Ivan Zhao: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's still in the bank. You're nodding, if you're on YouTube. You didn't have a salesperson until you hit over 10 million ARR. You hired your first PM at 50 people. You've always kept the team generally really small. Why is that been important to you? It's very cool now. Everyone's like, "Of course, that's how it should be." But for the past decade, that has not been the case. You've always been that way. Why has that been so important? I think going back to the abstraction system way of problem solving, I think we're lucky that me and Simon and Akshay, we have the skillset you probably can run a whole company, which is a couple of us, I can design, I can do marketing, storytelling, close sales deals. So you realize you don't need a lot. But when you can do a lot at the same time or hire people who can do that, naturally keep the company small. And you all know you're doing product management. The overhead is actually more from internal communication. It's really hard to get people's mind to be aligned on things, to see the world in the same way. And the part that you do need people, maybe you can solve better through systems, through better tools. Notion itself is a meta tool to build other tools. So we pretty much run everything on Notion. We use the same mindset to build our company. And accidentally, that keep our headcount low, keep our company profitable, which then puts you on a positive treadmill of you don't have to go for the next 18, 24 months to find money. You can just focus on building. And also because your team's small, we have this internal Notion called talent density. We don't try to track number of people but we try to track how talent-dense, revenue per employee we are. And people want to work with either more talented people. So it's a positive company group. I wonder how much of this is actually from being around for so many years without success of, "We just have to stay very lean and save our cash because otherwise, we'll die." Do you think that was a formative experience to inform how you want to operate or is that always something?…

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