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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Appearances
So we've actually chosen the path where we're doing fewer things and doing them better.
Initially we, we, we didn't have our values codified. And so a lot of the initial final round interviews was a little bit around our intuition where we felt like whether this person is going to be actually a good fit for the company. Um, after about, I think when we were 50 people, we actually like did the exercise of codifying the values. And we have four values. We are owners of the mission.
We are pace setters. We are truth seekers and we are kind and direct.
To answer your question, we wouldn't take someone who's nasty and direct. But no one would. There's a few nuances to this. If you take that example of kind and direct, the and direct part has an extra signal there. It's not like be nice to each other. We want people to be direct, which means that we are inviting people to be able to debate internally.
Initially, you sort of have to get a feel for the shape of what you're trying to do in this function. And I think, so in many cases, we didn't go to hiring the leader first. A lot of these functions, maybe I started doing the job myself, sort of shaping it to sort of what we wanted to do in Notion.
A lot of these functions, we also hired the ICs first, like individual contributors who can start to like do the work.
I think the people who do well at Notion are builders, and we sort of expect even the execs and leaders to be builders. I think when we hired people who are VPs or CXOs at big tech firms, they have a machinery around how their work happens. And because Notion is so small and so lean, those people had a tough time at Notion because A, like that machinery didn't exist.
But also when we did have a crisis or a moment of like solution that needed to be found, I think they typically sort of went to needing another headcount or sort of blaming on the systems or so forth. Right. Which actually didn't work so well.
The one I would change a lot if I could, or the one that I probably regret not doing the right way is probably sales. I was optimistic. I thought, you know, I think we could do sales a different way. And I thought our salespeople could be more consultative. They don't have to worry about Coda. They just have to make sure the customer is being successful and the product will grow and expand.
And what I learned the hard way is that... we try to reinvent the wheel on something that has been done in a specific way that does work really, really well that we shouldn't have. But B, I think the thing that I misunderstood was actually some of the best salespeople, they join because there is a quota, because they can hit a number, because they can outperform that number.
And so actually not having that and not having the attribution really hurt us, I think, the first year or two.
The way we looked at it was just the percentage of business that is driven by sales or sales-assisted wasn't growing as much as we would have hoped. But there's actually an interesting piece here around sales at product-led growth companies, which is that in many ways, product sells itself at these companies. And
You think you can do sales a slightly different way because you have all these leads, right? And that actually is also a blessing and a curse. Yes, it's a blessing because you have all these leads, but it's also a curse because I think your broader team starts to depend on it. It's like, oh, the product is not really signing up the right lead. This is why I'm not able to close sales, right?
Which if you didn't have the product, if you didn't have anybody signing up on your website, you'd still be going out and trying to find the lead. And so you'd be sort of complaining about that part a bit less.
Probably like three years in. So that would have been like three years ago. We've obviously now moved very much into like, you know, we have an incredible new sales leader, Pravesh, who comes from like, you know, an enterprise sales background. And I think he's brought a certain amount of energy and DNA that like I didn't have. Right. That's the other thing.
It's like you need someone who can really rally the troops and operate society a different way rather than like a systems builder, product thinker. It doesn't work. I can't stand on the stage of sales kickoff and like rally the troops as much as Pravesh can. And I think if you're like a sales account executive, you want to see that. You want to see that.
You want to see that you're crushing your quotas and you're really building for that. And so if I had to do, back to your question, if I had to do it one function all over again, I would do sales. And the way I would do it is to not try to like overthink it, just do it the way it is run, like a proper sales machine. I think it would have saved three years in that journey. Yeah.
So that part is painful.
I think one of the challenges for Notion has always been the fact that it's a horizontal product, right? And so I think the question people ask is like, oh, is it for consumers or is it for large enterprises? And the answer has always been yes. And I still very much believe in that sort of horizontal-ness. But one of the things I'm starting to realize is like, instead of defending the answer,
or trying to pick, we're much more forthright with our employees about the kind of company we are. How so? I think the best way I've seen more recently is Parker at Rippling sort of calls it a compound company, which is that it is this big mission that we're building many different products and they all connect through the data layer. I think in many ways, Notion is a compound company as well.
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