Notion Takes On Google Docs And Microsoft Office By Being Like Lego | Forbes - video Dailymotion

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Notion is a productivity tool powered by AI that is making inroads on Google Docs and Microsoft Office. The company is a standout on the 2024 Forbes AI 50 list and a steady stream of Notion tutorials can be found on social media, which speaks to its rapid rise in popularity.   In this video, Forbes staff writer and AI 50 list editor Kenrick Cai sat down with Notion cofounder and CEO Ivan Zhao in Notion's San Francisco headquarters to learn more about the company's philosophy and approach to business.   Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/lists/ai50/   Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

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00:00 What we do at work, what we do in life, has fundamentally come to our values.

00:05 What do we want to bring more into this world? I was truly inspired by

00:10 the early computing pioneers like Enkelberg, their wish to using computer to augment human intellect.

00:17 Hi everyone, I'm Kenric Kai. I'm a staff writer at Forbes and I'm here with Ivan Zhao, the co-founder

00:27 and CEO of Notion. Ivan, thanks for taking the time to chat with me. Our pleasure. Absolutely.

00:34 So we're talking about Notion, which is making our AI50 list of the most promising artificial

00:43 intelligence startups for the first time, I believe. So tell me about Notion. It's this

00:50 productivity software that I go on YouTube, I go on TikTok, there are thousands and thousands of

00:56 tutorials of people explaining what is Notion, how to use Notion, how to use Notion without going

01:03 crazy. There's so many different ways to use Notion, it seems like. But how would you describe

01:10 what Notion is fundamentally underneath it all? We're generally known as a productivity software

01:15 that can do everything for your work and for your life. People use Notion for writing their

01:20 documents, keep track of their notes, manage company knowledge base, managing your tasks,

01:26 projects, you can use for a lot of different things. The reason why Notion is so flexible

01:31 because we did not start as a productivity software. We were inspired by early computing

01:38 ideas that we should allow everybody to create their own tools. Here I have a portrait

01:44 of early computing pioneer Douglas Engelbart. When I was in last year of my college, I read

01:51 one of his papers, Augmented Human Intellect. It was written in the 60s. He did a fabulous demo

01:58 to show how people can use a computer to do almost everything in their personal life and work life.

02:04 That inspired me to create Notion, which is like the Legos for software that people can use for

02:11 all different kinds of things in their business and in their personal lives. I want to go all

02:16 the way back to the very start before you even had a prototype for Notion. I was speaking to

02:24 Josh Kopelman, one of the founders of First Round Capital. You had a meeting with him

02:30 back in the day when he was like, I think, top 10 on the Forbes Midas list, one of the

02:37 top venture capitalists in the world. He told me that your pitch to him was very unique because

02:45 usually a founder will go to him to show a demo or a prototype or at least a screenshot of the

02:52 product. When you first met him, my understanding, you didn't have a prototype yet and you just had

02:58 a conversation with him about paper. What do you remember from that? What was the idea there? How

03:06 did that relate to the idea you had for Notion that was in your head but not in prototype yet?

03:10 Paper's interesting cut is so malleable and people can use for so many different things

03:16 and they're extremely approachable too. You can write things on it. If you have a zero copy

03:23 machine, you can copy a hundred different things to it. We cannot do that with software today.

03:30 We still can't after all those years, even when we talk about AI. We still cannot do that for

03:35 the software people use every day. It's not as versatile as paper.

03:41 The goal behind Notion is how do you make software like paper, be the container of

03:49 information, can scale up, scale down, can be modified by kids in the kindergarten,

03:56 all the way to bureaucrats using paper to run businesses. That's the spirit behind Notion.

04:05 I think what's got Josh and it's like, wow, someone actually thinking about a problem like that.

04:11 Gotcha. This was 2013, 2014, you raised from a number of angel investors and early

04:21 venture capitalists. I think what a lot of people might not realize is that

04:25 first couple of years of the company, by 2015, you guys were almost out of money.

04:32 You took a trip to Japan with your co-founder Simon last. In these months, 2015 going into 2016,

04:41 something changed there. By the time that you guys launched the 1.0 version of Notion

04:48 in the summer of 2016, suddenly there was this user traction and people really liked the new

04:55 product. What was the challenge initially and what changed during that period that allowed

05:00 the product to suddenly go viral? Like I talked about earlier, our mission is to allow people to

05:06 make and tinker their own software. It's to augmenting human intellect. Then the question

05:13 is what kind of product is this? Our realization, my realization is most people don't want to

05:20 create software. Nobody wake up tomorrow and say, "Hey, I want to create my own project."

05:25 Nobody do that. People want to solve the problem in front of them,

05:30 use the off-the-shelf software, maybe tinker that a little bit down the road.

05:34 The shift for me and for us, Notion at that point is we cannot give people a software

05:41 building software tool. We have the disguise notion as the general purpose productivity software,

05:48 like the document tool, like the spreadsheet, like the project management tracker people use

05:54 every day. Almost sugarcoat the broccoli a little bit. Once people get familiar with Notion,

06:01 see we're solving people's daily problem, then they realize actually this Notion software is

06:07 made from Lego pieces and people can tinker and modify just like all the kids can change

06:12 their Lego toy once they get used to the initial set. That's the aha for us. With that, we rebuild

06:19 the product with the latter philosophy and become a lot more approachable and can directly fit into

06:26 people's work and life really quickly. That's how we start getting some tractions.

