. And so I think some of that exploration is”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, at least not till when they're a lot older. Actually, one of the best things that happened this year in the last couple last month, my daughter's school sort of banned devices in school. I'm just really glad because once a month I would have a conversation with her about some of her friend wearing an Apple watch. And as I explained, like, sorry, but we're not getting it at this age. Now I don't have to explain that, which is nice.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I just sort of worry that I think the incentives right now, at least for these companies that are primarily ad-based are just like it's going to be a hard one to move to subscriptions.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That clearly sort of resonates, but also like if you're just maximizing attention time, which these social apps are doing, it does sort of just sort of like spiral down to that.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would love to see in some ways how do we make learning and education more what people want to do? And I actually think like, I don't know, people watching this podcast hopefully learn a few things.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the question, I guess, I don't know, maybe I'm being cynical here, but I wonder what people are creating and what people are consuming and whether it's actually...”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Similar to this podcast, I think there's definitely better content out there. I'm not saying necessarily notion content is better, but how many people have controls over this information that they're consuming? They didn't have that even when they're watching TV or something. But the thing that I worry about is like is just the consumption to creation ratio has gone out of whack a little bit.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this general TikTokation of every social app, I'm really worried about that. Every social app has become like one or two clicks away from infinite stream of vital videos, which I think is just really sad.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things I think my wife was right on this one. One of the things I used to do about a year or two was try to pack up every hour of my kid's weekend with activities. And I was like, oh, they can't be bored. They got to do this. They got to do that. And then we just spent like a month in India this summer and they had no programming and they were just like sitting around with family. And in many cases, my daughter complained she was bored. But I think both of them grew so much with all these interactions. And I've realized that, I don't know, boredom is good. Like, I think it's okay for them to not be occupied every hour of the day.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in general, I would say almost all advice is genius for a subset of people and completely rubbish for the rest of them. I think you can take literally everything. Even founder mode, founder mode is really good if you have a founder who's right a lot. If they're not, God bless that company. So I think, I don't know, I think I've moved away from giving advice to more share my experience with what happened at Notion or Pulse because I found that to be like, I think hopefully you can take the right learnings from them and apply it to what your situation is.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So for me, I think I graduated 2010. I won't go into too much detail, but I build this small little app in my class project at Stanford that became a company called Pulse. And I remember meeting an investor, Emily Melton, was at Mayfield then, and she went to DFCH and now she runs her own fund. And one of the things I realized as a student, the superpower of meeting investors is that what I saw in Pulse was like just another RSS reader. And what she saw in Pulse was this next generation browser for the iPad. And it really sort of made my idea like 100x stronger, just like having that meeting and having her talk about someone seeing the vision even before you do it. I think that was incredible.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I personally would have loved Charlie Munger talk about long-term thinking, long-term business building. Sad that he passed away, but him and Warden are sort of like my heroes.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, these two questions are really awesome questions that I think I found them in Lulu's application, I think job application is. So there's an essay, I think one of the inspirations for Notion has been Alan K and his work. He's like one of the computing pioneers. He actually wrote an essay in 2008 where he said why the computer revolution still has not happened. And he sort of talks in detail about why a lot of the computer universes are mostly used for consumption. It's not used for creating things that the pioneers have thought about. It's worth a read.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With kids sort of reread some of the Indian epics, and so there's a part in Mahabharata called the Bhagavad Gita and some of those principles in Bhagavad Gita are so timeless that I think are worth reading again.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are rethinking what org structures should be and like how many people should report to you. I think people should rethink what boards should be. There is an element of if you had to like recreate what a board meant. I think just writing it down. But people don't get to do that, right? Because I think we got lucky in that the ownership and some of the cash flow positive really helped not dilute as much and not need as much capital. I also think like, you know, some of the investors I know, someone I really respect is Jeff Wiener, who was my old boss at LinkedIn. Ivan and I actually tried very hard to get him to be a board member, our first board member at Notion, and he said no, because deep down he wanted to be the CEO's coach. And he said some of the board stuff around, I think requires him to think about the company before he can.