Notion's CEO on if AI is really killing software companies

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Definitely we're looking for a fair AI native people who are shifting towards younger, early career folks. Early career. You hired a 16 year old the other day. Wait, did you really? What's out of all this? How do you know about it? Welcome to Access and hello to all of our new listeners, viewers after last week's splashy episode with Fiji Simo. Reminder, find us on YouTube in beautiful 1080p or higher definition. Ellis, how are you doing, my friend? I am something I am tired of overcommitting my calendar, my friend. As a new solopreneur who is also deeply a people pleaser, I set myself up today with an hour of therapy, an hour of client review 45 minutes for lunch, a two hour work session with a client, and one hour podcast where I had to bring it. And then now we're doing this. So yeah, my lips are chapped, a little worse for wear, but I'm all right. Sorry, 45 minutes for lunch. I don't think I've given more than five minutes for lunch on a weekday in 10 years. Well, thanks. That makes me feel better. I'm just saying, man, like you had some pad time here. Kind of co-host, are you? You got to validate, support, and praise the co-host. I mean, if I could have an agent manage my calendar and be like, Ellis, it's just too much. Then it wouldn't at least, I wouldn't have to be the one to say no. If I say my agent told me no. Well, we can ask Ivan Zhao, the CEO of Notion, who is our guest today about that in a little bit. But first, Ellis, I want to hear about your time up in San Francisco last week. I'm usually the one who's going to San Francisco doing the JSX up from Burbank. But here you were last week with me staying put in LA going up there and having some fun and telling the founders, what's up? Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I was invited by their speedrun accelerator, Andrews and Horowitz, A16Z, to speak to their brand new cohort of young founders about the art and science of startup storytelling, of course. I think it's going to get posted online later, and it was a bit of a exclusive for now. But I can share the things that people tweeted about it, and then I could say more. I think the big message, which I came up with the morning before, because I was trying to do my storytelling method on myself and say what people actually want to hear, the big message was don't say what it is, meaning don't say what your product is, but say what people want. I tried to give a bunch of examples of how I and others have done that through history. I think in a world where tech is frankly a lot less differentiated as it once was where everybody had different innovations. Now everybody's talking about the same AI stuff. It's powerful as it is, talking about agents or AI or saving time and money is going to be tough for you to stand out. So I think I just kind of shared the inside scoop on my method of trying to find, put my reporter hat back on, trying to find whatever is most interesting about your company through the eyes of your audience. And just like hammering that home, you know, and I think like one of the examples that resonated with people was when I worked on the daylight tablet computer and I think being tech dudes who did have like a legit innovation, like a 60 frames per second, super responsive, scrollable, e-ink, touch screen, so you could browse the web. You could listen to music or podcasts if you want, you could read your newsletters inside your email. It's kind of like a Kindle that can do a lot more, something like between the Kindle and the iPad. I think any other tech company would have just talked about the screen technology, especially if it was a company like Samsung. But the fact that they also created the Rono S that was all kind of about calm and peace and focus and it doesn't want to have notifications, it doesn't want to have social apps, they try and move you toward a psychological knowledge workers and moment, we ended up making the headline about the larger idea, which is I think what I believe people want most, is just a computer that's calmer and more focused and so the headline I came up with was the computer de-invented, when everybody else is reinventing and adding more and more and more into their products, I think reinvention has become synonymous with just adding more and shouldified stuff into your product, what if there was a de-invented way? And as always, the headline is just a hook, a way to get people in, I don't know if you'd like it, Alex. But why would you say that you weren't very calm when you brought your daylight to our live show with Google Ventures and Winston from Harvey and that ship broke immediately and you had no notes? But yeah, if it works, I can see that working. Yeah, Android is not my favorite to this day. I mean, I think half the problem was that I couldn't make the text bigger coincidentally in the Notion app. I know where that setting lives in iOS, I do not know where the setting lives in Android. Actually, I think I tried to change it, but it wasn't reflected in specific apps. So yeah. That's okay. I want to know about the actual day of doing this keynote, like in the process of it, where you were you pacing, you know, were you doing like, you go to one side of the stage and then the other, did you have a teleprompter, were you winging it, do you have a bunch of slides? Slides. But a lot of riffing, which I am prone to do as a yapper, that's why I have a podcast. I was supposed to go 45 minutes, but I went 20 minutes over. Jesus Christ, you talked for over an hour straight? Yeah. I mean, you heard, I've talked for like seven hours today already, including this. So yeah, I guess I can do that. But I just get excited. I mean, I, you know, I like to make people laugh. I think myself is a little bit of an entertainer or a stand-up comic. It's interesting, though. I felt like when I got out of media, I was like, I don't want to be in media, because I don't want to be an entertainer. But I do think going back to the people, please remind that, that is definitely a part of me. Did any 20-year-old founders come up to you after and be like, I was five years old when you were at the verge? Shockingly no. They all came up to me, which was fun. I mean, they are founders, meaning they are ultra-networkers, ultra-ambitious. They, by definition, are the people who approach the speaker after the event. But in a room full of founders, all of them approach the speaker after the event, which is funny. But yeah, I don't think any of them were alive when I was at the verge. Not wild. Something else you did last week after we recorded was you had another company that you worked with go live faces. Is that right? Yeah. This looked interesting. Like a new kind of PowerPoint. There's a million companies doing this, but I liked the kind of weirdly IRL low production look of at least the still of this trailer, you know, just chairs on a beach. Yeah, this one was fun, essentially what they're doing is instead of having your slides just be these kind of static rectangles, they are using the full power of the web to create live interactive experiences inside of your slides, whether it is a rotating 3D model, a live map, a quote you can generate from a client, anything that can be on your site can now be in your deck. And this was kind of like the perfect client for me because they have this very, very cool tech, but they aren't completely sure where they want to point it. And so for me, the exercise is always about what do you love? They talked about founders building cool stuff. What's the technology you have? Where might people want it? Who do you want to compete against? And I think we ended up in a really cool place. This was also a line I was proud of from the manifesto that I also tweeted. There's no power left in PowerPoint that, you know, you just got to give the people what they want. Right? Everybody says that shit. So again, what were you showering when you did that one? Dude, I like, I like don't, I don't even know at this point whose idea it was could have been me, could have been cloud. You're so in the zone. Yeah, I guess so. I don't know. I feel like I'm burning out a little bit in terms of my like random access memory. Like I don't even know what happened yesterday, but whatever I'm doing seems to be working at the moment. Well, we have to talk about the biggest news of this week, which is that the founder of OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger, is joining OpenAI. So you haven't, you haven't set up OpenClaw, right? Oh, my God. Did anybody make the joke that Altman buttered him up? Oh, why? Because he's a lobster. Exactly. No, because it's a bad idea. Not my best. Not your best. It's okay. If we were in person, I