Ivan Zhao: preference

Transcript context

…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. The tools are extensions of us. That's why our office room named as timeless tools. They extend us a little bit. And once they extend us, once we shape them, once we bring them to world, they can come back to shape us. One of my favorite quotes like the Marshall MacLean quotes, "We shape our tools. Then after, our tools shape us." I think that's probably too philosophical for building product or business, but there is a sense thinking what are you bringing to the world that will come back to bite you or shape you? And are you extending the part, the so-called good part of human nature, or are you extending the part that might be more zero-sum, might be more negative, right? For me, what is Legos? Lego is creativity. Lego is beauty. Software to me feels like lacking both. It's definitely lacking a lot of creativity. It's so rigid. So I believe both are human nature that worth amplifying. You can build another business that amplifies a different part of human nature. There was Sequoia famously invests in seven sins or seven human natures of human because they're so powerful if you just latch onto them, you can create a business, you can create a product. But at least I prefer to amplify creativity and beauty in the domain of software. To me, that's aligned with my values and I think can at least shape the market, shape our user of our product towards the better part of themself. It must feel so good to have a product that is so aligned with the way you want to see the world and actually working and growing at this rate and scaling and becoming this, I don't know, part of the ether of the world.…

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