Notion's CEO on if AI is really killing software companies

23:57Maybe not worth thousands of tokens in a Mac mini running on its own, but, you know, we'll get there. I think we all have to tinker within us, right? We all want to... People play Lego part of it to see the final result, but I would say the journey is actually making the Lego pieces. And when you make something great, you want to showcase to people. I think it's a lot of the draw for it, including Notion Included, people want to build something that showcases to other people. So open cloud plays into that too.

24:24Ellis:It's tough, I feel like, with any of these big paradigm shifts, and you're uniquely good at this, I think, Ivan, coming up with historical references or metaphors. and for a while I feel like it was Legos. Now we're moving on to the factory and I feel like I had a founder client who was talking about that game, Factorio. And I have a special thing that I want to show you from my history that I just thought of that's actually right behind me. Hold on one second. Uh-oh. I have the original PC box, one of the best box arts of all time, SimCity 2000. And it does feel like that. You're trying to manage and optimize this incredible system all by yourself, but what's crazy is that you could just, you almost feel like the boss.

25:07Ellis:You feel like the CEO, like the mayor of your SimCity when you just say it with words now. And that's to me, I think, what's the craziest piece with this empire you've built that is now accessible with the agents. It's actually, so there's two folds. One is that's the product we've built. We want all the leaders, CEOs, whoever working company feel like they can manage a team of agents or interns. I can't unhear it now, Ivan. That's the part of it, Bill. But at the same time, like me running Notions, like I've been doing a lot with coding agents, just plugging all the different tools inside the company.

25:46It just feels like superpower. Like some of our custom agents connect with Snowflake on one end, all the contacts in Notion, Cloud Code can run some other process on the other end. Like I can ask any question inside the company. and the answer is a superhuman level of answer for me and it can run some repetitive processes and it almost feels like it can do anything. So that power is, I would say, until this coding agent revolution since 4.6, we haven't had that power and that's fairly new. It feels like SimCity but for your companies. Akshay was showing us how you guys use the custom agents internally at Notion And I thought that was pretty interesting.

26:31Like everyone, you guys run on Slack and he was showing us how it can monitor one of the channels where people are asking like basic things around the office, like where are the chargers? You know, I'm out of whatever at my desk and it can respond and remind people of inventory. And if not, create a ticket that a human can then go and check on. And I thought that was a pretty cool use case because it's not revolutionary, but it does lessen the effort that you need to get basic things done that humans would have done before. So I'd be curious to see how that scales out and what other people built.

27:10Yeah, it's one of the... So there are three use cases we try to really nail with this custom agent launch. So you just mentioned one of them, which is answer repetitive questions. A big swap of knowledge where you can argue maybe a quarter of them are just answering questions that live in some kind of knowledge base. So we try to do a really good job of that. Another one is triage tickets, triage to-dos. You probably saw some demos from, hey, people ask questions in one Slack channel. You should pass to the team in the other Slack channel. A lot of PM's job, a lot of engineer-managed job is doing that.

27:45The third one is kind of write this kind of status report, status updates. So many team workers like, hey, what did we do last week? What did you do yesterday? So you don't need to do those anymore. And those three type of use cases will be considered busy work. And most knowledge work, it's actually a big swap of knowledge work are those kind of busy work. It sucks. It's so much tedious stuff, man. I know. Agents can do them pretty well in some sense, superhuman level well now. So just delegate those agents and you human can elevate up and play your SimCities.

28:20Ellis:I get to finally be the systems thinker. I think that I am when you're forced to actually construct the perfect instruction manual for each agent. And that was, I think, one of the things that you guys have done really well with this launch is create that settings panel where you can actually fine tune the different prompts, the different access, the different integrations. And I've been playing a lot with Wabi recently to create some little VibeCode apps. And they've done something really similar. And I think we're seeing a very cool innovation. People are moving beyond just the chat screen to actually catalog some of its memories in a UX that actually makes sense.

28:58Ellis:Like inside of Wabi, there's a settings page within your app for the icon prompt. There's a setting page for the different fetch prompts it's doing. And you can select a model. and I feel like you guys have taken a similar step forward. When did that settings page come about to let people actually tweak things not just with natural language but in more of an interface? It feels like a big next step for AI. I wouldn't say the big next step. It's about require step to do anything business facing because when you're working with a lot of people... Just like giving the transparency into what it's actually doing.

29:32The transparency and you want a lockdown. You want to make sure the permission is set. Like when you work with a team of people there are secrets, right? Certain people should see certain things. Certain people should not see certain things. Certain workflow should be defined by the experts and people shouldn't change it. The power of language model is free for all. Anybody, if you can speak English or Japanese, you can modify things. The downside of language model is free for all. Anybody can modify anything. In a business setting, you don't want free for all. You want some guardrails for the permissions, for the securities, for all the boring but very important and necessary things.