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a one to one coach for your executive team to your board that you sort of put together, where they, as they're growing in their careers and their sort of like figuring out the next phase and the next phase after that, they have an incredible board member who's investing in them. And so I don't actually, this is probably pretty rare. Like I don't know another company that has done that, but a lot of this sort of came from first principles thinking, what would we do?”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, actually, this is something we've been thinking a lot about, and actually, it's actually not that different from thinking about recruiting an executive team. There's like five seats that we would want to fill. I think I would want one person to be like a CEO whisperer, almost like a CEO coach, ideally like a former CEO who's done that job. I think CFOs always would like a partner in having an amazing audit chair. Then there's probably a person who's in go-to-market, and this could be like either someone who's deep in sales or deep in marketing and you can pick whichever one you need, you're gonna need help with in the long run. Then there's the other, like the governance and like the compensation committee is typically a person who you could match with your head of people. And what you could do, if you design it this way, you could also, let's say, you know, fifth one is an investor who actually gives you like a macro perspective or how things are going on. But if you design this well, you could almost”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These rounds were low dilution. I think there's essentially two to three percent ownership that we gave out. We were able to essentially not give out boat seats. We were able to do it in a way that sort of like felt like we could almost recruit a board in the future, which we wanted to do, not just because someone is investing money, but someone who could be a long-term sort of board member for us.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And actually, one of the things that I've also realized is it's not just business performance. I remember one quarter where we missed our, this was maybe like a year and a half ago or something where we missed a quarter where we sort of like missed our number. I remember saying like, oh, here are like seven things we're doing to close the number gap. And I remember both Mike Vernal and Pat said, I think you guys are thinking about this wrong. The question is not whether you can hit this quarter or not. The question is whether you can actually really scale this product to 100 million users and beyond because that's the future we see with Notion. It was a good reminder where it's like, wow, they sort of believe in this long-term mission and they're sort of the long-termism has sort of like helped us recalibrate in terms of what we should do.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the thing I would say about Sequoia having gotten to work with them more in the last few years is that similar to how we demand excellence from our employees, I think they demand excellence from their companies. And so if you like that pressure, if you like wanting to build a generational company, I think you get the best set of questions from them. a lot of really nuanced feedback and data points from them. You know, right now we work with Pat Grady. I mean, Pat has seen literally every generational SaaS company closely, really closely. And everything is memory. So he can essentially tell you are where ServiceNow was like 12 years and two quarters ago, right? And I think it's like he's seen the movie so many different times.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next one, we came back, we asked them first, and them and cotu, because I think Kotu had put a smaller check in the $50 million round. And so they came back and did a larger one. And Sequoia was the co-investor in that.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's from the partnership. I think the person we have talked to there was Mike Vernal then, who was an early personal investor. And I think they actually wrote a very thoughtful note for why. In many ways, it worked out in terms of us getting to know even each other even more over the next 18 months.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we did the COVID round in 2020, we really, really wanted Sequoia. Again, like if you think about the goal for that round was to get a stamp of approval so that we could recruit and people feel like this is a safe company and there isn't a better stamp than Sequois. And so we pitched them and actually we got to know that time in March 2020.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it is a challenge for a lot of companies when you can't show them a path. And I think it was a bigger challenge in 2022. I think some companies have been able to sort of like show a path or have gotten there. But I think they're probably more rare than the number of unicorns that were sort of made during that time.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fallation matters internally, I think, to employees. I think it matters that the stock that they did get is able to be valued that much and continue to grow in value over the years.