YouSaid · the spoken record

Ivan Zhao

lines on the record: 81
first: 2025-03-06
most recent: 2025-03-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“To hire misfits. So if you think you're a misfits, if you're exceptional at 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.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably find on me on Twitter, Ivanhoe. It is helpful for me. Give us feedback about notion about our product. That's the best help.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think I did Enneagram by Enneagram, it's seven and eight. It's like it's actually perfect with what we just talked about. Seven is like creative finding connection see the fourth and tree. Ay call challenger is like competitive They are optimizing so through energy accessing me.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to watch old documentaries Maybe there's another area or category too. There is quite a few on YouTube. People make really good documentary in the 80s, in the 70s. That's like Our OPPC ones are just excellent and they have a strong opinion in them. And they're no longer just like general education thing. They have a direction. They have a taste. Go look it up. Oh, yeah, one is a really cool one to guest star 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 change together a bunch of connection of stories. It's really good for technologists to watch, highly recommend.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The domain that I'm interested in the most is the complex system domain You can look up the term like. I think more and more people talk about this, but a thinking system, 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 do with few primitives, few Leco Breaks, you can create a thing called life. That thing just is trigger for me. So I love readings in that domain. And it's really helpful for a great product, at least a horizontal product, because you're trying to channel the energy. Smaller parts to create something that the sum is much larger than its parts.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people in tech. I wish more people look beyond tech to steal good ideas Like tech. Hacker News Twitter are so focused on the now and what's in front of it, what happens six months ago versus humanity, if you just read books in other industries, you can't look sideways. If you go back into 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 could give you like people figure out clever patterns in whatever domain in the past. You can just take in front of you, right? And I wish more people do that. I think it would be very interesting for product makers, businessmakers to solve the problem in front of them by stealing outside of the from the domain of tech and business. So at least it's very inspiring, very useful for me personally.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consulting templates. Yeah. And they're not programmers. I think that's the FST, that's the heart of it because their domain expertise, they have their YouTubers or creators. They have lifestyle brand. They know certain things, but they're not makers of software, then they can use Notion, package their workflows and expertise into Notion app and templates and make a living with it. It's awesome, you know?”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feels good. Yeah, it feels good Some of the most heartwarming thing is still. And that casts oath, like when you walk by coffee shop and see people using Notion, though, it feels good and feels good that we see people in our community can create a living selling Notion template, Notion apps, that they're not software engineer. And going back to the original mission of when people create software, I think that's one of the most fulfilling things, at least as a maker of tools can experience.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely lacking a lot of creativity is so rigid. So I believe both are human nature that works amplify. Can build another business in a different part of human nature, right? With them, Sequoia famously invest in seven cents or seven human natures of human because they're so powerful. If you just latch on to 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 can at least shape the Shape the market, shape our user of a product towards the better part of themselves.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extensions of us, that's where our office room name out of timeless tools are just the extends us a little bit. Once they extend 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 McLean quote, We shape our tools, they're after our tools shape us. I think that's probably too philosophical for building protocol or business, but Is a sense thinking, what are you bringing to the world that will come back to bite you or shape you? Are you extending Part, the so called good part of human nature, where is that in the part that's might be more zero sum, might be more negative. For me, what is Legos? Lego is creativity. Lego is beauty. Software to me feels like lacking both.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be created through bundling, at least for now, but the market could shift again. So understand this trend, I think it's helpful to see should you build vertical solution or should you horizontal solution because it does different things.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For computers, everything works on paper. Our knowledge work is done through papers is fully democratized medium. Then PC happens during the 80s. The first areas of PC theoretic actually are so many applications. There is early database software like DBAS is quite famous. It started at DBase 2 because it gives them credibility. Oh, they have been sticking around for some time. So that's the first unbundling phase of software computing. Then Microsoft bundle everything back into one suite in the 90s. Then SaaS unbundle that. Now we're sort of at the tail end of SaaS. There's so many verticalized SaaS average company to use like almost 100 tools. It's kind of madness, right? So there's more the market shifting towards more bundling approach. And with AI and with the macro, so there's more”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Marcus kind of like waves. There's like who said this? Two ways to build business bundling and bundling, right? 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 talked about the Three Kingdom era of China. And the opening sentence of this novel. It's empires long united must divide long divided must unite, as has always been bundling unbundling. This is one of my favorite book to read when I was a kid, but business works the same way, right? When there's too much, you can sort of see this.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not everybody can put together Lego set from scratch, right? 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 since Sauna 3.5, AI is so bad at 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 it AI coding agent on top of it, you can create any kind of knowledge, customer software, customer agent for whatever your vertical use cases you need. So that's the most fascinating approach for me. And we did not expect this at all.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what we realized has to really go with bundled offerings. It has really good with horizontal tools. So that's the second phase. The first product was our AI writer product. Second product is AI Q&A, we're connectors. Please look at 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 Zandesk 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 say the third one, which is even more fascinating. For the longest time, and still is one of the biggest weaknesses of building for Legos, it's hard to piece together.