30:06And in some sense, that's a lot of value we provide with customer agent to provide those guardrails. So like OpenClaw, you can run Mac Mini to run everything in your life, but that's just by yourself. But what is that for a company in that unique guardrails and all those checkboxes you mentioned?

30:24Ellis:Yeah, I'm curious. I would think you guys are on the cutting edge of actually implementing this stuff internally. I feel like every single company out there is saying like AI agents are going to help you automate the busy work and focus on what matters. But what have you heard from the team for what that actually looks like in terms of being able to focus on what matters? It's the repetitive work we're talking about. Like we've been testing this with a small group of alpha customers, like the Ramp, the Vercel, the Clay, the Cursor of the world. The Access podcast. We've got early access. Yes. even though those companies are very AI first, they have a lot of busy work too.

31:07They can vibe code a lot of internal workflow on the coding side, but anything that's knowledge work related, teamwork related, Notion is the best primitive for that. Give you one example, Ramp fully onboarded into Notion last year. Right now, I think it's about 3 ,000-ish people companies. Before Notion, they have to use across like half a dozen core collaboration tool. So they just shrink from six just to Notion. That's the first step, consolidation. So save costs, save money, move faster, one place for information. But now once you have one place for information, it's have one context for AI agent.

31:44So they deploy Notion AI across all the Ramp employees, one place for AI meeting nodes. Now there has one place to do the custom agent. So they can actually automate some of the repetitive workflow inside Ramp. One of their popular ones is for their sales teams. So Ramp is shipping really fast. They're shipping in the future left and right. And it's really hard for their sales team to keep up. Like, what's the latest feature? How do you answer a question from customers? So now they set up a customer agent that can answer all those questions from all the Slack channels, internal networking talks, emails.

32:17I think that's the most popular one inside the company. In the last couple of weeks, they, I believe, answered 4 ,000 questions for this customer agent. And that's about, you know, if we consider each question is about 30 minutes, that's about 2 ,000 human hours. That's a real time saving for Ramp.

32:34Ellis:It's funny when you say 2 ,000 human hours, I think CEOs love that kind of talk. But I feel like the AI narrative could have been a little different had it been a bit more like targeted around the exact use cases. Like if you were to say, hey, help desk, you don't have to tell people where the bullshit is that they're asking for every day. like the IT help desk, they would have been like, oh my God, give me this thing. And that's like one of the reasons that in my work, as you've seen, Ivan, I always try to lead with like the hyper-specific relatable problems because it instantly makes this stuff feel a bit less threatening.

33:08Ellis:But then the question remains, like with all that stuff automated, what are people doing instead? Like, have you seen the pace increase for your own team now that they're not doing the busy work? Like what's the outcomes that you're actually seeing? So I haven't heard this from anybody yet. Yeah, I would say the first appearance is happening on a lot of engineers, engineer product design within Notion. Like we don't, all the daily stand-up inside Notion were done by customer agent now. So you don't have to summarize the meeting notes. You don't have to say what you did last week, right? Those are small time saving, like five, ten minutes each meetings, but they adds up.

33:42Other things like triaging tickets, managing the bug backlog, none of this done by any PM, EM anymore. They're still small. They're like five, 10 minutes here and there, but they add up. I will say the shape of the time saving is very horizontal. It's not very vertical, meaning that it's five minutes, 10 minutes here and there for everyone versus the entire role, entire job done by agents. Because of that, we don't see a structural change at least in company yet. It's like everybody's life gets a little bit better. If you ask our team, like, hey, we're going to take away the customer agent from you, we're going to have a revolution inside the company, right?

34:21But it does not precisely map to any person's responsibility at this moment because the model capability needs to get better. The guardrails and all the permission stuff need to get better. That's what we learned with OpenClaw, right? Is that it's cool to let it go wild, but the model is still kind of unreliable. The safety is just not there. There's prompt injection. There's all these reasons you don't really want to let some agent go ham with shell access to your machine. And I guess that's the opportunity Notion is going after. Is that fair? That's fair, yeah. It's like, what is open cloud spirit?

34:58Asynchronous, can do almost everything you can do with a computer, but make a multiplayer, make a collaborative with enterprise-grade permission and security. How do you use it? You talked about how some of your team's using it, but you're the CO. How are you using agents in your day-to-day to run the company? Every morning I have a brief from this guy. So this is out of the box. So it tells me, actually, let me read my brief today. It's like you're going to talk to these two schmucks on a podcast.

35:26Ellis:I was going to say, please cancel all meetings with people that are five skip levels below me that somehow got on my calendar. Thank you. Bye. Give me a daily brief every morning. I used to archive my inbox. So we also, Notion Mail, Notion Calendar team, their top priority right now is to make their agent to use capability world class, the best in class. So you can archive any. I basically don't check my inbox like a normal person anymore. I largely talk with a custom agent that runs my inbox. So it has a context of what I'm working on. It has a context of what kind of thing I care about. So that's another thing.

