#209 Andrew McCarthy: Leading Notion in SEA, India, AU/NZ; Rowing, Grandfather's influence, Learning Sales at LinkedIn

Hi, I'm Vitt at the founder and host of this podcast, The High Fliers. And I'm Andrew McCarthy, the head of notion in ANZ at the South East Asian India. Andrew, this is really fun. I believe this is your first proper interview. Is that right? It is. Yeah, my first deep dive interview. I am honored. How should I address you? Is it Andrew or Maca? What's the. I go by both. It's actually interesting because obviously Chris and Andrew is my name, but at school I was called Maca and I do see a million of worlds about three or four weeks into a new job where someone speaks to someone I've known before and they start calling Maca. So happy to go with both. What if we could reimagine the traditional notion of a high flyer? Hey friends, welcome back or welcome to The High Fliers Podcast where we do reimagine a high flyer, showcase the brightest and most relatable role models and companies and their journey from sunrise to today. As one of the premier products in our curiosity center, line up, providing on-demand intelligence to help you be one percent better every single day. Homey host, Vitt at Aguil, and let's have some fun. Our listeners have called this podcast the meticulously researched audio biography unveiling the extraordinary lives and decisions of the most remarkable individuals and companies from around the world. What if the real edge in scaling iconic products across Asia? He is in Bravada or Big Talk, but quite resilience, relentless curiosity, and a love of rowing at dawn. My guest today in this episode 209 is Andrew McCarthy and he leads notion in Australia and New Zealand, Southeast Asia and India and this is his first ever in-depth interview. Think of this episode in two arcs, first Andrew the person growing up in Sydney with a lawyer dad and a entrepreneurial mum wise grandfather shaped how he leads, how he discovered disflin through rowing and sport, chasing dreams, to co-founding a startup in San Francisco that ultimately failed the YSL council as a win, then Andrew the operator, the builder and the leader. How he joined LinkedIn as a stopgab during his career to becoming a top salesperson in APEC to then becoming redundant before being rehired. What he's learned about culture, about sales and about leadership, during a decade inside one of the world's most admired tech companies, and then why he made the jump to notion to build again from scratch across diverse markets and lots more. In that time, to explore your curiosity, please enjoy. Let's set the scene with our fun facts, where we born and where do you live now? Born and raised in Sydney, so born and camped down and now live in the fair lights. And from a work perspective, Andrew, what was your first job and what do you do now? I ran a pamphlet delivery in Kuselcove. I also remember I never felt so rich, I think I got $45 a week and I'd go and look at pamphlets and I remember saving up and buying these pair of Arnett sunglasses and being hooked on and ability to work hard and making to yourself. So that was my first job and now I'm looking up to notion of region. Let's wind back the clock to your sunrises I call it, you childhood. You talked to I growing up in Sydney. What are your memories of the influence of family and the environment? Huge. I'd say my grandfather had a huge influence on both me and my sisters. I remember every morning from 18 months to 12 years, he would say every Saturday morning he would come pick us up and take us to the beach and we'd go for a swim. And I gave a eulogy to his funeral recently, so it's quite tough mind. And in the eulogy I said that he made you feel worth it and I really think that's one of the greatest gifts you can give people in life is making you feel worth it. That's had a huge influence on my life. Also growing up I was heavily involved in sports, team activities. And I liked the equalising nature of sport, it doesn't matter if you had a good week or a bad week or where you came from, where you were going, you came together as a team, one to twice a week and work together on a goal. And that also really sort of formed a lot of my framing of how I think about business and how I think about life as well. The grandparent one is so interesting and I completely agree. So on my mum's side my grandparent is still alive, her parents. And I always say the class they carry themselves with than just the richness in the humanity I generation had. I think today's generation is so attention span is so different and we're so transactional with social media and all that, but that generation was so much more patient and calmer. So absolutely and I'm super when people ask me who's my high fly, I always say it's my grandpa. He just completely lives it in a wonderful soul. I also remember hearing a story where my grandfather was one of seven or eight kids and they had one pair of shoes in the family. Right. So they're like each kid where the shoes together to school for one day. And I think it gives great perspective on life and now being a proud father of three and seeing how much the world's evolved and my kids have multiple pairs of shoes to go to school each day. And just like not sweating the small stuff, putting out a look at the bigger picture is something I really took my grandfather and want to continue and part-time generations as well. And document your parents what did they do for work? Yeah. So if that was a lawyer, still is, worked exceptionally hard. I remember he worked usually some afternoon, most weeks and really did a fantastic job of supporting the family and helping us have a great childhood. Mum had lots of jobs. I was actually reflecting I think she was probably an early entrepreneur. When I was young, she made bibs like childhood bibs and sold them to stores around the neighborhood. And then she went and worked at a school and she was, remember when you had school science experiments and someone had prepared all of the chemicals and the bunts and burners. That was her job. And so she had both parents' work that had a fantastic childhood and really grateful for all they did to invest in us as kids and create a great environment for the family. And you mentioned two sisters, where are you in the hierarchy? On the eldest? I think it's the thing, okay, tell me more. So I think the main thing is I probably grew up in a girl house, right? So, so, to younger sisters and my mum, so sort of swung in that way and I think that was really valuable for me in terms of seeing a lot of different perspectives and ideas on things as well. So from a very young age and having a lot of friends from brought backgrounds as well. I was the eldest, I was also the first to do things in the family. Like the first to go to school, the first to go to university, first to move overseas. And so I always appreciated a chance to sort of go out and forge my own path as well. And family's still very close and tight. My sister's entrepreneur and so, yeah, very close family. I've got to know you a little bit through this process and the notion every time I speak to you come across a very calm and just things seem like they're under control. Were you always like that as a kid as well? You know what? I think it looks can be the saving. It's like that duck head or right? Or the feet underwater. Yeah, it's interesting. I was actually thinking this week, I think there is a balance between urgency and calmness, particularly in startups. And you need to have that urgency and be the pace setter and feel like you're slightly behind on things that drives you to move fast and get stuff done. But you need the calmness as well to be able to give confidence to other people in the team that we're going the right direction or in the right path. And I've actually been thinking that ice humored towards the urgency side and lack the calmness side. I've been trying to build a team as well who are able to balance out those skillsets. I remember I spoke to my boss, Provesh, that notion basically, and he said that's great advice, which is you can individually have gaps and weaknesses. But the team you build shouldn't. Right? And you need to build a team that's rounded and able to support that. So I appreciate the calm sentiment from you. I'll often don't feel that way. Yeah, people are saying that about me, they're saying I'm very calm, but I don't think on that either. I'm actually anxious and worried about something, but I just don't show it in my emotions. How would your high school teachers describe the young Andrew? ambitious, hardworking, friendly, and occasionally reverent, I guess. Like I like to have jokes and play rounds. Not in a bad way, but I also loved being part of the action. Right? So if there was a sports team or someone with a hand up to join in, some type of group inside the school, I would be the first to put my hand up. It actually brings like a memory. I remember being in year four and my mum had bought me this drink bottle and the drink bottle had on a try hard club. Right? Which is like social suicide, idiot for and I remember thinking like I can't drink this drink bottle in the playground