Latest / Notion in Practice / How a Deep Tech Venture Capital firm Runs on Notion (Darja Nelson) | E07 Tim Jeffries, Jerwin Parker
Transcript
- Tim Jeffries: All right, great chat. she's excellent. Jerwin Parker: Fantastic. She is very busy person. to seven hours, Six to seven hours. ⁓ Tim Jeffries: episode are we up to? Jerwin Parker: I actually don't know. It's either six or seven. It's either six or seven. Tim Jeffries: Seven? I think this is seven. This is seven. Don't do that, my children. Darja came and stayed at our house. ⁓ my God. The whole time, all they think about is that Darja's getting, and he promised them he'd somehow work six or seven into every single episode. And so now my twins who are 11 are obsessed when I say, we record another episode. They're like, can we see the bit where he does six, seven? is a lot. That is a lot of meetings. But such an interesting job, like, to be between, you know, frontier kind of technology. Yeah, very Darja Nelson: also have kids. Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. can see why you can do that for that long is because she's probably engaging with the most interesting revolutionary technologies ⁓ these meetings. so it's sort of like best seats in the house for innovation, I'd say. There you go. Darja Nelson: You Jerwin Parker: It's getting harder to drop but we got that done. Tim Jeffries: Yeah? Darja Nelson: We got it right out of the way. ⁓ Tim Jeffries: Yeah, although she's still dealing with humans, right? Still be the same problems. Jerwin Parker: Yeah, exactly. what ⁓ your key takeaways? What's your first one? ⁓ Tim Jeffries: Hmm, there's a few. think maybe one that, you know, is not so sexy, but is really useful was how their team have taken ownership of the system that they've built. So obviously we work together to kind of roll it out initially. But I feel like we're in a time where All right, let's get going then. Welcome everyone to episode of the Notion in Practice podcast. ⁓ Today we have Darja Nelson, who is a friend of mine now. We've been working together, what was it? Late last year, I think. Yeah. ⁓ So she's joining us today Bridgewest Ventures and she's an operating partner, which she's gonna explain to us what that means, because we were just having a conversation before we started about. Jerwin Parker: ⁓ yes. Mm-hmm. Tim Jeffries: Systems, operational systems, tech systems used to build, used to kind of, oh yeah, we're gonna do the project to do that thing. We roll it out and then you sort of forget about it, right? It's in place and it just gets used and you don't have to touch it for 10 years. You roll down a new CRM, that's it. But it doesn't really work like that anymore. Like the tech is changing so fast. Everything is moving kind of constantly. You really have to own it. So what should we say every fortnight? Darja Nelson: Yeah, four or five months maybe? Yeah. Jerwin Parker: Yeah. Darja Nelson: you Jerwin Parker: Yeah. Tim Jeffries: Not really knowing what all these titles mean, but thank you for coming today. It's great to have you with us. Jerwin Parker: Yeah. Darja Nelson: Thank you for having me, Tim. Happy to help how I can. So yeah, I'm a newbie to the world of Notion, but I'm a full convert. So I'm excited to talk about ⁓ how we've been using it and what a difference it's made for us. But start with a bit of who I and where I work and what we do. So I work with Rest Ventures, which is a venture capital firm based in New Zealand. ⁓ We ⁓ are... Jerwin Parker: Wrap it very fast, yeah. I think so, Every fortnight or every couple of weeks, they sit down and have a notion specific session to talk what they're building next. I know obviously custom agents is their way of thinking. Yeah. ⁓ Tim Jeffries: They're building custom agents. Yeah. So I think that's good because in big orgs, ⁓ have, you know, a bunch of that stuff sort of built in because they're big and ⁓ have to. Governance whatever, but smaller orgs would often not do that. It wouldn't kind of rise to the top. So the fact they're prioritizing it and they're giving it that governance and kind of ongoing accountability and development, I think is good. And ⁓ it of speaks into two the... Darja Nelson: capital firms tend to invest in early stage ⁓ companies right through to late stage technology companies. ⁓ very much at the start. ⁓ we look at things that have never had any investment come into them before. ⁓ we look at ⁓ that are based on something called deep tech. So there's some sort of scientific innovation or technology that's been created to solve a problem. ⁓ not the traditional kind of Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Tim Jeffries: You know, she raised about, we put a new person on and yeah, and they didn't sort of get it straight away. And so it means that the team will own the system and yeah, think about, okay, well, how are we going to provide guidance and onboarding for new people? It's not just IT's problem or ops' problem. So yeah, I thought that was, that was good, really useful. And if people aren't doing that, they should. Jerwin Parker: yeah, the new hire. Darja Nelson: SaaS or software type businesses that we tend to look at. We look at term, bigger sort of opportunities to invest So Bridgewest, yeah, Bridgewest has ⁓ done it before. So we are founded by a ⁓ couple of brothers, entrepreneurs who built their very first successful business in the late nineties out of the US and Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, like it sort of helps. Well, if you're listening to this, person that the new hire, It'll be such a weird experience for you to be listening to us ⁓ about you ⁓ you go through us. So if we say this ⁓ the wrong context, let us know. But it's sort of the understanding everything in one place. know onboarding ⁓ can a very stressful experience for new hires and ⁓ to in and be making immediate impact and be able to measure that is quite useful as well. Mm-hmm. Darja Nelson: really just put that money straight back into building the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth. So there's this generation of operators and executives that have come from large, small life technology businesses that keep of recycling that experience back into creating new ones. And that's what we're really formed. That's kind of thesis we're formed on. ⁓ And that means operators as in we get in, elbow deep into the business. Tim Jeffries: What about you? Jerwin Parker: So yeah, is an angle that you don't really think about. think the other thing is, yeah. Tim Jeffries: Mm. Mm. We should have someone on one time to talk about onboarding, because I've seen some