36:03The superpower one I mentioned earlier, connect to our Snowflake backend. So I can understand almost any data inside the company with the commentary that's the contact from Slack, contact from NotionDocs, from an email. It's kind of like a data science team in your pocket. What was your brief like this morning? I mean, I usually, once you dismiss it, it goes away. So let me... That's kind of crazy that you're not really looking at email anymore. I love that. I would love to not look at email anymore. Happy to set up for you guys because it really changed your... All right.

36:37Ellis:So we'll stay on after the pod, Ivan. And you'll personally walk us through, right? I was just doing this yesterday with who's that lady from Wall Street Journal he said he finally clicked with Notion oh is this why Joanna tweeted that yes yes yeah oh Joanna shout out Joanna she just left I was gonna bring up her tweet she was like I finally understand Notion thanks to AI that was you Ivan you made her understand AI Ivan that's the power of going direct as they say it says a lot about our onboarding could be better but it also says our AI is quite magical, right? Can do everything you ask for.

37:15So I actually DM her afterwards. We're going to set up one-on-one to truly onboard. That is the thing about Notion for me is like, it still is kind of like, man, there's so much to do in there and I'm not sure where to start. The onboarding has to be tricky when it's such a powerful tool. Yeah, I would say in some cases, that has been our weaknesses for years because we give people the Legos, right? And this moment seems to be a blessing because if you think about traditional SaaS, you hard code the workflow into your software logic. And it's like that's your domain, what you're selling. Everything's rigid, but it's powerful, it's automated, it's on the cloud.

37:55Ellis:Some Salesforce dude spends eight weeks programming it for you. Well, Salesforce is actually a pretty flexible one compared to many vertical SaaS. So actually as a relational database behind the scene, you can do a lot of different things. But the majority of SaaS is pretty rigid. The workflow is big into it. Notion's Legos would turn out to be very opinionated. So historically, it's difficult to onboard. But with language models, language model can use those Legos. So it's actually making our weakness into our strength. So now you can do all the different open-ended things, all different flavor knowledge were in Notion.

38:30So it actually shifted a little bit.

38:32Ellis:I have personally onboarded Alex to a variety of different use cases. and I will require a small commission. Thank you, Ivan. So, you know, it's funny. My barrier to getting on Notion back when I joined the browser company is, and I actually hated it for a hot minute. Now I'm like an evangelist essentially. But I was like, where the fuck do I click? There's six buttons over here. There's six little dots over here. There's a little table dragger over here. You could drag around the lines. And now that I know how to use it, it's like my favorite thing. And I use Google Docs and I frankly want to kill myself.

39:05Ellis:But there are all those little things, I think, that kind of add up. And another really big thing, I think, to learn is how to actually use databases well, which was such a huge unlock for me. Are you telling custom agents to proactively recommend stuff like that, that maybe is underappreciated, that people don't even know what they could ask for yet? They ask for a faster horse instead of a database? We don't proactively ask agent to suggest a workflow yet. We're actually testing this to when we're deploying customers. It's like, how do you automate forward deployment motion, right? This is a buzzword.

39:40Forward deployment engineer, how do you make that better with our own tools? We should do that. I would say the most popular use case is rather than you build a database from scratch, like the roles and column and relational schemas, agent can just build it for you. And that has been, at this point, it's more than 50 % of database are built by agent than human now. That's probably the magical thing that clicked with the Wall Street Journal lady yesterday. I found my daily reminder, daily brief. So my top three items is confirm our domain because we're trying to, I think we're trying to buy another domain for our product.

40:17And number two is - Don't let that out here because it's coming out Thursday. You got to get the domain before then. The other one is prepare for podcast block this afternoon with you guys. There's a bunch of links in my calendar email. And the last one, before the end of the day, review the candidates in my recruiting databases. So we have a recruiting database internally. Every day our customer agents send me notifications. Those are the people who are job offers going out. So I usually review those job offers.

40:46Ellis:Speaking of recruiting, I know some CEOs like Toby Lutke of Shopify have been pretty forward about, you know, they're essentially saying you are not allowed to hire anybody unless you could prove that AI can't do it. whereas other companies have said whoever we hire has to be provably AI native in all their workflows. Are you implementing anything like that yet in the recruiting process as criteria? Not as true but definitely we're looking for very AI native people. I would say our overall we're shifting towards younger early career folks because they're just Early career. You hired a 16 year old the other day.

41:25Ellis:Wait did you really? Can I tell me about this? How do you know about it? I saw a tweet, a 16 and an 18 year old. Okay. So the story is late last year, we hired, well, mid last year, we hired an 18 year old. We thought this is the youngest one we ever hired. Right. So still just graduated high school, going to college. Then a month later, we found this person really talented on YouTube, not famous on Twitter anywhere. Like he making some cool videos about design AI stuff. So like, come, we invite this person to our office. Then I bump into him in the elevator and say, hey, where do you go to college?

