#581 Akshay Kothari | COO Notion

About this episode

Our guest today grew up in India, the middle of three brothers who all came to the US to study. He describes his life as a series of plans that did not work out, and of turns that ended up better than any plan precisely because of that. Instead of one of his dream universities he went to Purdue, instead of investment banking he joined a family office in Silicon Valley, and when his work visa did not come through in 2008, he started at Stanford, in the very week Lehman Brothers collapsed. A class that required students to ship a product within eleven weeks gave birth to the news app Pulse, which was later acquired by LinkedIn. There he led the international business as VP Product, until a chance breakfast with Ivan Zhao changed everything. He had backed Ivan’s startup Notion as an angel investor in 2013, his first investment after selling Pulse. For four years he watched the team search for its path, and at times thought his money was gone. When Notion finally took off in 2018, he joined as employee number eight, with the mandate to do “everything except product”. Today he is Chief Operating Officer and has built support, sales, marketing, customer success, people, legal and fina