places do it super well and use Notion really effectively. That'd be interesting. Jerwin Parker: Hmm. mean, Tim, you're embodying someone right now, aren't you? So. Darja Nelson: that's what an operating partner does at Bridgewest is we work alongside the teams that we invest in to really kind of accelerate them to that next growth phase. that can be anything from I'm helping you hire a team, I'm doing business development activities for you, I'm working with you on the commercial strategy right through to I'm assessing a technical plan. It's really what does that business need and how do we get it what it needs to make it successful. Tim Jeffries: I'm onboarding a few, but I don't know if I'm doing a great job yet, so let's not ask me. Jerwin Parker: Hey, hey, could go with that aspect, right? mean, a smooth ops will have you as a guest with ⁓ your knee higher. ⁓ I think the opportunity for reporting, like she is a very busy person, who has five, five very different, organizations she's dealing with that are. Tim Jeffries: I think everyone's hearing enough from me. What's your next takeaway? That sounds interesting. Do you get to sort of uncover and discover bits of sort of science and tech that you didn't even know existed before it comes across your plate? Jerwin Parker: have, as she said it herself, like different needs, different sort of problems that they're trying to solve. And then to be able to contextualize all that together and sort of try to find trends or ways that she can also use that in her conversations with people going through similar problems or similar issues. But that's, Dalton imagine that would save her a lot of time, right Tim? Darja Nelson: Yeah, absolutely. We see about 300 odd pictures a year. So we see a huge variety of things. Some of it is really kind of like futuristic, like wouldn't it be amazing if this is the world that we live in? And some of it's a bit more tame, but solves that like problem that everyone's got and no one's really come up with a way to solve it. So we see a huge variety of things. Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Tim Jeffries: Mm. Yeah, yeah. And I remember when we were doing the work together, they have some strong reporting requirements up to, I don't know, group that they report to. at that time when we were doing it, it was basically someone's job, you know, like gets towards the end of the month and they spend a week pulling all of this information together from different documents and meeting notes and, know, all of these other places. Darja Nelson: those 300, we tend to maybe dive deep on about 15 20 of them. And then at the end of that, there might be two or three that make it to actually us ⁓ putting a term sheet, so an offer of investment ⁓ to group once it's passed through the due diligence process. those are kind of things we're dealing with on a day to day. Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. ⁓ wow, okay. Tim Jeffries: But because now they've built that world all in notion, they've got all that information in the one place. And because they can develop a prompt or probably a series of prompts, I would imagine to pull that information together. It was one of the big hopes when they were building. So it's good to hear that it happened. But I really liked that she said, ⁓ we're up to the sort of fourth or fifth iteration on it. These prompts, don't write them once. You never one shot it. It keeps improving over time. Yeah, okay. Jerwin Parker: the whole context. Tim Jeffries: Mm-hmm. And do they all come to you or do you go and find them? How does that bit work? Jerwin Parker: Interesting. Darja Nelson: both. know, that's our team here in New Zealand is embedded very much with all of the universities and sort of research institutes where some of this IP and these people with these great ideas tend to come from. ⁓ And we also, you know, spend quite a lot of time walking the halls, really, of ⁓ all of different centers of excellence and trying to kind of Jerwin Parker: Hmm. That's good. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Tim Jeffries: I saw this week actually, Notion have released skills ⁓ the AI section of the workspace in ⁓ settings. Notion skills. So what we've been calling playbooks, because there wasn't a name for them, Notion have called skills. And so if ⁓ you have look in Notion AI settings, there's a section there where you can essentially just point Notion at a page. So like the playbooks pages that we've already got. Darja Nelson: be seen in the ecosystem, be helpful to the ecosystem so that people can come to us. So it's all about relationships and really kind of building on that. Jerwin Parker: Motion skills. What skills? ⁓ Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Tim Jeffries: mean, one of the things that I love about my job is that I get to go and bump into these different worlds that I don't know anything about. And I usually start out, I remember the first time I ever worked at the VC and there's a whole language and ⁓ and processes that you just have no idea about. ⁓ that a little bit the same? Like you find yourself trying to support a company that's developing a bit of technology that you don't know much about. And you obviously have a good understanding of the processes and the systems to help scale. ⁓ And then you can identify that this is a skill and then the AI like little owl Helper in the corner there. He'll treat that as special. So that's really cool. I think it'll evolve It's like it's brand new. It they just kind of snuck it out didn't tell anyone yeah, I'm gonna be playing with that a lot. So that's cool. But yeah, ⁓ guys, know ⁓ kinds of reporting skills that people on the team can just pick up and use it's obviously a huge lift Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Take the skill. Tim Jeffries: of those kinds of businesses, but the specific tech you get to dive deep and learn about. Darja Nelson: Yeah, and it's not just the tech. The tech is sort of the first part, but it's actually that market and that industry. know, there's all of these different nuances in terms of the problems people are trying to solve. whenever we do due diligence or considering investment in a group, we essentially have to get up to speed to where the founders are, know, build that our own conviction on, hey, we really understand that this is a problem. We go and talk to potential customers. We talk to other experts in the field. Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Tim Jeffries: what else? And speaking skills, fascinating that she was like, we're going to think differently about hiring. Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Tim Jeffries: that whole, you know, everyone's worried about jobs and talking about jobs, et cetera, but knowing that you're going to need to develop these other skills. I wonder if you need to, you know, and kind of people helping think about getting work roles are moving fast enough, but she needs people who are, you know, want to work in that world to be native with these tools. And she needs them to, it's more important now that they have good decision-making. Darja Nelson: We try and really become obsessed with the area that they're trying to disrupt and get conviction that their plan is going to work in that space. you know, it's almost like for me, feel like I have, you know, I work with about five portfolio companies at the moment, and then I look at new investments alongside that. And it's like I five different jobs that all speak different languages and operate in different contexts. And it's like I five different jobs that all speak different languages and operate in different contexts. Tim Jeffries: Yeah. Yeah. Jerwin Parker: Yeah. Yeah. Tim Jeffries: that they're wise in their thinking about all of the information that the AI is giving them rather than going and getting and, you know, formatting and summarizing and preparing the knowledge. The knowledge is almost free now, but the wisdom to use it well is not. And that's the kind of key skill they're looking for. I thought that was insightful. Darja Nelson: And you try and find those areas where you can transfer knowledge from one to the other and kind of give them ideas because they're so insular in their own space. ⁓ And you try and find those areas where you can transfer knowledge from one to the other and kind of give them ideas because they're so insular ⁓ in their own space. yeah, ⁓ it's lots of information, lots of different information flowing from one end to other all the time. Definitely a for people that, yeah, maybe are mildly ADHD, I don't know, ⁓ like to switch from one thing to the next. ⁓ Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's very insightful also because I was at a conference yesterday and it was a big UTS startups conference all about talking through what is the future of work? What does entrepreneurship look like and what are the skills needed in the workplace? And a lot of questions I got from students, high school students and students was like, hey, like, is it, are you, heavily are using AI and what should I be? Tim Jeffries: Yeah. Jerwin Parker: Yeah. Tim Jeffries: Yeah, yeah, nice. Okay, and so what about the journey with Notion then? How did you come across it and, you know, what was it that kind of led you towards it? Darja Nelson: Yeah, it was network again. We had someone in the extended startup network here in New Zealand that had become kind of like a Notion user and then joined the Notion And really, it was a few startup events where people were starting to talk about it and then seeing how others were using it that made us sort of think, hey, ⁓ this could solve the problem that we've got because we had, you know, ⁓ Jerwin Parker: upskilling myself in my studies to make sure I'm better prepared for work because one of the speakers asked everyone to put their hands up. were thousands of kids in the audience. It's like, who's about your future job being replaced by AI? And I'd say 99 % of the audience put their hand up. And so ⁓ it's to hear it from Herlens on the hiring perspective because yeah, I think everyone's super worried that. Darja Nelson: annoying and steadily growing issue in terms of our workflow and ⁓ I guess the technology we were using to help us manage that this sort of fast pace that I talked about. Jerwin Parker: Eventually, can take a lot of jobs, but I think it's at a spot where we can be humanly augmented for jobs with AI skills. to integrate that into academia, think academia is starting to really think about that now. ⁓ Tim Jeffries: okay. So when did I bump into you in that process? Still early or had you started kind of trying on your own? Darja Nelson: We'd started, we'd had a bit of play and then we realized this is like overwhelming. know, all of us are, you know, we are either scientists or engineers by training, operators and businesses, none of us come from a software background. It was pretty easy out of the box, but we knew that we weren't going to get what we needed out of it without like a bit of guidance and a bit of understanding of the potential. So we ⁓ Tim Jeffries: Yeah, I feel like the starting place for anyone, whether you're a school kid or you're already 30 years into your career, is just curiosity. It's just playing with it. The amount of times I'm working with an org and they say, oh, we want to implement this AI stuff. And before you know it, three or four weeks have gone past. They've had the tools at their disposal and they haven't tried it. Jerwin Parker: Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Tim Jeffries: You know, jump back on the next call and like, how did it go? You know, did you set up your instructions? Did you try? I haven't got there yet. Like the anxiety needs to result in action. People just need to play with it. Try it out. Stop using Google and start using, you know, AI search instead and see what happens. of fall down the rabbit hole. I don't think it's enough, ⁓ it's certainly the start. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Darja Nelson: asked around and see who could help us actually ⁓ maximize the impact that it could have on our business. So was pretty early on that we started chatting with you. Jerwin Parker: Mm. Tim Jeffries: Yep. Yep. Yeah, I find lots of people, they know that if they took the time, they could work it out on their own. You know, they could puzzle it through. And I think if you're in a really early stage thing and maybe you don't have that much demand yet, like lots of people will build their own things using it. But if you're busy and you just need it to solve a problem for you, then getting a hand makes a lot of sense. Jerwin Parker: going through that experimentation process. Yeah. I mean, that's the best part is that innovation piece, right? And she's, she's an innovator herself. It's, it's being able to experiment, be fast to adapt and, and put your skillsets into, into adapting to the new technologies. And obviously she and the team are exposed to new tech. Like we heard some of the cool stuff that she, heard. And it's like very groundbreaking. Some of it's like very like next Darja Nelson: Mm. Totally. And I mean, even the difference between when we started working together and today, earlier