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
I think the thing I would say about Sequoia, having gotten to work with them more in the last few years, is that similar to how we demand excellence from our employees, I think they demand excellence from their companies. And so if you like that pressure, if you like... wanting to build a generational company, I think you get the best set of questions from them.
You get a lot of really nuanced feedback and data points from them. Right now, we work with Pat Grady. I mean, Pat has seen literally every generational SaaS company closely, like really closely. And everything is memory. So he can essentially tell you, you are where...
And actually, one of the things that I've also realized is like, it's not just like business performance. I remember one quarter where we missed our, this was maybe like a year and a half ago or something where we missed a quarter where we sort of like missed our number. I remember, you know, saying like, oh, you know, here are like seven things we're doing to like close the number gap.
And I remember both Mike Vernal and Pat said, I think you guys are thinking about this wrong. The question is not whether you can hit this quarter or not. The question is whether you can actually really scale this product to 100 million users and beyond, because that's the future we see with Notion.
It was a good reminder where it's like, wow, they sort of believe in this long term mission and they're sort of the long termism is sort of like helped us recalibrate in terms of what we should do.
These rounds were low dilution. I think there's essentially 2% to 3% ownership that we gave out. We were able to essentially not give out board seats. We were able to do it in a way that felt like we could almost recruit a board in the future, which we wanted to do not just because someone is investing money, but someone who could be a long-term board member for us.
So actually, like, this is something we've been thinking a lot about. And actually, it's actually not that different from thinking about recruiting an executive team. There's like five seats that we would want to fill. I think I would want one person to be like a CEO whisperer, almost like a CEO coach, ideally, like a former CEO who's done that job.
I think CFOs always would like a partner in having an amazing audit chair. Then there's probably a person who's in go to market. And this could be like either someone who's deep in sales or deep in marketing, and you can pick whichever one you need, you're going to need help with in the long run.
Then there's the other, like the governance and like the compensation committee is typically a person who you could match with your head of people. And what you could do if you design it this way, you could also let's say, you know, fifth one is an investor who actually gives you like a macro perspective or how things are going on.
But if you design this well, you could almost have a like a one on one to one coach for your executive team to your board that you that you sort of put together, where they as they're growing in their careers, and they're sort of like figuring out the next phase and the next phase after that, they have an incredible board member who's investing in them. And so I
I don't actually, this is probably pretty rare. Like, I don't know another company that has done that. But I think a lot of this sort of came from first principles thinking, what would we need?
People are rethinking what org structures should be and how many people should report to you. I think people should rethink what boards should be. There is an element of if you had to recreate what a board meant, I think just writing it down. But people don't get to do that, right?
Because I think we got lucky in that the ownership and some of the cash flow positive really helped not dilute as much and not need as much capital. I also think some of the investors I know, someone I really respect is Jeff Wiener, who was my old boss at LinkedIn. Ivan and I actually tried very hard to get him to be a board member, you know, our first board member at Notion.
And he said no, because deep down he wanted to be, you know, the CEO's coach. And he said some of the board stuff around, I think, requires him to think about the company before he can think about the CEO.
Exactly.
You know, with kids sort of reread some of the Indian epics. And so there's a part in Mahabharata called the Bhagavad Gita. And some of those principles in Bhagavad Gita are so timeless that I think are worth reading again.
By the way, these two questions are really awesome questions that I think I found them in Lulu's application. I think job application is fantastic. So there's an essay. I think one of the inspirations for Notion has been Alan Kay and his work. He's one of the computing pioneers. He actually wrote an essay in 2008 where he said why the computer revolution still has not happened.
And he sort of talks in detail about why a lot of the computing devices are mostly used for consumption. It's not used for creating things that the pioneers had thought about.
I personally would have loved Charlie Munger. Talk about like long-term thinking, long-term business building. Sad that he passed away, but him and Warden are sort of like my heroes.
So for me, I think I graduated 2010. I won't go into too much detail, but I built this like small little app in my class project at Stanford that became a company called Pulse. And I remember meeting an investor, Emily Melton, was at Mayfield then, then she went to DF Change, now she runs her own fund.
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