 Hello! Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks so much for being here. I'm Anisa. I am a Startup Life reporter at Sifted, where I also co-author the Startup Life newsletter, which you should 100% sign up for if you don't already. And I'm very excited to be here with Olivia, who is the Chief Revenue Officer at Notion, but was previously in senior roles at Google, at Dropbox, at McKinsey. It's just the most impressive CV. And it feels kind of like I'm in a little bit of a privileged position because I love Notion. So this doesn't feel like work, which is amazing. Just to get a bit of a feel of the room, how many people here use Notion? How many of you use it for work? And how many of you use it for your personal lives? Oh, great. That's pretty impressive. I wish I had my phone. I could take a picture and send it to Ivan and Simon. I'm sort of hoping that someone's already done that. So you have a really interesting role in so much as it covers a lot of different departments that maybe you wouldn't quite expect. Could you talk us a little bit through how that works and how those all fit together? Sure. So I am the CRO at Notion, and I'm lucky enough to work with all of the go-to-market teams. So I think about it as the funnel all the way at the top of marketing and then bringing us through to sales and customer success, and then all the way through to customer experience and support. Amazing. Now, when I was talking to someone backstage, they were like, what does organic growth actually mean? So I'm just going to pose that question to you. What does it mean? I mean, Notion has really benefited from organic growth. For us, that means actually community-led. I think the typical belief is that it's a product-led company. It's very much product-led in the sense that Ivan and Simon and the team just built a beautiful, beautiful product, which I had nothing to do with. I just joined six months ago. But it really anchored then on community. And so it was the community that they leaned into and really built into that enabled organic growth. Okay, but we're saying organic growth. Yeah. So does that mean Notion has no marketing budget whatsoever? Because if so, that's very impressive. Yeah. So just to give you a sense, when I arrived six months ago, we had 20 million users, and we hadn't plugged Marketo in for those of you who know marketing tools. So we're very early, in performance marketing, we're a lot more about just kind of getting the word out and making sure that people are exposed to the product. And usually that means that they fall in love with the product. And frankly, that they talk about it to others, which is the most powerful way to do marketing. Is there like a point you see where that will maybe slow down, where the community growth will require an extra boost from maybe marketing spend or other tools, for example? Well, we have a very rich community. So we have ambassadors. We have over 200 ambassadors in over 23 countries. So that's really provided a wedge into certain markets. There are many countries where we actually have no employees. And Notion is only about 230 people right now. And so we very much lean into that community. The marketing serves to expand that narrative and help retell the stories that our ambassadors are already telling. So that will always be part of our go to market motion. But it's really meant to add fuel into the organic growth that's already there. Amazing. So let's just keep on that definition of organic growth. What are you tracking? What does growth actually mean to you and your team? So we look at users. For us, it's really, really important that people are not only landing on our website, but then of course you have the additional challenge of ensuring that they find value, right? So they land there. But more often than not, people will churn out, right? If you're not really good at creating that value. And so it's very important to us that as people come and they want to learn about Notion that ourselves or our community are there to instruct them and aid them into how do you get value out of the product. So that's very important to us. So the things we look at are users and then monthly active users. So making sure that not only has someone signed up, but that they're actually finding value time and time again in the product. Amazing. It's really interesting, right? So someone as cynical as me quite loves Notion and I'm an evangelical customer, so to speak. And there are lots of people like that about Notion. How has Notion achieved that? Because it's like the Holy Grail of Stars of Life, right? My customers are like, Oh my God, you know that product Notion. You should also be using it. How has Notion done that? And how can we get other startups to learn from how you have? It's actually an amazing story. And again, I'm just kind of the the storyteller. I wasn't at Notion yet. But about two and a half years ago, we, you know, Notion launched actually Simon and Ivan started working on Notion in 2013 and they realized they built it on the wrong stack. So then in 2015 they shut down, which is incredibly painful. They took a lot of learnings from that and they actually moved to Kyoto, Japan. And they were really inspired by the simplicity and the aesthetic of the Japanese design. And they built this beautiful product that was launched in 2016 and kind of as you know it today. And at the time they realized, okay, well, we're just, you know, a handful of people. So how do we get the word out there? And Camille Ricketts joined them and is our current head of brand and communications and just the most magical person, but also just amazing at thinking about community. And she hired someone named Ben Lang. And what he noticed was that there were about 10 people on Twitter who were incredibly excited about the product. And he reached out to them and he created a community. So the first ever ambassador community, he just created a simple Slack channel and brought those people together and really leaned into them and tried to understand what each of them were trying to accomplish as people, what they were excited about Notion. And he did a couple of things. One is he gave them early access to Ivan and Simon and Akshay, who's our COO. And he made sure that they had this special access. So they really felt like, okay, I can talk about this product on behalf of Notion. I know what's happening in the product roadmap. I'm actually contributing to the product roadmap. And that really fueled this ongoing engagement, right? So this really important part of finding out who's really excited