India one of our most important regions, Hyderabad our only engineering office outside US: Notion CEO Ivan Zhao

Notion CEO and co-founder Ivan Zhao

Ivan Zhao, CEO and co-founder of productivity and note-taking web application Notion, counts India as one of the company’s most important regions, with Hyderabad being its only engineering office outside of the United States.

Zhao, who was in Hyderabad to strategise on their expansion plans for the city, said that around 80 percent of its customers were outside the US.

“Notion is a very international company. India is one of our most important regions and Hyderabad is our only engineering office outside the US. And that’s why I am here. We are expanding this office. We will figure out a strategy, what’s the next roadmap for this office,” Zhao said.

Born in China, Zhao moved to Canada as a child. He graduated from the University of British Columbia, specialising in Cognitive Science. Before founding Notion in 2013, Zhao worked at an education publishing startup called Inkling.

Notion burst onto the scene during the Covid pandemic, with users taking an immediate liking to its minimalist look and the flexibility it offered in terms of note-taking, creating knowledge bases, and collaborating in the workspace.

Currently, Notion counts 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies as clients. “We want that to be 100 percent... We want it to be used everywhere, by every kind of business,” Zhao said.

In an exclusive interview with Moneycontrol, Zhao talked about the upcoming features in Notion, tackling competition with firms such as Microsoft, and navigating tight legislative spaces, among other things. Edited excerpts follow.

Keeping in mind that Notion is not the only productivity platform out there, why is it popular with users and customers? 

We call Notion a connected workspace for three use cases: for notes and documents, for knowledge base, and for project management. So, Notion is that one product that can do those three things pretty well. And that’s rather unique. Most products on the market can do one thing.

It’s good for personal users, and even better for team users. Because in a company, you don’t have to use three tools. You can use just one tool to keep all your documentation and projects in one place. You can replace a bunch of competitor tools, increase productivity and save money. That’s why companies love us.

Notion did the full release of Notion AI in February. In your blog, you mentioned a few learnings from the alpha release of the AI. Now that it has been a few months since the full release, what are your key learnings from Notion AI here? 

Learning is so consistent. Like people say that generative AI usually means creating new things. But what we learned is that people actually want to modify and update what they’ve already written. So, Notion is really good at that. We have a good document, notes, and text editor. So, you can select your text, turn it into tables, you can change your style for writing -- make it longer, shorter or summarise.

Have you noticed any new trends in the usage of Notion AI, like what do people use it for? Do they use it to improve their writing? 

That (summarisation) is a big one. To improve writing, people used to use browser plugins. Summarisation is a big one — that’s really important for work because people work on long things.

Translation is another big one. We are surprised by how popular it is with business users, especially European and Asian users. In the US everybody writes in English, and that’s fine. But once you go to Europe, there are so many different countries. And they have way more translations.

So, does Notion support all language-to-language translation?

Yes, most major languages. We are fine-tuned for the major ones.

What about Indian languages?

It depends. There are so many. It should work for most languages. We haven’t quality tested all the languages.

Microsoft has come up with its own productivity platform, with a real-time AI assistant. And, it looks like AI-based productivity platforms are going to be the norm in future. How are you tackling this competition?

Yeah, so just, you have to get ahead of everything. So we’re one of the first major AI writing products on the market. We did a public release almost before everybody else. But we’re not stopping here. The writing is just the first product. As I mentioned, documents and notes are our first use case. (We have other use cases such as) knowledge base and product management. We need to bring AI to those use cases.

So, that’s what we can expect from Notion?

I don’t want to promise it, but it makes sense. AI is going to be on all Notion surface areas.

In your blog, where you introduce Notion AI to users, you made it clear that user data cannot be used by others to train their models or for any other purposes. But what went behind building NotionAI? 

So, for Notion AI, there’s not much training (of the model) going on. There’s tuning. So, OpenAI is one of our vendors. Our agreement with them is that they cannot take Notion data to train their models. So, we can run their models, but that doesn’t mean they can take the data from Notion. It’s almost like when you run an analytics software.

Worldwide — not just in India — there’s been a call for algorithmic accountability. What’s your take on that? Are different geographies valid in calling for such legislation?

I think this is an industry problem. All new technologies sort of go through this, right? Like, people don’t know how it works. It works differently from how people think it works. The industry is going to mature, then the politicians are going to mature, and then we’ll figure out what’s best for our customers.

At the end of the day, especially for a company like Notion, people put their most important things into the process. Trust is everything. We will not do business, we will not work with vendors who lose customers’ trust. It is bad for us. We cannot have a sustainable business.

All our enterprise customers use Notion because they can trust us. We have a lot of enterprise customers. So, we need to protect that trust.

Startups are also one of Notion’s major customers, right? So, how does it affect Notion, especially since there has been a funding crunch in the startup ecosystem? 

Around 80 percent of our user base is outside the United States. Then also, we’re serving startups, we are also personal users, but we are also serving enterprises. Like our businesses, they’re spread out globally and in different sectors. So, it actually buffers pretty well, especially with the new product line (AI); it’s growing really fast.

What’s your target in terms of customer onboarding? What type of customers would you like to onboard more?

More enterprise customers — 50% of the Fortune 500 companies use Notion in one way or the other. We want that to be 100 percent, but that will take some time.

Notion got a major user boost during the pandemic. There were also other sectors in the industry like edtech, which saw a massive boom during the same period. However, we have seen that with edtech platforms there’s been a slump, with the pandemic receding and things going back to normal. How has that been for Notion? 

Notion has so many use cases. Things like video conferencing and whiteboard were really popular during the pandemic. But Notion, you use it with or without the pandemic, for personal notes, knowledge base, and product management. You need those every day.

It’s been 1.5 years since you opened your office in Hyderabad. What does the future hold for Notion in India?

Around 80% of our customers are outside the US. So, it’s a very international company. India is one of our most important regions. And Hyderabad is our only engineering office outside of the US. We’re expanding this office. That’s why I’m here. Meet people, meet the leaders of this office. We’ll figure out a strategy. Like, what’s the next half roadmap for this office.

Last year, amid a funding crunch in the start-up ecosystem, while start-ups were pulling back on their expenses etc, Notion kind of went against the tide and acquired a few companies. So, are you looking for similar acquisitions in the future? 

We usually don’t share that kind of information, and so far that’s not on top of mind. But usually, these things happen quickly, so….

Your last funding round was in 2021 when you raised $275 million and reached a $10 billion valuation. Are you planning any new funding in the near future? What’s next for Notion, financially? 

Our company is very profitable at the moment. So, there’s no need for that at the moment.

Where would you want to see Notion in the next five years? 

Artificial intelligence is a big one. I think it’s a generational trend and every company should take it very seriously — that there are many new ways you can solve old problems. Ubiquity is another one: meaning, we want Notion to be everywhere, used by every kind of business.

We want to be where our customers are. We have an office in India, we will also have an office in Japan, a sales office in Korea, an office in Dublin... We want to be where our customers are. That will take years, but that’s the fun part of it.

You also had a Notion community meeting in Hyderabad. How did that go?

We had a community Q&A for an hour and a half with a lot of people. There were many people: from personal users, to many students who use notion. There were also people who represented (the enterprise community). There was a woman who represented enterprise customers. They use Notion in their company. It was a good mix of people and so I had a lot of questions to answer. It was really fun.