Notion’s Ivan Zhao: The Refounder

28:00Most of our things our story would tell ourself. Of course.

28:03Brian Halligan:What story is the true story? The story we tell ourselves is like, Kyoto is a special place. If you can pull off anywhere, you can pull off from reborn in Kyoto. And it's also inspiring. Just look at the surrounding. The craft is probably the craft capital of Asia, right? So just make you okay. If notion fundamentally is tool, it's a tool for humans. And those people are building knives, ceramic cups, tatami seats. Like they're the tools, other tools for humans. It's a craft central. It's a craft central. And it's like, how can you not be inspired by building a better software tool? Okay, you still haven't answered my question.

28:44Brian Halligan:Which is? If you had gone to, whatever, let's pick someplace in the philippines and it was pretty would you have pulled this off or was there something exceptionally important about being immersed in such a craft centric place i think i pulled it off but yeah but the story is the better story okay fine okay so your big refounding not easy didn't immediately hit product market fit after still not no it took a while yeah because it took a year and a half to rebuild from scratch why didn't you just quit and start a new company at that point we never start a company for starting a company you want to build something like i got assessed about this notion shape tool problem since last year college and simon and i were both in this kind of tools for thought community which is you can trace the lineage back to grateful dead areas the the first generation computing pioneers around the bay area like the linear trace way back directly back to there i want to continue that lineage um so to me it's not it wasn't like another idea kicking around this is your life's work and this is like bigger than i can ever chew on this idea so i wouldn't do anything else he's in that community he's obsessed with this idea too so if we don't work on this work work on another company doing the same thing okay i'm gonna i'm gonna get back to the refounding but just on the grateful Dead.

30:11Brian Halligan:You study very important computer scientists from the 60s. You're a student of Steve Jobs, I'm sure. There was sort of a craft ethos about The Grateful Dead and the music back then, but certainly about the company, certainly about Jobs. Is it still here? It seems like it's a lot more commercial than craft today in Silicon Valley. Have we lost that? I think most people don't have it. Most companies don't have it. I agree. Like Steve Jobs, I look up to him, or people like him, it's like interception of humanity with technology. Versus Silicon Valley, at least tech is largely a technology and tinker culture.

30:51And tinker culture doesn't even know the history of, it's not even science, it's tinkering, right? It's like people like to build things in their garage and something works and maybe has a product market fit and grow a business out of

31:01Brian Halligan:this to be fair was and was was tinkering in the garage yeah but you require to meet someone to to bring the human side of it right um i think tinker culture that the risk of us like you don't know what comes before you science at least you respect the history like if we ask people who um dougas angle bar or alan kate was computing pioneers are most people in tech with no idea honestly the only reason i know that was i work for this guy ray ozzy realty like you would know of course because he's the father of notes but he was obsessed with those two and talked about them constantly i know reality uh it's like microsoft cto for a while too right so um that lineage is broken by the way the people who remember this 80 70s and 80s they were sort of people don't even yeah they're no longer working in tech today um so tech is like industry doesn't know its past if you don't know its past you don't know history which is humanity i think your point of view is like what's in front of you, what your competitor is doing versus if you bring humanity, you have all other disciplines around you.

32:10You have all the history behind you. There's way more good stuff you can steal from. I wish more tech founders steal from a side or from behind.

32:23Brian Halligan:I think they'd benefit from it too. Back to the refounding. lots of founders are going sideways lots of companies that started in 2021 are going sideways they've got 10 people it's like maybe their cash flow break even what's your advice to somebody as a founder has been going sideways for a long time adventure dollars in like you and working on product market fit like should everybody just be like rip the band-aid off and shrink it and moved to Kyoto and and refound if their body tell them so like I for me it's like there's you just feel it you have to do something drastic and Simon during that time was he broke his he got his wisdom teeth taken out or something so I'm by myself I was like I remember I was at my ex-girlfriend's studio I just like inner urge like there's no way out I have to do this and And it's like, then you'd feel liberated once you land in Japan.

33:24Brian Halligan:I guess your advice would be is probably more people should do it. And they should listen to their inner body and be more risk-seeking on that. Because they can get stuck for a long time in a venture-backed startup. They can spend 15 years of their career on something going sideways. I think there's no better time than now to do that. Because the market dynamic is wide open. Yeah, I agree. Okay, you re-founded a second time when you had 1 ,000 employees. Back then it was probably 500, yeah. Okay, 500 boys. Different animal. Without telling the same story you've told a thousand times, because I think everyone knows the lore, what was it like kind of behind the scenes?

