Akshay Kothari on Notion’s Lean Team, Fundraising and Board Design

In September 2024, Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari speaks with Harry Stebbings about building a lean organization, sales, fundraising and board design. His statements about Notion’s finances and growth are his own account as an executive, not independently audited results.

Kothari describes his role as helping scale the business while co-founders Ivan and Simon focused on product. He moved across unfamiliar functions and applied systems thinking learned in product development to operational problems.

In customer support, the instinct might be to add staff as tickets grow. Kothari instead looked for tools that made each support person more effective and a way to get customer feedback directly to engineers.

The team created a database of roughly 200 request categories and asked support staff to tag tickets. A daily script brought the tags from Intercom into Notion, giving engineers a view of recurring requests and helping them investigate the underlying issues.

He says this system reduced the early need for additional support staff, a dedicated product-operations hire and researchers. That is a description of Notion’s experience, not a claim that all companies should omit those roles.

On “founder mode,” Kothari welcomes questioning conventional organizational structures but thinks each leader must decide what works for the company. At Notion, keeping the team small was intended to preserve agility, not merely to achieve profitability.

He calls a founder’s veto power useful for resisting unnecessary hiring and expansion. Until the company reached roughly 500 people, he says, either he or Ivan met every final candidate; they were willing to wait for a stronger hire despite short-term pain.

A lean team can appear slower in the short term but move faster over time by avoiding fragmentation and forcing priorities. At the time he cites fewer than 20 product managers and around 12 designers across Notion’s surfaces, including Calendar.

Notion later codified four values: ownership of the mission, setting the pace, seeking truth, and being kind and direct. Stebbings challenges whether values are useful if nobody would openly choose the opposite; Kothari stresses that directness invites constructive internal debate.

When establishing a function, Kothari often did the work himself or hired individual contributors before a senior leader. This helped him understand what the function needed at Notion rather than import an organizational chart wholesale.

He says some leaders from large technology companies struggled because they were used to substantial machinery and headcount around them. At a lean company, he wants executives who can build and solve problems directly.

Sales is the function he would rebuild differently. He initially tried a consultative approach without conventional quotas, but later concluded that some strong sellers want clear targets and attribution; sales-assisted growth was weaker than hoped.

Product-led growth supplies inbound leads, but can also make a sales team overly dependent on them. To serve large enterprises, he agrees that a company must develop outbound selling and an enterprise motion rather than rely exclusively on inbound.

He says it took about three years to recognize the issue. A sales leader with enterprise experience brought a different ability to rally the team; in hindsight Kothari believes a more conventional sales organization could have saved time.

Notion’s horizontal product serves individuals and enterprises, creating choices about focus. Kothari compares its connected set of products to a “compound company,” sharing a data layer while serving multiple uses.

He cites a company study attributing about 46% of business to someone’s personal use of Notion and describes users introducing it to workplaces through family or personal projects. This is an internal attribution estimate, not independently verified proof of causation.

He says Notion became cash-flow positive early, giving the company time and freedom to choose whether to raise. A positive cash position reduced the pressure of a fixed runway and let the team spend more attention on product and customers.

Stebbings questions whether startups are raising and scaling too quickly. Kothari appreciates that capital funds many projects but urges founders to understand long-term valuation, growth and cash-flow economics rather than assume unusually high revenue multiples will persist.

In early 2020, Notion raised $50 million at a $2 billion valuation, he says, despite not needing the cash for operations. During COVID uncertainty, the team wanted investor backing from Index and Coatue to signal stability to prospective hires.

Kothari says Notion had more cash in the bank at the time of the interview than it had raised in its history. That is his contemporaneous company claim; it does not mean the company never spent money or establish its present financial condition.

Running finance changed his view of the function from bookkeeping to strategic resource allocation. He recommends small test budgets for channels, followed by greater investment when unit economics and results justify it.

Notion experimented with billboards, which he says improved brand awareness but did less for signups or deal completion. The lesson is to test a channel’s actual objective and whether returns hold as spending grows.

In October 2021 the company raised about $270 million at a $10 billion valuation. Kothari says competitors were spending aggressively, and Notion wanted the ability to compete in sales and marketing.

The team increased spending for about a year, then pulled back when markets changed in 2022. He says Notion also used its cash-flow position to pursue some opportunities as others tightened budgets, while acknowledging that scaling a successful channel efficiently is difficult.

Kothari expects long-term valuation to depend on revenue, growth, margins and market opportunity. He says the valuation also matters to employees receiving equity, and acknowledges that showing a credible path to growth after a high-priced round can be difficult; these are views, not a promised outcome.

He says Notion sought Sequoia in the 2020 round and received a thoughtful rejection. After the relationship developed, the company approached Sequoia again for the later round, alongside Coatue; Sequoia became an investor.

Kothari praises Sequoia’s brand and the long-term perspective of partners Pat Grady and Mike Vernal. He recalls them urging the team to think beyond a missed quarter toward whether the product could reach a much larger user base; this is his account of an investor relationship.

Because the rounds involved relatively low dilution, he says Notion did not automatically grant board seats to those investors. This gave the company more flexibility to recruit board members for specific skills, an option he acknowledges not all founders have.

His proposed board would include expertise in CEO coaching, audit, go-to-market, compensation and governance, and an investor’s broader perspective. He imagines board members acting as resources for different executives while retaining their formal responsibilities.

He recalls trying to recruit former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner to the board. Kothari says Weiner preferred being a CEO coach and recognized that a director’s duties to the company and shareholders can differ from that coaching role.

In a quick-fire round, Kothari predicts AI will create more jobs than it eliminates. This is his forecast, not a measured employment outcome. He also recommends revisiting the Bhagavad Gita for ideas he finds enduring.

He argues that most advice is useful for a subset of founders and harmful or irrelevant for others. Founder mode, for example, depends heavily on the founder’s judgment, so he prefers sharing specific experiences rather than universal rules.

Kothari has also changed his parenting approach: after a family visit to India, he became more comfortable leaving children unscheduled time. He says boredom and unstructured interaction can have value, based on his own family’s experience.

He worries about social apps funneling people into endless short-form video and about incentives that maximize attention. Stebbings notes that such platforms can distribute useful content as well; Kothari accepts that the issue is not entirely one-sided.

He would prefer his children wait until they are older to use social media and appreciates his daughter’s school limiting devices. He frames this as a personal parenting choice rather than a universal rule.

Reflecting on growing up in Gujarat, Kothari says family and early experiences shaped his creativity and business interests in ways he only understood looking back.