Latest / Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
Notion’s Ivan Zhao: The Refounder
Ivan Zhao, founder and CEO of Notion, joins me to introduce a new contender in the founder mode debate: jazz mode. Ivan has a different take than Jack Dorsey's circular org chart or Brian Armstrong's player-coach approach. He thinks hierarchy is human nature, and that you can't flatten it away but you can build a company that improvises like a jazz band instead of marching in formation. Notion has roughly 60 ex-founders on staff and a deliberately decentralized structure to make that work.
We get into why Ivan rebuilt his engineering org around a barbell — super junior ICs paired with very…
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