would laugh. But there's some legendary buttering up methodologies. Are there not zuckies take people for a walk around campus up to that hill or whatever? I don't know. What do you think Sam does? That's a good question. You know, I asked someone very close to this conversation. Why Peter probably picked OpenAI and Sam Altman over meta in Mark Zuckerberg because he had actually said on Lex Friedman's podcast that those were the two offers he was evaluating, which I just love how the entire process has been public and on display for like the last two weeks of he went to San Francisco. He talked about having these conversations and then he joined OpenAI like all within two weeks. But anyway, it's talking to someone very close to this and they said probably money was the reason he went to OpenAI. Though I don't know. I mean, Steinberg is an interesting dude, man. He's a repeat entrepreneur. He sold a company that did PDF stuff for like over $100 he did 40 something projects before cloud code. He's the PDF goat. He's also jacked living in Europe. And it doesn't seem like he really needs a lot. I mean, on Lex Friedman, he was talking about that, but I actually just wanted to play you him talking about the offers he was getting. Let's keep his first one. And then there's all the big labs that I've been talking to and from those meta and OpenAI seemed the most interesting. Do you lean one way or the other? Not sure, but I should share that it's not quite finalized yet. Let's let's say like on either of these, my conditions are that the project stays open source that maybe it's going to be a model like Chrome and Chromium. This is too important to just give to a company and make it theirs. So yeah, this literally came out I think a couple days before he joined OpenAI. Dude, I don't get this at all. You don't get it at all? It's so fucking simple. One company is about personal productivity and the name Open is in their name and they have 800 million intentional AI users every week. One has 800 million unintentional AI users every week has not stood for personal independence and doesn't really have anything to do with productivity or owning your own shit. Okay. Fair. Am I wrong? That is a very fair point. I think an interesting argument is that Zucker's over there trying to assemble the Avengers of AI to reboot everything and is willing to consider things he hasn't considered before. But yes, your point is well taken. I think it also helps that OpenClaw ran on Codex, OpenAI's coding platform and that Steinberger was such a proponent of that. Yeah, point taken. Now the question is what is he going to do at OpenAI? I'm not so much concerned about the future of OpenClaw because again, it's still this super early adopter thing that most people, including myself, will not take the time to go through and spend thousands and tokens and buy a Mac mini to have it maybe triage email. Okay. I would rather just wait for the hosted safe version of this, which by the way, Kiwi and then Manus, which Matt Abbott shipped also this week. So OpenAI will do a version of that. But I think there's actually something else Peter will work on that connects to our last episode with Fiji and he was talking about this with Lex Friedman too. Let's play this. There should be a very easy way for agents to get their own Twitter account. We need to rethink social platforms a little bit if we go towards the future where everyone has their agent and agents maybe have their own Instagram profiles or Twitter accounts or can do stuff on my behalf. I think it should very clearly be marked that they are doing stuff on my behalf and it's not me because content is not so cheap, eyeballs are the expensive part. So yeah, I think he's going to be working on this OpenAI social network for agents, which Fiji told us about for the first time last week. Let's just quickly play that. You know, nothing really specific in the works, but the thing we're thinking a lot about and I think everyone is thinking a lot about it. It's like what happens to like social relationship in a world where everybody has their own personal agent and like how can these personal agents maybe help you manage your social relationship in a better way. If you're agent and my agent were communicating ahead of this interview, would that interview have been better? So yeah, what do you think about this Alice? It sounds like we're going towards a future where agents are talking to agents. Well, he certainly sounds like a PDF goat out of that way. Man, I don't know. It just sounds like one use case to me. I mean, when I think about what I think the Johnny and Sam device is going to be, it is this always on thing that has access to computer use, browser use, app use, API's, MCP, whatever it is is going to be on the back end and you can use it to orchestrate whatever you want. And that could be an automation, that could be something that you want your computer to do while you're away. I don't know if they're going to use this guy's open source technology or even just the principles of it to help build it. But tell me this, I mean, I'm still not completely sure. I'm not completely sure what what was the hardest part about what he did. It sounds like a lot of it was around memory around the way that he designed it. Not so much the underlying technology because he was using you know, open clause based on models like cloud and GPT and all that. So it's not like he has some proprietary model. I think he connected the dots. He connected the dots and let it and let it go wild. And which is what Chats GPT did originally was, you know, Google and all these other companies had chatbots like that. And they just didn't want to release them because they didn't think people were ready. They didn't think it was safe or secure enough. And this open source project is like here, just have at it install this thing on a Mac mini, spend a shit ton and tokens and figure it out. And I think what he showed is that people at least a significant early adopter crowd, which is probably also a signature show like this, want to do that even if the ROI on the other side is not known. And so if you take that energy and you scale it to a hundred million, eight hundred million people with the right safeguards, with right the right tool access and really have strapped away the difficulty of setting it up, maybe you've got something pretty cool. Yeah, I think the other thing he hinted at with this project is back toward, you know, this vision of the future that there's always been where you own your computer and your computer does things for you versus, let's say, kind of the like approach where it lives on a corporate server and then that stuff does it for you. But I mean, I'll tell you this. I mean, as a segue into this notion interview with Ivan Zhao, I mean, I was using the new custom agents tool. And basically what I was able to say is every morning at seven a.m. like run a script where you update my availability document based on when the next two hour slot is in my calendar for like big project learning sessions. And also the next one hour slot for like one hour working sessions. And it's just going to do that every day. And then I made up another one that said whenever I get an email or I said after the final review with a client on my calendar, go to the relevant invoice, pre-fill that into an email and get it ready for me. And it works. Not yet. There we go. There's still some kinks to work out. One of them is a simpler kink, which is that the original availability one couldn't access my sub calendars. That'll get worked out. It's on my main calendar just fine, but I'm a nerd who has multiple sub calendars for each client. So that's my problem, I guess. But as far as I know, being able to like create time-based or rule-based or like trigger-based stuff is a lot of, you know, what people are talking about when it comes to OpenClaw and whatever is talking about, I think part of it is that you could kind of own it and run it yourself and have it be always on as a result. Yeah, but I don't think most people want to do that. Oh, for sure. For sure. Yeah. I think most people want the Manus version, which MetaBot, which is like, it's hosted for you and you access it via Telegram or WhatsApp. And it's your own little cloud that you control, at least theoretically. But yeah, you'll always, you know, it's the same people that have like physical Bitcoin wallets. There's always going to be people who want to control it on-prem. Yeah. And I mean, I've been actually gave us a juicy little hint here on the show about like this independent app that they're working on, just kind of talking to the AI. And it's going to be able to do stuff just like that. There's actually a lot of interesting new stuff in this combo with Ivan. He is a super well-connected influential dude, obviously, in AI and tech more broadly. But also notion, I think, has a soft spot in both of our hearts. You worked with Ivan on some of the company's positioning at one point, just full disclosure, like we're friendly with Ivan. Notion was actually one of our launch sponsors for access. So mad props to them for that. And just generally really good people. So it was super exciting to finally get time with Ivan on the show. Do you want to hear any more from Delirious seven hours talking Ellis or should we just cut Ivan? Let's just cut Ivan. Okay. Have fun. This episode is brought to you by Accenture when you're out for time. Exercising operations fall out of sync. Everything else follows. The result? Learn more at Accenture.com/Spotify. - This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. Ready to make anything online make sense? Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. (soft music) - Ivan, how are you? - I'm pretty good, how are you guys? - Good, where are you calling in from today? - I'm calling from our San Francisco office. - Are you tired of hearing and saying the word agents yet, Ivan? Or are you still loving it? (laughing) - Do you know one of our best designers in the company? - Do you guys know this guy, Jeffrey? - I don't think so. Sounds like I need to beat him. - Yeah, he's great, but whenever he says Asian, it sounds like Asians. (laughing) We have this Asian to do this, and he's Asian. - Right, so it's like Asian Asian, oh, okay, it makes sense too. - So we're catching you at an interesting time. Week before a big rollout, I know you previewed custom agents a little while ago, but how's everything going toward the launch? - That's very good, we're just prepping up for all the customations ready to launch next week. - I've been testing for a while. We've been actually talking about today and all hands like, we've been working on this idea almost a year now, next week it will be the week that's finally ready for public. So we previewed this earlier, late last year in our McQueen Ocean keynote events. So, a bunch of company be running out for some time, but next week is the public time. - Ivan, it's funny. I feel like I was giving custom agents a try. Big thanks, Takseh for the demo with Alex the other day. And what I was thinking was that it was kind of like your initial vision years ago for being able to create your own software. But you guys dumped that line, right? Is the time to bring it back? 'Cause it really feels like that. - Democratized software in Reynolds, Democrat has an AI agent. It's kind of similar. People are trying to from all different angles. You can even see from what is the open claw in the past couple of weeks, several weeks blowing up, right? People will buy Mac Mini. They want to use having asynchronous agents that running on the backgrounds can do work. So, but what is like to have a business grade multiplayer then you can create a factory of those kinds of custom agent working 24/7 for you and open up easy enough that more people can do that. That's the spirit of the Pradaware launching. - Ivan, have you actually had open claw do anything good for you? I'm actually dying to know anyone who's had open claw do something meaningful for them. - One of our had a product. I don't know if you hook up open claw, but a lot of claco to manage his lights for him. He has those like Lutron systems. He figured out how to plug into his AI system, whether it's open claw base where his only agent system. - Maybe not worth thousands of tokens in a Mac Mini running on its own, but we'll get there. - I think we all have the tinker within us, right? We all want to, people play Lego part of it to see the final result, but I would say the journey is actually making the Lego pieces. And when you make something great, you want to showcase to people. I think it's a lot of the draw for a, including notion included, people want to build something that showcases to other people's open claw place into that too. - It's tough. I feel like with any of these big paradigm shifts and you're uniquely good at this. I think Ivan coming up with like historical references or metaphors. And for a while, I feel like it was Legos. Now we're moving on to the factory. And I feel like I had a founder client who was talking about that game, Factorio. And I have a special thing that I want to show you from my history that I just thought of. That's actually right behind me. Hold on one second. - Oh. - I have the original PC box, one of the best box arts of all time, SimCity 2000. And like it does feel like that. Like you're trying to manage and optimize this incredible system all by yourself. But what's crazy is that you almost feel like the boss. You feel like the CEO, like the mayor of your SimCity when you just say it with words now. And that's to me, I think what's the craziest piece with this empire you've built that is now accessible with the agents. - It's actually, so there's two folks. Once that's the product we've built, we want all the leaders, CEOs, whoever working company feel like they can manage a team of agents or interns. (laughing) - I can't hear it now, I have a man. (laughing) - That's a power bill. But at the same time, like me running notions, like I've been doing a lot of with coding agents. Just plugging out all the different tools inside the company. It just feels like superpower. Like some of our customers can connect with Snowflake on one end, all the contexting notion, claw-cow can run some other process on the other end. It's like I can ask any question inside the company. And the answer is a superhuman level of answer for me. And it can run some repetitive processes. And I can almost feel like I can do anything. So that power, it's, I would say until this coding agent, coding agent revolution with, no, since 4.6, we don't, we haven't have that power. And that's fairly new. It feels like same city, but for your companies. - Akshay was showing us how you guys use the custom agents internally at notion. And I thought that was pretty interesting. Like everyone you guys run on Slack and he was showing us how it can monitor one of the channels where people are asking like basic things around the office. Like where are the chargers? I'm out of whatever at my desk. And it can respond and remind people of inventory. And if not create a ticket, that a human can then go and check on. And I thought that was a pretty cool use case because it's not revolutionary, but it does lessen the effort that you need to get basic things done that humans would have done before. So I'd be curious to see how that scales out and what other people built. - Yeah, it's one of the, so there are three use cases we try to really nail with this custom agent launch. So you just mentioned one of them, which is answer repetitive questions. - Right, a big swap of knowledge where you can argue maybe a quarter of them are just answering questions that live in some kind of knowledge base. So we try to do a really good job of that. Another one's triage tickets, triage to dues. You probably saw some demos from, hey, people ask questions in one Slack channel, you should pass the team in the other Slack channel, a lot of PM's job, a lot of engineer managed job is doing that. The third one is kind of write this kind of status report, status updates. So many team workers like, hey, what do we do last week? What do you do yesterday? So you don't need to do those anymore. And those three type of use cases where we consider busy work, and most knowledge were exactly a big swap of knowledge where are those kind of busy work. - It sucks. It's so much tedious stuff, man. - I know, agents can do them pretty well in some sense super human level well now. So just delegate those agents and you human can elevate up and play your same cities, right? I get to finally be the systems thinker. I think that I am. When you're forced to actually construct the perfect instruction manual for each agent. And that was I think one of the things that you guys have done really well with this launch is create that settings panel where you can actually fine tune the different prompts, the different access, the different integrations. And I've been playing a lot with Wabi recently to create some little vibe code apps. And they've done something really similar and I think we're seeing a very cool innovation. People are moving beyond just the chat screen to actually catalog some of its memories in a UX that actually makes sense. Like inside of Wabi, there's a settings page within your app for the icon prompt. There's a setting page for the different fetch prompts it's doing and you can select a model. And I feel like you guys have taken a similar step forward. When did that settings page come about to let people actually