today, I just built a new database in my private workspace because I wanted to keep private meetings private. And I just asked the AI to do it and I didn't touch anything. I just told it, this is what I want. Give it, gave it all of its information and it did it, you know, and that is not something that we would have even tried really. Tim Jeffries: really cool. Jerwin Parker: Nice. next good for the evolution of humankind I'd say. Tim Jeffries: Yeah, yeah, true. get away without another mention of meeting notes, everyone. Darja Nelson: when we first started this process, and I know Notion's gone through quite a lot of change to enable these kinds of things now anyway. So, you know, unless you're spending your, like, living and breathing it day to day, it's really hard if you're just dropping in as a tourist ⁓ kind of maximize what can do for you. Jerwin Parker: So if you're not using meeting notes, I highly recommend it. ⁓ Tim Jeffries: What are you doing? It is, like I just started working with a new org this week and you know, they've got the meeting note taker, but it gets sent around an email and that's it. And I think that's a lot of people's experience of meeting notes before they have a spot where they all live and then they become useful. And I think that's, I mean, the notion meeting notes tool itself is great, but the fact that Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Tim Jeffries: Yeah, yeah, nice. Jerwin Parker: What's been your most helpful Notion feature ⁓ as you started to use it? Has there been a standout Mm-hmm. Darja Nelson: You Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Tim Jeffries: They're there, they're sitting there in the workspace, they're instant context. You know, don't have to go to your email to find them. And with a custom agent, you can make it load up your email, load up your task list or update your project or whatever. That stuff makes it really useful rather than just being another email that you get. Darja Nelson: Yeah, yeah, there has. And it's hands down the AI meeting minutes for us and the ability to contain that information and call up that information. you I'm on, ⁓ I'm calls maybe like six or seven hours a day, you know, and it's a topic change every call. Yeah, ⁓ it's And ⁓ that's a function of, you know, all of the portfolio company work that we do. Jerwin Parker: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Exactly. Exactly. And sending it to the person that's responsible for that task and that meeting and having to that follow up for you. It's been useful in the context of this podcast, Tim. Every time I need to upload or do something for the guest or like send them clips or do the social stuff, I always get ⁓ an email ⁓ the custom agent to make sure I'm getting on that. So thanks, Tim. I don't know if it's you sending it sometimes or if it's your custom agent, but... Darja Nelson: And so being able to kind of have all of that institutional knowledge, already there and recorded for me has made me so much more efficient. means I can sit in the meeting and really concentrate on the conversation and not rushing to capture salient points. It means my follow-up gets more efficient. I deliver on things that I've promised people that I'll deliver on, and then others can pick it up when I'm away and run with it as well. So that's really made a difference to our team. Tim Jeffries: Yeah. Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Tim Jeffries: Yeah. Good, good, good. So why little robots? ⁓ that's good. Well, think that's a wrap, mate. Jerwin Parker: Yeah, your army of robots. That is a wrap. Do you have any resources you want to share with the audience? Tim Jeffries: true, true. I did write something this week. ⁓ I wrote an article that is about why your notion workspace design matters for AI. I obviously spend a lot of my time doing that. And I went really kind of deep down the rabbit hole about how that actually works. So it is a little bit nerdy. It's a little bit about what's really happening underneath the hood and why you should build it in a particular way. Darja Nelson: there's sort of six of us and three of us are in these really like high volume, cool type roles. And the other three are more analysts sort of don't have as much ⁓ of on, but are the ones that actually end up doing a lot of the grind the background. So that communication across team and institutional knowledge across teams being a game changer. Jerwin Parker: What did you write? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. wow. Six to seven hours in meetings every day. How do you do it? ⁓ not back to back, are they? ⁓ Darja Nelson: Yeah. ⁓ well, let me tell you. Yeah. Mostly. don't know how I do it. I come home and my husband's like, you want to talk? And I'm like, absolutely not. I'm going to go sit in a dark room for half an hour before I can engage. Yeah. ⁓ Jerwin Parker: Yeah. Tim Jeffries: So there's things about how the AI actually develops the context, how it works out, relevant when I'm talking to this person about it, ⁓ stuff around ⁓ difference between the AI just searching across the workspace versus having a structure to navigate through. So notions, relational databases ⁓ it a pathway to follow, whereas otherwise it just uses the semantic search. Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. ⁓ well. Yes. Tim Jeffries: Yep. Yep. you using like a meeting note taker before a bot or ⁓ like service? Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Right. Yes, yes. Darja Nelson: Yeah, we tried a few of them. We weren't loving any of them, to be honest, like the summaries that they were giving and the insights that they were able to provide. It just felt like more work for to try and kind of extract what we needed from them. And I think that was also kind of key with notion is that even out of the box, the automatic summaries were better than the automatic summaries on the other platforms. ⁓ But we had this ability to interrogate and Tim Jeffries: Stuff about the connected tools. So you know, you can in things like Outlook and, you know, Google Calendar. There's a whole bunch of AI, Notion AI connectors. ⁓ And sort of did a deep dive about how does that really work? we know when you've got your SharePoint connected, like what's that experience going to be like? What's it really doing? Because some people's SharePoints are an ocean of 20 years of information. So what sort of results can you really expect from that? Jerwin Parker: Mmm. Darja Nelson: rewrite it in a really way. So it's really felt like an extension of, you know, your memory ⁓ your capacity to kind of work on a project. Jerwin