Akshay Kothari. Image: Notion
The self-proclaimed ‘anti-SaaS’ SaaS company has a team of 50 at its Irish office, with plans to grow by a further 50pc this year.
Productivity technology has been on an upward climb for years now, with revenue in this sector expected to hit nearly $80bn worldwide this year.
This growth is largely due to the increasing adoption of technology worldwide, along with the remote-working revolution that came about due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
But everyone works differently, and no matter how much we may want it, there never truly is an everything tool. Many of us use one app for email, another for our workflow, a collaboration tool for working on documents together, perhaps a task manager to keep track of deadlines and a messaging app to stay social with colleagues.
Surely all of these apps and software systems, which promise to make our workloads easier, are actually just a fast-track to burnout simply from tech overload. After all, there’s only so many different notification sounds one can handle.
This is one of the main things I wanted to discuss with Akshay Kothari, co-founder of Notion. Despite being one of the leaders of one of these productivity platforms, he believes tech overload is real and it has gone too far.
“I think people just keep adding tools,” he said. “I think, because you have so many different tools, I think it’s kind of counterintuitive. It’s actually making you unproductive. You don’t know where things are. We believe the pendulum will spring back to like, fewer tools that are more intuitive, that are more connected, and that’s very much the trend that we’re seeing across different companies.”
Invest now, join later
Having grown up in India, Kothari went to Stanford University in the US for his undergraduate degree and “inhaled entrepreneurship” while he was there. Many of the projects he worked on were essentially ideas for start-ups and, while many of them didn’t go anywhere, one became somewhat of an overnight success thanks to the Steve Jobs effect, who mentioned it at an Apple conference in 2010.
That app was called Pulse – better known now as LinkedIn Pulse. The news aggregation app became a newsfeed for LinkedIn members after the company was snapped up by the social media platform for $90m in 2013.
Meanwhile, US software start-up Notion was just beginning its journey. “That was the same year I invested in Notion, it was basically my first angel investment. I made some money in the company and this was a way to give back and to start my investing.”
Kothari had even tried to hire Notion’s CEO and original founder Ivan Zhao for Pulse but instead settled for investing. Then in 2018, having managed LinkedIn’s international offices, Kothari felt he was “managing too many people and not really doing any real work” and so he met Ivan and came onboard as the chief operating officer of Notion.
In that role, he grew a lot of the company’s teams, did a lot of the hiring and essentially built out a lot of the functions and in the last year has had no one reporting directly too him and was more focused on building, making the COO title less relevant.
“I think co-founder makes it easier internally to not explain that I am working on a lot of different things the company needs, but it’s also very gracious of Ivan to give both Simon and me this title,” he said.
“I think Ivan believes that founders can come later in the journey, because if this company’s going to be around for decades, and I really hope this is a generational company, there’ll be many founding moments.
Ireland is ‘the Singapore of Europe’
Similar to other productivity platforms, Notion’s tools help organise, track and manage workflows and enable remote collaboration. It also enables users to integrate with many other SaaS tools such as Slack, GitHub, Zoom, Jira, Zapier and more.
“We sort of call ourselves, like the anti-SaaS SaaS company,” said Kothari. “Our core mission of the company is to essentially enable other people to build software.”
Along with many other productivity tools, Notion’s popularity surged in the months following the pandemic and it secured $50m in funding led by Index Ventures in April 2020 after new subscribers reached a new high. It was then valued at $2bn.
Fast forward to October 2021 and the company was valued at $10bn. Earlier that year, it announced the establishment of an EMEA headquarters in Dublin. At the time, the company’s EMEA lead Robbie O’Connor, said he planned to create 25 jobs. Now, it’s up to 50, with plans to grow by another 50pc this year alone.
“It’s actually kind of fun, I hired Robbie over Zoom and now I come and see there’s an entire floor of people working here, and I think we’re sort of accelerating now,” he said.
“I feel like Ireland does such a good job at supporting US companies. The infrastructure you all have built, it’s a bit like the Singapore of Europe in that I remember, within like a week, we were able to create the entity, hire Robbie, get a bank account, all in the middle of Covid, which I think is unheard of in some other countries.”
Kothari says he spent a lot of time thinking about where the EMEA office should be and spent a lot of time in other cities in Europe, but ultimately landed on Ireland, which already plays host to a lot of other SaaS companies.
“The talent is here. Not just talent that can serve Ireland and the UK, but actually, you can find people who speak German, find people who speak Spanish, and they can be here and serve the region from one place, which to me was very important.”
The growth of AI
It appears that AI is now being plugged into virtually every SaaS offering or will be in the near future. In fact, earlier this month, Canva received some backlash from users for raising its prices by 300pc in return for its latest AI products. And of course, it is part of Notion’s offering too.
But Kothari says that while the technology is undoubtedly powerful there is also a little bit of fatigue in the market right now as well as companies needing to find their feet with the tech and understand its limitations.
“The challenge that I feel both from the technology standpoint as well as from a design standpoint is it’s very non-deterministic, so it’s very hard to play with,” he said.
“When you write code, A happens, B needs to happen. You can roughly expect B to happen. Whereas with AI it’s a little bit non-deterministic. You can ask the same question again, you might get different answers.”
He said that this presents an interesting design tech challenge for companies who are creating features with AI because they really have to consider the end user and the problem they’re trying to solve.
“You almost have to go into that space thinking that you will play with AI to see whether it can actually solve that problem. Sometimes it does a beautiful job of it and then you can release it. Sometimes it’s very finicky and it’s very unpredictable and hallucinates and gives you the wrong information and at those times, you have to pull back. So, I think it’s simultaneously exciting and frustrating, but it’s really powerful tool.”
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