Keep pulling the thread on Ivan Zhao.
Notion's strategy for the past five-plus years has been to consolidate various knowledge work tools and contexts into a single platform to enable the creation of AI agents.
Ivan Zhao believes the current AI paradigm shift is as revolutionary as the invention of the personal computing medium itself.
The most significant shift for SaaS companies in the AI era is moving from selling tools that facilitate human work to selling AI systems that perform the work itself.
The company Ramp reduced its software tooling costs by 70% after fully migrating its internal operations onto the Notion platform.
After gaining early access to GPT-4 in late 2022, Notion's co-founders built the first version of their AI product in a week and a half, launching it one month before the public release of ChatGPT.
Ivan Zhao rates the level of craft in the Notion product as a 6.5 or 7 out of 10, stating that pushing for a perfect 10 would negatively impact the business and utility.
Ivan Zhao believes that software naturally degrades over time due to entropy, citing Microsoft Word on Windows as an example of a product burdened by excessive layers of functionality.
Matt McInnes, founder of Inkling and Ivan Zhao's only former boss, was the first investor in Notion.
Ivan Zhao predicts it will take half a decade to a full decade for the industry to discover the novel use cases for AI, as current applications still mimic old paradigms.
AI agents have not yet succeeded in general knowledge work because the required tools and context are fragmented across dozens of different applications.
Notion recently launched an enterprise search product that integrates with over 10 external data sources, including the Google, Microsoft, and Atlassian stacks.
Ivan Zhao believes building AI products is fundamentally different from traditional software, comparing it to "brewing beer" (organic, probabilistic) rather than "building bridges" (deterministic engineering).