tweak things not just with natural language, but in more of an interface. It feels like a big next step for AI. - I wouldn't see a big next step. It's about require step to do anything business-facing 'cause when you're working with a lot of people, just like giving the transparency and what it's actually doing. - The transparency and you wanna lock down. You want to make sure the permission is set. When you work with team of people, there are secrets. Certain people should see certain things, certain people should not see certain things. Certain workflow should be defined by the experts and people shouldn't change it. The power of language model is free for all. Anybody, if you can speak English or Japanese, you can modify things. The downside of language model is free for all. Anybody can modify anything. In a business setting, you don't want free for all. You want some guard reels for the permissions, for the securities, for all the boring, but very important and necessary things. And in some sense, that's a lot of value we provide with custom region to provide those guard reels. So. So like OpenClaw, you can run MacMe need to run everything in your life, but that's just by yourself. But what is that for a company in that unique R-reels and all those checkboxes mentioned? Yeah, I'm curious. I would think you guys are on the cutting edge of actually implementing this stuff internally. I feel like every single company out there is saying like AI agents are going to help you automate the busy work and focus on what matters. But what have you heard from the team for what that actually looks like in terms of being able to focus on what matters? It's the repetitive work we're talking about. Like we've been testing this with a small group of alpha customers, like the ramp, the Versao, the clay, the cursor of the world, right? Access podcasts, we've got it all access. Even though those company are very AI first, they have a lot of busy work too. They can buy a lot of internal workflow on a coding site, but anything that's knowledge work related, teamwork related, notion is the best primitive for that. They've won an example ramp fully on boring to notion last year. It's right now, it thinks about 3,000-ish people companies, right? Before notion, they have to use across like half a dozen core collaboration tools. So they just shrink from six just to notion. That's the first step consolidation. So save costs, save money, move faster, one place for information. But now once you have one place for information, it's have one context for AI agent. So they deploy the notion across all the ramp employees, one place for AI meeting nodes. Not there has one place to do the customer agent, so they can actually automate some of the repetitive workflow inside ramp. One of their popular ones is for their sales teams. So ramp is shipping really fast. They're shipping feature left and right, and it's really hard for their sales team to keep up, right? Like what's the latest feature? How do you answer a question from customers? So now they set up a custom agent that can answer all those questions from all the Slack channels, internal local thoughts or emails. I think that's the most popular one inside the company. In the last couple of weeks, they believe answered 4,000 questions for this custom agent. And that's about if we consider each question about 30 minutes, that's about 2,000 human hours. That's a real time saving for ramp. It's funny when you say 2,000 human hours, I think CEOs love that kind of talk. But I feel like the AI narrative could have been a little different. Had it been a bit more like targeted around the exact use cases, like if you were to say, hey, help desk, you don't have to tell people where the bullshit is that they're asking for every day, like the IT help desk, they would have been like, oh my god, give me this thing. That's like one of the reasons that in my work, as you've seen, I've always tried to lead with like the hyper specific relatable problems because it instantly makes this stuff feel a bit less threatening. But then the question remains like with all that stuff automated, what are people doing instead? Like have you seen the pace increase for your own team now that they're not doing the busy work? Like what's the outcomes that you're actually seeing? So I haven't heard this from anybody yet. Yeah. I will say the first appearance is happening on a lot of engineers, like engineer product design within notion, like we don't, all the daily standup inside notion were done by customer agent now. So you don't have to summarize the meeting notes. You don't have to say what you did last week, right? Those are small time saving, like a five, 10 minutes each meetings, but they adds up. Other things like tri-arching tickets, managing the bug backlog, none of this done by any PM EM anymore. They're still small. They're like five, 10 minutes here and there, but they add up. I will see the shape of the time saving is very horizontal. It's not very vertical, meaning that's like it's five minutes, 10 is here and there for each, everyone versus the entire row, entire job done by agents. Because of that, we don't see a structural change at least in company yet, right? It's like everybody's life gets a little bit better. If you ask our team, like, hey, we're going to take away the customization from you. We're going to have a revolution inside a company, right? But it does not precisely map to any person's responsibility at this moment, because the model capability to get better, the car reels and all the permission stuff need to get better. That's what we learn with OpenClaw, right? Is that it's cool to let it go wild, but the model is still kind of unreliable. The safety is just not there. There's prompt injection. There's all these reasons you don't really want to let some agent go ham was shall access to your machine. And I guess that's the opportunity notion is going after. Is that fair? That this is like fair. Yeah. It's like what is OpenClaw spirit asynchronous can do almost everything you can't do with a computer, but make a multiplayer, make a collaborative, would enterprise great permission and security. How do you use it? You talked about how some of your teams using it, but you're the CEO, like, how are you using agents and your day to day to run the company? Every morning I have a brief from this guy. So this is out of the box. So it tells me, like, let me read my brief today. So if you're going to talk to these two schmucks on podcasts, I was going to say, please cancel all meetings with people that are five skip levels below me that somehow got on my calendar. Thank you. Bye. You need a very brief every morning. I used to archive my inbox. So we also notion, male notion calendar team, their top priority right now is to make their agent to use capability world class, the best in class. So you can archive any, I basically don't check my inbox like a normal person anymore. I largely talk with a custom agent that runs my inbox. So it has a context of what I'm working on, has a context of what kind of thing I care about. Right. So that's another things that the super power one I mentioned earlier, connect to our snowflake backend. So I can't understand any, almost any data inside the company with the commentary that's the context from Slack, contact from notion docs, from an email. It's kind of like a data science team in your pocket. What was your brief like this morning? I mean, probably about, I usually, once you dismiss it, it goes away. So let me, uh, that's kind of crazy that you're not really looking at email anymore. I love that. I would love to not look at email or have it to set up for you guys because they really changed your, um, and so we'll stay on after the pod Ivan and you'll, uh, you'll personally walk us through, right? I would just do this yesterday with, um, who's that lady from Wall Street Journal? Hey, hey, he finally clicked with notion. Oh, is this why Joanna tweeted that? Yes. Yeah. Oh, Joanna shot at Joanna. She just left. I was going to bring up her tweet. She was like, I finally understand notion thanks to AI and I was like, that was you. Ivan, you made her understand AI Ivan, that's the power of going direct as they say. It's, it says a lot about our onboarding could be better, but it also says our AI is, it's quite magical, right? Can't do everything you asked for. So I actually DM her afterwards. We're going to set up one on one to truly onboard. I, that is the thing about notion for me is like, uh, it's, it still is kind of like, man, there's so much to do in there. And I'm not sure where to start that the onboarding has to be tricky when it's such a powerful tool. Yeah. I would say in some case that has been our weaknesses for years because we give people the