42:02He said, I don't go to college. So, like, oh, you drop out, right? So, no, I'm still in grade 10 in high school. But this kid is so talented. He's actually part of our... He runs marketing. No, no, no. He's a programmer. Part of our next, next product, he's building a big chunk of it. So we're going to announce hopefully in May. So a lot more people can play with it. Wow. So you find with AI, you want to hire younger because those kinds of people, what they use the tools and they embrace them faster. Is that the thinking? Embrace them faster, less assumptions. Because a lot of things you just assume you cannot do, but the assumption changes every two months, every month at this point, right?

42:48So I'm more optimistic, more hungry. A lot of experience doesn't matter anymore. You just have to ask the right questions. And I think it's also like you grew up with the internet in the past 10, 15 years, then you just, you learn much faster. Like we have internet when we were a little bit older, but this kid just completely grew up with internet from when they were toddlers. So their rate of learning is compounding a different rate. And last couple of years, if you grew up with ChachiPT, it's compounding yet a different rate.

43:31Ellis:I'm so happy you're advocating for toddler screen time, Ivan, because my toddler has screen time and has learned a lot from hashtag my iPad. And I'm just, I mean, even dating back to the snap years, I'm just such a big believer that it's not about the screen per se. It's about what's on the screen or sure, what it's replacing if it comes to relationships. play outside, unstructured free time, all that stuff. But yeah, one would think, I mean, I remember back in those days as well. I mean, I'm curious, you know, I know you've been with Notion a while now. I mean, how would you have done it differently on the way up if you had access to these tools?

44:07Oh man, good question. Anybody, nobody asked me this before. This is what you come on the show for, Ivan. Yeah. I'm not a researcher, so I don't think I will be building, even if you rewind back five, 10 years ago, I wouldn't be building, I wouldn't be like first deep diving into building HGI. So actually, you guys know that historically there's always two spectrums of schools of computing. So on the East Coast, there is this AI-HGI school, which is like that start at MIT, John McCarthy trying to teach computer how to play chess. This is the 1950s MIT. That's on the East Coast. On the West Coast, this is like Douglas Engelbar and later Alan Kay.

44:52Those are the HCI, Human-Computer Interaction, where you can know as like Augmenting Human Intellect, AHI school for computing. So AHI, HI always be polar schools of computing. I will say right now the power definitely shifts a lot towards AI, HCI side. But what drew me to start notion, drew me to start play with computers, is the interface, the tool side, the shape of something that you can hold in your hand that hopefully amplifying what makes us human. If I start in tech again now, I think I'll still be drawn towards that direction. Like in Notion, some of you have been to our offices. We care a lot about tools and craft.

45:37That's the HCI. That's the human augmentation schools of way of thinking about computing. And I think right now is interesting time because AI becomes so powerful. How do you use this power to create new forms of tools? It's the question that nobody proper answered yet. OpenClaw is a good example of that because I have -

45:57Ellis:Alex, why do you have to like incessantly bring up OpenClaw? Well, it's just on the mind, man. Like I think what he's saying is connected to that because I think a lot of people, a lot of labs had that kind of tech internally and AI is getting a lot better at tool use and agentic use cases. And really what it is, it's like a different interface. I mean, it's not a good one in terms of like a mass consumer interface, but it just changed the interface to interact with an agent in this way and make it accessible. And so the opportunity with interfaces in AI right now is just tremendous because there's so much ceiling on just the AI we have today, even beyond future models, right?

46:35I think that's people are starting to show like, hey, real-time strategy games from the 90 and 2000 might be a good form factor for managing agents.

46:44Ellis:That's what I'm talking about. We're Kanban board. Turns out we're a full circle now. We had a one year, two year of managing IDEs, using IDE to manage agents. Now we're going back to managing multiple agents. Turns out the best way is Kanban boards. So we're still looking for the best form factors. I was a Settlers of Catan addict in college. I won the Kentucky Championship one year. Are you saying that maybe that could come? back and I could use that skill to run my agents. I don't know about Catan, actually. It's probably more like civilization. I got one. What is the zergling rush of agentic deployment in StarCraft terms?

47:27Ellis:If you really want to destroy a competitor before they've even gotten out the doors. I need one agent to DDoS their servers. I need another to hire all their team members. I need another to what? We're missing metaphors here. Did you play StarCraft? I do play StarCraft. I like StarCraft. What will be interesting to see? It's like human wants to be in the loop. You just have to go up the loop. You don't want to be on the level of doing busy work loop. You want to elevate, elevate. Eventually, you're from managing work itself to managing a city. and I think we're still doing that. We're figuring out the right interface allows us to elevate.

