#514 - VO - Ivan Zhao - Notion - The software toolkit that beats them all

**Matthieu Stefani** (0:07)
What the fuck is Notion?

**Ivan Zhao** (0:08)
How would you describe it?

**Matthieu Stefani** (0:09)
It's hard. At the same time, it's everything, and at the same time, it's nothing.

**Ivan Zhao** (0:14)
Notion is like the LEGO for software. Computing should almost be like reading and writing. You ask me, should you teach your kids how to program? It's as if you ask me, should I teach my kids how to read and write French? You don't ask me that question, right?

**Matthieu Stefani** (0:27)
How much did you raise total?

**Ivan Zhao** (0:29)
Hundreds of millions. That's the most, all the money is still in the bank. Cashflow positive for several years now. We're not AI labs, we're AI application company. But we spend a lot of time building infrastructure to unlock the best in the models. The better part is because now you don't have these five, six tools, you save time, and even better, you have one place to deploy AI to help you do all the work.
Most Japanese people don't speak English, or just eat, work, eat, work. Very productive.

**Matthieu Stefani** (1:02)
What does Simon do today?

**Ivan Zhao** (1:04)
Simon is still coding.

**Matthieu Stefani** (1:05)
Yeah, okay.

**Ivan Zhao** (1:06)
Man, that guy is lucky.

**Matthieu Stefani** (1:08)
Are you jealous?

**Ivan Zhao** (1:09)
I'm jealous. I like what I do too, but coding gives you a different flow state.

**Matthieu Stefani** (1:17)
We are the average of people we spend the most time with. My name is Matthieu Stefani, and I invite entrepreneurs, athletes, and artists to raise my average, and yours. Just before we begin this episode, I'll switch to French for a brief moment to thank my sponsors.
Yeah, let's go. Thank you, Clémence. Welcome on board, Ivan. Are you okay? Are you still jet-lagged?

**Ivan Zhao** (1:42)
I'm pretty jet-lagged, but the tea will help, I hope.

**Matthieu Stefani** (1:46)
Well, we are both jet-lagged at some point, because you're coming from the US from like nine hours away, but we're coming from what, seven hours away, but on the other side. So you're in the middle of the night, and I'm in the middle of the afternoon right now. It's fun. Welcome, Génération Do It Yourself. I'm so happy to have you here. And the team was really happy, actually, because you don't know that, but the notion and what you've done in the past 10 years is like the backbone of all of our work.
Like, it's very exciting to understand how did it start and what are your views, what is going to be the future. It's going to be a lot of fun. May I ask you to introduce yourself?

**Ivan Zhao** (2:36)
I'm Ivan. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Notion. And I've been working and like you talk about, I've been working on this for more than a decade. To me, it's a product, it's a business, it's a company, it's a project, it's our piece, it's my life. Happy to talk about it today.

**Matthieu Stefani** (2:58)
So what do you do for Notion now? What does that mean, being a CEO? Do you still think about the product? Are you still on the product?

**Ivan Zhao** (3:06)
Oh yeah, I'm like, I spend most of my time on product. Like this morning, I was sending out an internal message to talk about, we have a customer dinner last night, and what are the top three, four requests from the customer? And especially the top request is about permission. How do we improve the permission of Notion databases? And explain to the team, why is this important? Give some context and meaning to it, and propose some solution.

**Matthieu Stefani** (3:39)
All right. Are the other demands from the customers different in France, or are they all the same more or less? They're very...

**Ivan Zhao** (3:51)
Consumer enterprise are very different. I will say for business enterprise, customers are actually kind of similar across different regions. France, I noticed we have somewhat sizable of a government or just infrastructure, energy company using Notion. And those companies tend to hire some office worker, but even more non-office workers. And those people have a different behavior of using Notion than office workers. So this is some pattern I pick up.

**Matthieu Stefani** (4:25)
People are on the field a lot?

**Ivan Zhao** (4:26)
People are on the field, yeah. They want to read their Notion page and projects, and they might not want to edit, but they want to be able to access on their phone and offline and all other kind of requirement that's not a typical from office worker with a laptop or computer.

**Matthieu Stefani** (4:45)