because it's social suicide, but looking back at it, I probably, it's pretty, pretty apt description. Like I was probably in that try hard club in terms of wanting to do stuff get involved and I'd say that's how my school teacher would describe me. I like how you use the word try hard was here. I've got national Australian rowing champion national rowing champion New Zealand under 19 under 21. First rowing team, first rugby team, first athletics team. I don't think that's try hard Andrew, that's pretty successful. I honestly have a watch that would be part of great teams. Like then. and it was particularly special. And it was special because beyond the fact that we worked really hard, we trained really hard, I think we're all still really great friends. We actually started the WhatsApp group recently and got together for lunch 20 years on and still reflect on some of those my best memories the early mornings with the team, not actually the training part, but just the camaraderie that came with being part of a team that was chasing a big ambition and working hard. And I think also the fact that we were able to have some success along the way as well was helpful. - Was that the dream to try and make it professionally in sport? - It probably would have been, but it would have been for rugby and I was never good enough for rugby. And I often reflect on this and think that I was probably more naturally talented at growing. But rugby was my childhood and I always looked up to the Walla B's and John Hills was a hero of mine growing up and but I just am not physically big enough and strong enough and tough enough to actually break through to that top level that I loved it and I played rugby for a lot of years after school as well. But growing was an element that I really enjoyed the team aspect, my enjoyed the fitness and I was part of it, a crew that went pretty well. - And I think the discipline I've never, maybe wrote once in my life in high school with a discipline of it, we see them up at 5am on the I-Grop in Melbourne, so you see them on the Yara River at 5am and the Cracker Dawn and in there whether it's winter or summer in their singlets. That must have taught you a lot about discipline and just routines at an early age. - It did. It also taught, like, so the thing about growing right, is if somebody doesn't turn up, no one else can train. So it's not really not about you, right? If you don't turn up in the ones like other sports where you can still play AFL or rugby or netball, which is like one person's short. But in growing, if you don't have all of the members in the boat, you can't actually guide and train. And so there's this element of just not just the discipline part of getting up yourself, but also the commitment to those around you and the fact that we're all in this together and the responsibility, it's not just for you, it's for a broader team that actually stuck with me. I think that is something that I still hold on to today, is getting in a great team, helping the team succeed, but knowing it's not just about you, it's actually about the team winning together. And everyone plays their individual parts. And the commitment you have to each other to be successful is I find personally motivating. (bells chiming) - Back to the episode in a moment. Let's talk about some of the most intimidating acronyms in business. ISO 27001, SOC2, Essential 8. They sound like an alphabet soup, don't they? Trust me, I've been there. Vanta is like your business's compliance superpower. They automate the messy mind-numbering parts of security monitoring, compliance tracking and audit preparation. All of you as listeners of this podcast, get a special offer. All you have to do is go to vanta.com/high. That's vant.com/high. H-I-G-H. Or reach out to me by my email in the show notes. And that link vanta.com/high is also in the show notes. Now back to the episode. (bells chiming) And when you think of age 18, so as you mere on year 12, what was fulfillment of that age? - 18, probably seeing the world. I did economic and social science university, really because I wanted to do a mix of psychology and business. And I had this view that technology would change really quickly and evolve, but understanding people and understanding motivations would be consistent. And so I wanted to get a deep knowledge of that. I also wanted to place plots and hang out with friends and have fun as well. So probably a mixture of those being involved in teams, seeing the world and sort of brought in my understanding of psychology and business and using that as a launch pad to better do different things in technology in my life. - Psychology is so interesting. I always joke with the podcast that it's been an MBA in life in a psychology degree in people. Having done it for five plus years. And I wish if I could tell my younger self, I would study psychology. I don't know what it was like with you in school, but psychology for me was a very wishy-washy subject. I didn't really focus on it. And I felt, of course, everyone knows how to manage people and work with people when you're a kid. And now I wish psychology was compulsory 'cause it's such a great teacher. - Yeah, so the interesting connection between psychology and growing, which you mentioned before was in our growing crew, one of the role is fathers was a sports psychologist. And so we had a sports psychologist that came along and worked with us as a team. And so many of the lessons that you learned and saw applied and then this success that came from those came back to having a sports psychologist in and around the group, the father of one of the crew members. And so that is actually probably the beginning of my interest in psychology, wanting to extend that and then go to university and do psychology because I had seen it applied and be successful. - So you studied psychology, you've got this sporting background. Where did you start your career post-graduate in university? - So when I was at university, I started some companies. I was always doing things. The first thing was I think I bought protein powder and sold it to kids at university and college. And then I actually started an outdoor fitness club for men. It was called Club Capoeil. And the idea was a lot of the environment I got from sport was the team training twice a week. And a lot of people I knew and friends had sort of stopped, when they stopped sport on weekends, they'd stopped that team training activity. So it was basically an outdoor bootcamp that around a couple sessions a week, but the goal was to create like a team environment where people could train and have connection and camaraderie. When I was going through that training pit phase at university, one of the people I trained was also the CEO of a digital advertising agency in Sydney. And I knew that I wanted to get into tech. And I knew I wanted to be involved in some intersection of business and technology. And so one day I asked if I could come in to be for a role there. And I remember I turned up to this advertising agency in Sydney wearing a full suit and carrying a briefcase. And I walked into the meeting and the person said, "What's in your briefcase?" My briefcase was just my resume. I had like one page in there. And I was at the back of the ad, I probably thought, "Prosal a dry hard club again." And I got a job there. And that actually was probably the path in that company managed Toyota's digital accounts. I was able to set up Toyota Australia's Facebook and Twitter accounts. And it got me into social and tech and building websites and seeing the commercial side of it. I think it was called Hot House Interactive, which sounds really interesting. I guess when you look back on that time, and this was in the early 20 2007s, eight, nine, 10s, right where, with the internet of course was around, but the internet was in a different phase. I could talk about it shortly with AI and no sh*t and all that. But this is when did Facebook start? 2006? 2004. So the interesting thing is, phase was out 2004. After school, I was very close to going to university in Harvard and Princeton actually flew across to Harvard for a week and then flew to Princeton for a week. On a rowing? Rowling? Yeah, through rowing. Yeah. And I actually remember seeing Facebook in the dorm and I remember seeing the wink of us twins with connect-you-hats on the growing machines in 2004. Right? 