Notion’s Ivan Zhao: The Refounder

About this episode

Ivan Zhao, founder and CEO of Notion, joins me to introduce a new contender in the founder mode debate: jazz mode. Ivan has a different take than Jack Dorsey's circular org chart or Brian Armstrong's player-coach approach. He thinks hierarchy is human nature, and that you can't flatten it away but you can build a company that improvises like a jazz band instead of marching in formation. Notion has roughly 60 ex-founders on staff and a deliberately decentralized structure to make that work. We get into why Ivan rebuilt his engineering org around a barbell — super junior ICs paired with very senior architects — which is the opposite of what most AI-pilled CEOs are doing right now. He explains why building with language models is "more like brewing beer than engineering a bridge," and how Notion's first candidate interview no longer involves a resume. Ivan is the king of refoundings. He's done it twice, once from a small apartment in Kyoto with five employees left, once from Cancun the day he got early access to GPT-4. When I was running HubSpot, I described our scale-up years as boring compared to what's happening now. Ivan's advice for any CEO who's calcified and wondering if it's