Legos, right? And, and this moment seems to be a blessing because if you think about traditional SaaS, you hardcore the workflow into your software logic and, and it's like, that's your domain. The way they are selling everything's rigid, but powerful is automated on a cloud. Some Salesforce dude spends eight weeks programming it for you. Well, Salesforce is actually a pretty flexible one compared to many vertical SaaS. So actually, it's a relational database behind a scene you can do a lot of different things, but more majority of the SaaS is pretty rigid. The workflow is baked into it and notions Legos would try not to be very opinionated. So historically, it's difficult to onboard, but with language models, language model can use those Legos. So it's actually making our weakness into our strength. So now you can do all the different open-ended things, all different flavor knowledge were in notion. So it actually shifted a little bit. I have personally onboarded Alex to a variety of different use cases, and I will require a small commission. Thank you, Ivan. How did you do it? So you know what's funny, my, my barrier to getting on notion back when I joined the browser company is, and I actually hated it for a hot minute. Now I'm like an evangelist, essentially, but I was like, where the fuck do I click? There's six buttons over here. There's six little dots over here. There's a little table drag over here. You could drag around the lines. And now that I know how to use it, it's like my favorite thing and I use Google Docs and I frankly want to kill myself. But there are all those little things, I think, that kind of add up. And another really big thing I think to learn is how to actually use databases well, which was like such a huge unlock for me. Are you telling custom agents to like proactively recommend stuff like that that maybe is under appreciated that people don't even know what they could ask for yet. You know, they ask for a faster horse instead of a database. We don't proactively ask agent to suggest the workflow yet. We're actually testing this to when we deploy in customer. It's like how do you automate for deployment motion, right? This is the buzzword for a deployment engineer. How do you make that better with our own tools? We should do that. I would say the most popular use case is rather than you build a database from scratch, like the roles and column and relational schemas, agent can just build it for you. And that has been, at this point, more than 50% of databases are built by agent than human now. And that's probably the magical thing that clicked with the Wall Street Journal lady yesterday. I found my daily reminder, a daily brief. So my top three items is confirm our domain. because we're trying to, I think we're trying to buy another domain for our product. And number two, don't let that out here 'cause it's coming up Thursday. You gotta get the domain before that. - The other one's prepared for podcast block this afternoon with you guys. There's a bunch of links in my calendar email. And the last one before end of day review the candidates in my recruiting databases. So we have a recruiting database internally. Every day our customers send me notifications, like those are the people who are job offers going out. So I usually review those job offers. - Speaking of recruiting, I know some CEOs like Toby Luckkey of Shopify have been pretty forward about, you know, they're essentially saying you are not allowed to hire anybody unless you could prove that AI can't do it. Whereas other companies have said, whoever we hire has to be provably AI native in all their workflows. How are you implementing anything like that yet in the recruiting process? As criteria? - Not as straight, but definitely we're looking for a very AI native people. I would say our overall, we're shifting towards younger, early career folks. 'Cause like they're just-- - Early career. - You hired a 16 year old the other day. (laughing) - I love that. - Did you really? - Yeah. - How about this? - I saw a tweet a 16 and a 18 year old. - Okay, so the story is lay last year we hired, well, me last year we hired a 18 year. So I thought this is the youngest, well, we ever hire, right? So it's just gradually high school going to college. Then a month later, we found this person really talented on YouTube. Now famous on Twitter, anywhere. Like, he making some cool videos about design and AI stuff. So like, come, we invite this person to our office. Then I bump into him and the elevator and say, "Hey, where do you go to college?" So I don't go to college. So I hope you drop out, right? So now I'm still in, I'm grade 10 in high school. (laughing) But this kid is so talented and he's actually part of our. - He runs marketing. - No, no, no, no, he's a programmer. Part of our next next product has, he's building big chunk of it. No, we're gonna announce hopefully in May. So a lot more people can play with that. - Wow, so you find with AI you want to hire younger because those kinds of people, what they use the tools and they embrace them faster, is that the thing? - Embrace them faster, let's have assumptions. 'Cause a lot of things you just assume it cannot do, but the assumption changes every two months, every month at this point, right? So more optimistic, more hungry. A lot of experience doesn't matter anymore. You just have to be a good, ask a right questions. And I think so. Like you grow up with the internet in the past 10, 15 years then you just, you learn much faster. Like we have internet when we were a little bit older, but this kid just completely grew up with internet from when they're toddlers. So their rate of learning is composing a different rate. And last couple of years, if you grow up with Chatchubiti, it's a compiling yet a different rate. (upbeat music) - This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When you're advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. The result, less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. (soft piano music) I'm so happy you're advocating for toddler screen time, Ivan, because my toddler has screen time and has learned a lot from #myipad. And I'm just, I mean, even dating back to the staff years, I'm just such a big believer that it's not about the screen per se. It's about what's on the screen or sure what it's replacing if it comes to relationships, play outside, unstructured free time, all that stuff. But yeah, one would think, I mean, I remember back in those days as well. I mean, I'm curious, you know, I know you've been with Notion a while now. I mean, how would you have done it differently on the way up if you had access to these tools? Oh man, good question. Anybody asked me this before? This is what you come on the show for, Ivan. Yeah, I'm not a researcher. So I don't think I will be building, even if you rewind back five, 10 years ago, I wouldn't be building, I wouldn't be ex, like not first, I keep diving into building HGI, right? So actually, you guys know there's, historically, there's always two spectrum of schools are computing, right? So on the East Coast, there is this AI HGI school, which is like that start MIT, John McCarthy trying to teach computer how to play chess. This is 1950s MIT, right? That's on the East Coast. On the West Coast, this is like, Douglas Engelbar and later Alan Kay, those are the HCI, human computer interaction, where you can know as like, augmenting human intellect, AHI school for computing. So AHI, I always be polar schools of computing. I will say, right now the power definitely shift a lot towards AHI, HGI side, but what draw me to start a notion, draw me to start what to play with computers, it's the interface, the tool side, the create, the shape of something that you can hold in your hand, that hopefully amplifying what makes us human. If I start in tech again, now I think I'll still be drawn to our stat directions. Like in notion, some of you been to our offices, we care a lot about tools and craft. That's the HCI, that's the human augmentation schools of what we're thinking about computing. And I think right now it's interesting time because AHI becomes so powerful, how do you use this power to create new form of tools? Is the question that nobody proper answer yet? - Open clause, a good example of that, because I have-- - Alex, why do you have to like, it's essentially bring up open clause? - Well, it's just on the mind, man. Like I think what he's saying is connected to that, because I think a lot of people, a lot of labs had that kind of tech internally, and AI is getting a lot better at tool use and agentic use cases. And really what it is, it's like a different interface. I mean, it's not a good one in terms of like a mass consumer interface, but it just changed the interface to interact with an agent this