Lenny Rachitsky: prediction

Transcript context

…This is something that has long since been rectified, but the first day that we came back from break in 2021 ... We had all been sort of away for the holidays. We reassemble. I think it's January 3rd, 2021 perhaps. Had a massive outage that day that took down, not just us but also a lot of our peer companies. And so it was literally all hands on deck. We're suddenly seeing all of these people on Twitter pop up, on the Reddit pop up being like, "Oh my gosh. What am I going to do?" And it really reinforced for us how central Notion had become to so many people. So on one hand it was kind of this amazing moment of realization of how vital this thing we were building was all the time, which adds to the stress in the moment, but also your motivation overall. And then we also saw on Twitter, and this is part of why community is such a core focus of mine, but people being like, "They're trying really hard to get it back up. Give them a break." Or like, "Sending hugs to the Notion team. We know you've got this." And we really appreciated that and that was just a very heartwarming aspect of it. But that day was definitely a scramble and we wanted to be as communicative as possible. So my team was really central to making sure that everybody knew what was going on, what the efforts were being made to fix it, time horizon, all of that. So they've long since hired the best infrastructure people I think in the industry and refactored the database and everything. So it's not an issue anymore, but certainly that was a moment of stress at the time. It's interesting looking at those times. When you're in it, you're like, "We are going to die. We're down. People will stop using Notion. We're in big trouble." When really people always come back if it's an awesome product. I think of last things down for a week, JIRA or Confluent, and people come back if it's an awesome product. I think that's a good tactical learning and hopefully a takeaway for folks who maybe will experience that moment is that truly there's more resilience built into the system than you might think.…

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