34:02Brian Halligan:What did you feel? Was it the same thing? Your body felt it? Like, what was the story? So the second time was in Mexico, Cancun. Right. Happened to be out somewhere. Right. You're always in a nice place. We just got early access GPT-4 model. It feels like the world is stopping. like when you first interaction with the gp3 is fine gp4 is a religious experience for me it's like holy shit it's a full body religious experience like you have to do something with this this is what change everything anything you do if you don't do this it will be meaningless um i think the company has been fairly there's be people doubt because they remember that around three years ago that's the crypto era landing right a lot of people is this another crypto thing there were a lot of doubters.

34:51Some of them, obviously, no longer at the company. But the conviction is so clear, at least for me and Sam in the early days. Like, we just have to do this.

35:01Brian Halligan:Did you take two steps back in the business to go 10 steps forward? Like, did revenue really slow while you were rebuilding everything? Our first product actually has a meaningful revenue boost. We launched our first AI product actually two weeks before ChatGPT happened. it's like AI writing product that has a boost but after that we've been pretty much want to build Asian Prada in 2022 end of 2022 and that's a slog that took us a year and a half to really didn't really work back then didn't work at all like Simon I would say my problem and Simon's problem we might be living too much into the future it bites you with new technology like we try everything Entropi built a model for us we work opening fine tuning or another model just none of them work that will like a year and a half just go with nowhere and morale is definitely low only start to work a year and a half our revenue growth inflection this around the same time right when the ai product the underlying got better yeah it's like um but that was the that was a pretty painful period was that the most painful period in notion history for you?

36:14Different type of pain.

36:15Brian Halligan:What was the most painful? Just when it was two, three, early days, pre-product market fit is despair. I was just like... Despair, is that the way it is? Okay. You don't know where it's coming from. You don't know where to go, right? When your growth rate low, like during that period of time, we were trying to rebuilding our AI foundation multiple times it's yeah that's not great um right now just everything on fire it's a different type of pay nice so a lot of people 500 person companies a lot of sas companies are doing the ai thing but certainly haven't refounded advice start with your product we just talk about treated like brewing beer, not building bridges.

37:05Because that's, end of the day, most tech companies, it's the product, right? So start with the product because then the founder has to be really hands-on to experience that way of building things.

37:18Brian Halligan:Can non-founder-led companies pull it off? I don't know. It would be tough. I think founder has the moral high ground to change things. People are more tolerant and forgiving with founders, right? I think the person needs to be used language modeling and just know how to feel it. Like you got to feel the AGI, feel the AI. Yeah, you can't read about it. You can't watch YouTube. You got to build. Building is one of the best ways for your product or build for your internal systems. Build for yourself. Yeah, tinker on the side. You have to do that because like I think the business are kind of like pathfinding entities, right?

38:01Like we're in this thing called a market. There's equilibrium for your company with the market, with your shareholder, with your company. Like we're just finding local optimists, local maximums for different our niches. When this new brand new ingredient got introduced into the market in this language model, doors are pathed, are opened up. And we are each company at different point in the market. You have different angle. You have different niche. you have to take in this internalize this new ingredient figure out which path got opened for you choose this with a customer with yourself if you don't know how this this can do you cannot find a new path i think you have to do something you have to feel this you feel the ai feel the agi

38:47Brian Halligan:i think you're right you use a word that i cringe at but i think is good called a lot of companies calcify as they get older. Let's just say you're a company that's calcified. How do you get uncalcified? We intentionally do a lot of acquisitions. We have 50, 60 founders at Notion. And were they aqua hires? Aqua hires. Aqua hires, acquisitions. Founders are kind of just kind of like little decalcified meathead machinery just trying to break things, right? So keep your regenerating. I agree with that. Yeah, I find that really helpful. So founders found for a reason, and now all of a sudden they're in a thousand-person company.

39:25Brian Halligan:How do you keep them motivated and not leaving and starting something new? Well, first, some of them work on the domain that they were working on before. Like the person leading our AI meeting knows has a startup of AI meeting knows before. The person leading our enterprise search is the founder of enterprise search product. So you actually give them a better platform support to do this. People feel appreciated. I just had lunch with the founder who started enterprise search product before. You give them leverage. They give them leverage. The actual people care about the thing they're building versus fighting for product market thinking of really crowded market.

