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Notion
Productivity software company building collaborative work tools and AI-powered solutions for teams.
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First Block with Jesse Zhang, Co-founder and CEO of Decagon
The episode profiles Jesse Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Decagon, whose AI agents support customer service and reportedly achieve 70–80% deflection rates and 3x improvements in customer satisfaction. In its first 18 months, Decagon prioritized short-term execution and customer deployment, then shifted toward longer-term thinking; the source says this helped it move from stealth to unicorn status in a year. Zhang also describes intentional customer discovery, Agent Operating Procedures (AOPs), enterprise trust, and the need to pair technical excellence with commercial thinking. He credits senior generalists from his network with establishing an early team foundation that supported growth from 12 to 200 people in 18 months, while cautioning against applying generic advice instead of judging personal strengths and timing.
The hidden cost of disconnected knowledge
Disconnected knowledge leaves important decisions in Slack threads, meetings, and Jira comments rather than the wiki, separating information from the work that uses it. The post frames this fragmentation as three compounding costs: switching between tools, paying for tools employees do not adopt, and limiting AI because it cannot access conversations, decisions, projects, and tasks. It proposes shrinking the distance between knowledge and action through a connected workspace, while keeping tools such as Slack, Figma, and GitHub searchable through AI. In this model, documentation is created during work, remains current, and links specifications, roadmaps, OKRs, and projects. A framework evaluates organizations as Fragmented, Consolidating, or Integrated across connected, alive, accessible, intelligent, and adopted dimensions, with examples from Ramp, OpenAI, Faire, and Cursor.
First Block with Fabian Hedin, Co-founder and CTO of Lovable
First Block features Fabian Hedin, co-founder and CTO of Lovable, an AI-powered software development platform that lets non-technical people build production-ready applications through natural language. The conversation covers Lovable’s launch in November 2024 and its reported growth from $1M to $100M ARR in eight months, alongside Hedin’s path from running Minecraft servers to founding the company. Hedin argues that teams should build around what foundational models can do now instead of designing elaborate agent systems for anticipated capabilities. He also says Lovable launched later than it should have because of its waitlist and uses its own product extensively for internal tools, including office CRM and operations software. The episode frames early user feedback and obsessive dogfooding as practical ways to improve an AI product.
From workspace to runway: How Kim Shui used Notion for New York Fashion Week
Kim Shui’s Spring 2025 New York Fashion Week show took place on the 102nd floor of One World Trade Center, requiring months of planning for a 10-minute presentation. Organization was central because the event involved guest logistics, multiple teams, and coordination in an unusual venue. Shui used Notion as a single hub for schedules, mood boards, run-of-show materials, to-dos, budgets, and real-time team updates. She also collected sketches, references, textures, notes, and fabric swatches there, using digital documentation to connect creative ideas, communicate direction, and build a searchable, cross-referenced archive. She says mapping timelines and deliverables beside creative boards helps account for production constraints while preserving room for creative exploration.
Introducing Notion 3.0
Notion 3.0 introduces Notion AI Agents that can create documents, build databases, search across tools, and execute multi-step workflows inside a workspace. Agents can perform up to 20 minutes of autonomous work across hundreds of pages, including researching information, synthesising findings, creating structured databases, and notifying users when tasks finish. Users can personalise an Agent through a Notion page containing instructions and context, including task triage, response formatting, and reference information; templates can add specialised skills. The launch also includes database row permissions, new AI connectors, and additional MCP integrations, while Custom Agents are planned to run on schedules or triggers and share workflows with teams.
Toyota, Affirm, Mercury, and more get faster business results with certified Notion Solutions Partners
Notion’s certified Solutions Partners help organizations replace fragmented tools, connect workflows, and build systems that can scale. At Affirm, Notion State used a five-phase deployment strategy across multiple departments, helping achieve 95% knowledge-management adoption, reduce tool seats, and create a unified workspace. NorthSand helped Toyota’s Future Creation Center add custom automations, approval workflows, and centralized scheduling, making key workflows three times faster and cutting meeting-preparation time in half. MegazoneCloud supported JOYCITY’s migration from Jira, Confluence, and Microsoft by running parallel systems, focusing new projects in Notion, and providing on-site training, while Optemization archived more than 63,000 of Mercury’s pages and established a standardized information architecture. The examples position partner expertise and ongoing support as ways to improve adoption, trust, collaboration, and scalability.
Meet Mick Hodgins, Notion’s new EMEA GM
Notion announces Mick Hodgins as its new general manager for EMEA, linking the appointment to a priority of expanding its international footprint; 80% of users are outside the US. Hodgins brings 13 years at Google, where he scaled the EMEA ads business and led teams serving customers in more than 20 EMEA countries across changes including mobile, programmatic advertising, the pandemic, and AI. His vision combines local execution with a unified regional team, including new office hubs in London, Paris, and Munich, continued growth of Dublin HQ, and EU data residency. He aims to support students, startups, and enterprises across EMEA while building high-performing teams and positioning Notion as a go-to solution for knowledge workers.
