Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedIvan Zhao: belief
6 Mar 2025 Lenny's Podcast Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder)
“I think the more interesting point here, it's like you can create progress through better abstractions.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Ivan Zhao
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 6 Mar 2025
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…Okay. And then there's also, I love these points. Don't be afraid to reset, as you just said. Tobi Lutke was on the podcast. He said the same thing. "Just be comfortable with some cost. I have done all this already and I will throw it away and start again and that's okay." Yeah. I think it's not just a self-help way to say don't be afraid to reset. That's like, that's okay, that's fine. I think the more interesting point here, it's like you can create progress through better abstractions. And that thing compounds faster, can catch up to all the things you build much quicker than you ever thought. Or humans are not thinking, not good at thinking in terms of abstraction or exponentials. We're thinking in terms of linearly. If you just reset it and you find a better way to do it, you can get all the thing you have to some cost recovered really quickly. So actually going back to the computing pioneers part, small talk, one of the first system and a huge influence for Notion was really tiny code base and inspired by Lisp, which is another programming languages and probably a hundred lines of code or something. The kernel of things could be really small, but just like math. It can compound. It can have complex behavior that unlocks so much value and things for you. But if you just find those right, you can catch up to all the things you did. You are free to lose really quickly. So I think that's the kernel of why reset is so powerful. And we're seeing exactly what you're describing in LLM advancements these days. All these companies have been working on this for so long and then they've cracked an abstraction of how to think about scaling these systems. And now just people launch them and are immediately where the companies that have been working this for decades are today because they are building off these abstractions as you described in these.…
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