40:01They don't. You can argue that it might be more difficult to start new companies today compared to even a year ago because the world is getting more noisy. like the shipping cadence from existing companies are just increasing it's like the

40:18Brian Halligan:everybody got twitter fatigue right so in the sas companies have got the memo most of them got the memo and are shipping fast now you were ahead of everyone but yeah people like it's still hubspot's cranking that's good no the people are still kicking and they're they have to kick in different gear no my thing these days is like it's it couldn't it's never been easier to start man it's never been harder to scale because like in every little micro segment if there's a little traction like there's a hundred competitors two days later and the thing i've also noticed about the startup land is almost in every one of these verticals it's a duopoly there's like a one and a two and then 50 tied for third they're way off and when you look back in time that the the great companies were often founded in shitty times because people were really grinders and people really want to start a company and really have a vision start in like 2022 2023 a terrible time to start in times like 2026 you get a lot of tourist entrepreneurs and so i've heard people say you know 2026 ventures are gonna be crap even though the valuations are like crypto crypto vibe energy yeah a little bit a little bit um i don't disagree market will do that thing market is kind of beautiful in that way yeah advice to founders of reasonable size companies who are a little scared to refound.

41:40Brian Halligan:I'm CEO of a 500-person company. It's going pretty well. I'm doing some AI stuff. My board's kind of happy with me. But there's a birdie inside of me listening to Ivan and maybe I should refound advice. Does the person need to feel the AGI first? If you feel you realize most tech industry is supporting different flavor knowledge work, we're at the beginning of how this can do due to this industry. I agree with you. How do you think organizations look like? So they're changing a lot now. What do you think they look like in like three, four years? Is your knowledge work, you're right at the center of this?

42:20I think truth is probably somewhere. There's a Dorsey, Jack Dorsey's thing. There is the traditional hierarchical ones. I like to think what are invariables. Like, let's look, invariably in this case, human nature are rather static. Like, we all...

42:43Brian Halligan:We don't change that fast. Human don't change. Human as a species doesn't change. That's where I think it should, you will be a hierarchical organization. If just observe bamboo or chimpanzees, right? It's like very, if you watch nature program, there's hierarchy. That doesn't change. It hasn't changed, left us since we left Africa. Division of labor makes sense. Um, so, um, people have different interests. You, you look at all the different like personality tests, right? They're just different ways of saying like people are different. There are not 10 ,000 flavor of them there, but there are probably a dozen flavor of humans, a cluster around this different dozen things.

43:22And we'll know that our legal system. Well, at least right now there's no autonomous companies, right? It's the CEO CF will have to sign up for something. So it will be a small team of humans to start. So those two are invariables. So this invariable tells me you need to figure out how those group of humans collaborate. Group of humans all have different biases, preferences, different values. And you will be somewhat a small, some kind of hierarchical system there. Then how do we use this new ingredient to pass information decision around the small midsize group of humans? That's how I think about it.

44:02Brian Halligan:I kind of think about it as like right now in companies, the AI system makes very few of the decisions. Let's call it 1%. But as that system gets more context using Notion, for example, it'll make better decisions than humans. It'll have more context and more history. And then humans will be more training that system and giving it context and giving it taste. And I think over time, the system makes more and more of the decisions instead of the humans. But the humans are still really necessary. Yeah. People say AI researchers in 15 months will not be able to make a decision to improve AI models.

44:37Kind of the same thing, but they're just seeing a bleeding edge for this.

44:40Brian Halligan:Yes. By the way, I think you're incredibly well positioned for all this. Oh, yeah. I worked for a while with this guy, Reazi. It was a company called Groove Networks. We were in the knowledge management industry, which is a shit industry because chief knowledge officers have no money. And it was never urgent. In theory, it sounded great. Now knowledge management is actually incredibly important and works incredibly well. I know. It's like, what's that industry called in the 90s? People hire consultants to map out their org chart and information flow. That becomes like what AI and forward deployment.

45:16Brian Halligan:Totally. And your platform is ideally suited for it. Yeah. I think we always forget that modern knowledge work is only about 150 years old. It's invented. It's not as old as fire or language. It's only 150 years old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? So why cannot be a new flavor of it? Okay, I want to talk about you. Okay. I don't know you super well. You're soft-spoken, and I thought you were an introvert. But in getting to know you better, was I wrong about that? I think I'm still introverted. Okay. Yeah. I like one-on-one conversations than one too many. I train myself to do company all hands just by doing a lot.

