Interview, Fireside Chat, Conference Presentation
Notion’s Ivan Zhao: The Refounder
- Notion's Strategic Mantra: The company operates on a "jazz band, not a marching band" philosophy, prioritizing self-management, improvisation, and individual agency over rigid, top-down execution; this has led to the proposed new internal concept of "Jazz Mode."
- Dual Refoundings: Ivan Jawan, CEO of Notion, has executed two major company "refoundings":
- 2015 (Product Market Fit): Moved co-founders to Kyoto, Japan, to strip the team down to two people and rebuild the product from scratch after failing to find product-market fit in the US.
- 2023 (AI Pivot): After early access to GPT-4, Jawan halted operations in Cancun, Mexico, to fundamentally restructure Notion as an AI-native company despite initial revenue stagnation and internal skepticism.
- Organizational Restructuring: Notion is shifting from a traditional triangular hierarchy to a flatter, more fluid structure where:
- AI acts as the central "steel" structure for information flow, replacing many human "middleman" roles.
- The average number of direct reports per employee is approximately 7–8, with some top performers managing 15–20.
- The company actively acquires founders ("acqui-hires") to inject "decalcified" energy and prevent organizational stagnation; currently employs 50–60 ex-founders.
- Hiring and Compensation Philosophy: The talent model has shifted from "experience" to "taste, agency, and will," driven by the democratization of technical capability via AI:
- The Barbell Approach: Hiring both extremely senior engineers (for architectural taste and direction) and very junior engineers (who leverage AI to produce senior-level output).
- Role Blurring: Hiring "designers who can code" and "product managers who can design," breaking down traditional role boundaries; PMs are now heavy token consumers and active in technical evaluation.
- Sales & Marketing: The CMO function was dissolved into two decentralized units: "Storytelling" (integrated with product and community) and "Go-to-Market" (focused on lead generation and sales support).
- Compensation: Moving toward high meritocracy where pay is heavily skewed toward top performers ("wartime" mode), moving away from the "peanut butter" distribution of the past SaaS era.
- Product Development Methodology: Notion treats AI product development as "brewing beer" rather than "building bridges":
- Technology-First: Unlike traditional "customer-first" product development, AI iteration relies on technology-first experimentation where outcomes are non-deterministic and require heavy human intervention in evaluation.
- Collaborative Units: Designers, engineers, and product managers sit in the same "bucket," working together with AI agents and evaluation metrics rather than passing work sequentially.
- Financial Strategy & Margins:
- Cost Awareness: Unlike traditional SaaS where code costs were negligible, AI products require active management of inference costs (tokens), forcing a shift in gross margin calculations.
- Margin Outlook: Notion anticipates different gross margin curves for knowledge work vs. coding agents; knowledge work tasks can be solved using cheaper, open-weight models rather than frontier models.
- Planning Cadence: Product strategy is now a weekly "jazz" process due to rapid technological shifts, while financial planning remains conservative and hierarchical.
- Leadership & Personal Evolution:
- Introversion: Jawan, an introvert, has forced himself into high-visibility communication (bi-weekly all-hands, weekly AMAs) to build trust and lead effectively.
- Value Alignment: He advocates for leaders to find "equilibrium" between their personal values and the competitive nature of business, suggesting that chasing competition without a core value system is unsustainable.
- The "Cult" Aspect: Notion views its culture as a belief system (similar to a religion), emphasizing shared values and rituals (like all-hands meetings) to create meaning and purpose for employees.
- Future Organizational Vision:
- Invariable Hierarchy: Despite AI advancements, Jawan believes human nature remains hierarchical; organizations will likely remain small-to-mid-sized hierarchical teams where AI handles the majority of information flow and decision-making context.
- AI as Decision Maker: Over time, AI systems will make an increasing percentage of decisions (currently ~1%), with humans transitioning to providing context, taste, and oversight.
- Lessons for "Stuck" Founders:
- The Body Test: Founders should listen to physical and emotional cues of despair or stagnation as signals to "refound."
- Feel the AI: Leaders must personally experience and build with the technology to understand its potential; intellectual understanding is insufficient for strategic pivots.
- Avoid Reinvention: Do not reinvent established functions (like enterprise sales) unless absolutely necessary; Notion initially failed by trying to build a custom PLG sales motion before adopting a traditional system.
- Industry Context:
- Tinker vs. Science: Critiques the modern "tinker culture" for ignoring the history of computing (e.g., Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay), advocating for a return to a "science" mindset that respects historical context.
- Wartime vs. Peacetime: Prefers "wartime" conditions where the stakes are high and the pace is fast, noting that "peaceful" SaaS growth has become boring compared to the current AI revolution.