2001, first introduction to social networks. But I didn't think much of it and came back to Australia. And then when I was at Hot House managing Toyota, social media was the thing given to the youngest person in the organization. And it's like, we've got TV and print and radio. And this social stuff's interesting. So this young kid can kind of work on that. And that was my chance to really dive in and take ownership of some element and be involved in some part. And I was purely just fortunate that, because I was the youngest and most interested in this space, I was almost like innovators dilemma inside a company, where everyone's focused on the big-pang stuff and the small stuff gets past someone who has the capacity and is interested and they're not able to grow with that. How interesting is that? And now, if that company's still around, social is probably their biggest team, I would imagine. And the senior folks manage it. And the spend is probably the biggest. So you didn't go to the US for uni? That didn't happen? No. Yeah, not to do the reasons. Yeah, I went across there for a week, which was fantastic, really grateful for the chance to source my first trip by myself overseas. But probably combination of factors, including the cost to go and the investment of the family. And then also, I was probably thinking as well 'cause I wanted to do rolling or rugby and it's balancing those things off as well. So probably a combination of factors. Went to university to Sydney, really happy because so many of my friends I met there and people who now have got really interesting jobs in Sydney went there as well. So all worlds had end well. I mean, aside that I didn't know if you know, beat more at Antler, beat was a roller and I interviewed him last year at a live event. and he was roommates with Zach. - Yes. - When Zach was a nobody, and he often tells me that he wishes he saw the future and life could have been very different today for him. - Right, so-- - So, Bede was the person that I roamed with for three days when I went to Harvard. - Oh, you might have just seen Zach in the corridors or something, right? - I think it was the year after or two years after he roamed with Zach, but yeah, that's-- So, yeah, small world once again. - Oh, okay, I have everyone. Andrew, you're well connected, so. (laughs) Okay, look, I found that one is really interesting 'cause people probably look at you today and go, like, your identity is the sales identity 'cause you have the success linked in and you're replicating that success at Notion. When you look back on the startup journey, what did you learn from that that you think you still keep at the back of your mind today? - I think in any company, there's really only three roles. Either building a product, you're selling that product or you're running the operations that build and sell a product that make money for the company. And in a startup environment, there's really only those two roles, right? Like, you're on the building side and you're taking the product to market and the smaller startup, the more intertwined, all of those things come. So, at a very small stage, you're both building and selling. And I was never technical. I wish I was, but I wasn't. Some of the lessons that would be interesting is probably the first lesson is when I first went to San Francisco in 2011. I had a decision. I could either work at a very well-known startup that's taking off in a very junior role or I could be co-founder of a company called Shoton and be VP of Marketing Business Development. And I chose the job title over the company. And I've learned a lot from that, which is I got caught on the ego of having a big job title as opposed to the momentum that great companies have. And so since then, a lot of the companies I've joined have been companies that have already been taking off. LinkedIn was well to taking off far before I walked through the door and notion as well had many years of success before I took on the role. I think one of the learnings there is like, don't undervalue the momentum the company has and the understanding that like once the generation companies only come around every few years and don't over-enphasize your own ability to change the direction of a smaller company and get caught up with job titles. And so that was probably like the first lesson is lighting in a bottle, lighting in a bottle. And don't worry about the job title, worry about getting on the right ship, pounding as hard as you can. The other is the ability just to make stuff happen and work hard to when we were doing the startup. Remember we did a contract with Visa and we just a couple of young kids and built into social commerce startup. And I also remember the interview I was really sick. (laughs) I couldn't speak and when I was, I was sitting down to Visa, I think the fact that I was quiet during the whole presentation made them feel like I had something really good. Because I was almost just like quiet and I just was a couldn't speak properly. But I think the idea that you can make stuff happen and some kids can do a contract with Visa and build a startup and raise money and those things actually give me a lot of confidence moving forward that if you want it to be, it's up to me and just get out there and have a crack and try and make it happen. So probably two big lessons I learned from that stage. - Super specific, thank you. And I mean that is a good jumping off point to go into how the LinkedIn journey started. And you touched on an interesting point about titles. That's one that I struggled with as well in my career. I think we all learned that the hard way where I chased titles early on in my career and chased social validation and chased working for companies that you could go to about with you and tell people about. And now as I get older I realize that actually is not happiness. Happiness is do I enjoy my job and do I wake up every morning ready to jump out of bed? And I've been in jobs where I've got paid all some salaries and I've been the unhappyest person ever. And then I've been doing my stuff now for five years and I'm the happiest ever. I'm still very stressed. I'm always stressed but I'm very happy 'cause I have an impact and it's grown commercially. So I think that's a really interesting point. I'd love to connect that to LinkedIn is 2013. Where were you at in your career at this point? We've talked about the sport aspiration. We talked about university. We talked about working in social media at the start of your career. You tried startups. You said you went to San Francisco. And you come across as a very ambitious, thoughtful person. I don't know maybe 10 years ago, 12 years ago, you weren't like that. So the main question one is where were you at in your career and to work with those ingredients that led to LinkedIn being the right fit? So I might actually call us on the gap in between the startup in San Francisco and LinkedIn. 'Cause it is my help. The startup in San Francisco failed and the reason that failed was, so just some context, what we were trying to do, we were trying to monetize the social graph. So until I went through an e-commerce checkout we'd offer them some coupons to be able to sell to share what they purchase with their friends on Facebook. When we first launched it was really successful and it had 3.6 clicks back from each share back to the e-commerce website. Was that a time that Facebook launched their first, one of their first f/8s and when Spotify got rolled into Facebook and they started to have to redo the newsfeed? And in the spirit of six months, Facebook basically crushed the business because if you weren't paying Facebook for the clicks back to the e-commerce site they weren't actually showing you in the newsfeed. And so it went from 3.6 clicks to 1.2 clicks in back to the e-commerce site in a period of six months. And I realized then that being inside Facebook they owned the world garden and being on the right side of that momentum is really important. And that was like a big lesson in terms of startup strategy and why the company failed. So I moved back to Australia off the back of a failed company and looked around at a money and the ends of my life was back here. And that's important because the job I had in between the startup and LinkedIn was I helped demand where which is now Salesforce e-commerce cloud launched in Australia. And the connection point in there was that I sold to people in the e-commerce space in Australia from my time at shop one. And so doing that, I then got experience launching a high growth technology company into Asia Pacific. Got to win its first customers, was able to leverage from the skill sets I had before to get back into the Australian markets in a good way. I often think about your career not being like a lad but being like a jungle gym, which is you want to hold onto one bar and reach another bar. If you jump for two bars at the one time and you're free for, if you're holding onto the same bar, you feel like you're stuck. And to my past back was I'd work in the e-commerce, it had failed, but I'd learned to make some relationships. I would extend to demand where and bleak, which was the company helping launch demand where in Australia and New Zealand. And then from there got experience with helping a high growth technology company launch in Asia Pacific. But I still had startup aspirations and startup vibes. I was still applying to YC and tech stars. We kind of went into those things the whole way through, right, to Nendo San Francisco. And then the opportunity with LinkedIn came, and I thought, honestly, I originally thought, good brand name, could learn a lot about how big companies work, also had that experience of seeing what it was like when Facebook crashed my previous business. And LinkedIn was a big social platform. And I took the job in my head thinking, if I got into YC, I would actually go to YC. But this is like a good stop-out. And then about three or four weeks into LinkedIn, I had that realization which went to a foretaste. Like, if there's lightning in a bottle, the best thing you can do is work hard to help extend that mission and vision really effectively. The other thing that LinkedIn did exceptionally well under Jeff Weiner was credit really aspirational vision. And then was able to operational that vision. So great economic opportunity for everyone with the global workforce. I think everyone inspired by and connected to and operationalized that through the platform and see how it built was hugely impactful. The other learning from LinkedIn is the importance of culture. LinkedIn and that's phase had an unbelievable culture where people were working hard, pursuing dreams, so I think they're okay to something big. I feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves as well. And so that was a really exciting time. And then I made a decision pretty quickly after joining LinkedIn to forget about trying to get back into YC or be a co-founder of a tech company again. But really just trying to do the best work I could do to help LinkedIn succeed and get into that team environment that was probably a theme from earlier in my life. - What was a signal that made you confirm that LinkedIn is the path and you should put that startup dream to bed for the short term? 