48:11You've inspired me to want to not look at email ever again. That's going to be my first level of elevating. Well, my prediction is like there's agents to manage inbox and there's agents to write emails and I think in maybe two years from now email will be a really flooded medium just with all the spams back and forth so it'll become too saturated, right? So we'll see. or gets really busy now with all the sales emails and all the agents collect them. If you think that happens to email, I'd actually, I was going to, I've been trying to find a way to ask you this. I'm curious how you think Notion itself survives agents at scale.

48:47Cause there's the argument that, um, what Claude is building and what OpenEye will probably do with Peter and, and what they're doing on agents with Codex, like, uh, maybe they want to eat you too. How does Notion, uh, stay, uh, firm in that kind of an environment where, you know, I was listening to Peter and Lex Friedman and the founder of OpenClaw, and he was saying like, most apps will just become API calls. So how do you avoid Notion being in that future? Or does that even matter? Is that okay? Yeah, I think it's a lot of discussion, like it's software dead, it's SaaS dead, right? To me, that's kind of like a tale of two cities.

49:24Like with agents, with language model, like how software is used and consumed and built is completely different. Like in some sense, software providers are no longer just building for humans. You're building for other language models and agents. Like if your product cannot be used by agents, I don't think the future is really promising for you. But if your product can be re-architected, can be properly adopted, used by agents, used or to use, I think that you can tap into brand new market that the tech industry have never seen before. Like for the longest time, tech mostly selling tools in the past 15 years, selling tools as a seed-based business model for other people to buy.

50:08But the larger market is not just selling tools, it's selling the work and services. That's about 10 times the market. So if you can make your product and your current stack and all the tooling you're building around this to tap into that market, that's much, much larger. And to me, that's the opportunity for all the tech companies. The question is, can you reshape your architecture to ride this wave? That's why we have been building Notion so many times to ride this wave.

50:36Ellis:Yeah, it's crazy to think about the back end versus the front end. That's what I was wondering about if you were to build Notion from the ground up with these tools, if the user interface would have been any different. I mean, it's definitely clear, you know, with y 'all's incredible design sensibility. And I think we talked about this once, Ivan, just like that eternal unsolvable tension, you know, between too many buttons and too few buttons. And how do you create some way for the team to know what's right, to know what's enough and what's too much? But it seems to me that with AI, a lot of this stuff could ostensibly be hidden.

51:14Ellis:And a lot of the buttons, you know, could go away. I mean, when you think about it, it's like moving your mouse and clicking something, maybe something that that 16 year old couldn't care less about versus just kind of speaking it even, which you're starting to see a lot of different speaking tools that register this stuff even more. That's why I've been using chat as an interface to manage my email inbox. Right. Like what's matter here is like I don't want you to click 50 button to archive emails. I can tell the customer agents, hey, archive what's I don't think is important today. So I think what's key here is, okay, fundamentally, the company kind of gets more nimble, shaped differently.

51:55But future businesses will be built by a small group of humans to start a company together. A lot of talk about one person building a billion-dollar business, but at least we believe it will still be a small group of people. So it will be some form of multiplayer. Multiplayer type of use cases are more important than single player. That's one form factor that's important. So when multiple people collaborate, what's the best form factor for multiple people to collaborate? Reading and writing text is still one of the best form factor. So you need a multiplayer canvas to do some form of documents, some form of writing.

52:32And when you have multiple people collaborate on strategy and writing, you also need to collaborate on what to do, who to do what. That basically gives us some kind of a project management shape of things. Whether you're managing to do for humans, managing to do for agents, you got some kind of Kanban board, right? To me, those are the core primitive to work with a small group of people and dedicate a lot of work to agents. Agent can write a lot of docs. Agent can do a lot of tasks. You can work with external Cloud Code and Cursor agent to create a new feature for your code base. But that's kind of your command palette, command dashboard for a small group of humans to work together, right?

53:14And lastly, you want to have the state of our models. So right now there's three or four model companies, and each one is leapfrogging each other every couple weeks. So for business buyers, they don't want to lock into any of the model providers. So there's a value to be neutral. There's value to be a switch line of all the model providers. So you want to have a multiplayer interface, collaborative environment that can use state of our models that are model agnostic and neutral and to be truly B2B rather than B2C. So that's the position we see that's brand new, wide open in the market. And that's what we're going after today.

53:54And that's how you think Notion will withstand OpenAI and Anthropic trying to go, hey, Notion, you're actually just an API call to our agent and our agent is going to traverse your interface, right? Because that's what they would probably like to do in the long run. I think we should open everybody. Because it should be more open rather than close. Right now, so many company SaaS provider close down their API, close down the endpoint. I think it's the moment actually to be opened up. So not just welcome human to read and write your product and services, welcome agent to do that. And you can win by providing a really good, thoughtful user interfaces.

