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The Twenty Minute VCAkshay Kothari: How Notion Has More Money Than Ever & Why Startup Fundraising is Broken | E1203
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Notion COO Akshay Kothari Redefines Hiring, Sales, Fundraising and Boards
- Akshay Kothari, COO of Notion, explains how first-principles, product-minded thinking let him span multiple executive functions while keeping the company extremely lean and fast-moving.
- He details Notion’s deliberate choices around small teams, disciplined hiring, and eventually embracing a traditional enterprise sales motion after initially trying to reinvent it—and losing years in the process.
- Kothari also outlines Notion’s unusual fundraising path: becoming cash-flow positive early, raising low‑dilution rounds primarily for signaling and go‑to‑market firepower, and deliberately avoiding investor board seats.
- The conversation widens into how startups are built and funded today, the importance of understanding real valuation mechanics, how to design boards and orgs from first principles, and his concerns about social media incentives versus education and creation.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasApply product-style systems design to every function, not just product.
Kothari turned customer support into a structured data system—tagging tickets into a canonical database and piping insights directly to engineers—eliminating early needs for product ops, research, and large support headcount while improving responsiveness.
Stay lean longer and endure short-term pain to move faster long-term.
Notion deliberately kept teams small, personally vetted nearly every hire up to ~500 employees, and accepted operating ‘understaffed’ so that focus, prioritization, and autonomy remained high instead of diluting velocity across too many people and projects.
Don’t over-innovate on proven motions like enterprise sales.
They initially tried a quota-less, ultra-consultative sales model in a product-led context, which hurt sales contribution and hiring; Kothari now believes they should have adopted a standard quota-driven sales machine much earlier instead of reinventing the wheel.
Use cash-flow positivity to change your relationship with fundraising.
Becoming cash-flow positive gave Notion control over timing and terms: they could raise when it helped with signaling or go-to-market, secure low-dilution deals, and avoid board-seat obligations, instead of fundraising simply to survive.
Anchor decisions in long-term valuation realities, not hype multiples.
Kothari stresses that in the long run, SaaS companies are valued on revenue and cash-flow multiples (historically ~5–10x), which can be improved only through faster growth, better margins, or structurally large markets—founders should raise and spend with that in mind.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesThere are 99 ways you can burn money and only one good way to effectively make money.
— Akshay Kothari
We may feel like we’re going faster by hiring more people and saying yes to more projects, but in effect it is actually going slower.
— Akshay Kothari
We tried to reinvent the wheel on sales and it probably cost us three years.
— Akshay Kothari
Once you’re cash-flow positive, you suddenly feel in control of your destiny—you don’t have an end date.
— Akshay Kothari
Almost all advice is genius for a subset of people and completely rubbish for the rest.
— Akshay Kothari
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