Parker: Yes. Yes. Tim Jeffries: Yeah, and then some strategies about, okay, given, you know, the restraint or the constraints that we found and the challenges with building in a way to get the most out of AI, what strategy should you take? What are some ways of getting around those challenges? So anyway, we'll post a link, but hopefully that's useful and we'd love feedback and comments and further questions because it's a rabbit hole I want to keep going down. Yeah, yeah, I'm seeing that a lot. And it was absolutely true for me. just would get that one summary in your email usually. And then it was a helpful reminder, but you still had to pick out the pieces and go and do something with it. Like it still required you to do busy work of saying, ⁓ yeah, yeah, I said I was going to do that thing or and then you didn't store it anywhere. Like it just stayed in my email for the longest time. Darja Nelson: Mm. Jerwin Parker: Yeah, I think a lot of people are going to want to go down that rabbit hole because I don't think I've seen that covered into that level of depth. And how much is that going to cost him? Mm-hmm. Darja Nelson: Yes. Tim Jeffries: or on the other platform, whatever it was. And if I wanted to know something about one of my meetings, I knew I could go there and get it. So it's really helpful if I forgot, you know, what I needed and I could go and ask, but it didn't become to the rest of my, you know, workspace. And ⁓ now, if I go into my Bridgewest project and ask it in Notion and ask it anything, it has the history of every conversation we had and all the decisions we made and... There are those. Jerwin Parker: Zero. All right, guys, you probably have to get on that because I'm pretty sure he's going to start putting a bit of a payroll behind that because that is a lot of value. Yeah, that is a lot of value. Yeah, definitely will be. ⁓ you, Tim. Thank you, everyone, for watching. ⁓ if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating on whatever platform you're listening on. Tim Jeffries: Zero. You know what's gonna make me? No, it's good. It should be free. I hope it's useful. Darja Nelson: Mm. Tim Jeffries: That piece, feel like for a lot of people who are using meeting note takers is still largely untapped. Yeah. Jerwin Parker: Any questions, call outs, just DM me or Tim on LinkedIn anytime. We love feedback. Actually, we should start highlighting some of the DMs we get, Tim. I think that would be a very interesting part to start off with. Yeah, exactly. Thanks, everyone. Have a good day, night. Take care. Darja Nelson: Missing, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and because it is busy work, as you say, and then when you've got a small team, a dynamic business, there's, you know, everything's kind of done in a very fast pace. So I think in certain industries, it's really important to have something that can kind of integrate into the pace that you're going at rather than having to create a whole new workflow to enable it. And I think that's the winner with Notion is just becomes one. Tim Jeffries: segment. Cool, thanks everyone. See you later. Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Tim Jeffries: Yeah. Darja Nelson: your team members essentially. Yeah. Tim Jeffries: Are you using the custom agents to do anything automatically after meetings yet? I know, I think our last call was sort of just as custom agents was launching. So there was talk about it, but where have you got to? Darja Nelson: Yes. Yeah, we haven't, we've started, haven't got one working perfectly yet. ⁓ know, even now that we don't have you to like guide us and make us do these things every week. We've in place, we've put place some time in everybody's diary every couple of weeks to just sit around the table and do notion stuff and talk about how we want to improve notion. Yeah. And custom agents is top of the list at the moment. So we've got one of our team members playing on, okay, how can we. Tim Jeffries: Yeah Jerwin Parker: ⁓ nice. ⁓ Darja Nelson: Um, you know, we use notion to look after our pipeline, so incoming projects and where we're at with how we're looking at them. And then also our portfolio companies, those are the two primary users. Like what am I doing with company A, B and C and what did I promise them and what's next? Um, yeah, exactly. And so at the moment we're trying to, uh, we're writing an agent that's looking at all of our, um, opportunities in our pipeline, looking at any recent meetings that we've had. Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah. What's the next steps? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Darja Nelson: we've discussed and pulling out actions or decisions or summaries that it can put in into the at a glance. can tell you where that opportunity is at and what our latest thinking on is, and we can then dive deeper into that. So that's our first kind of custom agent off the rank that we've been playing with. But I think, you know, when we think about what's next for Notion, I think it's maximizing that for ourselves and starting to create these different agents that, kind of increase our hygiene and the efficiency of what we're doing ⁓ that next level. Tim Jeffries: You've done the hard work of working out what all your databases are and getting all the properties and importing all the data and all of that ugly unavoidable piece. mean, there's a few sick individuals around who love that and live for those moments, but I think most of us are like, oh my gosh, if I see another duplicate, I'm going to lose my mind. But yeah, I think the payoff is worth it right now. You can genuinely automate things. Darja Nelson: you Tim Jeffries: The one we have to try, I'm going to send you the copy of my one that I run. I've just put a little toggle on meetings ⁓ that when I'm finished with the meeting note, I just click the checkbox and then the custom agent assesses that meeting and ⁓ runs sort of a follow-up process. ⁓ So it pulls, and the thing I love about it that I, because Darja Nelson: Mm. Yes, please. That sounds great. ⁓ Tim Jeffries: Like you, will often have back-to-back calls. By the time the day is done, or usually five minutes after the meeting's finished, things I said I would do ⁓ sitting in my task inbox. And I don't have to remember to go back and look at that meeting and grab those tasks. And the project that I was worked on has had its sort of current state, little summary that sits at the top of the project that anyone on the team can look at. That's there, just waiting, ⁓ already updated. Darja Nelson: Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm-hmm. Tim Jeffries: