Building the AI × UX Scenius — with Linus Lee of Notion AI

**Alessio** (0:10)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, Partner and CTO and Resident at Decibel Partners. I'm joined by my co-host, Swyx, writer and editor of Latent Space.

**Swyx** (0:20)
And today we're not in our regular studio. We're actually at the Notion New York headquarters. Thanks to Linus, welcome.

**Linus Lee** (0:27)
Thank you, thanks for having me.

**Swyx** (0:29)
Thanks for having us here in your beautiful office. It is actually very startling how gorgeous the Notion offices are.
And it's basically the same aesthetic.

**Linus Lee** (0:38)
It's a very consistent aesthetic. It's been the same aesthetic in San Francisco and the other offices and it's been for many, many years.

**Swyx** (0:45)
Yeah, you take a lot of craft in everything that you guys do.

**Linus Lee** (0:49)
Yeah, I think it, we can, we'll, I'm sure talk about this more later, but there is a consistent kind of focus on taste that I think flows down from Ivan and the founders and into the product.

**Swyx** (0:59)
So I'll introduce you a little bit, but also there's just, you're a very hard person to introduce because you do a bunch of things. You got your BA in computer science at Berkeley. Even while you're at Berkeley, you're involved in a bunch of interesting things at Replit, CatalystX, the Hack Club and Dorm Room Fund, which is also, I always love seeing people come out of Dorm Room Fund because they tend to be very entrepreneurial.
You're a product engineer at IdeaFlow, residence at BetaWorks. You took a year off to do independent research and then you've finally found your home at Notion. What's one thing that people should know about you that's not on your typical LinkedIn profile?
Ooh.
Just on the personal side.

**Linus Lee** (1:38)
Wow, putting me on the spot.
I think, I mean, just because I have so much work kind of out there, I feel like professionally, at least, anything that you would want to know about me, you can probably dig up. But I'm a big city person, but I don't come from the city. And so I went to school, I grew up in Indiana, in the middle of nowhere, near Pretty University, a little suburb. I only came out to the bay for school and then I moved to New York afterwards, which is where I'm currently, I'm in Notion, New York. But I still carry within me a kind of love and affection for small town, Indiana, small town, flyover country.

**Swyx** (2:10)
Okay, we do have a bit of indulgence in this.
I'm from a small country and I think, Alessio, you also kind of identified it with this a little bit.
What's something that people should know about Purdue?

**Linus Lee** (2:24)
Purdue has one of the largest international student populations in the country, which I don't know, I don't know exactly why, but because it's a state school, the focus is a lot on STEM topics. Purdue is well known for engineering and so we tend to have a lot of folks from abroad, which is particularly rare for a university in, out of the rest, kind of like predominantly white American and kind of Midwestern state. That makes Purdue and the surrounding sort of area kind of younger, more diverse international island within the, I guess, broader world that is Indiana.

**Swyx** (2:58)
Fair enough. We can always dive in to sort of fly over country or small town insights later. But you and I, all three of us actually recently connected at AIUXSF, which is the first AIUX meetup.
Essentially, which just came out, came out with like a Twitter conversation. You and I have been involved in HCI Twitter is kind of how I think about it for a little bit.
And when I saw that you were in town, Jeffrey Lit was in town, Maggie Appleton in town, all on the same date, I was like, we have to have a meetup. And that's how this thing was born. Well, what did it look like from your end?

**Linus Lee** (3:29)
From my end, it looked like you did all of the work and I...

**Swyx** (3:33)
Well, you got us the Notion.

**Linus Lee** (3:36)
Yeah, it was also in the Notion office. It was in the San Francisco one.
And then thereafter, there was a New York one that I decided I couldn't make. But yeah, from my end, it was, and I'm sure you were too, but I was really surprised by both the mixture of people that we ended up getting and the number of people that we ended up getting. There was just a lot of attention on, obviously there's a lot of attention on the technology itself of GPT and language models and so on. But I was surprised by the interest specifically on trying to come up with interfaces that were outside of the box and the people that were interested in that topic. And so we ended up having a packed house and lots of interesting demos.