06:32 Can you tell me about what are the most common ways that people are using AI in Notion today?

06:36 There are primarily three different ways to use Notion with AI today. First,

06:42 these are our most popular use cases for writing. Notion is a document editor. Rather than you go

06:48 to an AI chat product, copy paste the information and back to your document or notes product,

06:53 Notion has AI baked in. It can give you the first draft, help you improve your writing,

06:59 help you do the translation, all the goodies right inside where you write. That's number one.

07:04 Number two, we also offer a database and spreadsheet product. AI can automatically

07:10 help you update and organize all the information in your databases. Number three, most recently,

07:16 we offer this product called AI Q&A. Notion is a knowledge-based product as well.

07:23 Instead of using search to find the related document and to read about it and find your

07:29 answer, Notion can give you the answer right away. We call this Notion Q&A is the perfect memory for

07:37 your team or ask if you have a perfect memory yourself. I no longer need to organize my

07:43 document notes in Notion. I just dump into Notion. If I have a question, I can just answer on my

07:48 phone, ask on my phone, and I got the answer instantly. They fundamentally change how I use

07:52 Notion, how many people use Notion in their work and life. >> You don't have to be so organized

07:58 and particular and neat about it because the AI can kind of do it. >> Yeah, that's the power of

08:02 language model, right? You truly understand what you put in there. It can help you summarize and

08:07 help you give the gist of things. You no longer have to read everything. It's truly magical. You

08:12 really have to try it. >> So you guys last raised funding in 2021 at a $10 billion valuation.

08:19 But famously, at least in Silicon Valley circles, for a couple of years before that, you sort of

08:27 had what you've described as an anti-VC reputation. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

08:33 How did that reputation develop? What was your approach to fundraising?

08:39 Why did you not want to raise funds? Why did that reputation develop in the first place? And then

08:45 what changed that led you to raise from some of these top investors such as Sequoia Capital

08:51 and Index Ventures? >> Yeah. The anti-VC reputation is unfortunate. I'm not anti-VC at all.

08:59 >> You don't agree with the reputation. >> In fact, my fiancée is a VC herself.

09:05 It came about because we realized my co-founder Simon and I can do a lot of the

09:14 thing ourselves. So like, he's a programmer, designer. I'm a programmer, designer.

09:20 I can do marketing. I can do brand. So notionally, we always keep the company very small.

09:24 Everybody does everything. We grow very slowly, try to hire really carefully and still is today.

09:31 Because we keep the team size small, we burn very little. We don't burn. We become profitable

09:38 really quickly. Once you become profitable, you control your destination. >> Yeah. Does that mean

09:45 everyone is working a lot harder, spending a lot more time on the product? Or is there a way to be

09:50 efficient without... >> Yes, for both. People need to work harder because we're small in the team

09:58 size, but it's also a lot more fun, a lot more creative. People can wear different hats. So for

10:04 example, our designers, most of them can code. Our engineers are very product-minded. When designers

10:11 can code, when some problem becomes really hard to design, you change their engineering architecture.

10:17 When something is really hard to build, you change the design. It's almost where can you squeeze the

10:21 air bubble to the easiest corner. When people can have multiple contacts in their mind, they make

10:27 better decisions. They move much faster. They come up with creative solutions. >> So I wrote a magazine

10:32 story about Notion, about you, and talked to a lot of people that have been familiar with the company,

10:39 familiar with the product, familiar with you for a couple years. One of the things that

10:43 came up over and over again was this idea of how the office, from the furniture to the aesthetics,

10:51 the design, is kind of an extension of the Notion software, the Notion product, or vice versa.

10:57 Can you talk to me a little bit about how you think about your philosophy with design and how

11:02 that applies to what you're building with Notion? >> I think at the end of the day, what we do at work,

11:08 what we do in life, has fundamentally come to our values. What do we want to bring more

11:18 into this world? I was truly inspired by the early computing pioneers like Enkelberg.

11:26 Their wish to using computer to augment human intellect. That's my value. That has been the

11:34 value of this company. I'm inspired. We're inspired by timeless furnitures created by

11:41 people like Alto. We want to create high-quality, timeless software, beautiful software as well.

11:49 All those values are connected. You can learn more through history, inspired through history

11:56 of what people did in the past or in other industries, in art, in science, in films.

12:03 You can steal from all over the places and find out what's truly what are your values and what

12:10 can you create to bring to the rest of humanity. That's what inspired me, inspired us at Notion

12:17 to building software, building a ubiquitous tool for next generation of people.

12:22 >> Ivan, thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the thoughtful conversation.

12:26 >> Thank you.

12:27 >> Thank you.

12:27 [ Applause ]

Notion Takes On Google Docs And Microsoft Office By Being Like Lego | Forbes

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