45:54Brian Halligan:A lot of founders are introverts. The world is sort of built for, I'm kind of extroverted extroverts. Advice for founders who just don't like talking to other, don't like the whole extrovert game. I have to evolve a lot. Like, I hate doing company. Did you force yourself? Yeah, I did. Like, how did it work? A significant other put you? No, I forced myself. Okay. To lead a group of human, you need to do one-to-many communications. Otherwise, people don't trust you. They want to hear from you. writing is one mode, which is like sometimes link-naught, but even more so is face-to-face to the all-hands.

46:30So for a while, I tried to delegate all-hands to my co-founders, to other execs. No way. Now every all-hands, I open the mic, I do it, I lead the whole all-hands. Now I'm pretty comfortable with that. I still don't love it, but I don't dread it.

46:47Brian Halligan:Okay. Advice for people doing all-hands. Everyone seems to do it differently. I'll get a teleprompter. I'm the opposite. I can't read fast enough for the teleprompter. Really? Yes, I hate a teleprompter. Well, that changes me. Because English is my second language. So it's like if I have to think and speak, it's hard. So I just prefer to spoken before. And right now, all those speech-to-text model logos are so good. They're so good. So good. I literally like, okay, the night before, or then I just like talk to myself and got what I roughly want to say. and the time doing all hands, teleprompter is there.

47:24Brian Halligan:Do you do them once a week, once a month, once a month? Like, what's your cadence? We're actually changing our cadence. It used to be once a month. Right now it's every other week for all hands and every other week again for AMA. So every week now. Did you ever step on yourself on an AMA? You ever say something and you're like, are you going to crush for that? Yeah. Everybody has it. Or just you miss a good opportunity that you can actually rally people about something but you give a non-answer. That's the worst. And non-assers? We, at least at HubSpot and the company meetings and the AMAs, there would be a Slack channel on it.

47:57Brian Halligan:And you go back and look at it and be like, oh. What? Just like if I said something stupid or I missed an opportunity, like it would really show up in there. That's good. How do you manage your time and your schedule and your deep work? Like how do you manage your energy? Like for me, my energy is pretty good right now. It kind of goes up and down during the day. more than I would like. Is that the case for you? How do you deal with that? How do you deal with your introvert versus extrovert? How do you do it? What's your schedule like? It's actually not that crazy. Wake up 7, 7, 8, make coffee for my wife.

48:38I usually like to do work in the morning, do some thinking, writing at home. Come to office. I come to work every day. Come to office. sometimes a new habit I'm trying right now is doing the gym during the day. Okay. Yeah.

48:53Brian Halligan:That's a good idea. Perk you up. Elevate my energy during the middle of the day. And work in office till seven-ish. Usually it's social dinner with my wife. Back to work. Sleep out till midnight, around midnight. When do you have time to get down the cloud rabbit hole? Weekend. Weekend's my happy time. you describe that as your happy time yeah you can be led by your curiosity rather than by your responsibility usually Saturday, Sunday morning I have a bit time to read the books I want to read sometimes it's for work sometimes it's for my guilty pleasure during the day half hours one of my founders here in New York he gets his schedule in 10 minute blocks Meeting-wise?

49:43Brian Halligan:Yes. Like, what does your day look like? A lot of 25-minute blocks. I usually, like, five minutes between meetings and 25, 25, 25. My team pack my meetings together so I have one or two-hour chunk to think. But most of my thinking time is in the morning or in the evening. Usually I get too tired in the evening. I can't think really well. Morning's better. And I do a lot of Slack. My wife joked my Slack is my social media. Yeah. Why doesn't Ocean build a slack killer? We should. Definitely. Yeah. A lot of your team said you're humble. And I think you are too. Why? I wouldn't use the word humble.

50:22I use the word truth.

50:23Brian Halligan:Your team uses that. Truth seeking, probably. They use humble. I think you seek truth, you know you're just one perspective of the truth. Or pluralism. There are multiple flavor of truth in the world. You know the story of blind people touching an elephant? Yes. where just different blind people touching different parts of the elephant. Sometimes it could be the tail. The elephant's a snake. Sometimes the trunk is a tree, right? That's my worldview. Okay. Tonight we're going to have dinner with a bunch of founders and some are like 10 employees and they hope to go and build a thousand person company in the next several years.

51:00Brian Halligan:What advice do you have for them? It's a game. It's a game that's a social game. it's like there's all the good part and bad part of social game like humor status is human thing right like um powers is that's the ceo game is full of that game just like entertainment just like sports you have that like high school college lunch sessions right you you watch that in real in in the tech scene it also could be a pursuit of your personal values this is something i realized more in the past three, four years. It's like, I need to be in equilibrium with my own value of what this company I want to build with.

