Last week, Notion CEO Ivan Zhao recorded a podcast at Sequoia Capital, discussing his experiences of twice bringing the company back from the brink of death and twice rebuilding from the ground up. Now, he is using the same logic to 're-found' this thousand-person company, calling himself a 'Refounder':
He believes AI has turned technical capability into a commodity, and what is truly scarce now is Taste and Agency. Therefore, hiring standards must change; information dissemination and coordination work are being taken over by AI, so organizational structure must change; technology changes too fast, making any planning beyond a few weeks likely obsolete, so planning methods must also change. Enjoy!
01. How Notion Was Rebuilt Twice from Near-Death Experiences
In 2015, after two years, Notion still hadn't found Product-Market Fit (PMF). Money was running out. Ivan and co-founder Simon made a decision most founders wouldn't dare: lay off everyone, move to Kyoto, and rebuild from scratch. They sublet their residences and office in San Francisco. During that time, Notion surprisingly achieved its first positive cash flow.
(Notion's initial office in San Francisco)
After arriving in Kyoto, life became extremely simple. Write code, eat, write code again, eat again. No team, no processes, no resources, just two people and an idea. This experience taught Ivan for the first time: what drives things forward has always relied on judgment and willpower; how abundant resources are is secondary. A year and a half later, Notion 1.0 launched.
(Ivan and co-founder Simon's residence in Kyoto)
The second time was in 2023. The team was having an offsite in Cancun, and Ivan got early access to GPT-4. That experience was an almost shocking impact for him. He instantly judged: this changes everything, and if we don't bet the entire company on it, nothing else we do will matter. So he announced a restart within the 500-person company, fully pivoting to AI.
But what followed was nearly a year and a half of agony. Model technology wasn't mature yet. They tried almost every direction, none of which worked. Growth stalled, morale plummeted. It wasn't until the underlying models truly matured that the product began to take off, with the revenue inflection point and the AI product's traction appearing almost simultaneously.
In both experiences, what truly mattered was his judgment and the willpower to keep moving forward amidst uncertainty, which also became the starting point for his later 're-founding' of the company.
02. 'Capability' Is Depreciating, Yet Companies Still Pay a Premium for It
Ivan proposed a talent formula:
Talent = Capability × Taste × Agency
Understanding this formula lies in the derivation process.
Why is Capability Depreciating?
Before Google, information access was a scarce resource, and those who could find information had a real competitive advantage. After Google appeared, this advantage vanished. 'I can find this information' became a basic skill. AI is causing the same thing to happen at the level of capability production. Writing code, crafting copy, performing data analysis—tasks that used to require years of accumulation to do well—can now be done to a decent level by recent graduates equipped with AI tools. The scarcity of Capability is being systematically compressed.
Ivan's original words were: 'What LLMs do is like how Google gave everyone access to information; they give everyone the ability to be a decent writer and programmer. Everyone possesses Capability. But Taste still matters—it's your value system, it's your manifestation of what you want to bring to the world; Agency is the same—how hard you work, this is something companies cannot change. So now we're optimizing for the latter two.'
Why Won't Taste and Agency Be Leveled?
Taste is your value system, the ability to make judgments when there's no standard answer. Which direction a product should take, how an architecture should be balanced—AI can give suggestions, but deciding which suggestion is right still requires someone with real judgment to make the call. Taste is rooted in aesthetics and values, something that can't be changed much by effort in the short term.
Agency is the willpower to make things happen. Moving forward without waiting for instructions, not backing down in the face of resistance, truly completing a half-finished task. This is also something AI cannot provide.
Previously, hiring looked at experience; later, Silicon Valley trended towards looking at Slope (growth rate), using learning speed to replace past accumulation. But Ivan says even Slope isn't enough now—it still measures the acquisition speed of Capability, essentially still operating within the same depreciating dimension. Taste and Agency are on entirely different axes; how fast one learns cannot predict them.
Two Actions in Hiring
For engineering roles, they hire many recent graduates, focusing not on past experience but on initiative, curiosity, and judgment; for sales roles, the first round of interviews eliminates resumes, requiring candidates to first build something, focusing on what they can do now and their willingness to take initiative. Both actions are doing the same thing: replacing 'what you have done' with 'what kind of person you are now.'
Consider these questions: What was the last reason that convinced you to hire someone? Was it that the candidate had done similar work at a certain company, had a background you respected on their resume, or that past project scales were large enough?
These are all signals of Capability. Without a set of methods to evaluate Taste and Agency, your hiring process is likely still optimizing a depreciating dimension.
03. Becoming an Agile Jazz Band
Three years ago, an internal slogan was established at Notion: We want to be a Jazz Band, not a Marching Band.
The fundamental difference isn't in tempo, but in who can improvise. A marching band needs a conductor; each musician follows the score, and uniformity is a virtue. A jazz band has structure and默契 (tacit understanding), but everyone can pick up from others and improvise at any moment. The conductor disappears, but structure doesn't, because it's already internalized within each person.
