Akshay Kothari
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Akshay Kothari’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Founder mode is really good if you have a founder who's right a lot. If they're not, God bless that company. There's more cash in Notion's bank today than the history of its race. So it's like in some ways, like we've produced cash. We haven't spent any of it. I think the thing I would say about Sequoia, I think it is probably the best brand.
Similar to how we demand excellence from our employees, I think they demand excellence from their companies.
I didn't really think of my job as those titles. My job was COO. My primary job was to help scale the business and the company and let my co-founders, Ivan and Simon, stay focused on the product. And so that meant whatever the company needed, I would jump in and try to figure it out. How did I do it? This is actually kind of interesting. So my background is product, right?
And Ivan told me to join and take care of everything except product. And so I essentially put myself on all these new functions and just try to learn on the job. So one thing I realized
was even though I had never really done any of these things before, actually like first principles thinking and like systems design that you learn in product development actually like applies a lot to these functions too.
Yeah, so let's say the first job I had at Notion was actually like there are three people who reported to me were support, customer support, right? Now, typically, as the number of tickets or as the number of requests go up, the first thing that people typically do is they just add more people. They sort of like divide the tickets by productivity and then they come up with some number of people.
The product manager in me was like, well, we could build a better system, right? And so we could build better tools so that each support person can do more every day. But also, once you have enough of these customer tickets, then the next role you want to hire would be something called a product ops. Product ops would take all this feedback and synthesize it and share it with the engineers.
So one thing Ivan and I did in the early years, we created this canonical database of about 200 types of requests that would come, which would map to features. And we trained our support team to tag every request that come in with one of those 200 tags. You have to do that. That was part of the job.
Every morning at 6 a.m., we wrote a script which would take all these tags from Intercom and write it against these database tags in Notion. And so essentially what every engineer at Notion had was a real-time view of what people were talking about yesterday or the last week or the last month.
And so if you could see like, oh, wow, people are talking about the Android app over the last month and it's really gone up, they can go in and start solving that problem. And we use this tag across the tools we had, right? So for example, if you were working on Android, you could essentially put that tag in intercom and you can basically see all the customer support tickets that have come.
So you could essentially, in many ways, you don't even have to hire a researcher. If you put all these things together, we didn't have to hire as many support people. We did not have to hire a product ops person. And we also did not have research early days. In fact, all of these were given to the engineer directly to be able to tap into that feedback and actually solve that problem.
Everybody is starting to question things that we've been taught about this specific org structure and the fact that Jensen has like 40 direct reports and doesn't do one-on-one. So I think it's actually kind of good that we're reopening what does this lead to? And I think every leader has to sort of question what is sort of the best way to run their company.
If you go back to Notion and sort of why we did some of these things, I think a lot of it came from Ivan really prioritizing keeping a very small team. And that part was not done just because we thought we would be profitable because of that. But I think we did it because it really meant that we can stay a lot more nimble by doing that, right?
The best power founder has is like the veto power. And Ivan used that a lot when I was in the early days. Like, you know, I remember, I don't know how many salespeople we'd interviewed for the first six months. And Ivan was like, well, this person is quite good, but not great. So let's keep looking.
And I think for up to about 500 people, we're about 700 people today, but up to 500 people, the last interview was always with Ivan or myself. So we met literally everyone before. And because we did that, I think it already sort of forced a certain rigor inside the company. But also in general, we were okay with enduring the pain.
Like a lot of times you feel like this person needed to be hired yesterday and we would be okay waiting a few weeks, few months until we found the best person for that job.
I think we took a slightly different approach where we did try to keep the team lean. And we felt like it might feel like short term, it's slowing us down. But in the long term, keeping the team small allowed us to move a lot faster.
Today, all of Notion with all the different surfaces we have under 20 product managers, and we have about 12 designers, 12 designers sort of design the entire surface of Notion, including calendar, and it really allows us to move faster. Like it's not a committee of design or committee of product managers where someone's only responsible for a very small part of the problem.
And so because we are a lean team, we can actually take a little bit longer because we're not trying to hire a lot more people. We're trying to hire maybe a couple people every year. And it also forces a certain prioritization that makes you a lot more effective, right?
Instead of just taking the fundraising money that you took, hiring a lot of people, saying yes to all the projects, I think that actually comes at a cost. The cost is that your bandwidth is now split among so many different projects. And so I think you may feel like you're going faster by hiring more people and saying yes to more projects, but in effect, it is actually going slower.
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