I am a staff writer covering venture capital, startups and AI. I am based in San Francisco and work on the technology team. Previously, I covered tech billionaires as a wealth reporter. I graduated from Duke University, where I spent time as news editor for The Chronicle, the university's independent news organization.
Notion cofounder Ivan Zhao captivated Silicon Valley investors and everyday consumers alike with a sleek productivity app that went so viral its servers crashed. Now, the profitable startup’s CEO sees a rare opening to break Microsoft and Google’s dominance in the workplace by going early and aggressive on AI.started the company based on the idea that you should be able to do as much with a word processor as you can with a blank piece of paper.
TICKET MASTER | After joining as chief operating officer in 2018, Akshay Kothari answered support tickets for six months. “Every day, I realized how little I knew about the product. The different ways that people used Notion was just mind-boggling.”and Last returned to San Francisco triumphant. Notion was spreading globally on word of mouth alone. It hit its first million users in 2019. Students liked it for making to-do lists and taking class notes.
“Notion is a manifestation of value system and his urge to create. That’s why he doesn’t want to sell the company. I can’t imagine he even wants to go public.” People who know Zhao well say his new wealth and Notion’s success have hardly changed him. He still picks out all the furniture for Notion’s office—recent additions include curvy Artek armchairs and the De Stijl art movement’s angular Red and Blue Chair —though he has had to compromise in some ways: Shoes are now allowed. “Notion is a manifestation of his value system and his urge to create,” MacInnis says. “That’s why he doesn’t want to sell the company.
One of those hires was Kothari. During a routine investor update in 2018, Zhao surprised him with a job offer: chief operating officer. Kothari was living in Bangalore, where he ran LinkedIn’s 1,000-person India operation and his wife was overseeing construction of their new house, but he was willing to relocate to California after a few days of playing with Notion’s new 2.0 product.
But their rivals are among the biggest companies in tech—Google, which injected dozens of AI features into its work suite, and Microsoft, whose new collaboration app, Loop, looks eerily similar to Notion.
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