Akshay Kothari's Journey to Scale Notion to $10B+

Key Concepts

• Minus1 Podcast: A podcast focusing on pivotal career decisions and "minus one" moments.
• Pulse: An early news reading application for mobile devices, particularly the iPad, co-founded by Akshay Kothari.
• Notion: A versatile productivity and workspace tool, initially envisioned as a platform for building customized software using "building blocks."
• Silicon Valley Culture: Characterized by a default of curiosity, ambition, embracing failure, and a focus on current relevance over past achievements.
• Entrepreneurial Motivation: The distinction between wanting to be an entrepreneur/CEO versus genuinely wanting to build a product to solve a problem.
• Product-Market Fit: The stage where a product naturally grows due to latent market demand, often without significant marketing effort.
• Wedge Strategy: Starting with a narrow, easily adoptable product (e.g., note-taking) to gain user traction before expanding to a broader vision.
• Long-term Patience & Short-term Impatience: The balance required in building successful companies – a clear long-term vision combined with a sense of urgency for immediate progress.
• Butterfly Effect: Serendipitous events or small changes that lead to significant, often unforeseen, outcomes.
• Stoicism/Eastern Mindfulness: Philosophical approaches emphasizing control over one's reactions and actions, rather than external outcomes.

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Introduction: The Minus1 Podcast and Akshay Kothari

The "Minus1" podcast, hosted by Adita, features Akshay Kothari (Aka), a prominent builder in Silicon Valley with an impressive career spanning Pulse, LinkedIn, and Notion. The discussion centers on Aka's pivotal career decisions and the underlying motivations that shaped his journey. Adita highlights Aka's unique perspective on entrepreneurship and product development.

The Genesis of Pulse: Constraints, Iteration, and Early Ambition

Akshay's entrepreneurial drive began at Stanford, where his primary goal was to start a new company every quarter, rather than solely focusing on his master's degree. He attempted five ventures before Pulse, some even securing funding but ultimately failing. Pulse emerged in his final quarter as a "last shot" at entrepreneurship, built within a Stanford class called "Launchpad."

A key constraint of the Launchpad class was the requirement to publicly launch a product (version 0.1) to pass. This forced rapid execution and prevented overthinking, which Aka believes was crucial to Pulse's success. Co-founded with Ankit (technical) and Aka (product design), the team chose to build a news app due to their shared interest in news and the recent launch of the iPad, which presented a new platform opportunity. The decision was driven by the need for a project with fast iteration cycles within the 12-week quarter.

Adita draws a parallel to South Park Commons (SPC) and Facebook's culture, emphasizing the importance of prototyping and "showing the product" over mere ideas or slide decks, a principle Mark Zuckerberg famously instilled. Aka admits his initial desire to "be an entrepreneur" or "be CEO" was a "dumb reason" to start a company, a motivation he "got out of the system" with earlier failures. By the time of Pulse, his focus shifted to building a product he genuinely used and that others found valuable, regardless of the company's ultimate fate.

Silicon Valley's Unique DNA: Ambition, Failure, and Humility

Akshay and Adita discuss the unique cultural environment of Silicon Valley. Unlike other global tech hubs, Silicon Valley's default response to ambitious or outlandish ideas is curiosity and "what if it works?" rather than skepticism. This fosters a snowballing ambition, encouraging founders to think bigger.

The valley also uniquely embraces failure; investors are often willing to engage with founders whose companies have gone bankrupt, valuing the experience gained. There's a strong emphasis on current relevance and being "in the arena" building today, rather than resting on past successes. Aka notes that seeing "God-like" CEOs (like Mark Zuckerberg, whom he once walked with in Palo Alto) as ordinary people demystifies the process, making others feel they too can build great things, echoing the sentiment that "all the things you see around you are made by people no smarter than you."

Pulse's Rise and Acquisition by LinkedIn

Pulse gained significant early exposure when Steve Jobs famously highlighted it at WWDC, just three weeks before Aka's graduation, transforming it into an overnight company. Months later, Aka met Jobs at a Rupert Murdoch-hosted journalism conference in mid-2010, where Jobs again praised Pulse.

Pulse grew to 30 million users and partnered with 750 publishers. However, after three years, the initial problem of reading news on mobile devices had evolved. The new challenge was personalization amidst content overload. Aka realized that simple collaborative filtering wasn't effective. The key insight was the value of "knowing who the reader is and who they're connected to and who they know and what they care about."

