Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Casey Newton, founder and editor of Platformer and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast. This is the second episode of my productivity-focused Decoder series that I’m doing while Nilay is out on parental leave.
Today, I’m talking with Notion cofounder and CEO Ivan Zhao. I’ve followed Notion for quite some time now — I’m a big fan, and a major part of my workflow for Platformer is actually built on top of Notion’s database feature. So I was very excited to get Ivan on the show to discuss his philosophy on productivity, how he’s grown his company over the last decade, and where he sees the space going in the future.
If you’ve never used Notion, you can think of it as an all-in-one productivity suite comparable to a lot of the collaboration and so-called “second brain” apps on the market — from the more business-y project management tools like Asana and AirTable to the more DIY note-taking variants like Anytype and Obsidian.
Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here!
Notion sits pretty comfortably in the middle here, since it can do what a lot of these kinds of apps do very well, and all in one package. At the same time, it allows for a pretty substantial amount of customization, which has made it popular both for individual productivity power users and for companies large and small.
But Notion started as a very different piece of software, and its evolution over the last 12 years or so has involved a fair amount of trial and error, one major reboot, and a lot of big decisions. In my opinion, what really sets Notion apart from so many of its peers is Ivan’s deep passion for design and an almost relentless drive to make products that he sees as useful and aesthetic in equal measure.
You’ll hear Ivan early on in this conversation reference LEGO: the toy bricks are the central inspiration for Notion, which employs “blocks” as a metaphor for configurable templates that allow you to use Notion in a pretty diverse set of ways. Think everything from simple notes and lists to complex databases and workflows.
But Notion, like so much software these days, is evolving. Now, the company calls itself the “AI workspace that works for you,” and you’ll hear Ivan recount in detail how the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-4 proved to be a big turning point for him and for Notion. The company launched an OpenAI-powered AI product much sooner than the competition, even before the launch of ChatGPT, and it’s added a host of new AI-powered features in the past few years.
Ivan himself is also pretty excited about the capabilities of AI; he said he uses it in his free time to learn about new subjects, and you’ll hear talk in depth here about his vision for AI agents that increasingly do more and more work for you inside of apps like Notion.
But a common theme with the AI industry right now is the very large gap between what AI can actually do today, and what so many people hope it can do down the road. So I really wanted to ask Ivan how we might get to this future he predicts, how long that will really take, and what productivity and knowledge work look like if AI delivers on some of these lofty promises.
... continue reading