$10 Billion Productivity Startup Notion Wants To Build Your AI Everything App

Forbes

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 it's going aggressive on AI.  Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrickcai/2024/04/11/10-billion-productivity-startup-notion-wants-to-build-your-ai-everything-app/?sh=2b0482f66079  Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1  Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:  https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript  Stay Connected Forbes newsletters: https://newsletters.editorial.forbes.com Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com  Forbes covers the intersection of entrepreneurship, wealth, technology, business and lifestyle with a focus on people and success.

Transcript

00:00 Here's your Forbes daily briefing for Friday, April 12th.

00:05 Today on Forbes, $10 billion productivity startup Notion wants to build your AI everything

00:12 app.

00:14 Ivan Zhou had started his company based on the idea that you should be able to do as

00:18 much with a word processor as you can with a blank piece of paper.

00:22 Josh Koppelman, frequent Midas lister and co-founder of First Round Capital, was so

00:27 impressed by Zhou's unusual pitch, which involved a lengthy digression into the origins

00:31 of paper, that he wrote the biggest check in the $2 million seed round in 2013.

00:37 Koppelman says, "I remember walking out and thinking, 'This is different from any

00:42 founder pitch I've ever taken.'

00:44 There was no screenshot, no mock-up.

00:46 It was very conceptual, but I felt like I understood at the highest level what he wanted

00:50 to do."

00:53 But Koppelman was in the minority.

00:55 Two years later, people didn't understand the company, called Notion.

00:59 Notion was the software editor Zhou had built, and he hadn't figured out a compelling

01:03 way to explain it.

01:05 Few saw a need for a tool to design personalized computer programs.

01:08 When he saw First Round employees using Notion, it seemed to Zhou that they were doing it

01:13 "out of pity," he recalls.

01:17 He admits, "The software wasn't good enough yet.

01:20 You know you can get better.

01:21 You know what better feels like, but you don't quite know how to get there."

01:26 In a last-ditch attempt to save the company, Zhou and co-founder Simon Last laid off all

01:31 their employees, sublet their San Francisco office, and moved to Kyoto, Japan, to cut

01:36 costs.

01:37 A $150,000 emergency loan from Zhou's mother gave them enough time to reboot with Notion

01:43 1.0.

01:45 The software editor was still there, but now Notion looked like a productivity tool on

01:49 the surface, a minimalist twist on Google Docs that also let you easily make wikis and

01:55 manage your to-do lists.

01:57 In August 2016, they released it on app discovery site Product Hunt.

02:01 It was the site's most popular product of the day, then week, then month.

02:07 Within weeks, Notion, which is free but charges power users upward of $8 a month, was turning

02:12 a profit and had become one of Silicon Valley's hottest startups.

02:18 Zhou and Last returned to San Francisco triumphantly.

02:21 Notion was spreading globally—80% of users are outside the U.S.—on word of mouth alone.

02:28 It hit its first million users in 2019.

02:31 Students liked it for making to-do lists and taking class notes.

02:35 Design-minded entrepreneurs used it to replace the traditional pitch deck, and artists used

02:40 it to show off their portfolios.

02:42 How I Use Notion Tutorials Flooded YouTube

02:45 People needed those videos because while Notion is powerful, the customization options for

02:50 something as simple as a to-do list can make it overwhelming.

02:54 One of the most popular is a relatively simple walkthrough of the software that shows how

02:57 to get started using it "without losing your mind."

03:00 But it was precisely this level of customization that made Notion so useful for work.

03:07 Employees at DoorDash and Nike adopted it to manage projects or share notes.

03:12 It caught on among some teams at McKinsey after a partner began using it at home to

03:16 organize his pizza recipes.

03:19 Scott Belsky, Adobe's chief product officer, used Notion to organize all his research and

03:24 write the drafts to his best-selling book, The Messy Middle.

03:27 He says, "In a wonderful way, Notion has collapsed the concept of a website and a document."

03:35 In January 2021, a handful of those How I Use Notion videos went so viral on TikTok

03:40 that the demand for downloads overwhelmed the company's servers and Zao was forced

03:44 to pause all product development for six months to shore up the back end.

03:49 At the time, the app had 20 million users.

03:52 "Now it's fast approaching 100 million," Zao says.

03:55 By Forbes' estimate, it made $250 million in revenue last year and remains profitable.

04:02 Later this year, the company hopes to debut Notion 3.0.

04:07 Users got a preview when the company launched an artificial intelligence bot in November

04:10 2023 that can rapidly surface anything stored inside Notion, part of the company's aggressive

04:16 bet on generative AI that earned it a place on Forbes' sixth annual AI50 list, which

04:22 was released yesterday.

04:24 For full coverage, you can see our video interview with Ivan Zao and check out Kenric Kai's

04:29 piece on Forbes.com.

04:32 This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.

04:34 Thanks for tuning in.

04:36 [music]

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