about your product and bringing them in and actually helping them do what they want to do was a really meaningful part of building that early, early motion. And it didn't stop there. So they gave them early access. So that was part one. Part two was they actually funded them. So imagine Ambassador in Paris, who's incredibly excited to bring people together to talk about Notion. How do you use Notion? How do I use Notion? Instead of having it be Notion employees flying out from California, it was them hosting that event, hosting all of those folks who wanted to talk about it. But Notion was paying for the venue, paying for the food, trying just to help in any way. And then the third element of that was actually doubling down that exposure. So if someone tweeted about Notion, Notion made sure to retweet it, made sure to send out the emails and really leaned into these ambassadors in a way that I think is pretty differentiated and I think has had tremendous impact. Again, I wasn't actually part of it, it's just me telling the story. But it's wonderful to see the impact of it now, to see 20 million users is wonderful. So let's talk about when you did join. So you were at 20 million users, you had this fantastic story. How do you keep those brand ambassadors, the older ones and the new ones still engaged? And when you look on Reddit at the Notion community, if you haven't and you are a Notion fan, the Reddit community is a bit much, but there are lots of tips and tricks on how to use it. And one of the big topics that comes up time and time again is how inclusive the community is. How have you achieved that at 20 million users and what are kind of the processes you've been going through? Yeah, I mean, I across my career, I've worked in enterprise tech and you named a couple, I was at McKinsey, I worked with a number of companies there. What Notion has done is unique in that it hasn't tried to be the voice of Notion, if that makes sense. So it actually, if you look at the Reddit community, there's 165,000 sub Reddit followers in that group. And the moderators are not paid for by Notion. Those are actually people who have volunteered to do that work, right? Similarly, if you look at the Facebook group in in Vietnam has like over 200,000 followers. And it's this amazing community that I think gets power and feels independent in that they're able to voice whatever they want. And a lot of that frankly, includes criticism of the product. And we take it very, very seriously. And we actually log. So we have someone on on the CX team who logs every single tweet where someone is asking for something from the product. And we have this amazing database all in Notion. And we're cataloging all of that. And then as we go to do a feature release, we, we let it be known to all of the people who have asked for that feature that we've followed up and we've actually delivered it. So it's very much this like closed loop of thank you community for all this information and all this feedback. And we have a responsibility to get back to you and tell you what are we working on? What are we delivering? If we haven't been able to do it, why not? When are we going to get it out? And so I think that's one of the reasons why these communities grow so big, because they don't feel managed, you know, they don't feel edited. We lean into whatever it is that they're telling us. And we take it very seriously. Do some challenges come up with that though, if you're not controlling the narrative around these communities. Think in this day and age that genuine and being genuine is just far more valuable for a brand than being perfect. The second it feels like it's too manipulated, that people aren't able to be imperfect in their comments, that all of a sudden, people don't feel like they can be their true self in that community. And they kind of don't want to be part of it anymore. So I personally feel like there's far, far more value and having it be a little spiky, a little, you know, difficult at times, that's more important than having this beautifully curated narrative that really isn't coming from the users themselves. So I want to switch it up a little bit. One of your, I guess, areas of people that you look after are startups. And you provide quite good benefits for startups. Why do you do that? Well, I mean, startups are everything. So if you think about the world of startups, it's where all the innovation happens. It's where the companies and the enterprises of the future are born. It's where we get an amazing feedback loop. So for us, the startup community is everything. And we're really proud of where we are with the startup community. And again, it's been a lot because we're constantly trying to take feedback and trying to do our best to serve their needs. We provide credits for startups, we provide communities for startups. And for us, it's just the lifeblood of our company. But how does it fit into that growth narrative? What is the, I guess, the underlying sort of sales that requirement that you have for giving startups these credits? Well, because if you think about startups, so a couple numbers, there's 20,000 startups that are pre IPO kind of in the SaaS space. That's a lot of surface area. And so, you know, part of the challenge of being a startup is getting through that collaborative period, right? So how do you actually bring your product to market? As many of you know, you're living it day in, day out. And making it easy to do that work is probably one of the best things we can do to contribute to those startups being successful. And those startups that become successful, then become our quote, unquote, enterprise, you know, or I would say digital native decacorns, right? So I was talking to Geraldine earlier over at personio. She just gave a speech. You know, she was one of the early adopters of notion over here in Europe. And obviously, they're a very large company now and doing really, really well. You know, there are so many startups like Monzo is another example, right? Where you are in with them early and they turn into this incredibly successful large organization. And there too, you're not trying to pick which startup will do well because it's very hard to know if there's a lot of serendipity there. We just try to help every startup do their best job and hope that they are successful in everything they're trying to get done. Love it. So let's keep on that startup source of theme. Yeah, I want to talk hypothetically, if I was starting a startup today, who would I be looking for to bring into my team as my sort of first or second strategic hires