Akshay Kothari
@akothari • 61,427 subscribers
co-founder @NotionHQ
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Videos
"Am I dreaming big enough?" This video will inspire millions of builders today.
Akshay Kothari1,098,562 views • 1 year ago
For the past few months, a small crew got together to overhaul Notion sidebar / navigation. We called the project "Slippery Slope" :) For anyone who's worked on a similar project knows how hard it is to make any changes to navigation, because it directly impacts how millions of people use your product every single day. To my surprise and delight, the team was able to ship something remarkably better in a matter of weeks. We've been using it internally for some time now, and I cannot imagine going back. We start ramping to users tomorrow, but feel free to reply here, and I'll try my best to turn on early access!
Akshay Kothari211,120 views • 5 months ago
I vibe coded an iOS app this week. I called it Pulse. LMK if you'd like to try it!
Akshay Kothari62,586 views • 4 months ago
I shot this video last week to onboard a new set of alpha customers to Notion Custom Agents. Figured I should just put it out here so you can follow along the latest and greatest. It's so cool to see all the things people are building with it. You can see some of my own use cases here: (0:00) Intro to custom agents Starting with personal use cases (1:00) Building a mail triage agent (5:00) Creating a prep doc for all my daily meetings (6:45) Generating a daily report that helps me catch up with multiple slack channels Switching to company use cases (8:30) Agent that automatically answers questions in a slack channel and files tasks when necessary (10:30) Agent that auto-routes product feedback to the right team channel and task db. And it does this with routing rules, that it wrote itself. (12:40) Build your own agent. Let your imaginations run wild! Send us feedback! The product is rolling out quickly, and everyone should have access in the next couple weeks.
Akshay Kothari74,684 views • 5 months ago
Custom Agents become generally available today. What we learned in the alpha: - Over a million custom agents went live! The use cases are SO broad. Seeing what people do with them is easily my favorite part of the job. - Agents are not just for engineers! People from every function are now building their own factories. (watch this space at Developer day next week!) - The combination of custom agents with Notion Workers is basically magic! What you can automate is now limited by your own imagination. - Control matters! Context, permissions, and cost came up a lot, and we shipped major improvements within the alpha. - On cost, people love the ability to experiment with different models, and swap out more expensive models with open-weight ones, where it makes sense. - Usage-based pricing is new for Notion, but becoming the standard for AI. It fits the idea of intelligence as a service. Really grateful for all the feedback. It directly shaped what we shipped. Keep it coming, my DMs are open.
Akshay Kothari29,899 views • 2 months ago
Starting something fun: Notion After Hours. Here's episode 1 with Geoffrey Litt, Mary Rose Cook, Max Schoening and Nintendo .DS_Store! We talk lifelong love of computers, malleable software, and the future of our relationships with AI. All the stuff we care about. Tell us what you think!
Akshay Kothari83,554 views • 9 months ago
For most of the last two decades, our ability to make things on mobile devices has been pretty limited. We got good at writing emails, taking photos and videos, and doing some light editing. But the vast majority of our time was still spent consuming. One under-discussed shift is how much AI has unlocked creation on mobile. People are literally coding iOS apps on their iPhones now. The activation energy has dropped dramatically. This is true for Notion as well. Writing a doc or creating and managing a database used to be fairly involved, not to mention the paper cuts that we are fixing fast. The new agent on mobile has made creation 10x faster and better. And I should add, 100x more fun! In this demo, I use our iOS app exclusively by interacting with the agent. I never type into a doc or a database. I just ask the agent to make things, add things, and update things, and it goes and does it. Take a look, and let me know what you think!
Akshay Kothari59,005 views • 6 months ago
Notion’s Q3 was our finest yet. Growth is accelerating at scale. We used to sell software; now we sell work itself. That’s a profound shift, and the numbers show it. I ran 50+ demos this past quarter, refining our story for customers each time. I shared the latest version internally last week and thought: why not share it with all of you too? It’s an 18-minute watch; feedback welcome!
Akshay Kothari64,115 views • 8 months ago
In the early days of Notion, we published a changelog weekly, sometimes multiple times a week. As we grew into a larger organization, with many people shipping many things, we moved to a monthly cadence. It helped consolidate everything, but it somewhat blurred what was changing week to week. For a long time, I’ve wanted to get back to a weekly changelog. I think it’s a more transparent reflection of what we’re building, fixing, and improving each week. Excited to share that we’re back to our startup roots, and now publish the changelog ~weekly. We also do a short video highlighting the most important ships. See the latest one below. Would love your feedback! How do you like the format? How can we communicate this better?
Akshay Kothari41,450 views • 7 months ago
For the past few years, the product we sold was software. Beautiful software that helped you get your work done. In the years ahead, the product we’ll sell is actual knowledge work: repetitive tasks you can fully hand off to Notion Agents. Here’s a quick demo:
Akshay Kothari42,070 views • 8 months ago
If Notion ever made a podcast about the people we admire and the ideas we obsess over, it’d look a lot like Dialectic with Jackson Dahl. I wasn't able to hire Jackson Dahl (yet!), so I did the next best thing: invested in him and Dialectic so he can do it full-time. Unreasonably excited!
Akshay Kothari36,410 views • 7 months ago
At Notion, we’ve spent the last 3 years iterating our way from a product with an AI feature to an insanely useful AI-native product. This wasn’t an easy transformation and required a fair amount of rewiring in how we build products. In this episode of After Hours, Shir Yehoshua, Sarah Sachs, Lauren Oliveri, and Eric Sabandal, the real builders behind this evolution, share what we learned and offer ideas for how other companies can do the same. (0:00) Introduction (0:50) Everything is Waymo (6:39) Demo vs Memo (10:50) Try, try, and try again (18:46) Everyday AI (21:38) Progress > Perfection
Akshay Kothari25,741 views • 5 months ago