'Cause it sounds like that startup dream was a fire inside that you've really wanted to chase. A lot of people would go, "Why give that up?" And why just take a job and earn a salary? How did you compute that? - Well, I actually think they're one and the same, which is you can still have entrepreneurial tendencies and rhythms inside a bigger company. Like, I'd linked in at that stage and now at Notion, I really feel like we're in a startup inside a startup. Right, there is an unbelievable product team. That's why I linked in now first. There's building amazing products that's changing. We're able to take those products to market in Australia and New Zealand. We're able to help them grow out for Asia Pacific. We're learning of nuances between different countries and where we should focus and prioritize. And so that really is those same skills of the startup that I was doing at shop on. But it's doing it with this whale of momentum, which is this product behind you. And it's also doing it in the world where you're getting really good feedback from customers seeing immense value. So when you do, when you deliver the product and the value, you see immediately how much it changes how people can get new jobs or create sales or be able to fulfill their life. And I think those two feedback loops of the customer feedback loop on how the product is resonating in the market. And also that mindset of wanting to help grow the startup here with the two things that sort of felt like I found my place. I also think it was really interesting at that stage because I was selling a sales product to salespeople. And it was a really free moment where there's like, it was like I was a salesperson selling a sales product to salespeople with LinkedIn. And that created a really nice authenticity that I was able to just work across all of those together. And those things meant that I felt like dim was the right place and doubled down there for the next 11 years. 11 years, wow. And I think you had a lot of success along the way, which I want to hunt back now. A good starting point is I believe you are part of the founding team for LinkedIn sales solutions. That's right. Can you unpack what that means to be part of the founding team for LinkedIn sales solutions in APEC? Yeah, there was four of us and Matt Loop, who now runs Rippling with the leader. And our job was to take LinkedIn sales solutions to market here to when it's early customers, tell those customers they're successful, to make sure those customers refer to us to new customers and we continue to grow. And we did everything from upbound prospecting, running events, email campaigns, client conversations, managing full sales cycles. And at stage it really was, because it was on me, four of us, it was like an end-to-end process where we did everything in the sales funnel. You've learned a lot about sales and maybe we can jump around here between LinkedIn and Notion. What do you, is a successful sales process from start to end? I mean, that could be an episode on its own, but if you have to distill that out to a few minutes, if I came to you and said Andrew, I want to be an awesome salesperson. I want to spend time with you and learn from you. What would you teach me about sales and what are those key ingredients to be a good salesperson? The most important thing is to start with customer value. Like what is the value that customers getting? And the best way to do that is to look at where you're having success today and to use that to break down and what an individual attributes or elements or conditions that it help people get success today from your product. So you might look at where success is happening and say, actually, I can see it's a lot of startups based in Sydney and Singapore, other groups. And it's not just startups, it's actually the subset of startups working in financial services as the group that is doing it again the most day today. And really doubling down and making that group successful. The best strategy in sales is to do more of what's already working. And so it starts with looking at customer value, getting really clear what the value you're living for the customer is. And then working your way back to how you are able to find, engage, and communicate that value to new people to help more people join by the product. - And were the early market signals of the Australian market or the APEC market was ready for the product that you were trying to sell? How did you validate those signals? - So both LinkedIn and Notion have, unless we call it a time with LinkedIn, but the product led growth motion, which is they're already people using the tool and getting value in the market. So the signals are, is there organic pickup of the product today and how people are using it? And now they came back regularly to use it. And so talking about looking at Notion is, there's already a couple of million people in Australia using Notion today. This blows my mind. (laughs) There's giant population. And so there's already this organic pickup by people getting value from it using it today, bit for building up their startup or managing their school projects or organizing their origami set or managing their wedding, whatever it might be, they're using it in ways that's creating value and they become raving fans. And so those signals, in the sandwich with LinkedIn is there was earlier adopters of LinkedIn that were getting a lot of value from the tool and being able to use those signals to just help understand where the value is and then work your way back from that. It's just a really simple way to be successful in sales. - I'm assuming there's potentially two aspects, both with LinkedIn and Notion. I'm assuming most people are freemium users and you're trying to get them to trade up. That's one, but then you also want the teams to use the product right. Do you wanna talk about LinkedIn? Did that cause each of us interacts with LinkedIn through our careers, like we've all got LinkedIn profiles, but I think we forget the business behind the product. - Yeah, so I think that LinkedIn was, when I was there might have changed last few years but was in higher market cell, which was there's three marketplaces. There's a marketplace for people hiring that's job seekers and recruiters and then a lot of it goes into that in terms of how to attract those people. There's cell, so there's a marketplace for buyers and sellers and then there's marketing side as well, right? Which is advertisements on the platform. And so the area that I was in, which was the sales navigator area, the focus there was how could we help sales teams connect with more buyers effectively and one of the most unrealized assets any company has is the collective network and the collective intelligence of all employees who their team knows and connect you through. And so a lot of the sale early days was saying, your company, you're looking to connect with audiences and you're looking to get new speakers and marketing. Who inside your organization might already know someone there and can we help shine the light, to help you find that path to get to those people. And so once again, it's not really about being too broad with the value proposition. It's about saying, okay, what's this person trying to achieve and then how can we help them get there and how can we show them the path that have previous other people have done as well. That's that process I think that's linked in. For notion that's really around helping companies ship products faster. I once seen I believe that the greatest asset any company has is the collective intelligence for all employees and being able to organize that knowledge in a really effective way that's applied AI to that knowledge to get value from it and about to help the company get to where they want to get to. But it really comes back to what's the goal that the