From Coder to Manager: Navigating the Shift to Agentic Engineering with Notion Co-Founder Simon Last

**Sarah Guo** (0:05)
Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Simon Last, co-founder at Notion. We talk about their new vision for Notion in the AI age as a platform for humans and agents to collaborate, how the engineering and product org at Notion is changing, and these new tools for thought. Welcome, Simon. Hey, Simon. Thanks for doing this.

**Simon Last** (0:24)
Yeah, of course. Yeah, it's really fun to be here.

**Sarah Guo** (0:25)
Notion's at scale, amazing platform, lots of users. You did start quite a while ago. I think of Notion as one of the companies that has really like braced AI quite aggressively. I was told you first got your hands on GPT-4 at a company offsite in Mexico. Is that true? What is the origin story of like starting to work on this stuff?

**Simon Last** (0:45)
Yeah, I think, yeah, that year, that was 2022 I've been watching, you know, what's going on. In general, I've just been like super curious about the technology and fascinated to try everything and think about like how we can apply it. It wasn't until I played with GPT-4 that it became really, really real. So, you know, we got access to it. It was sort of like a proto-Chetchabut-like interface. And my co-founder Ivan and I both got access. And it was just immediately clear, like I would say two big things. One is that it was just pretty smart. It could follow reasonably complicated instructions. It could write things for you, you could edit things. And the second big thing was the scope of its knowledge was extremely interesting, super, super deep.
And broad world knowledge. When we played with it, it became just instantly clear to both of us, like, okay, the time is now at a start, but thinking about how to apply this, it's only going to get better.

**Sarah Guo** (1:41)
We were talking about Mexico, GPT-4, you guys saw it was clearly the time. Did you start with a particular vision of what you should obviously be able to do with AI in Notion, or just start pulling people from different teams, or recruiting people and say, like, let's experiment? How did you begin?

**Simon Last** (1:57)
I think we immediately had a long-term and a short-term vision.
I would say, I'll start with the short-term one. The thing that was immediately obvious was, oh, it could be like a writing assistant. So it could be in your document. You can select some text, rewrite it. You could have it write text for you. Maybe look something up and then give you sources or more information. So that was the thing that we immediately got to work on. And we sort of started a Tiger team around it, and then we were able to launch it in like two or three months after that. And then the long-term vision that we immediately had was like, oh, the thing that looks like it may be possible is more of like a general assistant. So what if you could just give it all the tools inside Notion that a human would have be able to create its own databases, query, manipulate them, create documents, edit them, and sort of weave all these things together to do like a longer range task. And so we sort of immediately started on both. The short-term one, we were able to shoot very quickly, and then the long-term one didn't really work yet. And so that took much longer to get working.

**Sarah Guo** (2:58)
Are there specific first launch of the AI-specific notion, futures and products, was when? Last year.

**Simon Last** (3:05)
No, it was February 2023

**Sarah Guo** (3:08)
Oh, okay.

**Simon Last** (3:09)
It launched, yeah.

**Sarah Guo** (3:09)
My timelines are wrong. Are there a few specific learnings or breakthrough moments, you think, since beginning to release, that are interesting?

**Simon Last** (3:18)
Yeah, I mean, there's been, it's been a slog over many years, or over multiple years at this point, with many, many learnings. I would say, yeah, I mean, just to give you a timeline of the arc of what we shipped is, you know, so the first thing was our writing system. We called it AI Writer. That's the first thing we launched. It was easiest to get working, because it's like single step task, rewriting, editing text. There's no retrieval aspect. It was just like raw access to the model to write the text. The next big thing that we immediately started working on was Q&A, doing a semantic index of the entire workspace, and then letting you ask a question, and I can give you an answer that's grounded in the sources. That was also immediately obvious to us that that would be super useful. And so we started work on that. That one we launched in, I think it was October 2023 So we started a beta before then, but then our GA was in October. That was a much bigger effort to get working, obviously. We weren't just like plugging in the LLM. It was actually doing this real-time updating index. We had to get much more serious about the evals and the quality there as well. The Q&A has been a multi-year journey. Basically, what we did is, as soon as we got the Notion index working, it was obvious that, okay, we should index everything else as well. And so we indexed Slack and Google Drive. We're launching new ones on a regular cadence.