Akshay Kothari: How Notion Has More Money Than Ever & Why Startup Fundraising is Broken | E1203

(instrumental music plays) Akshay, I am so excited for this, dude. We did this four years ago in COVID (laughs) uh, when no one was getting out, and now you're in London, man. This is so special. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for hosting, and so good to see you in person.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I spoke to Ivan before the show. I spoke to many people before the show. Basically, just talked the shit out of you.

(sniffs)

Uh, and what I heard was actually that you have had so many different hats across the Notion journey, from CMO to CFO to Head of Inside Sales, CHRO, Head of IR, CPO. I mean, Christ, I hope you're accumulating different salaries for this. How did you learn new disciplines so quickly on the job?

Uh, I didn't really think of my job as those titles. Like, I think I, I, I... My job was COO, uh, and, and in many ways, I... My, my primary job was to, like, help scale the business and the company and let my co-founders, Ivan and Simon, stay focused on the product. And, and so that meant whatever the company needed, I would jump in and try to figure it out. Um, how did I do it? This is actually kinda interesting. So, so my background is product, right? And, and, and, and Ivan told me to join and take care of everything except product. And so I was... I s- essentially put myself on all these new functions and, um, and, and just tried to learn on the job. So one thing I realized was even though I had never really done any of these things before, actually, like first principles thinking and, like systems design that you learn in product development actually, like applies a lot to these functions, too.

Can we take one, apply systems design in a way that you did, just so we can understand that in a more contextual manner?

Yeah, so let's... The first job I had at Notion was actually, like there were three people who reported to me were support, customer support, right? Now, typically, as the number of tickets or as the number of requests go up, um, the first thing that people typically do is they just add more people. They sort of like divide the tickets by productivity, and then they come up with some number of people. Uh, the product, um, manager in me was like, "Well, we could build a better system, so we could build better tools so that each support person can do more every day." But also, you know, once you have enough of these, uh, customer tickets, then the next role you want to hire would be something called a product ops, right? Product ops would take all this feedback and synthesize it and pro- pr- and share it with the engineers. So one thing Ivan and I did in the (laughs) in the early years was, um, we created this like canonical database of about 200 types of requests that would come, which would map to, like features, right? And we trained our support team to tag every request that come in with one of those 200 tags. You have to do that, right? That was part of the job. And every morning at 6:00 AM, (smacks lips) we wrote a script which would take all these tags from Intercom and write it against these database tags in Notion. And so essentially, what every engineer at Notion had was a real-time view of what people were talking about last, yesterday or the last week or the last month. And so if you could see like, "Oh, wow, people are talking about the Android app over the last month, and it's really gone up," they can go in and start solving that problem. And, and we use this tag across the tools we had, right? So for example, if, if you're working on Android, you could essentially put that tag in Intercom, and you can lis- basically see all the customer support tickets that have come. So you could essentially... In many ways, you don't even have to hire a researcher, 'cause now... So now, if you put all these things together, we, we, we didn't have to hire as many support people. We did not have to hire a product ops person, and we also did not have research early days. In fact, all of these were given to the engineer directly to be able to tap into that feedback and actually solve that problem.