company's looking to get to and how can we help a company get there effectively. I want to come to comparing and contrasting notion and linked in in a moment. But before that, something you just said, and everyone, when you said it to me the other day, when we spoke as well, is coaching sales people to sell value not features? How have you done that? So coachings are really interesting. Part of it is like two principles I use. The first is I believe that career is a built off strength. And so you first have to understand what is the individual strength of the person, some people are great with relationships, some people are amazing at analyzing documents and looking for ways in. So I'm saying like what is the seller's strength? The second part is I use this framework for coaching of show, teach, coach, which is if you're looking to help someone develop a skill set, the first time you have to show it to them. Right, let's say we're learning golf. Right, the first time, if I said describe the golf screen to you, you just wouldn't know what to do. Go ahead and show you the golf screen first, you can see it. And then we can work down the path and I can teach you actually is about dropping your elbows and getting the plane through. And in an after a period of time, I can ask you questions and say, what does that feel like when you hit the ball well and you're like, I feel like I'm in my hips and I was like, great. And so when it comes to coaching sales people to customer value, so those two principles sort of come into play, which is what are the natural strengths of the person that you're working with? And then also how can you centrally focus on what value looks like the customer and then help coach that show, teach, coach framework to help the sales be able to get there with themselves. Something I've learned is people have to also find their own way as well. And once they have found their way and made the process work for them, they are able to repeat that and be like individually successful themselves and that's also really powerful. The faster-growing companies in history, like Figma, Ramp, OpenAI and Kerser are all built on notion. Notion gives startups everything they need to move fast, stay lean and scale smarter. It replaces eight plus tools like Trello, Confluence and meeting no apps, saving founders and teams, thousands and reducing chaos. Over 50% of the Y Combinator and 90% of the Forbes Cloud 100 companies use Notion to run everything from fundraising to hiring. And here's the best part. High-Fly's podcasts, listeners like you can get up to six months of the Notion Business Plan free. saving the up to $12,000. So if you're a founder or executive team member looking to move faster and stay focused, notion is the place to build. Get that off for now at ntn.so/highflyers. That's ntn.so/highhiGH flyers flyer. And now back to the episode. I also believe at 1.10 LinkedIn you were the top performing sales person. You got sent a nice holiday to 3G potentially. My research is correct. What did your systems and habits look like at that time to allow you to achieve that recognition? Because I'm sure there's a lot of high ambitious smart people at LinkedIn or Notion or other companies. What separated you from the pack and how did you actually deliver that in terms of cold-out value to the company and to your customers? Firstly, very kind. And there's you achieved it. I would also say that at LinkedIn, I saw the high of the highs and the lows just to provide proper content. We will come back to this. So this is on the high of the highs where I think your presence club was able to go to presence club a number of times. I often believe that two action proceeds clarity and action proceeds motivation. So just start doing stuff and work through it. So when that comes to being successful in the sales role, there's no silver bullet of one line you can say. It's really around focusing on customer value, being able to become really good at communicating that customer value to different people and just working really hard to get in front of more people to share that story and be able to empathize with their challenges and be able to help them solve their challenges in a really succinct, meaningful way. And then there's just a whole bunch of like, well, that goes into that, right? Which is being creative and thinking of you pass forward. One thing I've sort of come to realize recently is the best sales reps I've seen run towards challenging problems and think of creative solutions. And the way that I think about this in my head is it's a combination of grit and creativity, right? If you just have pure persistence, you'll keep running up against the same wall over and over again. And eventually you get frustrated of a table lose confidence in you. If you have too much creativity, you just keep on bouncing between things and not actually moving forward. And the best sales reps have that perseverance and that creativity where they continually move forward, but they continually when they hit roadblocks, think of that creativity to move around. And that's something I've always tried to instill with myself and still with the team is have that balance between persistence and creativity to drive through. Last year I interviewed, you might know Stevie Case, the Chief Revenue Officer at Vanta. And Heron and I spent a lot of time talking about sales because that's what she does in revenue, as you I think a more general management remit now at Notion, congrats by the way on that step up. And one of the things she said, which I found really interesting, she said, "Junior sellers think they can close deals themselves, whereas senior sellers no coalition is critical at the own company and after buyers. Is that been your experience as well at Notion all linked in?" Yes, I think you need to think about how you can move the whole value of your company's organization. And this saying is selling to team sport, probably comes back to my team roots, but I really believe that, which is if you're working with, I'll make it practical here, let's say you're working with a company. You don't have to have every conversation, but what you need to do, you need about a quarterback, your team to get the right people in their site. So it might be a CEO to CEO connect conversation. It might be exact round table where you're in back the head of marketing to come along. It could be someone from the customer success team working with NDE users to help them see more value. And eventually you're able to start enough spot fires across the organization that you can bring those spot fires together and create a big fire. And so I think enterprise sales is more like melting an ice cube, right, which is you want to get a lot of different melting points around the ice cube and to do that you need to bring the whole value of your company. Probably a really underestimated part of sales is the power of bringing the value of customers to other customers as well. So how can you connect customers with HR that help them solve problems? We had an event in Singapore last week and one of the amazing moments was when one customer who was having a challenge sat next to another customer who had solved that challenge. And you could see the customer teaching the customer on what to do. And people believe and resonate with people who exactly like them more than some with the sales title. And so be able to create that environment where they can come together is huge. I want to talk about markets going to it now because you've touched on it. How different are markets where I've worked in sales many years not in other markets but only in Australia. And one of the lines people who saw say to me is humans are humans. Yeah. Like we've all got the same biases. We've all got to wake up in the morning, put our clothes on, eat some food. We've all got desires and hopes. But every market is different where you see products and I saw this and I worked in CPG and retail for many years and did sales and account management. And we would take a global asset, often an American asset or European asset, whether it was procting gamble or Nestlay or what have you and launch it into an Australian market or New Zealand or Singapore. And we would just try and use the strength of the brand and strength of distribution to just push it through the market and throw a lot of marketing spend at it. And then eventually you realise we need to listen first and then your bottoms up. I'm curious, maybe let's use notion because you're in that role. How do you go and understand the consumer, understand the product and then build a launch, go to market plan. So if you compare say Sydney to Singapore, what are some of the differences from the way you've approached it and how you've positioned the notion product? It's really good question. So my first thought is our story is best told in the voice out customer and finding local customers in the market who can tell that story really effectively is the first place to start. The second part is like understandings come back to product strategy is what is the central product strategy that the whole team is working towards and what Elwin and that is true in