Ivan Zhao: prediction

Transcript context

…Thank you, AI. Is there anything else along the lines of building horizontal products and bundling that you think is interesting to share or important? Otherwise, I have one last question I want to ask you. I think market is like waves. There's... Who said this? There's two-way to build business, bundling and bundling, right? There's too much of a zig and the zag. Actually, my favorite version of this is there's a classic Chinese literature called Romance of Three Kingdoms. It's great novel. It talked about the three kingdom era of China and the opening sentence of this novel, it's, "Empires long united must divide, long divided must unite." That has always been bundling, unbundling. It's one of my favorite book to read when I was a kid, but business works same way. When there's too much, you can see this. It's like before computers, everything works on paper. Our knowledge work are done through papers is fully democratized medium. Then PC happens during the '80s. The first era is a piece there actually are so many applications. There's early database software, dBASE, it's quite famous. It started dBASE 2 because it gives them credibility. Oh, they have been stick around for some time. So that's the first unbundling phase of software computing. Then Microsoft bundled everything back into one suite in the '90s. Then the SaaS unbundled it. Now, we're at the tail end of SaaS. There's so many verticalized SaaS average company to use almost a hundred tools. It's madness. So there's more the market shifting towards more a bundling approach. And with AI and with the macro, so there's more value to be created through bundling, at least for now. The market could shift again. So understand this trend, I think, helpful to see should you build a vertical solution or should you build horizontal solution because it does different things. I love that story. Okay, so last question. Something that one of your early investors, Finn Barnes, suggested to ask you. I'm curious where this goes. There's this, and you've touched on this a number of times, just the way you think about Notion, it's almost like a philosophy of how to work and be versus just a productivity tool. And so I'm just curious how you think about the relationship between tools and human potential and humans and how we live in the world.…

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