Notion's lost years, near collapse during COVID, staying small to move fast, building horizontal

We internally help other people and understand this. Internally we use the metaphor that Notion's a small bus. The bus, the smaller the bus, it's easier to turn corners, easier to accelerate, easier to maneuver.

Ivan is explaining Notion's internal metric called "talent density" which tracks revenue per employee rather than headcount, creating what he calls a "positive feedback loop" for attracting talent.

We don't try to track number of people but we try to track how talent-dense, revenue per employee we are. And people want to work with either more talented people. So it's a positive company group.

You can create progress through better abstractions. And that thing compounds faster, can catch up to all the things you build much quicker than you ever thought.

Only hardcore Lego fans care about Lego bricks. Most people care about Lego boxes. And they actually want the Lego box to be ready-made.

You want user. You want revenue. That's the product business. And building for something you want the world to have is building for your value. You have some taste. You have some aesthetic. There are different energy. You need to create a balance. Too much of yourself. Then there's no users. Then you're just doing our project. And too much for business, you're building a commodity.

We shape our tools. Then after, our tools shape us.

We call it sugar-coated broccoli. People don't want to eat the broccoli but people like sugar, so it gave them the sugar then hide your broccoli inside of it.

Simon is Notion's CTO who advocated against premature optimization, leading Notion to run on a single PostgreSQL database instance that nearly caused the company to shut down.

For the longest time, Simon's really good at don't do premature optimization, so for the longest time, we Notion runs on one instance of Postgres database... So there's a doomsday clock that when we're going to truly run out of this space to store everything in Notion and Notion got a complete shutdown.