our parts of the world. And I believe that great products are built off a truth that is not widely known but when people understand that truth, it starts to build some momentum. And so the truth with notion is that SaaS sprawls is a huge problem. Like most companies today are trying to manage in some case a hundred to three hundred different SaaS tools across the business. Knowledge is siloed, information is siloed, everyone wants to take advantage of AI but it's really difficult, borderline impossible to do that if you're constantly bouncing between different tools all day. And so that is like a universal truth which is SaaS sprawls a huge problem. And notions value is they provide one canvas where you're able to replace a lot of those tools and build end-to-end workflows that help you achieve your business car more effectively. And to that universal truth of SaaS sprawls a problem is the same in Singapore, in India, in Hong Kong, in Australia. What is different markets have you slightly different products or different stages. So other point solutions have really sprung up in Singapore or India. And so the competitive landscape is different in those markets. The other thing that is different is that there is cultural nuances with different countries. And how businesses down in Japan is very different to Korea, it's very different to Australia. It's even different between Australia and New Zealand. And there's like some slight nuances. And if one thing I've learned is when someone from a foreign country comes in and says this is how to do things. There's automatically almost universally like a pullback of like well, what does this person know about my world. And so the answer to that I found is like tell the story through the voice of the customer, which is the first thing you should do is get out there and expect as many customers as possible. And really listen to them like what's working, what's not working, help try and solve their problems, help try and remove the issues that they had before, and then help them tell their story more broadly in that market. But making sure that in those days you you move away from like the common truth that you're trying to solve and the common thing that find different together. Because that's ultimately that product direction and that trajectory you're going on. And so that's how I think about different markets is looking at them through the eyes of the customer and seeing whether that cross over point between what you believe to be true and what you're feeling in the market and what your customers experiencing in their world but through their competitive landscape and their environment. What's been the biggest change you've had to make in the transition from LinkedIn to Notion in terms of selling the product? So when I finished LinkedIn it was a very large team and I found that the large of the company gets more internally focused it becomes. And so just by nature my last couple of years at LinkedIn was mostly spent in internal meetings getting alignment between different regions. And it's not good about it. It just is. And so coming to Notion is a very small team. We have a huge market. And a lot of what the first things that I did was, don't expect as many customers as possible. So it was really about like Frankfurt being on the customer edge speaking to people, seeing what value has been created. And that was probably, I don't know. change of shift between LinkedIn and Notion, it was also really refreshing shift to me because I just generally miss that part of it, which is like getting out and the hustle and the working with customers and being on that bleeding edge. And so that's one part. One thing that I'm slightly different in Notion and LinkedIn, but one thing I think I think there's this ambition and humility that comes through the whole organization, like the ambition to change the world the way that people use software. That is like a huge ambition. There's a lot of people using a lot of software and we want to change the way that they do it and help people get more value from the software and help them mold the software to their process. They'll have to change their process to mold the software. But there's also this humility, which is we know that people know their world better than we do. And we're not telling people exactly how to manage their project plan, but giving them building blocks to do that. And I think the way I've described LinkedIn was ambition and compassion and the way I describe Notion is ambition and humility. But there's that common thread between both of them, which is the human authentic compassion humility aspect, juxtaposed with the deep desire to do great things and to change the world. And I really, that's a lot of work. You talked to Elie about Jeff Weiner. I have followed his stuff for many years, particularly when he was in the role. And I think compassion was one of the things he used to lead with. And he wrote a lot of articles about it. And I think he's moved on now, but four, five, six years. I can't remember the time frame. But it's not a tabling of LinkedIn. Yeah, but when he was actively the person running it, I used to follow him very closely. And I was always very impressed with what he would say. So I think what he just said is really interesting. I want to go into Notion the product. And I'll use a real life example. So as you know, we've just launched the startup playbooks report that Notion has been one of the sponsors on and commercial partners on. And one of the really interesting observations when we were collating all the data and information with each of the nine companies is their operating systems. Yeah. So some companies use Google Docs, some use Notion, some use the Microsoft SharePoint, I think it's called. And when I double-clicked on why they were, which was really annoying for us actually, because we had to figure out how do we get this information, how do we have a shared document. And what I realized through that process, and I knew this, but it confirmed is they were using the software their customers were using. Some of the companies in the report using Microsoft, because that's what their customers want. Some are selling into startup. So they're using a combination of Notion and G Suite. Some are just using G Suite. Some are just using Notion. So I guess my question is you're not competing with the tutorial, the stack, whether it's G Suite, even with note taking and AI and the operating system. How do you see Notion? Is it a full stack productivity OS or is it focused still on depth over breadth? Can I actually take a step back into a revolution of software? Because I think it's actually really interesting. So you go to the 1970s, long way to start that. 1970s, the focus was like computers could be all-right human intellect, could be bicycles to the mind. In 1983, Microsoft released Word, and 1985, they released Excel. And the process at that stage was taking a blank piece of paper like this and putting it online, taking it physical and putting it online. And it was the ethos of the time was to mass market products, the abuse of everyone. The Microsoft suite could be on every desk, and we're going to put a PC on every desk. That was that whole process that appeared. What happened in the early 2000s was really interesting. The cost of building developed software went to freefall. So things like cloud, open source actually meant that what cost $5 million dollars, someone to build in the year 2000s only cost $5,000 11 years later. And so this freefall in software cost meant that a lot of organizations and startups, entrepreneurs went after fragments of the Microsoft suite. So we want to build a better project management tool for engineers than Excel. We want to build a better project management tool for marketing teams than Excel. And over the next 15 years, 130,000 software vendors were created. If you look at G2 crowd today, there's over 480 project management tools today. And these project management tools, they compete with each other, because they want to get close to their ideal customer and they want to get build a better workflow to help that customer succeed. What's interesting, and this is the insight that Notion had, is all 130,000 software vendors have the exact same building blocks. They're all a database, some text, some charts, some automation. They've just been hard coded in different ways. Similar to Lego versus Barbie. They're both toys. Lego gives the individual building blocks and Barbie's that hard plastic coded way of software. So the reason that that's important is because what's naturally happened is a lot of companies have actually competed with each other by building different workflows for their particular function or niche or company. And this is why we're in a situation where there is thousands of different tools across teams and companies. And this tools designed for marketers and this one's designed for engineers. And so our ethos is just fundamentally different, which is we've always been built as a horizontal platform as opposed to a point solution. And by building a horizontal platform, we think you are able to build the tools that work for your