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely did not expect language model. It's such a gift for everybody building tools. It completely changed the material you can work with. Realization is you have a surface area that people spend daily work with, especially during 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 program we've built. Realization is so good at reasoning and understanding and searching things. And we can do a much better job of finding and searching things if all the information are together.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Last year, because which other category of software has one billion plus users, there's document nodes, there's calendar, there's email. That's why we're also working on the email product right now.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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. Half our B2B customers coming from prior personal users. And most of them use 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 vertical lights enterprise use cases. And that's the reason where we ship a calendar product.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And our approach for that is like, yes, we're number two in project management, number four in CRM, but we're kind of interested in more bricks to make us move out the categories in ranking. So it just takes time, but that's our approach.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we did not intend to build CRM, but what is a CRM relational database? That's why we give people that break. That's a relational database. And they can build CRM themselves. I think the good advantage is if a customer used 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? Save their costs, which is more and more people care about the bundling purchase nowadays.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Solution is one of my favorite words internally to rally the sales team or the product team will think that way. But then you need to hold in your head, make sure you're still building bricks behind the scenes. Otherwise, you're pigeonhole yourself into. Best spot like what we did with a project management sprints features.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're building vertical software, naturally your vertical is the box, right? So you know you have one or two persona you're selling to pretty straightforward your market constraints you and no judgment people like doing you can go that way but then you hit this you hit the wall off the market The advantage of building horizontal there's no wall at least for in our space we not shouldn't go after 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 own market teams. That's why we're”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they actually want the Lego box to be ready made when you unpackage box, the set is there for you, right? That's what we're learning a lot, especially move up market. There's this term 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 or due to risk. That's Lego box. It's not a LEGO brick. Related segmentation really. To shift your mindset as you more towards B2B, more towards move up market. I wish we would have done it earlier. For the longest time, I'm still too much in the Lego break mindset, not in the solution Lego box”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 want to go. We always want to do that. So we did not start to optimize for business, but we 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 Leco boxes.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I recall correctly, 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 don't really don't know which day going to hit you. We just need to go as fast as you can to become sharding”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, one of the bleakest ones is when we, during COVID, we just couldn't scale up our infrastructure. It was pretty, for the longest time, like Simon's really good at don't do premature optimization. So for the longest time, notion runs on one instance of Postgres database. Then we find the beefiest machine we keep scrolling, find a beefier 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 Notion and Notion 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.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're feeling non likable way, the system works against you. So, in some sense, we're creating the tool that has an emergent behavior in your channel in that emergent behavior to unlock more values.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was it all of that above? But especially just release the sprint product through our community and customers, then it's like, what is this? It's like underpowered. Compared to other competitive products to doing product management. And it doesn't work well with the Res and Notion Lego set. And if you talk to engineers, okay, there's this part of Notion. You have to touch the code base that's just weird, right? You hardcoat too much into it from all the dimension technical front calling a customer and when you use the thing, it just doesn't feel right. So there's another saying that if you build in the Lego inside notion in the code base or product, the system work for you.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A while and still is project management is one of the most important use cases for Notion. And you can get to project management of better project management tool just by hard coding things like sprints, milestones, all those things into your product, right? Or you can do it the way the notions are being through Lego pieces. What is a sprint? Sprint's a clusters of tasks that group together. So it's the new LEGO. Introducing Lego is much harder, slower. You can, instead, we hard coded sprint concept into the product and this become doesn't quite fit. And took me at least a year, year and a half to realize that's not the way we should continue building. We should go back the original Lego of building the product. So we changed quite a bit internally. Now it feels good now. And building according to”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You create this thing, kind of product or business, you attract people are value aligned to it, then if you're trying to optimize too much on this competition revenue side of things, forced to introducing something anti-value, then it's the system, it's like there's organ rejection with your employees, with your customers. Give you concrete example.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? Actually, last year, 2024 is the year that I can't say we shipped good stuff at good velocity and good quality and align with our values. We sort of get lost there for a year, year and a half shipping something not according to our value, not according to my value. notion we call notions lego for software or sort of ship non-Lego pieces into our product we're 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”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's like human minds are resistant to change. And how do you lamb in people's head through my best word marketing and positioning are for, right? To find the three spot to get in. And you also be truthful, 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-creating or the exchange with the other person. It's a craft. Is it market storytelling is a dimension, it's a vast dimension making trade trade.