This insight made LinkedIn a "perfectly complimentary" acquisition target. LinkedIn, 12 years ago, possessed deep identity, network, and job data but lacked content, while Pulse had content but no identity data. The acquisition process was remarkably fast, with the term sheet signed just four days after the initial phone call.

On a human level, Aka and Ankit were "really tired" after three years, with Aka feeling more like an HR person than a product builder. They independently decided on a target sale price (Aka: $40M, Ankit: $50M) before committing to another funding round. Looking back, Aka is proud that many Pulse employees remain at LinkedIn, contributing to its homepage relevance, and believes LinkedIn now generates more revenue from content/marketing solutions than recruiting, indicating the acquisition's long-term success for both parties. Adita praises the quality of the LinkedIn newsfeed.

The discussion touches on the paradox of Silicon Valley: things take off quickly, but "true seismic change always takes longer than you think" (8-10 years). This requires a balance of "long-term patience and short-term impatience," a quality Aka attributes to LinkedIn's former CEO Jeff Weiner and current CEO Ryan Roslansky. Adita references a quote from GMO of Vercel, highlighting the need for a "10-year plan" combined with "three-month dopamine" to maintain progress and motivation in an organization.

Notion's Foundational Vision and Pivotal Journey

Notion was Akshay's first investment after Pulse's acquisition in 2013. Ivan, Notion's co-founder, had a specific vision: current software is too rigid, like "appliances" (e.g., a toaster) designed for single tasks. He argued that all software is built from similar "building blocks" (databases, relations, visualization, automation). Ivan's core idea was to provide users with these "primitives" (like Lego blocks) to build their own customized software that aligns with "the way that their brain works."

However, this vision led to a four-year struggle without a launched product. The company shrank from 12 employees to just Ivan and Simon. The "big learning" was that "people just don't wake up to want to build software" (especially pre-AI, when it required coding); they "wake up to do their job."

This led to a crucial pivot: Notion adopted a "wedge strategy," starting with productivity tools like notes, docs, and wikis. While many still perceive Notion primarily as a "note-taking tool," which can be "frustrating" for the team, Aka acknowledges it was the "right place to start" to get into people's lives. The launch in late 2016/early 2017 revealed a "latent demand" for modern productivity tools, leading to rapid growth. Akshay joined in 2018, coinciding with the introduction of databases, which was another "big inflection point" allowing the integration of unstructured and structured content.

Akshay's Serendipitous Path to Notion

Akshay's decision to join Notion in 2018 was "very serendipitous." As an early investor and close confidant of Ivan, he observed Notion's growth (8 employees, weekly user growth indicating product-market fit). Ivan asked him to join full-time to handle "everything else" while Ivan focused on product.

This was a significant bet for Aka: he was based in India, his background was in product, and he wasn't looking to join a company. The biggest hurdle was convincing his wife to move back to the US, as they were settled in India and building a new home. A "butterfly effect" moment occurred when their nanny unexpectedly left, which Aka interpreted as a "sign" to embrace change and make new roots.

At the time, Notion was not widely known, even in the US. Aka's motivation was not primarily financial success but a deep pull towards the "mission" and the desire to be "in that garage and start building again," to "build good stuff with interesting people."

The Philosophy of Building: Patience, Impatience, and Purpose

Adita shares his own motivation: building interesting products with great founders and teams. Both agree that ultimate success is often beyond one's control; the focus should be on doing great work with people you care about.

They discuss the "paradox of being an entrepreneur": "the harder you try to be a founder, the harder it is going to be." True success often comes when one lets go of the desire to be a founder and instead embraces the act of building an interesting product. Aka reflects on how he has become more "stoic" with age, realizing that past perceived failures or missed opportunities (like not getting into investment banking in 2007) often led to better, unforeseen paths. This aligns with stoic and Eastern mindfulness philosophies of controlling what you can control and finding the rhythm of the universe rather than fighting it.

Conclusion: The Enduring Drive to Build

Adita concludes by thanking Akshay for sharing the deeper, more vulnerable aspects of his journey, including moments of struggle and uncertainty, which provide valuable insights for aspiring entrepreneurs. He also expresses gratitude for Notion's impact, fundamentally changing users' lives. The conversation underscores the enduring drive to build meaningful products with passionate people as a primary motivator in Silicon Valley.