54:32You can win by being Switzerland and play with the state of our models. Like whenever OpenAIR Entropic release a new model, the next day or the very same day, we have that model, right? Customers want that. And we can play neutral in these ways. And we already have the artifacts of the documents and Kanban board and to-dos and all the permissions and securities in the enterprise care about.

54:54Ellis:So when AI can use your apps, access your tools, use APIs, access other things through MCP, I mean, it seems to me that it's kind of turning a lot of services into at least more so of a dumb pipe than they have been. And if it's kind of being abstracted away, you wonder kind of what happens to these companies and the types of edges that they were able to achieve by having their own interface. Do you think that's what's behind some companies' resistance to being open? The future is really unknown. People don't know how this is going to play out. There's a lot of fog at work. with using some real-time strategy metaphors, right?

55:37So if you don't know the future, you tend to play it safe, right?

55:42Ellis:Don't want to accidentally drain your moat. You don't want to accidentally drain your data. Drain your sheep, yeah. Right. At least in Notion, we believe, like, when other people zig or should zag, when the entire software market sort of closed down their data, it's a time to actually embrace open, embrace developers, embrace getting CodingAgent to access your data and just be a really good in and out, be a really good human canvas to collaborate. That has been our strategy. So beyond our next week's customization release, we're going to release a lot more developer-facing features in the coming weeks and months.

56:18And those are embracing this openness of the platform. Notion historically hasn't been a very developer-centric company, but this is about to change because of this philosophy. So it sounds like the nuanced view you have is that the whole SaaS is over market sell-off thing maybe is overblown in some cases, but there are companies that if they are not designed for agents to traverse, you think they're gonna have a really hard time. And that's kind of gonna be the pecking order is you've embraced this, you're gonna be more open, you're gonna let agents crawl you, be open your endpoint, or you will be kind of left behind.

56:54Is that fair? That's fair. I think there is a change in terms of how fast can you re-architecture your product, right? So if a product has a lot of buttons, I don't want to speak poorly for anybody's product, but assuming a product that 90s, early 2000s software with like a thousand buttons on the screen, it will be really difficult for agents to understand how to use it. And if agents cannot use it, and if the majority of human knowledge were going to be done by agents, then you're going to lose market share. It's very simple. right second it's the business model transition so you no longer just selling seats but you should think about how do you sell in usage selling work selling outcomes there's a lot of buzzwords and nobody have a right answer in the market literally not a single company figures out outside some developer tools so everybody's just watching each other and but we're going to figure it out in the next year or two do you think you'll move to usage base because to my understanding you're mostly seed-based, right?

57:54That's what we're doing right now. Really? Yes. Yeah. That seems profound, and that seems like that could change the product a lot. Yeah, it's a lot of experiments. So a customer agent is our first usage-based product, and the customer is actually embracing it. We're talking about the ramp, Vercel, Clay, cursor of the world. If you just ask the value they get from those customer agents, they're saving meaningful real human hours, and that can translate into dollars in a substantially amount of away rather than just seats. So people are embracing because the benefit it creates for people.

58:31Ellis:So I'll make you sweat a little bit, Ivan. I know you were talking about kind of using email through the AI today. Why was it important to acquire the email app and the calendar app? Was that about having better access to some specific data, coming to own it? I know a lot of apps in the past want you to create, you know, their own pipes instead of using the Gmail pipes, et cetera? Yeah, we want to create our own pipes. So we bought the mail and calendar product two years ago, right? And at that point, we want to create our own pipes. It's still the plan long-term, but there's an even faster way to create value, which is to create the best tool used for mail and calendar.

59:13Ellis:Two ways in at different paces. It's like sooner rather than later, we're going to have computer and browser use. later, it'll just be the pipe. And we'll get there both ways. Yeah, you need to build good pipes, right? Like the model capability has been there for quite some time, pretty much a year now. What's missing are the infrastructure and the pipes to do knowledge work, the high quality tool use capability that works well together, how the permission pipe together. And that's what we're building. So we've been repositioning our mail and calendar team to build those pipes and make sure they work really, really well out of the box.

59:49Yeah, because like, why would you even need all these separate apps in the future? Why would you need a separate calendar app, email app, et cetera? That whole model seems like it's going to go away. I think calendar, email, TBD, calendar, you still need a very information dense way to see things. So the interface is still really critical. You can argue if you are professional salespeople or someone living in the inbox and you see like five, 10 emails at a time, interface still matters. For me, at least for my personal email habits, I usually pick out three or four important email at each given time.

1:00:21So interface is less important. So it really depends on how you, what kind of information density you want. And calendar is really hard to beat. Has been around for like 100 plus, hundreds of years, this kind of way of layout time. So I think calendar is here to stay.