51:44That gave me more sustainable energy source. I cannot just chase something or competition for competition's sake. Like I'm really competitive. I need to compete to win as part of me. But at the same time, I need to be true to my own values, the value of building good tools, the craft, the human side of things. The social part of being a CEO, the market dynamic just compete for competing sake. And the value, I wouldn't say they are, this is somewhat a zero-sum game. So you need to figure out where do you want to sit in the spectrum. And your personality might be different. Some people might just compete for competing sake, doesn't care about what they're building.

52:29Some people just want to be popular. If you just only care about craft, then you don't build a business. It might as well just be an artist. Took me a while to realize where's my equilibrium.

52:39Brian Halligan:Are you someone that tries to fix your weaknesses or you just lean into your strengths? And what's your advice on that? Definitely leaning on your strength. There's a necessary thing you have to do. Like one-to-many communication likely you need to do with your company's scale. Maybe you can lean more on writing rather than speaking. but there's such an invariable that works, right? Within the boundary of that, you should amplify what you're good at because capabilities are becoming more and more commoditized with machines. So it's your own point of view, your strength that you can live with, that's more lasting.

53:17Brian Halligan:Okay, something I assume that isn't your strong suit is building an enterprise sales org, which seems like you're in the process of building that. and want to hear it's going exceptionally well. How did you get your head around it? How did you hire? It sounds like you hired the right person. So many companies are PLG and are desperate to move to the enterprise and the founders are similar mold to you. You talk about that. We had a mistake. As I mentioned, we sort of did not buy traditional sales motion for a good two-ish years. Because Nelshan sales can start earlier, but we want to first principle our way into it, which is, yeah, we're going to design our own system.

53:59That doesn't work. Again, it's a reflection of human nature. A lot of things you want to talk to a seller. There's a lot of the reason the modern sales playbook has been around for two-ish decades.

54:12Brian Halligan:I think enterprise sales is like the last function. I agree with you. It's like you want to see a human, you feel comfortable. You don't want to be a doctor from a robot. No. Then why should you buy an expensive thing from a robot, right? So it's not that hard, I would say. But you need to know, like a lot of smart people might think they can create something new. Like fundamentally, you should not reinvent new things unless it's really absolutely necessary. I was trying to reinvent a new go-to-market motion. That's stupid. Okay. I didn't mind how we built HubSpot. Yeah, right. But that's the thing, HubSpot, right?

54:52like this inbound that was the thing you should only have each company should only preserve your innovation point to few places go a couple places you cannot spread everywhere like otherwise you're spread to thing you're like you're trying to like reinventing the wheel too many times we try to put our innovation point on to sales back then so just just go classic sales It works. But you can make a lot more efficient today with a lot of tools we're building internally. That's different.

55:26Brian Halligan:Okay, so you woke up one day, you're like, we got to get good at enterprise sales. What did you do? What are the mistakes everyone makes when they do it? Did you miss a hire or two before you got the right person? I thought that some was solved today, right? I kind of do, but people struggle with it. Enterprise sales has changed very little since I did it in the 1990s. Yeah, so we tried initially only half PLG flavor of sales, like system thinker, sales system, sales leader. Didn't quite work. It's just like then you're just taking orders. And it's not like the PLG give you the luxury that your customer want to buy your product.

56:05Brian Halligan:Easy to sell it. Yes. It's like fulfilling demand. You cannot get your sellers to do something difficult when there's so much easier thing they can do. It just doesn't work. Then we realize, okay, yes, we're starting to respect the system. So our CRO, Erica, she was CRO of GitHub before. It's a system thinker, right? We pair Erica with our head of sale, Pravesh, which is rah-rah, like the meat eater. The veins in the teeth. Perfect pairing. And so we have sellers, we rah-rah, pravesh, but also respect working with Erica's overall system. This is when things start to work in the past year and a half.

56:47Brian Halligan:Got it. In so many of the organization I deal with, the engineers look at how much money the salespeople make and look at the rah-rah, and they roll their eyes and they complain. I assume that happened here? No. We actually, notion culture is always pretty receptive for different, people are different. So we never have the organ rejection of sellers. in the company. Our engineering team love work with sales team. Okay, awesome. Speaking of culture, I saw online some people refer to you as a cult leader and some people referred to me as a cult leader back in the day. I didn't particularly like that.

