No Priors Ep. 51 | With Notion CEO Ivan Zhao

(instrumental music) . Hi, listeners. Welcome to No Priors. Today we have Ivan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Notion, the beloved productivity application for notes, tasks, and knowledge base. They recently launched an AI Q&A interface as well as a calendar application. We're super excited to have Ivan. Thanks for being here again, Ivan. Uh, we are gonna start with, uh, the hardest question, which is what is Notion?

Notion's always pretty hard to define because it can do so many different things. Um, but that's also our goal. We wanna give people one tool that they can do their most work with. For a personal user, that means all your personal notes, all the planning for a trip or for your wedding. For business, for enterprise, for company, that means all your documents, all your tasks, all your issues, calendaring, knowledge base in one tool. Um, the reason we wanna do that because there's just so much fragmentation in the market today. We wish like... It wouldn't be nice as one place to do your most work. And the, our approach here is rather than try to cram all different use cases into one product, uh, what are the underlying software building blocks? What are the Legos that power those use cases? Can we give users those Legos so they can be creative with software themself? They can create and tinker their perfect workflow for their personal life or for their company. And none of this is new, by the way. Like people back in the '80s, even '70s, tried this kind of building blocks approach to software. We're just trying to take a modern spin with cloud work and with AI, uh, to what it's like to break the prison of application-based software.

It's dramatic to think we've been living in a prison of SaaS fragmentation for the last two decades. But I, I do think it's actually, um, uh, you know, surprising to hear a point of view that is so obvious, which is like of course we want one tool where the data was interconnected.

Mm-hmm.

Why do you think people, um... Why do you think more people don't try that, to have unified tools and unify data underneath?

I think people try it for different angles. Like even fairly recently, there's this thing called no-code, right? No-code is like coming from this kind of like power user, developer angle of, "Wouldn't it be nice everybody can modify this underlying software they use every day?" That's one angle. The, it wasn't coming from the angle of the, the knowledge and data wants to be in one place, right? And language models sort of give another angle is the underlying knowledge and embedding space wants to be one place. Wouldn't it be nice in one place, right? And the macro is also coming from the, uh, the budget place. Wouldn't it be nice rather than pay for five different vendors and all C-based business just to pay one vendor and save some money? So there have different angles from different times. Um, I will say we are more come from this kind of computing and medium and literacy angle. Like you and me go through school to learn how to read and write, uh, you know, English and Chinese. We've spent years to do that. We all know how to do that. The world, the same MacBook for most people are, are very rigid. It's, uh, more like a machine to do typewriting or watching YouTube. Uh, not much more beyond that. It's not very creative, right? Um, wouldn't it be more nice that more people can use their software more creatively, right? Because there's a separation be- between people who can make software and people who use software, in... That's why SF's rent is so expensive because we're the modern-day Detroit or Manchester, right? We're the factory of the world. Um, Notions largely come from that angle, which is the original angle. We were inspired by our c- early computing pioneer. They thought about that angle, right? They thought about computing could just be like literacy one day everybody can do it. I, I guess they didn't expect AI might make that even give a really interesting twist to it because now language model AI can not only do create software, but also do a lot of thinking working for you so the future is pretty interesting, yeah.