And those pieces, is something I didn't expect, but one of the big advantages is the AI always does the thing that you've told it to do, like 100 % of the time, it'll do that meeting follow-up. And as a human, ⁓ never did anything 100 % of the time, even if I had a great day, I would only get nine out of 10, you know, ⁓ it just always reliably. And so then I have this real confidence that anything I said I'm going to do, it's going to be in my list and staring at me and I won't forget. Darja Nelson: Mm. Yeah. Absolutely, I think it also makes, you it kind of turns you into a type A person or enables you to be a type A person even if you're not, right? And I think that's, we've already seen the impact of that, being able to move things more quickly, being able to come to decisions more quickly. People have a lot more power in their hands, they're not having to wait for somebody else to get them something they can get the information that they need for whatever purpose they need it for. It is that efficiency gain that you get across the team is significant. know, it's like, it factors into how you think about what, what kind of people you need to hire, how you need to grow up the team, how you look at new investments and new processes within your own business. So really does change you at an organizational level. think if you can adopt AI in that way, ⁓ into your workflow. Tim Jeffries: Mm-hmm. I want to ask about that hiring piece because everybody's thinking about jobs. Darja Nelson: Mmm. Tim Jeffries: Ike have you... You haven't hired anyone since you've done this... yet? Darja Nelson: No, no we haven't. We do generally. Tim Jeffries: What do you think will be different from what you had before, like, you know, on the job description or on the sort of key attributes that someone needs? Has that changed now? Darja Nelson: I think so. I think not specifically Notion, but kind of AI in the workplace and Notion is an extension of that. You know, with our analysts, used to look or interns, we used to look for a specific set of skills. And that's an ability to sort of research and digest and present data in a certain way. I think the essential skills have now changed for an intern. You know, we want somebody who Jerwin Parker: Mm. Darja Nelson: how to efficiently use all of the new tools that are available and can understand what the crux of the matter is more so than how good they are at analysis, like traditional analysis, because that's essentially, you can outsource a lot of that grind now to the computers, right? So ⁓ definitely changed the profile of ⁓ hires that we bring into the organization at that intern and analyst level. ⁓ more around, you know, Tim Jeffries: Yeah. Yeah. Darja Nelson: What is your thinking process like? How can you critically analyze or how can you spot whether something feels wrong or right and how can we build on that rather than, you know, show me your traditional kind of like McKinsey style or big consultancy firm style approach to how you do this. So I think that's where the biggest change for hiring has come. not a big enough team to have like support staff really. ⁓ Tim Jeffries: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mmm. Yeah. Darja Nelson: And, but I think it's definitely like reduce that operational burden for us to a point where like, we're not feeling that burden as much anymore. So if we were hiring support staff that would, you know, I think that'd be another area where we would probably have fewer needs or slightly different needs in terms of the people we were looking for. Tim Jeffries: Yeah, hiring a support staff now, ⁓ think it will still hire them, but we'll hire people who can essentially be five times ⁓ productive they ⁓ leverage tools. And so ⁓ you one, you get for the price of one and their job is almost managing the tools that are doing the work that previously a ⁓ support person to do. The other thread I wanted to pick up on was just Darja Nelson: Exactly. 100%. Tim Jeffries: sort of scratching around for the right word, but wisdom seems like the right one. Like want, instead of just doing the analysis now, it's about the, like you said, kind of the model of the way that you think about it, how the decisions you make, you your insights about the analysis, which is tricky to have when you're a grad and you've just popped out of university. But it's almost like that's the thing that we ⁓ need like how... Darja Nelson: Mm. Tim Jeffries: How wise are you to deal with all of this intelligence that sits underneath you, know, that's being handed up? It feels like a very different set of skills than from the old ones. Jerwin Parker: Mm. Darja Nelson: Definitely. And I think it's hard to screen for that because I think our tools and the way that we've approached in the past ⁓ so different. I think for us at that early grad stage, obviously they're not going to have the wisdom to know on day one, you know, what the right pathway is, but it's more about that capability and that flexibility and the right mindset. So ⁓ if understand the tools, understand the shortfalls of the tools understand how to operate within environment to ⁓ out some of shortfalls, their training with us becomes about, hey, as a VC, what questions do you ask and what things are important? And, you know, we build that kind of wisdom framework for our specific area, but there's a base set of skills there that enables them to natively in this new environment ⁓ and advantage of it to displace, you know, traditional model building or traditional report writing or traditional presentation writing, which is how you look at ⁓ interns or analysts previously. Tim Jeffries: Yeah. I could talk about this bit forever, but I do want to ask you about the like implementing notion. What was the or what are the hard bits? What are the bits that are clunky and still don't feel like they're landing and where it hasn't, you know, delivered? Darja Nelson: Mm. we, did actually just thinking back to a previous question, we did hire someone new since implementing notion and it's been interesting having her join in on notion. The rest of us were all right there from the start. And now we're seeing this experience of someone naively coming into this environment that we built. And I think that's pointed out like some areas of weakness for us, right. In terms of how we. Tim Jeffries: Are you? Jerwin Parker: Alright. Tim Jeffries: Hmm. Darja Nelson: What is our user, Bridgewest user guide for Notion? Like how do we think about the logic of how these things are structured within our environment so that we can use them to their maximum kind of impact? So I think