First Block with Brendan Foody, Co-founder and CEO of Mercor
First Block features Brendan Foody, co-founder and CEO of Mercor, discussing the company’s path from selling donuts in eighth grade to building an AI-powered recruiting platform. Mercor reportedly grew from $1 million to $100 million in revenue run rate in 11 months, and Foody connects that growth to automated hiring solutions and the AI talent revolution. He argues that founders should pursue problems they cannot stop thinking about, set a high bar for their first 10 hires, and remain patient while shaping culture. The episode also frames fundraising as an input to better user experiences rather than an objective, encourages founders to return quickly to customers, and covers long-term orientation, personal scaling, and finding the right market.
Her Tech Circle rebuilt a community from scratch using Notion
After Girls in Tech abruptly ended its global operations, Renece Brewster and Karen Katz had one week to decide how to preserve an Australian community of 18,000 members. They launched Her Tech Circle (HTC), retaining the community’s core values while focusing on helping women in Australia and New Zealand thrive, lead, and contribute in tech. To rebuild quickly, HTC made Notion its digital headquarters, first piloting it with the social media team before rolling it out across the organization. The workspace combines a public-facing volunteer portal, a shared marketing database, and a directory that doubles as an org chart, linking roles, team leads, and peer support. HTC’s experience argues for testing tools early, making knowledge discoverable, and building scalable systems that let volunteers contribute independently rather than concentrating operational knowledge with founders.
How Aaron Chasan is making the office less lonely
While working at Ernst & Young in 2020, Aaron Chasan heard HR leaders worry about maintaining social connection in a hybrid workplace, prompting him to build Thred. The tool asks employees who opt in to complete an interest assessment, then matches them with coworkers for one-on-one conversations around shared interests, applying a summer-camp insight about connecting isolated newcomers with socially connected peers. Platform data says employees who made a friend on Thred are 50 percent less likely to leave, and the service has expanded beyond workplaces to neighborhoods and school districts. Chasan runs Thred’s product roadmap, wikis, schedules, and other projects in Notion, which he describes as central to his professional and personal organization. He advises builders to surface common ground, start building rather than over-research, and maintain a personal connection to the problem.
How Sarah Jutras is teaching the world how to work for themselves
Sarah Jutras moved from junior UX designer to director of interaction design before age thirty, but repeated conflicts with startup hustle culture, demanding bosses, and corporate work led her to leave her tech job in 2016. She now runs Huzzah Studio, a product design practice serving clients including Instacart and Imperfect Produce, while also leading Freelance for Life, a community launched in 2022 that has helped more than one thousand professionals design freelance practices. She uses Notion as a hub for client relationships, with a customer relationship manager, onboarding guides, and project boards, and created a Business Kit covering finance, business development, client experience, and work-life balance. Her guidance emphasizes identifying the audience and its problem, treating business building as an experiment, and designing a supportive team through community, collaboration, and public learning.
First Block with Varun Anand, cofounder of Clay
First Block features Varun Anand, cofounder of Clay, discussing the company’s path from a horizontal spreadsheet tool to a specialized go-to-market platform at the intersection of GTM and AI. He argues that product-market fit can emerge from curiosity, authenticity, and unique insights rather than rigid goal-setting or conventional market sizing. Clay changed its sales motion from seven demos for a $200/month product to self-serve after running eight daily “reverse demos,” in which customers brought real problems for 20–25 minute sessions that informed rapid iteration. Anand also describes hiring people without prior experience in the role, including more than half of Clay’s non-engineering team, and connecting flexible compensation with varied perspectives and competitive advantages.
Notion’s hosted MCP server: an inside look
Notion’s hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) server describes its move from a downloadable MCP server to an all-in-one hosted service that lets AI clients such as Cursor and Claude Desktop interact with workspaces. The initial proof of concept generated MCP tools from Notion’s OpenAPI schema, mapping endpoints one-to-one to API calls, but setup required API keys or Docker and the approach consumed substantial context when handling hierarchical block JSON. The hosted version uses a code-generation pipeline that converts OpenAPI schemas to Zod, combines rewritten AI-oriented tools with wrappers for existing v1 APIs, and exposes them through a central integration. Users connect through one-click OAuth; the server manages sessions and tokens, with streamable HTTP and SSE supported for client compatibility. A design change is Notion-flavoured Markdown, which represents blocks including callouts, columns, pages, and databases more efficiently for agent conversations, while semantic search can span Notion and over ten third-party apps.