life's work. But we also think that it's inherently flexible and can continue to grow and evolve as you change. So you look at the introduction of AI right now. What's happened here? There's this been this whole moment where everybody's trying to roll AI into their solution and what they do, they work the workflow. But it is really difficult. It's broadline impossible. If you're trying to do that across the 10 or 20 different apps that people use today. And so the way that we think about it is if we can continue to build the building blocks that help people be successful, they can continue to roll in different workflows into their solution. And the value of that is that they reduce their subscription costs and they also increase their speed to market because they're able to ship stuff faster as well. And that's how we think about that evolution right now, move out of the sun. Yeah. So my understanding is notions motion is B2C2B? Yeah, which is do a great job for people at home and they take into the workplace. I saw one example of someone recently who built a used notion to document their home origami set. So they had like 365 days of origami and they'd documented that. And they went to their workplace and they thought actually using notions like more flexible and seamless and easy to use than the tool I'm using internally. So I'm going to start documenting my work in notion as well. And now there's over 800 people at that company that use notion because gradually other people start using the documentation tool that person builds and it can actually grow as it grows. And so we've really had this strong belief that to a great job people at home, they're taking into the office. I think that if I look at it's a very unique market motion. But if you look at like the Apple iPhone, right, it's kind of the same, which is Apple was used at home by people first and they just suddenly thought actually so they used the iPhone and then use this work phone. And naturally that starts building and growing momentum inside companies as well. And tell me, I mean, this is in the reports. There's a page in there about notion how you help from early stage through to IPO. And I know you're very passionate about the different stages of companies and how notion can be helpful and be the operating partner of sorts. If I'm a new maybe not new founder, let's say I am two years into my journey and I'm doing a couple of million dollars in AI. I've got a small team. I've got some early customers and I came to you and I said, oh, you came to me. Whatever, organically it happened and we were talking about whether we should notion. How would you have that conversation with me if I'm considering the options I mentioned earlier, the G Suite Microsoft notion, there's probably a couple of others that I don't know about. Yeah, I would start with your goals. So imagine if you're a founder of a company two years in, you'd probably have a couple of goals. One goal is to ship better products faster. That's a, I imagine a pretty key goal because your ability to ship the right products faster is going to impact your ability to attract capital and attract talents and attract right customers. And so if we come back to that point, okay, that end-to-end process of shipping products faster, what is getting in the way today? It's usually two things. It's usually friction between jumping between different tools that's slowing you down. It's the inability to find the right information quickly, you're wasting time trying to look for information and it's lack of visibility because stuff being stored in different tools and systems across the business. And so if we bring back to your goal, which is you want to ship products faster and the what's getting in the way is friction lack of visibility, I would recommend thinking end-to-end with the process and saying, how can we redesign a process that helps you build a tool and ship a tool faster that's going to help you achieve your goal. And with Notions Building Box, you can actually build that whole end-to-end process from collecting knowledge, in team meetings, to use AI to that knowledge into a PID to take that document and share it with different team members, get different perspectives, to have customer interviews and collect that information through notions AI meeting tools to have that knowledge capture in the system. So we can really start thinking like end-to-end with the process, but ultimately back to the sales part, it comes back to you as the founder, want to ship products faster, and we are able to help you get there and get there with less investment in subscription cost for software. Yeah, you mentioned a line earlier that at LinkedIn you saw the lows of the lows, and I'm sure, I mean, we've all seen it, right? But people look at you and go, "You're the GM of APAC." What is it, Southeast Asia and Z India? That's a huge remit. What are some of those painful learnings at any point in your career, and can you share one that you've learned from the most? So I can share some color on LinkedIn. I thought the time shared actually outside of small groups of people. But when I said that's all the highs, I went to President's Club five times at LinkedIn, which was fantastic, a trip overseas. I was named over the year, in my first year there as well. But I also was made redundant at LinkedIn. I had my whole team was made redundant. I also had a point in time when I was in San Francisco, missed two quarters in a row and got a letter from LinkedIn saying, "Mission of the quarter, I might be out of the business." So I went through this arc of journey where I felt like I had a great start. I was a year of the year and went to Club, and then I had two bad quarters, and we had a letter saying, "You can't miss another quarter, Andrew." And then I worked out of that. I went to Club again, and I felt I was back on top. And then suddenly the team was made redundant, and I got out the door, and then I kept going, "Good relationships, I came back a year later, I kept growing." And so a couple of parts that stick to the mind. The first is relationships matter. How you show up and what you do in trying times is more important than what you do in great times. And I remember after I was made redundant, I was insidient, I drove out to home bush on my final day to deliver a training session for a customer. And I remember just thinking, "This is the right thing to do." It's the right thing to do because I met a company to the business, and to my final day, and I delivered the training session, and I was pretty emotional driving home, actually, so it felt like an end of an era. And I'd been to a lot of change, I think, then. And then a year later, when I got bought back, one of the leaders said that when I did that internally, that was a moment that they wanted to bring me back for. You know, like they, and I'd seen those powers in those times. And I was like, that stayed with them, there's like the integrity and the doing the right thing in trying times. And so I think my first learning is relationships matter. Doing the right thing when no one's watching, because someone probably is somewhere around the world. And just don't give up, I guess, right? When those moments that elements were really hard, it was difficult. I'd just moved my family to San Francisco, go on my visa, right? I'd been a top performer. I felt like I was a top performer, and I missed her chords, and I get a letter. I could, they're really tough times, but trusting yourself, working hard, and doing the right thing and building relationships, the thing that I think, if you have consistently, we'll last with you forever. Well, firstly, thank you for sharing. And secondly, I've been through two redundancies. I mean, this, all this started five years ago, because of redundancy, and it's turned into this business with all these different products that we have now. And yeah, I think, when I look back on my redundancies, they were the best thing that could have happened to me, because they made me stop and think and reflect and grow. Where's prior to that, I was on this rocket ship, and I think I would have, you know, like you meet people, like they have success for 20, 30 years, and they get to their 40s or 50s in the career just plateaus. I still see that, and I always go, how do I not do that? I think the redundancy maybe gave me that, that, I don't know, that vitamin or protein shake in the middle of a race to go, hey, just stop, refuel, reset, and then go again. There is, one of the greatest few thousand lives, been to start again. Like I have even a presentation, I've been working on presentation for a while. There's real reluctance to see just to start and write from the top. But when you do that, the results are often better. And I think the same thing in life as well, which is creating space and then not, and having the courage to start again, takes a lot of courage, but when you do that, quite often the results and they're decided better. I want to ask two last questions, and we'll wrap with the rapid fire sprint. You touch John San Francisco and family. I'm conscious I've not asked you about that, and I always say the support cast is as