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

[upbeat music] 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.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, it's really fun to be here.

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, raced AI quite aggressively. I was told you first got your hands on GPT-4, uh, at a company off-site in Mexico. Um, is that true? What is the origin story of, like, starting to work on this stuff?

Yeah, I think... Yeah, that year, that was twenty twenty-two. Um, I, 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, to try everything and think about, like, like how we can apply it. It wasn't until I played with GPT-4 that it, it became really, really real. So, you know, we-- When we got access to it, it wa- it was sort of like a, a proto-ChatGPT-like interface. Um, and, uh, my co-founder Ivan and I both, 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 c- it, it could follow reasonably complicated instructions. It could write things for you. It could edit things. And, and the second big thing was that, uh, uh, the scope of its knowledge was extremely interesting. Uh, super, super deep, like, um, and, and broad world knowledge. When we played with it, it became just instantly clear to both of us, like, okay, the, the time is now to start th- thinking about how to apply this. It's only gonna get better.

We were talking about Mexico, GPT-4. You guys saw it was, like, clearly the time. Did you start with, like, a particular vision of, like, what you should obviously be able to do with AI and Notion? Or did you start pulling people from different teams or recruiting people and say, like, "Let's experiment"? How did you begin?

I think we immediately had a long-term and a short-term vision. I would say the, the, uh... I'll start with the short-term one. The, the thing that was immediately obvious was, oh, it could be, like, a writing assistant.

Mm-hmm.

Um, so it, it could be in your document. You can, like, select some text, have it rewrite it. You can have it write text for you, maybe look something up, and then, uh, you know, give you, like, like, sources or more information. So that was the thing that we immediately, like, like, got to work on, and, you know, we sort of started a tiger team around it, and then we were able to launch it in, like, two, 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, like, create its own databases, query, manipulate them, create documents, edit them, uh, and sort of weave all of these things together to do, like, a longer range task. And so we, we sort of, uh, immediately started on both. The, the short-term one, we were able to ship very quickly, and then the long-term one didn't really work yet, and so that took much longer to get working.