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think going back to what we discussed, I think in the very long term it will be a function of the company's sort of multiple will be a function of revenue and the premium we'll get is based on us being able to grow fast or continue to grow fast and do it in an efficient way. The great thing about Notion is that we just operate in a very large market. categories that we play in has like I think we've barely scratched the surface on it and so there's you know we're pretty excited to sort of like keep building”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did do some of that, and I think the reason we were able to do some of that was because we were already cash flow positive. So we saw all the companies around us all trying to get fit, all trying to get back to cash flow positive, and we were like, we're already there. So what do we do? Through all of these things, one of the thing I realized that there's like 99 ways you can burn money. There's only one good way to like effectively make money, right? There's just so many bad ideas out there. You can throw money on the billboards. You can throw money on YouTube. But I think it's actually very few ideas that actually can continue to scale well. And even when it starts to do well, like you put more money in and it starts to be a bad channel, right? So it's actually kind of an interesting exercise of like if something works for X, like how do you get to 10x and still have the same unit economics is pretty hard.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What happened In 2022. In fact, the harder times came much faster than most had imagined. And so in many ways, the pullback happened quite a bit early in our journey.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably nuanced. I think you don't want to bone your company down, but I think you do want to compete and see if you can capture more of the customers that you and your competitors are both trying to get.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to. I mean, there is no other choice, right? I think at the end of the day, you do have to play the game that is being played on the field. And in this particular case, D.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So this was second half of 2021. Pretty crazy time. And the reason we did this raise was because our peers, our competitors, were getting very aggressive in going to market, both from the marketing lens as well as from the sales lens. And we saw an opportunity to not only raise this money, but also to sort of play the game on the field. And so we did this in October 2021. And I think the plan was to sort of go more aggressive on go to market.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the budget could be pretty small. You just need enough of a budget to be able to get signals back that channel is working. And in many cases, you don't need it to be very large, right? I think maybe like sales might have a longer period for you sort of see what the paybacks are. But I think anything you're doing with performance marketing or some partnership deals or other things, like I think those things, you know, you can do it. So we do the fixed.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I remember one of the conversations was actually quite interesting where I asked what's the ideal rule of 40? Should it be this? Should it be that? And this person said, basically you should have test budgets for everything you want to try out. And you should just look at each part of your business through that unit economic lens. If you want to do performance marketing, give people $50,000, $100,000. Doesn't matter. Tell them to test whatever they want to test. And if they can prove the unit economics for that channel and the channel's working, then you should load up the truck. You shouldn't worry about rule of 40 at that period of that quarter or that month because you've seen an opportunity that pays you back. You can do the same with sales. And so one of the years we did actually spend a lot of money on billboards. It was a way for us to learn that, okay, well, this does improve your brand awareness, but doesn't actually do a lot to sign ups or, you know, deal closing sort of”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so that's a question people ask. One of the things I learned, this was actually one of my favorite tours of duty inside Notion was when I was running finance for a year. First of all, I thought finance, like at least before I actually worked on it directly, I thought this is just like bookkeeping, stay out of trouble, like stay compliant. But only after I worked for a year and I sort of got introduced to the whole world of FP&A, BizOps, and I was like, wow, this is so strategic. And once you get to a certain scale, Notion got to about 100 million in ARR a couple of years ago, and you realize like, oh, there's all these interesting comps you can look at, public comps that you can measure a real performance against as well, right? So it's very, if you think about your job as like, well, there's all these different projects you need to fund and you need to resource allocate, finance becomes such a strategic partner in that. So I remember talking to as part of like me going to hire RCFO, I talked to a lot of CFOs in the valley as a way to learn.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in some ways, like there's more cash in Notions Bank today than the history of its race. So it's like in some ways we've produced cash, we haven't spent any of it. And some people might look at it and be like, hey, you're not really utilizing the cash that is in hand.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Frankly, I don't know. I think this might sound weird, but I think we just not wired that way. In some ways, which may be very...”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're able to break the rules because there's more demand than supply. But the reason we raised that round was also, I think, was an interesting one where we didn't have a need for $50 million, but we raised it because we saw that the talent was flocking to safety where all the people we wanted to hire needed some signal to say like, oh, this company is stable and I'm willing to work there. And so in March or April 2020, again, we didn't have the cash needs, but we needed an index and cotu stamp that I'm putting $15 million in this company that is growing and that actually really helped us recruit and break that.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You came about really fast and actually goes back to being cash flow positive and not needing it. I think you sort of are able to do.