Notion’s Ivan Zhao: The Refounder

About this episode

Ivan Zhao discusses his unique approach to leadership and organizational structure at Notion, emphasizing improvisation and refounding.

Ivan Zhao, founder and CEO of Notion, joins me to introduce a new contender in the founder mode debate: jazz mode. Ivan has a different take than Jack Dorsey's circular org chart or Brian Armstrong's player-coach approach. He thinks hierarchy is human nature, and that you can't flatten it away but you can build a company that improvises like a jazz band instead of marching in formation. Notion has roughly 60 ex-founders on staff and a deliberately decentralized structure to make that work. We get into why Ivan rebuilt his engineering org around a barbell — super junior ICs paired with very senior architects — which is the opposite of what most AI-pilled CEOs are doing right now. He explains why building with language models is "more like brewing beer than engineering a bridge," and how Notion's first candidate interview no longer involves a resume. Ivan is the king of refoundings. He's done it twice, once from a small apartment in Kyoto with five employees left, once from Cancun the day he got early access to GPT-4. When I was running HubSpot, I described our scale-up years as boring compared to what's happening now. Ivan's advice for any CEO who's calcified and wondering if it's…

People in this episode

Host: Brian Halligan

Guest: Ivan Zhao

Topics covered

• founder mode
• organizational structure
• hiring practices
• refounding
• AI integration
• leadership advice

Keywords

• Notion
• refounding
• hierarchy
• AI
• hiring
• organizational design
• leadership
• GPT-4

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Notion, HubSpot

Places: Kyoto, Cancun

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