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of fun though every 12-18 month notion is like a new company or at least it requires 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”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one as more self as well myself. As companies grow, you realize I'm pretty good at storytelling. 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 skills one reason I try not to do podcasts and all this is like, oh, it's actually a drinks 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 company, the business I'm building. I treat them like a craft. Like there's some things go outside the video game. You need to pick up something to unlock something else and make a new demand to kind of trade off with yourself and the business.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would have the most Soft interaction person at work. It's actually the reverse is true because you grow up in China people way more direct. People just say what they want, say what they think, right? And you move to California, you move to US, move to the West, wow, everybody says everything's wonderful, everything's nice, but that's not true. In Notions Ethos is probably more like the East Coast rather than West Coast. So somewhere in between. It's more Dirac. Do I need to learn? Things I think the early days is like 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 Go something that's like the war actually cares. The striker code of broccoli, you have to hydrobroccoli within something on the sugar pills, right?”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product maker, businessmaker's job is to find that sweet spot of all the multiple dimensions, then create something has a right to exist, at least it's more durable to exist.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like computer wasn't there until semiconductor becomes required new technology to unlock new way to making trade-offs. And then you need to balance the technology trade out with human behavior trade off. We are not, as a human effort ever since we got out of Africa, we're sort of set, right? That's like a constraint. It's an invariable. 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 the people trade-off, technology trade-off. There's some kind of macro, there's a different dimension of things just cooking together that come together as a product as it more as a business, then what is that? And I think”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think this is quite relevant, especially for product makers and business makers. There's no free lunch. Don't get something for free. You have to give up something. Then, what do you give up? It's essentially, are 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? That the market is so dynamic, especially now with AI. Optimize the function of the market changes. So then you need to make new trade off, and new technology emerges, right? I always chose like AI language model feels like a new type of Feel like aluminum. It's a new type of material. So you can make Mass air travel wasn't available until aluminum became cheap enough that people can make airplanes that support this, right? At cost.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 where on paper and to get there. To me, 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.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the keyword here is craft. Internally our company philosophy called craft and values. Craft is like your skill set, your taste value is like your personal value. And how do you see the world? Kraft's interesting world is kind of like about Apply your value to some technical know-how and to make more clever trade-offs to create something new and useful. Just keep doing that at my wife often referred me as a wood cabinet builder. That's how I, at least in my mindset training towards building notion, is like, oh, can I make this what happened?”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For 100 million and 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 every six months, every 12 month cycle, we don't think enough about create something that lasts eye care creating something that at least the form factor lasts longer than 1218 months.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We name our conference room after timeless tools in history. So there are, give you an example, iPhone's obvious one, original Macintosh. There's different forms of chairs. Lamy's 2,000 pens, Toshiba rice cookers and other ones. Because there are inspirations, they're just like, at the end of the day, we're creating a tool. Recruiting a meta to a lot of people to create tools, software tools. And Toshiba Rice Cooker changed how people eat rice in Asia for”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 to not have a thing that hurts.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe they're a two-dimension part of it. One is. One is the pragmatic part you just want office to be a pleasant experience to be at. Therefore, most office, the top life feels like hospital. I just say, 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 and make flory colors. Don't use 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? So the vision we have is she feels like Artist Studio or she feels like you're home. And that's why most of our office furniture are home furnitures. It just feels cozy. That's more so people spend more time feels more creative. Juices flow better. The other one is like,”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think just understand abstraction or system is a better curve than heck on curve, right? Linear. We help other people understand this. Internally, we use the metaphor, the notion of small bus. The smaller the bus, it's easier to turn corners, easier to accelerate, easier to maneuver. The bigger the bus it is, like bigger the boat, bigger the bus slowed. And as a leader in the company, you decide who sit around you on the bus seat. That dictates how fast our overall bus moves. Dictate your work and life experience at this company because you pick your roommate, you pick your seatmates. That metaphor clicks with people inside a company Overall, help us optimize the bus type, make the bus link.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say where notions like a cost saving first company. Like I like fancy chairs. I like furniture. But we're not wasting money. I think it's more just from... Taste or approach to problem solving. I just believe better system that's much better than put forth through people.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the part that you do need people, maybe you can solve better through system, through better tools. Notion itself is a meta tool to build other tools. So we pretty much run everything on Notion. We use the same mindset to build our company. And accidentally, that keep our heck on low, keep our company profitable, which then puts you on the positive treadmill of you don't have to go for the next 18, 24 month to find money. You just have to, you can just focus on building. And also, because your team is small, We have this internal notion called talent density, which we don't try to track number of people, but we try to track how talent dense revenue per employee we are. And people want to work with either more talented people. So it's a positive company.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, closed sales deals. So you sort of realize you don't need a lot. And 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's mind to be aligned on things, to see the world in the same way.”
2025-03-06 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source