Notion’s Ivan Zhao: The Refounder

**Ivan Zhao** (0:00)
We started Mantra in the company. We want to be a jazz band, not a marching band.

**Brian Halligan** (0:04)
I love that.

**Ivan Zhao** (0:04)
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 and a half years. So more jazz band people can really shine during this moment.

**Brian Halligan** (0:19)
Okay. So we had manager mode, we have founder mode. There's this new mode. What should we call it?

**Ivan Zhao** (0:24)
Jazz mode, maybe.

**Brian Halligan** (0:25)
That's not bad, actually.
Hey everybody, today we have Ivan Zhao on the co-founder and CEO of Notion. I like to think of him as the refounder. He started the company a long time ago. In 2015, he didn't have product 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. In my mind, he's the canonical example of how a SaaS company can move and become an AI company. That's super interesting. The second thing is 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.
It rhymes a lot with some other CEOs that have interviewed like Jack Dorsey a couple of weeks ago. I hope you like it. What do you think of my outfit, by the way?

**Ivan Zhao** (1:44)
I think your outfit is, your pants could be looser.

**Brian Halligan** (1:47)
Looser? Okay. On the bottom or just in general?

**Ivan Zhao** (1:50)
In general.

**Brian Halligan** (1:51)
Okay.

**Ivan Zhao** (1:51)
I like your sneakers. I don't know what they are.

**Brian Halligan** (1:53)
Okay. They're Italian, Premiata.

**Ivan Zhao** (1:55)
It's cool.

**Brian Halligan** (1:56)
You're known as a very fashionable fellow. Where do you shop these days here in New York?

**Ivan Zhao** (2:00)
New York has a good store near here, in like Soho, Tribeca, called Lacassane. Not like a designer designer, but more like a European, easy to wear.

**Brian Halligan** (2:13)
I like the vibe.

**Ivan Zhao** (2:14)
Thank you.

**Brian Halligan** (2:15)
I got up my game, Ivan.

**Ivan Zhao** (2:16)
We're just channels on 1980

**Brian Halligan** (2:18)
Let's go shopping. You want to go shopping?

**Ivan Zhao** (2:19)
It's right around here.

**Brian Halligan** (2:20)
Let's go shopping.

**Ivan Zhao** (2:21)
Afterwards, we can go.

**Brian Halligan** (2:22)
Okay. I want to talk about CEO stuff, not just fashion. I've been doing this Sequoia thing for a couple of years, and a lot has changed in CEO-dom.
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.

**Ivan Zhao** (2:42)
When was that? It's 2020? It's like you, right? 2021?

**Brian Halligan** (2:45)
No, it was later than that. It's like 2024
My reaction, by the way, was relief, because I was a quirky founder mode type of person, always being... everyone's trying to talk me out of doing that. What was your reaction?

**Ivan Zhao** (2:59)
I didn't have too much of a reaction, to be honest.

**Brian Halligan** (3:02)
Nowadays, Jack Dorsey 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. Can you talk about your journey there, your company's journey, what's new? How are you thinking about the organization? How is it changing?

**Ivan Zhao** (3:23)
Yeah, my journey, actually, I have a small detour off the founder mode, which is like try to delegate, trying to grow your... Notion has very been small as a company in the early days. We had product market for 2019, early 2020, we were sub 10-ish people in 2019, and the company would become profitable because we're small.

**Brian Halligan** (3:48)
Did you raise venture in the early days or you bootstrapped it?

**Ivan Zhao** (3:51)
We raised venture.

**Brian Halligan** (3:52)
You did? Okay, that must have been tough.

**Ivan Zhao** (3:54)
It was tough. First five years, just C stage money dragged us for five years.

**Brian Halligan** (3:59)
Yeah, HubSpot was like that. Took us a long time to get the product market.

**Ivan Zhao** (4:02)
It was very tough. But yeah, it's a different type of tough compared to now. Back then, there's no product market fit, it's despair. Just black. You don't know where to go. So we have been very small from the get go and we sort of taste the sweet of it because you're small, you're profitable, easier to raise money, you're default alive and we've been resisting growing team size.