Business used to be go karting. Now it's Formula 1.
Akshay Kothari · Co-founder & COO, Notion
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.
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.
The most quotable moments from Akshay Kothari
The terminal value of these old businesses — you should just assume they may go to zero. You have to disrupt yourself to where the business is going. Do it to yourself before someone else does it to you.
Just because something didn't work a year ago doesn't mean you shouldn't try again. You could try the same exact thing, but the capability is now ready for it to work.
You have to stop trying to fit the LLM with what you have, and fit what you have to the LLM. If you can do that, you'll feel like you're going with the tailwind instead of the headwinds.
It's underrated to have a founder who is an individual contributor, because my only optimization function is Notion winning. I don't care about the bureaucracy or politics — I'll run after the problem and then hand it to the right person.
If truly anybody can build anything, then the alpha is going to be around picking the right thing to build and doing it with taste. We might be back to what was already true before.
The best companies aren't using AI to do the same work with fewer people — they're raising their ambitions. It's less about efficiency and more about each person being way more productive.
I don't want to live in a world where there are single-person billion-dollar companies. If the business is going so well, it's a lot of fun to build it with other people. Think abundance.