that's been quite difficult and compounded by the fact that none of us really have the time spend doing that, right? And so ⁓ that's area I think as you have a growing team or a large team where there's quite a lot of turnover. that probably becomes a lot more important ⁓ than we've kind of it credence in our team and our ecosystem. Jerwin Parker: Yeah. Tim Jeffries: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've just finished a job with a company that's got hundreds of people in it. And a big part of like landing it in the end was how do we mean how do we make it accessible to someone who's coming in for the first time? And like a help file is just not quite good enough. ⁓ Yeah. So, I mean, it's a mix of trying to help them understand the sort of principles and ideas behind the Darja Nelson: Mm. Mm-mm. Tim Jeffries: operating system that you've built so that when they come across something, they sort of intuit what the path to take is. But it is quite different. Yeah, I do feel like more than with other tools, you're building a way of working and you're building it sort of into the tool and people have to get it, get the way of working, get what it means to, you know, be a Bridgewest person to know how to use your way of doing it. Darja Nelson: Mm. Exactly. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. Tim Jeffries: I tip would be use the AI and Notion to try and write that stuff. Like ask it to write itself a prompt to put together the operating system for someone new to use it. It's very meta, meta, meta, it's pretty good at it. I do it a lot. ⁓ Yeah. And because it understands how it works and it understands how to use Notion. Darja Nelson: Mm-hmm Yeah. Tim Jeffries: And it's an LLM that has all these ideas about what a user guide should look like and how to help people on board. And I think it does ⁓ % of the grunt work. Darja Nelson: I thinking about it now, especially, I don't know whether you ever put all your minutes and recordings from our sessions as we were building it into our system. But if that data is there, it could easily go and interrogate like the thinking that we were doing at that time and ⁓ something off the back of that. Yeah. Tim Jeffries: Yeah. Jerwin Parker: Hmm. Tim Jeffries: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's all in there. All the strange rabbit holes we went down trying to work out how to build it the right way. Darja Nelson: But... Tim Jeffries: Yeah, nice. Jerwin Parker: I got a question. how do you deal with, because you mentioned you're in many, many meetings and a lot of different types of people you're speaking with, how do you deal with the information overload as you speak with like multiple companies across different sectors and different ecosystems daily? Like how do you, how do you manage that? Darja Nelson: Mm. Mm-hmm. Mm. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, when it comes to new opportunities, you know, we as a team will kind of always, you know, we talk multiple times a week across the pipeline and people have the ability to kind of pick up areas that they're really interested in and really speak to them. So ⁓ might tend to favor certain industries or certain types of companies because there's a lot of similarities to other areas that I'm already working on. So you kind of tend to compartmentalize a little bit like that, you know. Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Darja Nelson: I'm working with my plastics companies at the moment that are trying to replace plastic with biodegradable or compostable plastic, and they're in different industries, but lots of the same problems. ⁓ I'm working with my diagnostics companies at the moment that have got some amazing new science that's to sort of change how early we can detect things like cancer and Alzheimer's disease or how early we can create. Jerwin Parker: ⁓ well. Mm-hmm. Darja Nelson: therapies to target them and they'll have very similar challenges, strategic partners, customers, know, inflection points, ⁓ all those kinds of things that are important when you're trying to think about how you progress a business or grow a business in a certain field. Jerwin Parker: Yeah. Hmm. Tim Jeffries: Mmm. One thing I think... Sorry, guy. No, no, no, guy. Darja Nelson: But I think, ⁓ sorry. I was just going to say that's also an area where Notion's kind of enabled us to be like even more strategic, right? Because I can now say, hey, looking at all of my diagnostics companies, can you write me a little piece around some of the challenges that we're seeing with reaching customers in this market? And it can kind of pick up different things from different companies across a time period and bring it together, right? Into an area. Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Mmm. Darja Nelson: Or I can then look at, how do we use that in our marketing as a VC firm? How do we use it when we're advising customer to sort of say, or a or a portfolio company to say, ⁓ hey, are problems that we're seeing across the ecosystem. This is how others have dealt with it. So it enables you to kind of pull this knowledge that ⁓ we don't have the time to do that kind of thing on the day to day. yeah, there is. Jerwin Parker: Yes. Yeah. Darja Nelson: Aside from an efficiency piece, there's actually also an acceleration or value creation piece in there that it's unlocked for us. Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Tim Jeffries: ⁓ I was going to raise, I remember a key of need was around reporting and about, you know, collect all this information and we're doing the work and we're having the meetings and we're pushing these things forward. And then ⁓ time comes at the end of the month or the end of the quarter or whatever ⁓ you need to do some reporting. How's that process gone? Because I think by now you would have sort of several months through. And the idea was that we might be able to write some prompts to help. Darja Nelson: Mm. Tim Jeffries: collect the relevant pieces, prioritize what matters and then get us a bunch of the way there. Darja Nelson: Yeah, absolutely. And one of our team members has been very much owning that piece. And he's gone through three or four rounds now of reporting where he's built ⁓ a prompt ⁓ those three or four rounds and has been able to use the output of the previous month as a template for the future. So it's really enabled us to be really fast now. I think it's ⁓ definitely that we can almost Tim Jeffries: That's good. Darja Nelson: save that time that we used to put into end of the month or end of the course of reporting use it in a different way. And the we've used it, the better