How European businesses are turning company knowledge into competitive advantage
European businesses hold valuable collective knowledge, but employees often spend hours searching across fragmented tools and storage systems for information that exists somewhere. The report presents a survey of 650 decision-makers across the UK, France, Germany, and eight other European countries to examine how organizations are responding to AI in knowledge management. Although 97% identify effective knowledge management as a competitive-advantage driver, only 28% use a structured, centralized approach; multiple tools cost nearly five working weeks per employee annually, while AI adopters are four times more likely to report significant cost savings. It also says 90% of respondents see Gen Z as a force for simpler, more transparent systems, and presents coordinated strategy, systems, and technology as ways to improve collaboration and decision speed.
First Block with Michael Truell, Co-founder and CEO of Cursor
Michael Truell, co-founder and CEO of Cursor, recounts the company’s path from an initial mechanical-engineering AI project to an AI code editor and developer tool. He describes the pivot, the decision to fork VS Code, and the challenge of building AI-native coding tools while balancing speed with control. Cursor initially prioritized product quality over networking, speaking events, and hiring, then added roughly one person every two to three months while scrutinizing its first hires for belief in the vision and dissatisfaction with the current state. Truell argues that founders should question startup orthodoxy rather than follow universal rules, citing Cursor’s solution-first origin, four-person founding team, and deliberately slow hiring before its reported rapid growth.
How Notion helped a college “tools guy” build a business serving 150+ clients
Tem Nugmanov turned his reputation as a college “tools guy” into Optemization, a consultancy built around improving companies’ collaboration and productivity tools. The business began when an entrepreneur asked him to help move a startup to Notion, and five years later it had served more than 150 clients, including Discord, CashApp, and Metalab, while becoming a million-dollar agency. For Blank Street, Optemization rebuilt the Notion workspace with individual team pages, cross-functional databases, and automated processes to support onboarding, store expansion, and information access. The redesigned workspace became the coffee chain’s digital office, housing its newsletter, resource hub, and location information, while Tem reports that the consultancy now makes over $80,000 a month. He attributes the company’s development to starting before he felt ready, maintaining self-belief, and returning to hands-on building.
Introducing Notion AI for Work
Notion introduces Notion AI for Work, an all-in-one set of AI capabilities built into its workspace to address time spent searching for answers, writing updates, and following up after meetings. The release adds AI Meeting Notes, Enterprise Search across connected tools, Research Mode for drafting documents from workspace sources and the web, access to top AI models, and bundled pricing. AI Meeting Notes transcribes conversations, summarizes them, surfaces action items, and stores meetings in Notion so they can be searched and connected to projects; connectors support Slack, Microsoft, Jira, Google Workspace, and GitHub, with more planned. Research Mode can produce project updates, research reports, and internal best-practice documents from a single prompt, while the offering starts at $20 per user per month versus the stated $150–300-plus range for separate tools. Research Mode and AI Meeting Notes are available, while Enterprise Search and connectors are rolling out.
Why the future of work depends on AI
The post examines why organizations struggle to make AI useful in daily work despite strong demand. Tool fragmentation forces teams to search across disconnected systems, manually prepare data, and switch context, while resource limits and concerns about hallucinations complicate adoption. A survey of 1,000 productivity-software decision-makers found that integrating AI into existing systems was the leading challenge, while productivity motivated 57% and AI specifically motivated 44% of platform evaluations. The post presents embedded AI and connected workflows as the response, citing Notion AI’s AI Meeting Notes and Enterprise Search as examples. It reports that 86% of users would be disappointed without it, over 70% report improved work quality and faster information processing, and 50% save more than an hour weekly.
Email wasn’t designed for modern work—so we started from scratch: A Q&A with Notion Mail founders
Notion Mail’s founders argue that email remains universal but has become an overwhelming work hub, forcing messages ranging from spam to critical information into an equal inbox structure. They describe rebuilding it around a familiar inbox with Notion’s more opinionated conventions, including labels instead of folders, no nested labels, and a modern editor with shortcuts, slash commands, and mentions. The team says earlier AI plans focused on advanced drafting and auto-response, but research suggested most users need organization more than composition; on a given day, 80–90 percent may only want to read email. Its resulting Auto Labeling feature learns from a few confirmed examples and applies personalized labels, such as doctors’ appointments or customer support requests, to future messages. The founders position this as a shift from speeding up manual triage toward helping people take action and gather information, while leaving future direction to user feedback.
How to turn your company's knowledge into action
Companies can lose speed when knowledge remains in silos, making work harder to complete quickly. A Harvard Business Review survey cited in the text found that 44% of respondents think their company manages knowledge well, while 3% use AI to help. Conversations with Rohit from OpenAI, Jennifer from Slack, and Kristen from Hinge point to organizing information around actual work, establishing clear locations for knowledge, and designing systems people will use. The examples include Hinge’s weekly “Documentation Fridays” and Slack’s inclusion of documentation in performance expectations. Recommended actions are to define a source of truth, map where information lives, use templates, build sharing into routines, and recognize contributors; the stated payoff is faster movement, more innovation, and learning from experience.
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