Interview with Ivan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Notion

**Ivan Zhao** (0:04)
You're listening to STATION F, the podcast. From the world's largest startup campus in Paris.

**Roxanne Varza** (0:21)
This is STATION F, the podcast, and I'm your host, Roxanne Varza. In today's episode, I'm absolutely thrilled to have Notion founder, Ivan Zhao. If we ask STATION F companies on campus what company they want to grow up to be like, a lot of them are probably gonna say Notion. They have an incredible backstory, and we get a chance to go behind the scenes with the founder. Hi Ivan, it's great to have you with us.

**Ivan Zhao** (0:53)
Thank you for inviting me.

**Roxanne Varza** (0:55)
Wonderful, well, I think we're gonna get a chance to talk about a lot of different elements from Notion's story. But I wanted to start by asking you this one question. I think what you guys have built is incredible. At the same time, I'm wondering, did we really need this tool? How did you guys decide that was a need that needed to be addressed?

**Ivan Zhao** (1:19)
I think the way for us to address that question, there are two folds. One is, does the market need that tool? Need Notion. To give you one angle, it's Okta, the logging company, once a year they publish a report of the state of software. There's one stats that's increasing every year. The stats is the average number of tools the company needs to run their business today. Numbers are around 70 and 80, and the numbers keep increasing every year. One half of Notion, why Notion exists, is to solve the fragmentation of tools, especially in our workplace. We don't need to use this many tools. If we have one tool that does the job of many, that's better. That means less silos, people are all on the same page, fewer tabs open. That's the business need for Notion. The other half for this is, what we want. As a company, Notion was initially created less about solving a particular productivity problems or the fragmentation problem. It's actually come from the early days of computing. In the 70s, computing pioneers really thought about, our software could be this medium that everybody can modify and can create their own tools. That never happened. If people can create their own tool, there doesn't need to be so many fragmentation tools.
They can just make their own. So for us, internally, we really want to realize that vision that computing pioneers in the 70s started. So the second half of the question is, yes, we want to make Notion so powerful that everyone can make their own software. And so those are two halves of this answer. Why Notion should exist and need to exist?

**Roxanne Varza** (3:04)
Well, you kind of blew my mind with average company uses 80 tools. So now I kind of I don't think we probably have a lot of listeners that don't know Notion, but just in case we have anyone who doesn't actually know what you guys do. How do you describe what you're building?

**Ivan Zhao** (3:19)
I think in a very simple way, you can think Notion address four use cases. Notes, documents, that's number one. Number two is Wiki. Number three is project management, and number four is databases. So Notion combines those four use cases into one product, and it's so flexible that people can modify those use cases themselves. So some people use Notion to replace Evernote. Plenty of companies entirely run some Notion to replace Google Doc, or Confluence, or Agera, or Trello. So it's a very flexible productivity tool made for teams, but it can also be used for personal users.

**Roxanne Varza** (3:56)
I have to tell you, something that just blows my mind is the fan base that you guys have generated because people don't just use Notion, they love it. And I feel like you guys have cracked something. How do you build something that people just love and go crazy about?

**Ivan Zhao** (4:15)
Yeah, we actually don't know how that happened.
It's kind of amazing to see how large the community is. And I read it on Twitter. The one design principle we have for Notion is what we call a Lego for software. We don't make one of those four tools I mentioned previously, but we build a building block so end users can create whatever tools they want. Just like the kids can use Lego to make whatever toys they want. And just like when kids once they build their Lego set, they want to show up to the world, right? They want to share with their friends the same motion story exists in the Notion community too. Once someone set up their Notion Workspace and they want to show up to the world on Reddit, on Twitter, and that keeps growing and community brings more people into Notion. One funny story that happened earlier this year was TikTok discovered Notion. And all of a sudden, all those teenagers start building their Notion Workspace for their personal note taking or collaborative document for school notes. You know, it's really amazing to see that we didn't initially build for that teenager demographic, but people find use in Notion because how flexible the product is.