Notion's CEO wants you to demand better from your tools

Hello and welcome to Decoder. This is Casey Newton, founder and editor of Platformer and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast, and this is the second episode of my productivity-focused decoder series that I'm doing while Neli is out on parental leave. Today I'm talking with Notion co-founder and CEO Ivan Zhao. I've known Notion for a long time now. I'm a big fan and a big part of my workflow for Platformer is actually built on top of Notion's database feature.

So I was really excited to get Ivan on the show to discuss his philosophy on productivity, how he's grown the company over the last decade, and where he sees productivity software going in the future. If you've never used Notion, you can think of it as an all-in-one productivity suite. It's comparable to a lot of the collaboration and so-called second-brain apps on the market, from the more businessy project management tools like Asana and Airtable to the more DIY note-taking variants like AnyType and Obsidian. Notion sits pretty comfortably in the middle here, since it can do a lot of what those kind of apps do very well, all in one package. And at the same time, it allows for a really substantial amount of customization, which has made it popular both for individual productivity power users like me and for companies big and small.

But Notion started out as a very different piece of software, and its evolution over the last 12 years or so has involved a lot of trial and error, one major reboot, and a lot of big decisions along the way. In my opinion, what really sets Notion apart from so many of its peers is Ivan's obsession with design and craft and this drive he has to make products that he sees as useful and beautifully aesthetic in equal measure. In this conversation, you're gonna hear Ivan talk about Lego blocks a lot. Legos, the toy bricks, are a central inspiration for Notion, which employs its own blocks as a metaphor.

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