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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The building blocks that we're building really do serve consumers all the way to large enterprises. The reason the flywheel works is that we actually did the study recently and we found that something like 46% of our business, it can be attributed back to someone using Notion in their personal life.
Everybody I spoke to who was using it at a large company with wall-to-wall usage, they all started because their spouse is using it for their home project, or they're using it with their kids on something, or their niece told them about it, or I saw my uncle having their portfolio on it, and so on and so forth. So we know that this part is very important for us.
It's almost like a part of distribution that happens naturally because it's a consumery product, but it doesn't pay the bills. The business is growing on the B2B side.
I would say in many ways, like Notion is kind of unique in that the company became cash flow positive pretty early on. You know, we did not have to spend a lot of money or spend a lot of time on sort of fundraising. There's very little external pressure on Notion.
It's a huge, like once you get there, it's actually a huge time save. So I think I'll just talk a little bit about Notion. It's very nuanced, but we got there pretty early. I think we got there like five years ago. What it did was it meant that suddenly you feel in control of your destiny. You don't have to think about, you don't have an end date.
You don't feel like you're going to run out of money in X months or X years, Y years away. And what that means is you can choose to raise money if you have a good need for it, but you don't have to. All the time spent there could be spent back into building a better product and selling to customers.
People should have a deep understanding for what long-term valuation metrics look like, right? What do you mean by that? I mean, you just look at historically what is the revenue multiple or PE multiple of SaaS companies.
So you can raise on hope today, but in the very long run, unless you're trying to just get acquired, you will be valued at a multiple of your revenue or a multiple of your cash flows that you're generating. And they tend to be an average of like, you know, what, 5 to 10x on the revenue multiple side. And the way that you can increase your multiple is by three things, right?
I think in my view, one is you can increase it by having a faster growth rate. You can increase it by having a better cash flow margin. And you can increase it by operating in an industry or in a space where the terminal growth rate can still be pretty high.
So I think as long as you have a deep understanding of those things, and I think as long as you have a good understanding of what you're going to use the money for, you can build towards that, great. I think if you're hoping that we're going to be back to 100 times revenue, 100 times ARR valuation, I think that's a bit challenging.
I think it's some of it like I also have to credit Ivan here because in the early days, I think, you know, you know, this lot of investors did knock on our doors. A lot. A lot. A lot. And I think did some crazy things to get attention from you guys. Correct. Correct. And so literally every quarter, Ivan and I would discuss is like, should we do it?
I think primarily Ivan was very focused on is money the constraining factor right now? It's like if we had more money in the bank, would we spend it on hiring faster?
We raised $50 million at $2 billion at the start of COVID, like pretty much like a couple of weeks into COVID in 2020, early 2020.
It actually came about really fast and actually goes back to being cashflow positive and not needing it. I think you sort of are able to do... You're able to break the rules. You're able to break the rules because there's more demand than supply.
But the reason we raised that round was also, I think was an interesting one where we didn't have a need for $50 million, but we raised it because we saw that the talent was flocking to safety. where all the people we wanted to hire needed some signal to say like, oh, this company is stable and I'm willing to work there.
And so in March or April 2020, again, we didn't have the cash needs, but we needed an index and CO2 stamp that I'm putting $50 million in this company that is growing and that actually really helped us recruit and like break that.
Frankly, I don't know. I think this might sound weird, but I think we're just like not wired that way. Like in some ways.
Yeah. In some ways, like 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. And some people might look at it and be like, hey, you're not really utilizing the cash that is in hand. Are you being aggressive enough? Yeah. So that's a question people ask.
One of the things I learned, this was actually one of my favorite tours of duty inside Notion was when I was running finance for a year. First of all, I thought finance, like at least before I actually worked on it directly, I thought this is just like bookkeeping, stay out of trouble, like stay compliant.
But only if I worked for a year and I sort of got introduced to the whole world of FP&A, biz ops. And I I was like, wow, this is so strategic. And once you get to a certain scale, so Notion got to about 100 million in ARR a couple of years ago, and you realize like, oh, there's all these interesting comps you can look at, public comps that you can measure your performance against as well, right?
Showing 41–60 of 120 · page 3 of 6
← Previous
Next →