Ivan Zhao: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, man. Okay, last question about the early years. Everyone's always wondering what does product market fit feel like? You worked on it for three to four years. What was the moment? What would it look like? What was different when you're like, "Okay, this is going to work"? I think going back to me and Simon, high is never that high, low is never that low, it never hit us as a binary state. Just like, "Oh, good. We have people who care about this thing we make now. Oh, good. People reach out to us who are paying us." And it's a very gradual ramp. Maybe that's why early days when it's really the lost eras, it doesn't feel too low because it just... Even for Notion today, it feels like it's so small in terms of where it could be. It just they keep going, right? It's a less of a milestone way to thinking about things. It's more just like, "Can we do the same that's in our head and better than we did last week?" way of thinking about things. So there's a such movement that product market, boom, milestone achieved. Didn't feel that way. I've heard that from a lot of founders actually. Was there a moment in that point of just like, "Oh, this is different," or, "Maybe it's going to work this time"?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.