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By Lenny Rachitsky · with Ivan Zhao · lennysnewsletter.com · @lennysan on X · YouTube · LinkedIn
Ivan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Notion, shares his path from a small town in China through programming contests and self-taught English to building Notion. The conversation covers Notion's lost early years, its near-collapse from database scaling during COVID, the trade-offs of staying small and lean, and the challenges of building a horizontal, bundled productivity platform.
01Key learnings
- Hide a grand vision inside a product people already want: Notion's 'sugar-coated broccoli' approach meant shipping familiar productivity software while the developer-empowering vision stayed underneath.
- Test whether your early adoption comes from real users, not just from your own taste: Ivan warns that building too much for yourself yields a research project, while building too much for the business yields a commodity.
- Don't be afraid to reset the codebase when the foundation is wrong, and favor better abstractions, since a small core can compound into complex, valuable behavior.
- Keep the team small by leaning on people who can cover several functions and by investing in systems and tools, since internal communication overhead grows fast with headcount.
- Be wary of letting momentum or competitor features drive you; shipping features that don't fit your core building-block philosophy caused Notion a year or more of misdirected work.
- For horizontal products, find a broad entry use case (like note-taking) that creates a large top of funnel, then sell packaged 'solution' boxes to enterprises rather than raw bricks.
- Plan ahead on infrastructure scaling so you don't hit hard limits; Notion nearly ran out of database capacity during COVID before sharding.
- Treat leadership storytelling as a craft: moving from one-to-one influence to one-to-many communication is a skill that must be learned as the company grows.
“Tools are extensions of us. And once they extend us, once we shape them, once we bring them to world, they can come back to…”Ivan Zhao · Lenny’s Podcast · 00:01:15
“We call it sugar-coated broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli but people like sugar, so give them the sugar then hide the broccoli…”Ivan Zhao · Lenny’s Podcast · 00:13:47
“Too much of yourself, then there's no users. Then you're just doing our project. You're just doing a research project. And too much for a…”Ivan Zhao · Lenny’s Podcast · 00:22:17
02Frameworks mentioned
Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.