important as the lead actor. And in this conversation, you're the lead actor. Do you want to talk about, I mean, the thing you said at the start, you got three kids, and you talked about sport, and I heard from a lot of your colleagues and friends that you're very loyal. Do you want to talk about family and maybe even give some credit to your wife, who potentially is a high flyer, who deserves more recognition? Yeah, yeah. She certainly does. I often say that her competence outweighs her confidence, and my confidence outweighs my competence. That she's one of the best players in Australia and has had a fantastic career, has a master's of law, has, yeah, someone I constantly look to for inspiration and guidance in job-ling times. My wife had pretty traumatic experiences with our second and third child being born. I remember my wife, Dr. Elton, and anybody during the first birth, which meant that in the second and third birth, the anybody thought the baby's blood was a foreign object and we were done trying, so I get a bit in this way, trying basically kill the baby. And every Wednesday morning, during the second and third birth, she had a scan at 10M on a Wednesday, and the scan came back and it was one of three options. Either delivering that day, we were flying to Queensland to get an interior blood transfusion and a change of abilities of blood in the uterus, or we were waiting and holding on. And that was a really interesting time. My biggest reflection is you don't know what fights are the people who are fighting. So no one of the people that work knew that I was going through that. No, at 10M on a Wednesday, I'd get a call and one of these three things was in play. The second thing that struck me from that time was after the baby was born, I remember being in the near-night, intensive care unit and watching the nurses and doctors go around and make literal laugh-or-death decisions. They were looking at these monitors and making decisions of what they did to kiddie baby alive. And I remember watching the poise that they went through, they mentioned the calmness that they had when they were making these decisions and think, "I don't feel nearly as calm and I'm making questions about my forecast, my sales forecast." It means like nothing in the scheme of keeping a baby alive. And that gave me a lot of great perspective and also since I've taken forward as well, which is figure out what your baby vitals are, like figure out what your business vitals are, what are the three or four metrics that you're going to watch and you know how to impact the business. And if you can then monitor those, that gives you the confidence to make decisions that can move things forward. And so I think those are my two big lessons from both my children, who are the number one, you don't know what fights other people are fighting for those. So, like, and the second is develop some baby vitals that help you navigate those challenging times with calmness and confidence because the nurses do it every day and they have a lot harder job than I do and I'm in awe of what they do. Well, thank you for sharing and baby vitals is my, my, my, my, my, soon to be wife is their doctor. And I'm a pediatrician so baby vitals will be an interesting conversation down with that tonight. So I will, I'll mention that to her. But anyway, let's move to rapid five finals ring to close us out. Is there one non-work investment, ideally of time and energy that you consider the best in your life? Beyond investing in my kids and family, which I've put number one, I'd say health. So exercise, daily, try and eat well, that becomes the framework that's my ability to invest in my kids and invest in the business come from. One interview question you love asking perspective candidates? Why notion? And the reason for that is actually tells me a lot about the research I've done and the understanding of the market. So a level one answer is I love notion because I love the product. A level four answer would be I'm seeing a trend with CFOs wanting to reduce their tech stack. I see notions of really interesting opportunity to help companies streamline and move faster. I've seen a lot of momentum with the marketplace and how that is, is playing out. And so that one, those two work questions helps me understand not just their passion for notion, but also their depth and understanding of the market and the research they've done beforehand. We'll be interesting up when this comes out of the interviews change and the people that come to meet you and listen to this interview before they come and meet you. One thing you'd like to learn in the next six months, this could be life for work. Yeah, managing through change, I think that we are in a really interesting spot right now where technology is changing with AI. There's market changes, our competitors are changing and our teams growing and the ability to navigate that change effectively from the team of my customers is something I'm thinking about a lot. Favorite AI product that isn't notion? That is, I use notion AI for everything. You're probably curious, consumer like all of us, right? What are you experimenting with? So I'm going to give it like an answer to these notions, but it's an answer that's different, right? I'm being young and watching my dad on a dictophone. [BLANK_AUDIO] He's talking to the Dictaphone and then someone else on top of those notes and then I'd summarize those notes and organize them. I now have the ability to have a one-on-one meeting with myself with like AI meeting notes and to talk into it. And I find that the output helps me clarify my thoughts on the run and saves me hours of time the other side. There's such a practical simple thing which is we have these thoughts in our head and we have a phone on the run and being able to cock into that and have the AI in this case of this notion. Like, organize, transcribe and use that is a really meaningful practical use of AI that anyone can do today that I don't think many people are doing. Do you want to talk about how AI has changed your own workflow, just on a personal level at work? How are you using AI? What are the biggest efficiencies you found with it? I would say that I'm two to four times more productive than I was six months ago. And the reason for that is I've started to implement really simple building blocks of AI. One example is AI meeting notes to dictate, right, I can, after a meeting I can talk into it. It summarizes my thoughts, it provides a transcript. I can take that and then produce a full up email to a customer. That process would take me two hours before I can now do it in 15 minutes. Another is improving my writing. So remember the saying, I would have written the short letter at enough time, right. I can get stuff down and I highlight it and I just say make sure it's all right. Or I highlight and say simplify language. And that once again saves me like 30 minutes to an hour each day just in terms of re-crafting the stuff I'm using. The third way is just enterprise search. Quite often every question that I have has been answered by someone else in the organization before being some slack message or teams message or the like. And so with like, no, I'm able to just ask a question as simple as complex as I like and it goes and references always points. And so like those three points together actually add up to three or four hours of time back in the day. And so I'm applying on top of that ability to use deep research to improve my ability to draft first draft reports. And that's basically like most of my job at a desk. I'm able to deliver two to four times more. There's still the human element, which I was not repacing or the creative element or the collaboration part internally. But those building blocks, I would say make me two to four times more productive than I was six months ago. So how fast I'm seeing the space meeting. Yeah. Yeah. Last one. And is there a pet peeve you have? Is there something that really annoys you? Sending an email when I'm in a conversation or doing a text message. You're talking to someone one on one. That's a person. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. Andrew, that's the finished line. You've made it to your first podcast interview. Thank you so much. You've been great commercial partners of ours now. And excited to come visit any officer. Yeah. Thank you. I really enjoy the conversation. What a journey from rolling a dawn and startup heartbreak in San Francisco. Building LinkedIn's sales engine in our leading notion across India, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Andrew's story is one of quite drive deep resilience and thoughtful leadership. Huge thanks to Andrew, Bruce Kanda and Wisdom and you for listening. If something of this episode is back to talk, send it to a friend or colleague. And please rate us and review us on your favorite app as it always helps. And for curious about partnering with us at the Curiosity Center across this podcast and our other products. And joining the likes of notion, Google, KPMG, Vanta and more might details and the show notes. Until next time, I'm Vita Tagalwal. Take a while and this is the High Files podcast.