57:22Brian Halligan:How does that land with you? I like that. Okay. A company is, it's sort of a religion. It's you have a point of view. You have your value system project to the world through a business, through a product. Like, My favorite saying is Catholic Church is one of the most successful companies of all time. 2 ,000 years, they have their ritual, their business models. They're still around, kicking. Great founder in Jesus and a great head of sales in Paul. Right? And there are a lot of sellers and referral system. Viral marketing. Viral marketing, OG viral marketing. Yeah, and to me, religion or belief system or value system are, again, one of the few dozen things that's ingrained in human nature.

58:08Like, people want to believe in something to find meaning and purpose. That's why wartime make this more fun, right? Your purpose and meaning got amplified. Work and company give people that. Camaraderie give people that. That's why we play sports. It's the same energy.

58:26Brian Halligan:The first four words in culture are cult. Yeah, probably I need to look up the roots, but yeah. It's like, what is all hands? People go to church every Sunday. All hands every week, same thing. We used to have a thing with our all hands that Darmesh and I wanted it to be so inspirational that people would well up or cry during the all hands. It's like we really, really worked on our all hands. Nothing, I don't think anything wrong with that. No. Okay. Thank you for coming on the pod. Thank you for building Notion. Thank you for being an inspiration for tons and tons of founders. I'm glad. Hopefully, it'll be helpful for others.

59:01Appreciate you. Thank you for your time.

59:04Brian Halligan:Okay. I hope you liked that episode with Ivan. One of the things I like about him, there's a famous quote by Oscar Wilde, be yourself, everyone else is taken. I like to think I am myself, like I'm pretty quirky and I've embraced that quirkiness. And I think at the end of the day, companies really reflect those CEOs. And I don't think CEOs should be afraid to really be themselves and kind of build the company around them. Ivan's really done that nicely. That might be a good plan for you, too. The second kind of takeaway I had is I work with lots of startups and there are so many companies, let's say less than 500 million in revenue growing like 30 percent.

59:48Brian Halligan:They're kind of stuck and there's infinite numbers of stuck companies out there. If you're in that boat, I'd recommend a refounding moment. The refounding is harder than it looks. It typically involves like a big step back and two steps forward. It's going to be hard. Your numbers will look worse in the short term. Ivan didn't do this, but when we wanted to do a refounding at HubSpot at one point, we started a new company inside of HubSpot that was completely independent from it. And that served us well. That's how Apple did it back in the day. But if you're stuck and a lot of companies are stuck, be risk on and do what Ivan did.

1:00:28Brian Halligan:Like he was a ye olde SaaS company and now he's a rocket ship AI company. I think he's on to it. The last takeaway I have on Ivan kind of starts back in a podcast interview I did with Jack Dorsey a few weeks ago. And it does seem to me there's a new way to build and run companies today. That's a pretty big departure from the way people have done it the last 30 years. Jack's iterating on it. Ivan's iterating on it. A lot of the, call it vintage 2025 startups are iterating on it. And this is something I'm thinking a lot about. I think there needs to be a new playbook on how to be a CEO in the iNative, in the kind of era we're in.

1:01:11Brian Halligan:And I'm early in the iteration. But just roughly the way I kind of think about the way they're organized is historically there is a triangle shape org chart. Those org charts have been around a long, long time since the Roman Empire. They're a very inefficient way to run a company, but they've been the best way to run a company because there's been no better one. I think the problem with them is the bigger that org chart gets, the more that information gets distorted across and up and down in the slower it gets. And so it's pretty inefficient. The new way that Dorsey described, and I didn't quite get into it with Ivan, but I suspect it's similar, is it's a circle.

1:01:49Brian Halligan:And in the middle is all of the context in the AI system. And initially, humans are making all decisions. But over time, as you give that kind of centralized AI system more context, it gets smarter. And you're feeding a context, and you turn over more and more of the decisions to them. I don't think it happens overnight. I think it's quite gradual. But it's an IT task to get it right. You have to be legible. I don't love that word, but you have to have a legible set of systems. You have to kind of record everything. But I think this is the new way. Companies who are doing this seem to be just moving a lot faster than the companies that aren't.

1:02:25Brian Halligan:And Ivan is moving at breakneck speed. And I think there's a lot of things that fall out of it. They don't need as many people. They move much faster. Because of that, they have much shorter planning cycles. all of those kind of one-way doors that Bezos used to talk about are really two-way doors because nothing takes that long to do. Anyway, I think there's this new playbook I'm interested in and I'm going to be talking about it on the podcast. And on X, if you're interested in it too, hit me up on at B. Halligan. Thanks for tuning in.