1:00:35Ellis:Well, so how are you thinking about the product suite growing? I think I'm sure there are folks internally who are like, let's just create a bottom nav bar inside main notion that includes your docs, your calendar and your email. But then there's also the school of thought that having these as separate apps for any number of reasons is pretty important. I feel like the consumer appetite is definitely for simplicity as opposed to super app, at least here in the West. So what's your take on that? I personally changed my philosophy on this. Given how quick you can just build things with coding agents.

1:01:14hopefully soon enough we're going to create a release a dedicated custom agent or agent chat product that has all your business first chat needs in one place right and that's a dedicated use cases that's chat first notion with all the context in notion and you can use it to manage in calendar and email and this is a standalone app and we can build this fairly quickly because now a small team with a coding agent can just whip it out in a few weeks Ellis just started sweating with anticipation.

1:01:44Ellis:Yeah. I mean, as a designer, that's the number one goal, right? Ivan, you want to fill up the entire iPhone dock with your own apps? Is that not the goal for every designer? I want to turn them into black and white color. Mono color. Oh, man. I guess the only one left is Slack then, huh? Yes. Ivan, I wanted to ask you about the company more broadly. You all just did a pretty big tender offer. You let employees sell some stock. I noticed you waved your cliff, the one-year cliff for new employees. And I think everyone, you know, now that Figma went out, went public, people are wondering, when is Notion going to go public?

1:02:23Is Notion going to go public? How are you thinking about the next phase of the company like that? Yeah, to us, we share this message really clearly internally. It's most important for us to layer our business model into this usage-based business model. like the one we talked about earlier. Not a single software company has done this at scale yet, outside developer tools. And people are looking, it's wearing the knowledge work domain. It's one of the largest, not the largest market. But not a single product has do this kind of conversion into selling work to other knowledge work customers. So we need to do a good job, do this kind of transition while we're private.

1:03:04So we can take a lot of risks. We can move really fast. We can watch how the public market plays out. and this could happen in the next two or three or quarters, right? And when this is figured out, when we fully release custom agent with a new pricing model, with new business model, then we can talk about IPO timing. The only other person I've seen talk is clearly about that shift to usage-based as you is Brett Taylor at Sierra. That's how they've been operating from the beginning. And it makes sense, right? I mean, he puts it very plainly, like, why would you not charge for outcomes if you could?

1:03:37and you could maybe charge more. And I think people are so used to the kind of, frankly, lazier seat-based SaaS model. It's almost like a gym membership where you probably make a lot of money off of seats that don't get used, right? So I imagine, especially in AI, which is expensive to serve, and you guys are a huge token buyer from the labs already, I imagine there's a lot of trade-offs to going to that approach. but it seems like you have conviction that this is going to be the future and that every business like yours will eventually move to this and you all want to be early to that, right?

1:04:13Yes, because the market is much, much larger. Selling tools, selling seats, you're still in the tech industry. When you're selling work and usage and outcome, you're in the knowledge war economy. That's 10 times larger. right um and that's i will say that's the direction that more companies more software companies should look towards to not think about okay can someone vibe code their own products and they just shrink the cost of creating software that's more interfacing the margin looking but outer looking one is like there's entire knowledge for economy there's so much busy work in the world how do you how do you help people delegate some busy work that's a much larger market and more interesting market.

1:04:58Ellis:I know there have been a lot of different ways companies have been positioning themselves and you just bring up busy work again. I mean, how are y 'all working to differentiate yourselves at this point? I know there's kind of been the teammates angle from Notion, but it seems like when a lot of folks are talking about the same thing, it's got to be pretty tough. I mean, especially to enterprise customers. What are you guys saying these days? What's the latest and greatest. Yeah, if you think about the market, who are the players in this kind of knowledge workspace? We mentioned OpenClaw, right?

1:05:33OpenClaw is Mac mini, very much for tinkers. You can manage your personal knowledge or personal work with it. That's one space. It's a single player. It's fairly complex to use, but quite powerful, right? Sitting on one of the quadrants. And here we also have Claw Cowork, which is Claw's sister product for Claw Cow, tailored for knowledge or less for coding. And it works great with files. Lawyers loves it. Spreadsheet finance team loves it. And Entropy really doubled down on files, so their work's really good for all the formats, known formats. But because of the files, it's still largely single player.

1:06:17It's good for individuals. goals. I think the niche that we can occupy is this multiplayer from the get-go sits on the cloud and it's made for business, made for teamwork, not for personal use from the get-go. Right? And that's a niche that not many players are going after today. And we have a head start because we've been building a collaborative product for more than five plus years. We have all the canvases and building blocks from a document for project management tools. We've been building AI product for more than two, three years. So a lot of pieces are there and allow us to shift the customer agent as one of the first in industry to do those kinds of things for business.

1:06:57And that's a position we really want to nail for the next coming quarter.