it's got. Yeah. Tim Jeffries: Right, right. Yeah, that's good. That's good. I see lots of sort of opportunity there to reclaim time. I did have a conversation with someone yesterday who is a guy who, you know, he's been ⁓ is a he ⁓ in and he's probably been doing it for 30 years. And he said, ⁓ I like the AI and I copy things and I paste it into the AI. He said, but I Darja Nelson: Mm. Tim Jeffries: I wouldn't want to lose the process where I get a chance to look over the source material. I wouldn't, because we were talking about how much could we automate this? He gets all this stuff in his inbox and at the moment he's copying and pasting it. He said, but it's an hour of my day where I actually go deep looking at the source data. If we automated the AI collecting that source data for me and then producing the thing ultimately that he does use a prompt to produce, he would be really missing something. Darja Nelson: Hmm. Tim Jeffries: And so the part of what I'm sort of fascinated about helping us all think about is which bits of human workflow and process do we not want to lose while we're automating these things? I don't think putting together reports is one of them, it might be. Darja Nelson: Mm. Yeah. Yeah. mean, even with that process where we've kind of automated a lot of the like grant work of pulling it all together, there's still multiple conversations that happen and there's still multiple reviews that happen and it prompts a conversation around the portfolio company that either leads us to improve the information in the system or it leads us to, you know, make a different decision. So I think there are bits of it, but you can't just leave it alone to do. its thing without your involvement because that, like me losing that touch point with that macro reporting is also going to be, make my job more difficult on a day to day. So it's about augmenting rather than replacing, or at least how we're viewing it. Tim Jeffries: Yeah, yeah, I think that's really important because I think the perception for a lot of people is, ⁓ we just automate it and then, you know, the report will get sent off to the board without us even looking at it. You know, that's not how it works. Darja Nelson: No, definitely not. people can tell, you know, it's interesting. I've become, it's very easy to tell when an email has been written by an AI now, I think. And there's just a feeling about it. Right. ⁓ then you get to a section where you're like, well, someone I have, ⁓ almost never use what notion natively produces for me as an email that I send out to someone, you know, I use it to gather all the facts, but I still do that sort of human element because I think. very difficult to interact in a meaningful way. If you're outsourcing all of that thinking the computer, it means the other person won't read it, they won't take it on, and you're not going to have that quality of interaction. Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Tim Jeffries: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's so true. So what's next? What are the big things on the horizon for, you know, your, what did you say, fortnightly notion sessions? Darja Nelson: Yeah. Yeah, agents is a big one. ⁓ Also looking at integration with email, we've just sort of started around that process and yeah, how do we get it to talk a little bit more to the rest of our systems and access that knowledge that exists outside of Notion at the moment? ⁓ Yeah, we are. Speed it up a bit. Yeah. Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. ⁓ well, nice. Tim Jeffries: Mm-mm. You guys at Microsoft house, right? It's all yeah. Come on notion. We need you to roll out. Well, cause what we, what we really need is if, if could put an outlook account in notion mail and notion calendar, as soon as you could do that, cause that does it with Gmail and I literally say, you know, to the agent, what's my inbox. And it says, you've got 10 emails. This one's sitting there from two weeks ago. Come on, mate. ⁓ You to reply to it. Jerwin Parker: That'd be so helpful. Yeah. Darja Nelson: Yeah. Yeah. Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Darja Nelson: Yeah, we've tried, we've just connected it to our look via the beta sort of connector. And it's not great. Yeah. at the moment, it's, you know, it's, there's signs of life there, but it's not good enough for us to use yet. I think that calendar integration piece, that email integration piece, it's going to be another level of efficiency for us, right? You're not going to have to go into Notion and start a meeting and make sure your metadata is manually. Jerwin Parker: Yeah. Tim Jeffries: You Mm. Mm. Darja Nelson: sort of filled out or you've got the agent filling it out, it's all going to be pulled from the system and the quality of it is going to increase. So really looking forward to that piece. I think that's going to also enable us to kind of up our game in terms of dashboards and reporting and how we communicate what's coming out ⁓ ⁓ due diligence processes and out of our portfolio management processes. Tim Jeffries: Yeah. Nice. Okay. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of that. I know ⁓ I first discovered world of VC, I just had no idea what it was. And it was fascinating to me because you get to explore so many interesting projects and worlds. And as I've gone on, I've realized there's all kinds of different VCs as well who are at different stages of the process and whatever. So thank you for sharing that and the Notion ⁓ Any parting for people who are Jerwin Parker: Mm-hmm. Tim Jeffries: So setting out trying to do this for themselves. Darja Nelson: Yeah, I think it's just about time and really kind of committing to like that this being a thing. It's not something you can just pick up once every couple of weeks. then, you know, even like if I'm not using it daily, I feel like I'm behind in terms of, you know, what, how I'm using that system. So it's really about that curiosity ⁓ and having, know, watching as many videos and listening to as many podcasts and Jerwin Parker: Wakes. Darja Nelson: getting as much help from super users to kind of grow and feed that curiosity because the more comfortable you get in the system, the more you're going to get out of it. you don't have to be a software engineer or someone with a computer background to ⁓ benefit from it. Tim Jeffries: Yeah. Great. Cool. Well, thanks very much for coming on. Really appreciate your time. Jerwin Parker: Thank you so much. Darja Nelson: No, happy to help. Yeah, thanks for the chat. It's been really interesting. Can talk about it all day. Tim Jeffries: All right. Jerwin Parker: Ha