Notion’s Ivan Zhao: The Refounder

We start a mantra in the company. We want to be a jazz band, not a marching band. I love that. It's like a self-reflecting value thing. It's auto equilibrium with me. So, it's like, okay, I'm a jazz band person. So, we've been hiring more and more jazz band person. Also, AI happened in the past two two and a half years. So, more jazzband people can really shine during this moment. Okay. So, we had manager mode, we have founder mode. There's this new mode. What should we call it? Jasmo, maybe. That's not bad actually. Hey everybody. Today we have Ivan Jawan, the co-founder and CEO of Notion. I like to think of him as the refounder. Uh he started the company a long time ago and in 2015 he didn't have part of market fit. He and his co-founder moved to Kyoto of all places and kind of restarted the company and rebuilt it. After that, they got product market fit and it really took off. He did the same thing in 2023 around generative AI in an offsite down in Cancun and literally restarted the company and in my mind he's the canonical example of how a SAS company can move and become an AI company. So that's super interesting. The second thing that's interesting is just hearing how he builds the company. He's very AI native in the way he organizes the company, the way he compensates people, the way he builds today. And it rhymes a lot with some other CEOs that have interviewed like Jack Dorsey a couple weeks ago. I hope you like it. What do you think of my outfit, by the way? I think your outfit it's uh your pants could be looser. Looser. Okay. On the bottom or just in general? In general. Uh I like your sneakers. I don't know what they are. Okay. They're Italian. Premiada. That's cool. You're known as a very fashionable fellow. Where where you shop these days here in New York? New York has a good store near here in like Soho Traca called Lakasan. Um not like a designer designer, but more like a European, easy to wear. Um I like the vibe. Thank you. Um I got up my game. Ivan, just channel some nice. Let's go shopping. You want to go shopping? It's right around here. Afterwards, we can go. Okay. Hey, I want to talk about CEO stuff, not just fashion. I've been doing this sequoia thing for a couple years and a lot has changed in CEO. Like the whole manager mode, founder mode thing happened and now it's founder mode and some new mode seems to be happening. Let's just reflect back when Paul Graham's founder mode memo came out. My my person When was that? Since 2022, right? 2021. No, no, no. It's like it was later than that. It's like 2024. My reaction, by the way, was relief because I was a quirky kind of founder mode type of person. Always being everyone's trying to talk me out of doing that. What was your reaction? I didn't have too much of a reaction to be honest. Yeah, nowadays, uh, you know, Jack Dorsey kind of redesigning his company to put AI in the middle and Brian Armstrong doing the same thing. My sense is you're kind of heading this way as well. Um can you talk about your journey there, your company's journey? What's new? How are you thinking about the organization? How's it changing? Yeah, my journey actually I have a small detour off the founder mode um which is like try to delegate trying to grow your notion has very been small as a company in the early days like we had product market fit 2019 early 2020 uh we're sub 10ish people 2019 and um company become profitable because we're small right um did you raise venture in the early days or you bootstrapped it we raised venture you Okay, that must have been tough. Um, was tough like first five years just seage money dragged us for five years. Yeah, HubSpot was like that. Took us a long time to get the product market. It's very tough. But yeah, it's a different type of tough compared to now. It's back then there's no product market fit. It's despair. You just black. You don't know where to go, right? Um so we have been very small from the get-go and we sort of taste the sweet of it because it's you're small you're profitable easier to raise money you're default alive and um we've been resisting growing team size and and during co a lot of companies really blew up remember that right I'm sure you did we relatively yeah blew up you got to product market fit at the right time we grow to product market around the same time um there's a lot of eyes that you got to grow so we did grow um relative to other company still resistant to grow a lot uh in terms of headcount. Um but that's the moment I sort of learned oh you need to delegate need to have introduced in professional manager management