way and make it accessible. And so the opportunity with interfaces in AI right now is just tremendous because there's so much ceiling on just the AI we have today, even beyond future models, right? - I think that's people are starting like, hey, real-time strategy games from the 90 and 2000 might be a good form factor for managing agents. - That's what I'm talking about. - Or Cambambor, turns out we're full circle now. Like for, we had a one year, two year of managing IDEs using IDU to manage agents. Now we're going back to managing multiple agents, turns out the best way is Cambambor. So we're still looking for the best form factors. - I was the settlers of Katan, addict in college. I won the Kentucky Championship one year. Are you saying that maybe? Maybe that could come back and I could use that skill to run my agents. I don't know about Katan actually. It's probably more like civilization. - I got one. What is the zergling rush of agentic deployment in Starcraft terms? (laughing) If you really want to destroy a competitor before they've even gotten out to doors, (laughing) I need one agent to de-doss their servers. I need another to hire all their team members. I need another to what? - More and more missing MetaForce here. (laughing) - Did you play Starcraft? - I do play Starcraft. - I like Starcraft. (laughing) - What'd be interesting to see is that like human wants to be in the loop. You just have to go up the loop. You don't want to be on the level of doing busy work loop. You want to elevate, elevate. Eventually you're from managing work itself to managing a city. And I think we're still doing that. We're figuring out an interface that allows us to elevate. - You've inspired me to want to not look at email ever again. That's gonna be my first level of elevating. - Well my prediction is like there's agents to managing box and there's agents to write emails. And I think maybe two years from now, email will be a really flooded medium just with all the spimes back and forth. So it'll become too saturated, right? So we'll see. Oh, it gets really busy now with all the sales emails and all the agents to write them. - If you think that happens to email, I'd actually, I was gonna, I've been trying to find a way to ask you this. I'm curious how you think notion itself survives agents at scale because there's the argument that what cloud is building and what open eye will probably do with Peter and what they're doing on agents with codex. Like maybe they want to eat you too. How does notion stay firm in that kind of an environment where you know, I was listening to Peter on Lex Friedman and the founder of OpenClaw and he was saying like, most apps will just become API calls. So how do you avoid notion being in that future or does that even matter? Is that okay? - Yeah, I think it's a lot of it. discussion like it's software dead, it says dead, right? To me, that's kind of like a tale of two cities, like with agents with language model, like how software is used and consumed and build is completely different. Like in some sense, software providers are no longer just building for humans, you're building for other language models and agents. Like if your product cannot be used by agents, I don't think the future is really promising for you. But if your product can be re-architected, can be properly adopted, used by agents, used the word to use, I think that you can tap into brand new market that's that the tech industry have never seen before. Like for the longest time, tech mostly selling tools in the past 15 years, selling tools as a sea-based, sea-based business model for other people to buy. But the larger market is not just selling tools, it's selling the work and services. That's about 10 times the market. So if you can make your product and your current stack and all the tooling you're building around this to tap into that market, that's much, much larger. And to me, that's the opportunity for all the tech companies. The question is, can you reshape your architecture to write this wave? That's why we've been building notions so many times to write this way. Yeah, it's crazy to think about the back end versus the front end. That's what I was wondering about if you were to build notion from the ground up with these tools, if the user interface would have been any different. I mean, it's definitely clear, you know, with y'all's incredible design sensibility. And I think we talked about this once I've been just like that, eternal, unsolvable tension, you know, between too many buttons and too few buttons. And how do you create some way for the team to know what's right, to know what's enough and what's too much? But it seems to me that with AI, a lot of this stuff could ostensibly be hidden. And a lot of the buttons, you know, could go away. I mean, when you think about it, it's like moving your mouse and clicking something, maybe something that that 16-year-old couldn't care less about versus just kind of speaking it even, which you're starting to see a lot of different speaking tools that register this stuff even more. That's why I like I've been using chat as an interface to manage my email inbox, right? Like what's matter here is like, I don't want you to click 50 button to archive emails. I can just tell the customer agents, hey, archive what's, I don't think it's important today. So I think what's what's key here is, okay, fundamentally, the company gonna get more nimble shape differently. By future business, they were built by a small group of human, start a company together. A lot of talk about one billion, one person building a billion dollar business, but at least we believe it still be a small group of people. So it will be some form of multiplayer, right? Multiplayer type of use cases, a more important than single player. That's one form factors that's important. So when multiple people collaborate, what's the best form factor for multiple people to collaborate, reading and writing text is still one of the best form factor. So you need a multiplayer canvas to do some form of documents, some form of writing. And when you have a multiple people collaborate on strategy and writing, you also need to collaborate on what to do, who to do what? That's basically give us some kind of a project management shape of things. Whether you manage it to do for humans, managing for to do for agent, come, you get some kind of campaign board, right? To me, those are the core primitives to work with a small group of people and dedicate a lot of work to agents. Agent can write a lot of docs, agent can do a lot of tasks. You can work with the external cloud code and cursor agent to do creating a new feature for your code base, but that's kind of your command command and palette, command dashboard for human, a small group of human to work together, right? And lastly, you want to have the state of our models. So right now, there's three or four model companies and each one's leapfrog each other every couple weeks. So for business buyers, they don't want to lock into any of the model providers. So there's a value to be neutral. There's value to be a Switzerland of all the model providers. So you want to have a multiplayer interface collaborative environment that can use state of our models, that are model agnostic and neutral and to be truly B2B, rod and B2C. So that's the position we see that's brand new, wide open in the market and that's what we're going after today. And that's how you think notion will withstand open AI and anthropic trying to go, Hey, notion, you're actually just an API call to our agent. And our agent is going to traverse your interface, right? Because that's what they would probably like to do in the language open everybody because like that, it should be more open rather than close right now, so many company, SaaS provider close, close down their API, close down the endpoint. I think the moment actually to be opened up. So not just welcome human to read and write your product and services, a welcome Asian to do that. And you can win by providing a really good thoughtful user interfaces. You can win by being Swiss land and play with the state of our models. Like whenever Open AI and anthropic release a new model, the next day or the very same day, we have the model, right? Customer want that. And we can play mutual in this way. And we already have the artifacts of documents and can ban board and to do and all the permissions and securities in enterprise care about. So when AI can use your apps, access your tools, use APIs, access other things through MCP. I mean, it seems to me that it's kind of turning a lot of services into at least more so of a dumb pipe than they have been. And if it's kind of being extracted or sorry, abstracted away, you wonder kind of what happens to these companies and the