to take me on that growth journey to get to where the notion is today? Ah, well, you know, I, I would say that obviously an amazing team building the product is incredible. You know, if I just take a page out of notions book, it was really 40 engineers and product folks that were the core and the kernel of the company, even until 2019. And only in 2020 did the company kind of bridge over 100 people. But in that was also a mention before Camille Ricketts, who was the marketing lead, and she took this very innovative approach to community. So I think that's incredibly important. Early on, there actually were no salespeople. It was really about what is the brand? What is the vision for the product? How are we constantly helping our users? And then how are we getting the word out there? And I would say one of the very different ways in which notion has approached the market is that our community is an extension of our of our own team, right? So we actually have less than 10 customer customer success folks. We have two SDRs, you know, and so this growth has really come from having our community be an extension of the team. So we have folks who are making templates for notion and we're helping people learn how to use notion. And they are monetizing that there are people like August Bradley who have 44,000 followers on YouTube who is making a living off of helping people learn how to use notion. And we don't take a cut of that. We don't try to monetize that. We're just delighted that he and others like Marie Poulin can actually build a business on notion and almost be an extension of our team. And it's wonderful to know that, you know, we don't have to build a professional services organization. We don't need to build a large customer success organization because there are consultants out there building businesses on notion and helping teams and companies get the best out of it. Love it. So we've talked about the past. We've talked about what's happening now. You've obviously been at notion for six months. What's coming up? What are your next big challenges that you're facing? Well, it's just this constant desire to make sure that everyone knows about us, right? So we're super excited about about Europe, but actually something that you might not know about notion is 80 percent of our users are outside of the United States and 35 percent of our daily active users are here in Europe. And so we were really excited to open a Europe headquarters in Dublin earlier this year in the summer. So that's really exciting for us. We're going to be leaning into the markets in Europe and making sure that everything we do is with the mindset of businesses and how they use notion in their daily lives and customizing that and localizing that to the local countries. We had we launched in Korea last year, earlier this year, we launched in Japan. And so that's one of the really important things for me is to make sure that we continue coming to people in their markets. Okay, so we've obviously got lots of startups here. How many of you run your own startup? Founders? Let's go. How many founders do we have in the room? It's not as many as I thought. And how many of you are like first 50 people at a startup? That's a bit more. So for these people here who want to get to a notion is what would be your first like top three tips that you would give them to work on their growth to follow in notions footsteps? Well, I think I'm going to repeat myself. I would lean into your community. First of all, I would create a community. You know, it's a full time job. So one of the things that I was amazed to see when I joined notion is that not only did Camille think about this on a daily basis, but we had someone named Ben Lang who was hired in those first 50 to be the head of community. And then we have in addition, Francisco, who's also a community manager. So we have multiple, multiple people at notion whose full time job it is to lean into community. And it basically means someone's waking up every day and thinking about, okay, why are these people excited about my product? How can I help them either build a business or build a platform? And so that really can be a multiplying force. I think we've seen three waves of SaaS growth and not to date myself. But, you know, the early wave was this top down growth wave where, you know, if you're Salesforce or your SAP, you go into a company and you tell people they need to buy a certain technology. And then you had this second wave that was product led growth. And that product led growth was people bringing your product into their environment. And then this third wave really is community led growth where not only is the product delightful, but I think that's table stakes, right? But you're not going to win just with a great product. You're going to win if you have other people telling other people your story and why it's so wonderful to use your product. Is that your three? Those are my three. Amazing. So I want to end on a fun question. We heard at the beginning that people were using notion for different things. And someone I know who's maybe in the audience, so I won't name them, has a dating profile on notion. They say who they are and what they're looking for on it. What are some of the use cases you're seeing for notion that you didn't expect when you started at the company or when maybe the product started itself however many years ago? Well, I'll do the life cycle of the dating app. So I have also seen other ones like that, which is you put your profile on and you're off to the races and then say you meet your special someone. I have found people making these beautiful and extensive trip plans back when people are able to travel again. And then I've seen others actually do wedding planning and then I've seen others take paternity leave and map out paternity leave. So there's a life cycle of the individual. But on the business side, we see everything from people creating entire customer databases. The database function is just magical because the back end is shared and you're able to translate all of that information and whatever view you'd like to see it. And then we've also seen it go all the way through post sale to the loyalty loop where people are cataloging every single support ticket in notion and making sure that they're tracking that customer experience again so they can close the loop and make sure that the customers had an amazing experience. Amazing. Olivia, thank you so much. I'm really excited to see where the next six months of your journey go. Thank you Slash for having us. It's been great. Thank you.