Ivan says this is his self-calibration mechanism. He is a jazz-band type of person and cannot stand the feeling of delegating everything and just giving orders. Once he figured it out, he systematically began recruiting like-minded people to build a company aligned with his own temperament.
This logic manifests in the organization through three specific actions.
The 'Dumbbell-Shaped' Engineering Team
The shape of Notion's engineering team is now a dumbbell: the two ends are Super Juniors and Super Seniors, with the middle layer shrinking.
Previously, the value of a Senior Engineer was multi-dimensional: more reliable code, deeper system understanding, ability to independently drive complex projects. After the emergence of AI Coding Agents, most of this value sequence began to be taken over. Therefore, the value of Seniors has been refocused on the remaining parts: architectural judgment and directional sense.
LLMs are still quite weak at system architecture; suggestions that look reasonable individually often cause problems when pieced together in complex systems. This is where Taste is required, the truly irreplaceable domain of a few top-tier Seniors.
Ivan described the optimal combination as something like this: a top-tier senior architect leads two or three young engineers, each managing two or three Coding Agents. Compared to a group of Seniors each managing Agents, this structure yields higher output and better multiplier effects. The middle layer is compressed from both ends; the execution layer is taken over by Juniors + Agents; the judgment layer is only held by top Seniors with genuine architectural ability. The value of intermediate positions is becoming increasingly unclear.
Dissolving the CMO Organization
Notion currently has no CMO. Marketing has been split into two independently operating lines: one close to the product, directly connected to social media, following the product release rhythm; the other serving sales, focusing on lead and demand generation.
The reason for removing the middle coordination layer is simple: after AI takes over a large amount of information transmission and coordination work, the cost of letting information make a detour through the CMO before distribution is now too expensive. Each side handling its own affairs is faster.
Introducing Dozens of Entrepreneurs
Notion has brought in many founders with entrepreneurial experience through acquisitions, each leading the domain they know best. The person responsible for the meeting notes feature previously ran a startup focused on meeting notes; the person responsible for enterprise search was the founder of an enterprise search product. Giving them a better platform and resources to continue doing what they excel at is itself a logic for retention.
Ivan himself is also a 'Refounder,' able to jump into any area at any time or fully let go; there's no territorial threat on either side. This reinforces the jazz band property of the organization at the personnel composition level—bringing in people who can already play independently.
04. Notion Has Given Up on Product Planning
Ivan splits planning into two fundamentally different things, handled with completely different logic.
He believes financial planning is still useful, like the speed setting on a treadmill. You set it to a certain level, and you know what pace you're running at; this reading is real. Notion tends to be conservative to neutral in finance, leaving itself enough Buffer. In the AI era, cost has also become a new variable; Token expenses can scale directly with product usage and must be seriously factored in.
Product strategy is another matter entirely.
No plans, really none—not six months, not three months, but improvising week by week.
This judgment comes directly from the lessons of the second rebuild. At the end of 2022, Notion wanted to build an AI Agent product and was pushing it very seriously. There was almost no progress for a year and a half. The team wasn't slacking; it was because the underlying models themselves weren't ready yet. Any product plan at that stage was empty. What truly worked was constant improvisation within the boundaries set by technology.
You can only plan the Tempo; financial goals define the treadmill speed. The Melody is improvised, written weekly based on the actual conditions of technology and the market. This is precisely the core reason why a jazz band is more suitable for the present than a marching band: a marching band must arrange all the sheet music in advance before going on stage; a jazz band improvises and adapts on the spot, not knowing where the next bar will go but having the ability to catch it in the moment.
05. At Which Level Has Your Company Not Yet Started Rewriting?
When asked what the organization would look like three or four years later, Ivan didn't describe any technological blueprint but first asked: What remains unchanged?
His answer is human nature. Humans are inherently hierarchical; division of labor has meaning; people have different interests and values—these are constants over millennia. The legal system also has no autonomous companies; CEOs and CFOs still have to sign and take responsibility. These invariants are the anchor points for organizational design. What AI changes is the way information and decision flows between these people; human nature itself cannot be moved.
But above this anchor point, rewriting is already happening at three levels. It's worth seriously asking yourself three questions:
- Is your hiring process still primarily optimizing for Capability? Do you have a method for evaluating Taste, a method for evaluating Agency?
- In your organization, how many people's core value lies in transmitting information and executing instructions? The structural pressure on these positions will continue to increase as AI tools mature.
- Are your product plans still trying to pre-arrange a six-month score? This isn't to say quarterly planning itself is problematic, but rather, how you use it—as a promise, or as a reference adjusted weekly?
Finally:
'Modern knowledge work is only about 150 years old. It's invented. It's not as old as fire or language. Why can't it be a new flavor of it?'
Knowledge work has only existed for about 150 years; it's a human invention. The logic of how companies run is also man-made. What can be invented can be rewritten. Notion is already rewriting it, and it started two years earlier than most.