types of edges that they were able to achieve by having their own interface. You know, I mean, do you think that's that's what's behind some company's resistance to being open? The future is really unknown. People don't know how this going to play out. There's a lot of fucker work. We've been using some real-time strategy metaphors, right? You don't know the future. You tend to play a safe, right? Don't want to accidentally drain your mode. You don't want to answer the thing you're doing your data. All right, you're sheep. Yeah. Right. At least in notion, we believe like when other people zig, we should zack. When the entire software market started to close down their data, it's a time to actually embrace open, embrace developers, embrace getting collination to access your data and just be a really good in and out. You're a really good human canvas to collaborate. That's has been our strategy. So beyond our next week's customization release, we're going to release a lot more developer-facing features in the coming weeks and months. And those are embracing this openness of the platform. Right? Notion historically hasn't been a very developer-centric company, but this is about to change because it's philosophy. So it sounds like the nuanced view you have is that the whole sass, you know, is overmarket, sell-off thing. Maybe is overblown in some cases, but there are companies that if they are not designed for agents to traverse, you think they're going to have a really hard time. And that's kind of going to be the pecking order is you've embraced this. You're going to be more open. You're going to let agents crawl you, be open your endpoint, or you will be kind of left behind. Is that fair? That's fair. I think there is a change in terms of how fast can you re-architecture your product? Right? So if the product has a lot of buttons, I don't want to speak port for any product, but as assuming a product that 90s or early 2000s suffer with like a thousand buttons on the screen, it will be really difficult for agent to understand how to use it. And if agent cannot use it, and if the majority of human knowledge were going to be done by agents, then you're going to lose market share. It's very simple. Second, it's the business model transition. So you no longer just selling seats, but you should think about how to use selling usage, selling work, selling outcomes. There's a lot of buzzwords, and nobody have a right answer in the market. Literally not a single company figured us out outside some developer tools. So everybody is just watching each other, but we're kind of figured out in the next year or two. Do you think you'll move to usage base? Because to my understanding, you're mostly seat based, right? That's for agreeing right now. Really? Yes. That seems profound, and that seems like that could change the product a lot. Yeah, we are. It's a lot of experiments. So customization is our first usage based product. And customer has to be embracing it. Just we're talking about the ramp, versatile clay cursor off the world. If you just ask the value they get from those customer agents, they're saving meaningful real human hours. And that can translate into the dollar, substantially amount of a way rather than just seats. So people are embracing because the benefit creates for people. So I'll make you swat a little bit, Ivan. I know you were talking about kind of using email through the AI today. Why was it important to acquire the email app and the calendar app? Was that about having better access to some specific data coming to own it? I know a lot of apps in the past want you to create their own pipes instead of using the Gmail pipes, etc. Yeah, we want to create our own pipes. So we bought the mail and calendar product two years ago. And at that point, we want to create our own pipes. It's still the plan long term. But there's a even faster way to create value, which is to create the best tool you use for mail and calendar. Two ways in at different paces. It's like sooner rather than later we're going to have computer and browser use later it'll just be the pipe and we'll get there both ways. Yeah, you need to build good pipes, right? Like the model capability has been there for quite some time pretty much a year now. What's missing are the infrastructure and the pipes to do knowledge work, the high quality to use capability that works well together, how the permission pipe together, and that's what we're building. So we've been reposition our mail and calendar team to build those pipes and make sure they work really really well out of the box. Yeah, because like, why would you even need all these separate apps in the future? Why would you need a separate calendar app, email app, etc? That whole model seems like it's going to go away. I think calendar, email, tbd, calendar, you still need a very information dance way to see things. So the interface is still really critical. I can argue if you are professional salespeople or someone living in a box and you see like five, ten emails at a time, interface still matters. For me, my, at least for my personal email habits, I usually pick out three or four important email edge given time. So interface is less important. So it really depends on how you, how, what kind of information density you want and calendar is really hard to beat. It has been around for like 100 plus, hundreds of years, this kind of way of layout time. So I think calendar is here to stay. So how are you thinking about the product suite growing? I think I'm sure there are folks internally who are like, let's just create a bottom nav bar inside main notion that includes your docs, your calendar and your email. But then there's also the school thought that having these as separate apps for any number of reasons is pretty important. I feel like the consumer appetite is definitely for simplicity as opposed to super app, at least here in the West. So what's your take on that? I'm personally changed my philosophy on this. Oh, given how quick you can just build things with coding agents. Hopefully soon after we're going to create a release a dedicated customization or agent chat product that has all your business first chat needs in one place. Right. And that's a dedicated use cases that's chat first notion with all the context and notion and you can use it to manage and calendar and email. And this is a standalone app. And we can build this fairly quickly because now a small team with coding agent can just whip it out in a few weeks. Let's just started sweating with anticipation. Yeah. I mean, as a designer, that's the number one goal, right? Ivan, you want to fill up the entire iPhone doc with your own apps? Is that not the goal for every designer? I want to turn it into black and white color, model color. Man, I guess the only one left is slack then, huh? Yes. Ivan, I wanted to ask you about the company more broadly. You all just did a pretty big tender offer. Let employees sell some stock. I noticed you waved your cliff, the one your cliff for new employees. And I think everyone, you know, now that Figma went out, went public, people are wondering, when is notion going to go public? Is notion going to go public? How are you thinking about the next phase of the company like that? Yeah. To us, we shared this message really clearly internally. It's most important for us to layer our business model into this usage based business model. Like the one we talked about earlier, not a single software company has done this has to go. You have outside developer tools and people are looking is wearing the knowledge work domain. It's one of the largest, not the largest market, but not a single product has do this kind of conversion into selling work to other knowledge work customers. So we need to do a good job. Do this kind of transition while we're private so we can take a lot of risks. We can move really fast. We can watch how the public market praise out. And this could happen in the next two or three or quarters. And when that, when this is figured out, when we fully release customer agent with the new pricing model, with new business model, then we can talk about IPO timing. The only other person I've seen talk is clearly about that shift to usage based as you as Brett Taylor at Sierra. That's how they've been operating from the beginning. And it makes sense, right? And he puts it very plainly like, why would you not charge for outcomes if you could? And you could maybe charge more. And I think people are so used to the kind of frankly, lazier seat based SaaS model. It's almost like a gym membership where you probably make a lot of money off of seats that don't get used, right? So I imagine, especially in AI, which is expensive to serve and you guys are a huge token buyer from the labs already. I imagine there's a lot