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Akshay Kothari

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2024-09-18
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2024-09-18
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  1. “The fun I would change a lot if I could, or the one that I probably regret not doing the right way is probably sales. I was optimistic. I thought we could do sales a different way. And I thought our salespeople could be more consultative. They don't have to worry about CODA. They just have to make sure the customer is being successful and the product will grow and expand. And what I learned the hard way is that we tried to reinvent the wheel on something that has been done in a specific way, does work really, really well that we shouldn't have. But B, I think that I misunderstood was actually some of the best salespeople, they joined because there is a quota, because they can hit a number, because they can outperform that number. And so actually not having that and not having the attribution really hurt us, I think, the first year or two.”

    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

  2. “I think the people who do well at Notion are builders, and we sort of expect even the execs and leaders to be builders. I think when we hired people who are VPs or CXOs at big tech firms, they have a machinery around how their work happens. And because Notion is so small and so lean, those people had a tough time at Notion because A, like that machinery didn't exist, but also when we did have a crisis or moment of solution that needed to be found, I think they typically sort of went to needing another headcount or sort of blaming on the systems or so forth, right? Which actually didn't work so well.”

    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

  3. “Initially, you sort of have to get a feel for the shape of what you're trying to do in this function. And I think so in many cases we didn't go to hiding the leader first. A lot of these functions, maybe I started doing the job myself, sort of shaping it to sort of what we wanted to do in Notion. A lot of these functions we also hired, the ICs first, like individual contributors who can start to do the work.”

    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

  4. “There's a few nuances to this. If you take that example of Kynan Direct, the AND direct part has an extra signal there. It's not like be nice to each other. We want people to be direct, which means that we are inviting people to be able to debate internally.”

    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

  5. “Initially, we didn't have our values codified. And so a lot of the initial final round interviews was a little bit around our intuition, where we felt like whether this person is going to be actually a good fit for the company. After about, I think when we were 50 people, we actually did the exercise of codifying the values. And we have four values. We are owners of the mission. We are pace setters. We are truth seekers, and we are kind and direct.”

    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

  6. “To all the projects. I think that is actually comes at a cost. The cost is that your bandwidth is now split among so many different projects. And so I think you may feel like you're going faster by hiding more people and saying yes to more projects, but in effect, it is actually going slower. So we've actually chosen the path where we're doing fewer things and doing them better.”

    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

  7. “I think we took a slightly different approach where we did try to keep the team lean and we felt like it might feel like short-term it's slowing us down, but in the long term, keeping the team small allowed us to move a lot faster. Today, all of Notion with all the different services we have under 20 product managers and we have about 12 designers. 12 designers sort of designed the entire surface of Notion, including Calendar. And it really allows us to move faster. Like it's not a committee of design or committee of product managers where someone's only responsible for very small part of the problem. And so because we are a lean team, we can actually take a little bit longer because we're not trying to hire a lot more people. We're trying to hire maybe a couple people every year. And it also forces a certain prioritization that makes you a lot more effective, right? Instead of just taking the fundraising money that you took, hiding a lot of people saying yes”

    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

  8. “The best power founder has is like the veto power. And Ivan used that a lot when I was in the early days. I remember, I don't know how many salespeople we'd interviewed for the first six months. And Ivan was like, well, this person's quite good, but not great. So let's keep looking. And I think for up to about 500 people, we're about 700 people today, but up to 500 people, the last interview was always with Ivan or myself. So we met literally everyone before. And because we did that, I think it already sort of forced a certain rigor inside the company. But also in general, we were okay with enduring the pain. Like a lot of times you feel like this person needed to be hired yesterday and we would be okay waiting a few weeks, a few months until we found the best person for that job.”

    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

  9. “You go back to Notion and sort of why we did some of these things, I think a lot of it came from Ivan really prioritizing keeping a very small team. And that part was not done just because we thought we would be profitable because of that. But I think we did it because it really meant that we can stay a lot more nimble by doing that, right?”

    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

  10. “Together we didn't have to hire as many support people. We did not have to hire a product ops person, and we also did not have research early days. In fact, all of these were given to the engineer directly to be able to tap into that feedback and actually solve that problem, right?”

    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

  11. “And we trained our support team to tag every request that comes in with one of those 200 tags. You have to do that, right? That was part of the job. Every morning at 6 a.m. we wrote a script which would take all these tags from Intercom and write it against these database tags and notion. And so essentially what every engineer at Notion had was a real-time view of what people were talking about yesterday or the last week or the last month. And so if you could see like, oh, wow, people are talking about the Android app or the last month and it's really gone up, they can go in and start solving that problem. And we use this tag across the tools we had, right? So for example, if you were working on Android, you could essentially put that tag in Intercom and you can basically see all the customer support tickets that have come. So you could essentially, in many ways, you don't even have to hire a researcher. If you put all these things together,”

    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

  12. “Yeah, so let's say the first job I had at Notion was actually like there were three people reported to me were support, customer support, right? Now typically as the number of tickets or as the number of requests go up, the first thing that people typically do is they just add more people. They sort of like divide the tickets by productivity and then they come up with some number of people. The product manager in me was like, well, we could build a better system, right? And so we could build better tools so that each support person can do more every day, but also once you have enough of these customer tickets, then the next role you want to hire would be something called a product ops. Product ops would take all this feedback and synthesize it and share it with the engineers. So one thing Ivan and I did in the early years, we created this canonical database of about 200 types of requests that would come, which would map to features, right?”

    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

  13. “I didn't really think of my job as those titles. Like, my job was COO. My primary job was to help scale the business and the company and let my co-founders stay focused on the product. And so that meant whatever the company needed, I would jump in and try to figure it out. How did I do it? This is actually kind of interesting. So my background is product, right? And Ivan told me to join and take care of everything except product. And so I essentially put myself on all these new functions and just try to learn on the job. So one thing I realized was even though I had never really done any of these things before, actually like force principles thinking and like systems design that you learn in product development actually like applies a lot to these functions too.”

    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

  14. “Founder mode is really good if you have a founder who's right a lot. If they're not, God bless that company. There's more cash in Notions Bank today than the history of its race. So it's like in some ways like we've produced cash. We haven't spent any of it. I think the thing I would say about Sequoia, I think it is probably the best brand, similar to how we demand excellence from our employees. I think they demand excellence from their companies.”

    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