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think primarily Ivan was very focused on is money the constraining factor right now? If we had more money in the bank, would we spend it on hiring faster”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's some of it. I also have to credit Ivan here because in the early days, I think you know this. A lot of investors did knock on our doors. Lot”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think if you're hoping that we're going to be back 200 times revenue or 100 times the ARR valuation, I think that's a bit challenging.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you just look at historically what is the revenue multiple or PE multiple of SaaS companies. So like you can raise on hope today, but in the very long run, unless you're trying to just get acquired, you will be valued at a multiple of your revenue or a multiple of your cash flows that you're generating. And they tend to be an average of 5 to 10x on the revenue multiple side. And the way that you can increase your multiple is by three things, right? I think in my view one is you can increase it by having a faster growth rate, but you can increase it by having a better cash from margin and you can increase it by operating in an industry or in a space where there's the terminal growth rate can still be pretty high. So I think as long as you have a deep understanding of those things, and I think as long as you have a good understanding of what you're going to use the money for, you can build towards that. Great.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a huge, like once you get there, it's actually a huge time save. So I think I'll just talk a little bit about Notions, very nuanced, but we got there pretty early. I think we got there like five years ago. What it did was it meant that suddenly you feel in control of your destiny. You don't have to think about you don't have an end date. You don't feel like you're going to run out of money in X months or X years, Y years away. And what that means is you can choose to raise money if you have a good need for it, but you don't have to. All the time spent there could be spent back into building a better product and selling to customers.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. I would say, in many ways, like Notion's kind of unique in that the company became cash flow positive pretty early on. We did not have to spend a lot of money on sort of fundraising. So there was very little external pressure on Notion.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, it's almost like a part of distribution that happens naturally because it's a consumer product, but it doesn't pay the bills. The bills, the business is growing on the B2B side.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the best way I've seen more recently is Parker at Rippling sort of calls it a compound company, which is that it is this big mission that we're building many different products and they all connect through the data layer. I think in many ways Notion is a compound company as well. The building blocks that we're building really do serve consumers all the way to large enterprises. The reason the flywheel works is that we actually did the study recently and we found that something like 46% of our business, it can be attributed back to someone using Notion in their personal life. Everybody I spoke to who's using it at a large company with wall-to-wall usage, they all started because their spouses using it for their home project or they're using it for with their kids on something or their niece told them about it. Or I saw my uncle having their portfolio on it and so on and so forth, right? So we know that this part is very important for us.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think one of the challenges for Notion has always been the fact that it's a horizontal product, right? And so I think the question people ask is like, oh, is it for consumers or is it for large enterprises? And the answer has always been yes. And I still very much believe in that sort of horizontalness. But one of the things I'm starting to realize is instead of defending the answer or trying to pick, we're much more forthright with our employees about the kind of company we are.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overthink it, just do it the way it is run like a proper sales machine. I think we would have saved three years in that journey. So that part is painful.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably like three years in, so that would have been like three years ago. We've obviously now moved very much into we have an incredible new sales leader, Pravesh, who comes from like, you know, an enterprise sales background. And I think he's brought a certain amount of energy and DNA that like I didn't have. That's the other thing. It's like you need someone who can really rally the troops and operates a slightly different way rather than a systems builder product thinker. Doesn't work. I can't stand on the stage of sales kickoff and like rally the troops as much as Provesh can. And I think if you're like a sales account executive, you want to see that. You want to see that. You want to see that you're crushing your quotas and you're, you know, you really building for that. And so if I had to do, I used to back to your question, if I had to do one function all over again, I would do sales. And the way I would do it is to not try to like.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way we looked at it was just the percentage of business that is driven by sales or sales assisted wasn't growing as much as we would have hoped. But you know, there's actually an interesting piece here around sales.”
2024-09-18 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Notion's Founder on "Founder Mode": When it Works & When it Doesn't | Why The Way Startups Fundraise & Construct Boards is Broken | Raising at a $10BN Valuation in Peak Bubble Times and How Notion Has More Money Than Ever Before with Akshay Kothari · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source