of trade offs to going to that approach. But it seems like you have conviction that this is going to be the future and that every business like yours will eventually move to this and you all want to be early to that, right? Yes, just the market is much, much larger selling tools, selling seats, it's your still selling, you're still in the tech industry. When you can selling work and usage and outcome, you're in the knowledge where economy, that's 10 times larger. And that's, I will say, that's the direction that more companies, more software companies should look towards to not think about, okay, can someone wipe code their own products and they just shrink the cost of quitting software, that's more interfacing the margin looking. But all the looking one is like, there's an entire knowledge where economy, there's so much busy work in the world. How do you, how do you help people daily get some busy work? That's a much larger market and more interesting market. I know there have been a lot of different ways companies have been positioning themselves and you just bring up busy work again. I mean, how are y'all working to differentiate yourselves at this point? I know there's kind of been the teammates angle from notion. But it seems like when a lot of folks are talking about the same thing, it's got to be pretty tough, I mean, especially to enterprise customers. What are you guys saying these days? What's the latest and greatest? Yeah, if you think about the market, who's, who are the players in this kind of knowledge work space? We mentioned OpenClock, right? OpenClock is MacMini, very much for tinkers. You can manage your personal knowledge or personal work with it. That's one space. It's the single players. It's fairly complex to use, but quite powerful, sitting on the one of the quadrant. Here, we also have Claw Co-Work, which is a Claw's sister product for a Claw Co-tailor for knowledge or less for coding. It works great with files. Lawyers love the spreadsheet, finance team loves it. And Tropic really doubled down on files, so they worked really good for all the formats, known formats. But because of the files, it's still a largely single player. It's good for individuals. I think the niche that we can occupy is this multiplayer from the Gecko sits on the Claw. And it's made for business, made for teamwork, not for personal use from the Gecko. And that's the niche that none of the many players are going after today. And we have a head start because we have been building a collaborative product for more than five plus years. We have all the canvas and building blocks from a document for project management tools. We've been building AI product for more than two, three years. So a lot of pieces are there. And allow us to ship the customization as one of the first in industry to do those kind of things for business. And that's our position while we're on to really really want to nail for the next coming quarter. A lot of talk about multiplayer, but I still can't see people typing live in notion. That's the only thing I think Google Doc still has. Is that like an architecture thing? We have the architecture to build it. The question is just like, do we spend more time on the AI stuff or do we go back to do the Google Doc competition side of things? Just hire a couple more teenagers who get it done in like a day. If you have your cousins where you're not used to recommend, we're happy to take them. While I have you, I feel like, you know, when you're on a meeting and presenting or working at the same time with people, it's maybe not as much watching them type, but being able to highlight specific things, like look at this, you know what I'm saying? You see cursor and see highlight is the same architectural or implementation complexity. So I'll add one more to do for. Or do you have an agent that is going to review the meeting notes, are you running notion AI right now? I am not meeting us. Of course you are. I'm not actually. Wow. What did that smart to do? I assume you guys will have a recording so I can just. I mean, yeah, but you need it for your agent's context. How's it going to know what to tell you tomorrow morning? I think we're mostly covered the things we already talked about. You guys trust better questions, right? Automatically. We didn't cover anything new. Don't need my note taker. That's a great modern burn. This isn't a new one, but I did want to know what it felt like to get quoted alongside Steve Jobs and Bill Gates by Satya Nadella at Davos. I know you saw this. He really loved your manager of infinite minds. You wrote this essay that was really great. I got shared a lot around the holidays about how you're thinking about AI. And this phrase manager of infinite minds, which is the kind of phrase Ellis would spend days in the shower trying to come up with for a founder. Satya was giving you mad props for that. I have to imagine that was pretty wild to see that. Yeah. Some bunch of people text me in life. I'm very flattered. Yeah, Microsoft is company we look up to. like it's one of the companies that put PC, personal computer on every desk, every home, right? So it made this industry, and Steve Jobs, those people I look up to when I got into tech, and I think Satya is the real one, because he actually came up based on what I know, through the rank of Excel, building all the, basically, local product of the '90s, right? Open doc, Ole type of thing, so he knows what he's talking about, and see him refreshing something I was, we published during the break, so it's a huge honor. Manager of Infinite Minds, though, how did you come up with that, Ellsnees, to know? I'm not sure, it's because there's just been ocean agent regurgitated a thousand times, and some words just show up, and then I probably played more of editor roles, oh, wow, that feels right, so I kept it. I like to think in metaphors, metaphors just like help me think through problem from different angles, and also other people can relate it to. So, like, bicycle for the mind is Steve Jobs quote, right? But if you think about that, and we have internet in that since the '90s, we're still paddling bicycle on information highways, so when I express this metaphor to my team and for other people, people get it. So what's coming, it's like we're gonna can drive cars on information highway through AI's, and people get that. Those are pretty powerful things. Speaking of word choice, I know something we've discussed in the past, Ivan is workspace. When that 16-year-old, that 18-year-old shows up, I mean, obviously they're not your, your ICP, but this is something that, you know, Microsoft and Google have been using for years, is that still the right word? How are people gonna talk about this in the future? Everybody start using the word workspace. I don't love that word. That's just become what it is. The meaning behind it is still important. I think it's still gonna be around, which is you have a centralized place, a system record of things, a system record of workflows to power your project or power your business. And it will be a group of people looking at the same thing together. I think that will be around if anything become more important in this kind of agent first world, right? And how do you allow that get different agent to access to this workspace? Invite a claw co-agent cursor agent coming to, based on your understanding what you're business trying to do and start working on your workspace and get up and do something there. Does notion still be around? I think what's different is, in the past, is the human doing a lot of information pushing from this workspace to the other workspace, which is a majority of knowledge work. Now, we have this magical materials of information and minds who can't do this for us. And how do we elevate ourself to not just managing one workspace? Can we manage in 10? Can we play a sim city of a thousand workspaces in time? Maybe it's possible. And the limiting factor, again, is human interface, in my opinion. Here's bringing a full circle, my genius idea. If we want to appeal to all the strategy bros, we could just call it the war table, where you direct all your field trips to destroy your enemies. On the other hand, serve your customers with delightful solutions. Putting to a flower notion, and I find better options. I haven't just think about it. Just think about it. Okay, all right. We should let Ivan go. Ivan, we appreciate your time. It's a pleasure. Thank you for joining us. I'll see you next time. Yeah, see you next time. Bye. Star Review, all five stars, or a thumbs up, share it with a friend, really makes a difference. And you can find my newsletter at sources.news. #Sources.news, and you could find me at hamburger on Twitter and at meaning.com. 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