Akshay Kothari has spent most of his time at Notion trying to put himself out of a job. His move, repeated for years, is to run at whatever the company’s biggest unsolved problem is, build the system around it, hire someone great to own it, and then remove himself. In 2023 the approach left him, a co-founder of a multibillion-dollar company, with zero direct reports and a calendar wide open to think.
That instinct fits the company he helps run. Notion built itself like an art project: profitable, still largely owned by its founders and employees, raising money only when there was a real reason to, and kept deliberately small, around 1,200 people running a business at public scale. For years its core was a system of record, a modern editor and database that people genuinely loved and built their work inside. Then AI changed what people expect software to do, and Notion decided to reinvent the product rather than wait to be replaced.
In this conversation, Akshay walks through how Notion pulled that off: the stretch he calls the swamp of despair, when its AI agent failed four times before it worked; why the company stopped trying to make the model fit its product and started fitting the product to the model; and how it dissolved the line between its AI team and everyone else until there was nobody left who wasn’t building with AI. The bet landed. AI moved from a defensive play to a real driver of growth, and Notion’s growth rate has climbed for over a year, with the most recent quarter running about 50% above where it was a year earlier. As Akshay frames it, the business went from go-karting to Formula 1, and now the company has to rewire how it drives.
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Akshay Kothari is the co-founder and chief operating officer of Notion, the productivity software company valued at around $11 billion, where he has built and scaled functions from support and sales to marketing and finance, alongside co-founders Ivan Zhao (CEO) and Simon Last. Before Notion, Kothari co-founded Pulse, a news-reading app that began as a Stanford design school class project in 2010, won an Apple Design Award, reached more than 30 million users, and was acquired by LinkedIn for $90 million in 2013. He then spent roughly six years at LinkedIn as Vice President of Product and Head of LinkedIn India. Kothari holds a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University and a Master's in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
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In this conversation with Akshay Kothari:
00:00 Who is Akshay Kothari?
01:27 What were Notion’s core founding principles?
06:20 Which early cultural principles scaled, and which broke?
08:22 How did Notion hire its first employees, and where did they come from?
11:48 How does hiring work now that the founders can’t meet everyone?
14:35 Why does Akshay, as COO, prefer to have zero direct reports?
19:05 How do Ivan, Simon, and Akshay divide the work?
21:07 Does Notion’s intentionality ever conflict with speed?
25:25 What should other founders steal from Notion’s culture?
28:11 When did AI become a reason to rethink the whole product?
30:44 Why were the early AI years a “swamp of despair”?
36:05 How do you push AI across a huge product without losing the user?
39:25 Does Notion buy its AI DNA or build it?
40:44 Should Notion be afraid of OpenAI, Anthropic, and fast copycats?
46:58 What’s hardest about the reinvention, and what does “meet the LLM” mean?
52:42 Is Notion AI-native in every function yet?
54:36 Are Notion’s engineers still writing code, and how has engineering changed?
1:01:07 Once building is cheap, what’s the new bottleneck?
1:02:39 How is AI reshaping sales, marketing, and support?
1:09:07 How many agents run inside Notion, and who builds them?
1:11:28 How has recruiting changed for the AI era?
1:13:48 What still worries Akshay about Notion’s future?
1:15:22 Quickfire: admired founders, books, overrated AI advice, and Akshay’s superpower
1:19:42 What should a $50M pre-AI company do in the next 90 days?
Akshay’s sharpest lines from this conversation:
On putting himself out of a job:
“Ivan calls me a stem cell. I go there and build something, then I get out of it.”
On building the same agent four times:
“Just because it didn’t work a year ago doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try again, because you could try the same exact thing, but the capability is now ready for it to work.”
On meeting the model where it is:
“You really have to stop trying to fit the LLM with what you have, and you have to fit what you have to the other.”
On what AI is really for:
“The best companies are just raising their ambitions. It’s less about efficiency and more about, can each person be way more productive?”
On the solo-founder fantasy:
“This whole idea that one person will build a single-person billion-dollar company sounds very lonely to me. If the business is going so well, it’s a lot of fun to build it with other people.”
On just how much AI changed business:
“We cannot take the way we were go-karting and apply it to Formula One.”
On disrupting yourself before the market does:
“You have to disrupt yourself to where the business is going. You can kind of do it to yourself before someone else does it to you.”