1:07:02Ellis:A lot of talk about multiplayer, but I still can't see people typing live in Notion. That's the only thing I think Google Docs still has. No. Is that like a architecture thing? We have the architecture to build it. The question is just like, do we spend more time on the AI stuff or do we go back to do the Google Doc competition side of things? Just hire a couple more teenagers. You'll get it done in like a day. If you have your cousins or your nephews to recommend, we're happy to take them. While I have you, I feel like, you know, when you're on a meeting and presenting or working at the same time with people, it's maybe not as much watching them type, but being able to highlight specific things.

1:07:46Ellis:Like, look at this. You know what I'm saying? You see cursor and see highlight is the same architectural or implementation complexity. So I'll add one more to do for it. Or do you have an agent that is going to review the meeting notes? Are you running Notion AI right now? I am not. Of course you are. I'm not actually. Okay. What have been smart to do? I assume you guys will have recording so I can just... I mean, yeah, but you need it for your agent's context. I wasn't going to know what to tell you tomorrow morning. I think we're mostly covering the things we already talk about. We need you guys to ask better questions, right?

1:08:24Auto distribution.

1:08:26Ellis:We didn't cover anything new. Don't need my note taker. That's a great modern burn. This isn't a new one, but I did want to know what it felt like to get quoted alongside Steve Jobs and Bill Gates by Satya Nadella at Davos. I know you saw this. He really loved your manager of infinite minds. You wrote this essay that was really great. It got shared a lot around the holidays about how you're thinking about AI. And this phrase, manager of infinite minds, which is the kind of phrase Ellis would spend days in the shower trying to come up with for a founder. And Satya was giving you mad props for that.

1:09:04I have to imagine that was pretty wild to see that. Yeah. Some bunch of people text me in live. I'm very flattered. Microsoft is a company we look up to it's one of the companies that put PC, personal computer on every desk every home so it made this industry and Steve Jobs those people I look up to when I got into tech I think Satya is the real one because he actually came up, based on what I know, through the rank of Excel, building all the basically no-co-product of the 90s right uh open doc uh olay type of thing so he knows what he's talking about and uh and uh see him refreshing something i was uh uh we published during the break so it's a huge honor manager of infinite minds though how did you come up with that ellis needs to know i'm actually not sure it could just be notion agent regurgitated a thousand times and some words just show up then i probably play more of an editor role so wow that feels right so i kept it um i like to think in metaphors.

1:10:11Metaphor just like help me think through problems from different angles and also other people can relate it to. So like bicycle for the mind is Steve Jobs quote, right? But if you think about that, and we have internet in that since the 90s, we're still pedaling bicycle on information highways. So when I express this metaphor to my team and for other people, people get it. So what's coming, it's like we're going to can drive cars on information highways through AIs and people get that. Those are pretty powerful things.

1:10:42Ellis:Speaking of word choice, I know something we've discussed in the past, Ivan, is workspace. When that 16-year-old or that 18-year-old shows up, I mean, obviously they're not your ICP, but this is something that Microsoft and Google have been using for years. Is that still the right word? How are people going to talk about this in the future? Everybody started using the word workspace. I don't love that word. That's just become what it is. The meaning behind it is still important. I think it's still going to be around, which is you have a centralized place, a system record of things, a system record of workflows to power your project or power your business.

1:11:23And it will be a group of people looking at the same thing together. I think that will be around if anything become more important in this kind of agent first world, right? And how do you allow that, get different agent to access to this workspace, invite cloud co-agent, cursor agent coming to, based on understanding what your business is trying to do and start working on your workspace in GitHub and do something there. Does Notion still be around? I think what's different is in the past is the human doing a lot of information pushing from this workspace to the other workspace, which is a majority of knowledge work.

1:12:03Now we have this magical materials of infinite minds who can do this for us. And how do we elevate ourselves to not just managing one workspace? Can we manage in 10? Can we play a sim city of a thousand workspaces at the same time? Maybe it's possible. And the limiting factor again is human interface, in my opinion.

1:12:21Ellis:Here's bringing it full circle. My genius idea. If we want to appeal to all the strategy bros, we could just call it the war table, where you direct all your field troops to destroy your enemies. Or on the other hand, serve your customers with delightful solutions. Let's put into cloud or notion that I find better options. Ivan, just think about it. Just think about it. Okay, I'll keep thinking about it. We should let Ivan go. Ivan, we appreciate your time. It's a pleasure, gentlemen. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for joining us. I'll see you next time. Yeah, see you next time. Bye.

1:13:00Ellis:And that's it for this week's show. Don't forget to like, subscribe everywhere you get podcasts. Our website is access.show. And you can find us on video at AccessPod on YouTube. Thanks to Ivan from Notion for coming on this week. And if you liked this episode, please leave a five-star review, all five stars, or a thumbs up. Share it with a friend. Really makes a difference. And you can find my newsletter at sources.news. Hashtag sources.news. And you can find me at Hamburger on Twitter and at meaning.company. Access is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and the show is produced by Hooked Creators.

1:13:38Bye.