Georgie 01:01

Wow, guys, a bit of a different one this week because it’s a bit of a different episode. This is the recording of our live show, which we did at UNSW in Sydney, a very special venue. UNSW is recognised as Australia’s leading university for entrepreneurship, particularly through their UNSW Founders Program. Special venue. Special guest. We had Andrew McCarthy, General Manager at Notion for Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Join us. The feedback from this evening and about Andrew was genuinely incredible. For a live show, we wanted to make a big splash. It was a sold-out event. We had merch — people were rocking it, sending me photos. Thank you so much everyone who came. We’ll have to do it again in future. Now, I’ll do a proper intro for the show as part of the live recording, but this episode had AI hacks, the Notion origin story, and even skincare tips. Andrew’s glow was real, and now that we’re streaming video on Spotify, you’ll be able to see that glow for yourself. I’m excited for you guys to hear this. Let’s dive in. Wow. Wow. Hey, Georgie!

Georgie 02:31

Hey Andrew. What brings you here? You, yes. Oh yeah, I did actually plan this for months. Thanks everyone. Look, I’m genuinely so excited to do this live show. This was a thing I manifested one night, and then when UNSW said yes, I was like, oh wow, that’s really exciting. Now I need the most incredible guest possible. Some suggestions were given to me that were great, and we did that and we got you. So much being show of hands — who has used Notion before? Ooh,

Andrew McCarthy 03:12

That could have gone one of two ways.

Georgie 03:14

I’m

Andrew McCarthy 03:14

Glad it went that way.

Georgie 03:16

Okay, raise your hands if you used it in the last week.

Andrew McCarthy 03:22

We go, yeah.

Georgie 03:23

That’s a pointed question because a lot of new AI features rolled out into that. So we’re going to start the official part. So, In The Blink of AI, I talk to the brightest AI startups and innovators each week. I’m Georgie Healey. It’s the 30th time I’ve done that, so I didn’t need the script until now. I’m speaking to Andrew McCarthy. He’s the General Manager at Notion for Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Notion is the AI workforce, where you can find every answer, automate busy work and get freight checks done. 80% of users are located outside the US and users grew from 19 million to 100 million last year. Australia has about 26 million, so it’s a lot of… When I was researching Notion, the first comment on Reddit was ‘Notion’s too good. I’m afraid it’s gonna get acquired.’ So that’s the biggest, I think, I think it’s going quite well, no?

Andrew McCarthy 04:40

I’m — oh, first live show tonight. Good energy in the crowd, but I do love podcasts. Listen a lot.

Georgie 04:49

Yeah. Any particular ones you like?

Andrew McCarthy 04:51

In The Blink of AI? I was actually listening to your mic, Jackie Coe, on the way in today.

Georgie 04:57

Relevance?

Andrew McCarthy 04:59

Yeah. You gave a plug and said, ‘We’ve got a live show and some spicy questions they can’t get away from.’ And I was thinking, uh-oh, that’s me. That’s me, right on the way. Other ones I like are BG2 for Markets, Yes, Fall Civilisations or The Rest is History. Wanna go to sleep at night — it’s got a very soothing voice. Can listen to Rome go in the distance, and yeah, our whole podcast. Thank you.

Georgie 05:25

The Roman Empire. Your Roman

Andrew McCarthy 05:26

Empire. I dunno. Maybe.

Georgie 05:31

We’ll reflect on that one. So General Manager of Notion, Australia, Asia, everywhere, I’m sure. What’s a general day in the life like?

Andrew McCarthy 05:43

I’m not everywhere, just in case my boss is watching as well. Lots of parts of the world I don’t have the privilege to work with. I have three young kids. So a day in the life probably starts with me yelling, ‘Put your shoes on!’ into an abyss, then get in the car and ends with ‘Go to bed.’ And in between that a lot of Notion. I think great leaders do two things really well: they build an engaged team and deliver customer value. A lot of my focus is putting together an integrated team — a team that sees Notion as a talent destination, a place where they can change their life and career, making sure diverse ideas and opinions come forward so the team thrives. The other side is building customer value — how we help customers ship products faster, go to market and achieve their dreams. Most of my thoughts during the day are on one of those two things: bringing great people and helping them grow, or talking to great customers and helping them grow.

Georgie 06:43

You’ve recently launched in Australia and last week you were in Singapore. We saw that all over LinkedIn. That was quite viral. How’s that going and what does success look like for you in APAC specifically?

Andrew McCarthy 06:55

It’s going really well, thanks to Mackay, our incredible marketing leader around the event in Singapore last week. We now have millions of views in Australia, which blows my mind. The Australian population is just north of 26 million. Success looks like success in the eyes of our customers — making sure our users get great value from Notion. I’m really proud that some breakout Australian success stories use Notion, like Linktree, who use Notion to reduce the amount of time they spend in meetings and take tasks that used to take five hours and do them in seconds. That’s inspiring — great Australian companies taking on the world and using Notion as their knowledge backbone. Globally, we’ve worked with companies like OpenAI, which is pretty hot right now. They use Notion to reduce the time to iterate on models really fast — they reported a 70% reduction in iteration time, which is amazing because they produce really intelligent models that get better every week. We’re privileged to work with them. It’s going really well but there’s a long way to go. It comes back to listening to our customers and really growing with them here.

Georgie 08:08

I’ve been in tech and startups for the last five-plus years.

Andrew McCarthy 08:13

It’s

Georgie 08:14

Quite stressful, I find, and productivity is a bit cultish. Everyone’s really trying to optimise their day and life, fitting in ice baths, saunas and longevity hacks. Do you lean into that yourself, Andrew? Are you part of this cult of productivity? Sorry for the cold word. Or do you get overwhelmed and go back to pen and paper at the end of the day?

Andrew McCarthy 08:42

Interesting question. I think there’s a big opportunity to simplify and reduce a bit of ado. A lot of my life and the life of people I work with is managing different software solutions and tech flow across companies. That creates productivity challenges. Any productivity benefit one app gives gets eroded by the need to move out of it and find information elsewhere. So there’s a big opportunity to simplify and reduce — that’s how I view productivity.

Georgie 09:16

Amazing. I was excited to have a briefing call with you because I peeked behind the scenes of the early days of Notion. One thing you said that I picked up on was Notion is an anti-SaaS company.

Andrew McCarthy 09:42

It’s interesting you mentioned the last five years because I like to view this on a longer horizon. If I think about the 1970s, the early computer pioneers were creating tools for thought to help augment human intellect. In the 1980s, it went a different path — Microsoft released Word in 1983, Excel in 1985. They feel exactly the same today as they did in the eighties. But at that time, the process was to take physical world items, make a digital copy, and put a PC on every desk. They succeeded — there is a PC on every desk.

As we got to 2000, something magical happened: the cost to launch an internet company fell drastically. What cost $5 million in 2000 cost $5,000 eleven years later due to open source and cloud computing. That opened the door for hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs to attack the Microsoft suite. The ethos was ‘find your niche and smash it’ — do one thing better, like be a better bug-tracking tool than Excel for engineers or a better program management tool than Excel for marketers.

During that period, called the G2 Crowd era, over 130,000 software products were created. Many are probably still in our inboxes today. If you look at project management tools, there are now over 480 rated on G2 Crowd. There is a tool for every niche and vertical, and they compete by building better workflows for specific use cases.

The insight Notion had is that all those 130,000 software providers have the same building blocks: some element of database, text input, automation. Notion’s vision was to deconstruct software back to those building blocks — software like Lego. That way, someone can build a solution that works for them, not just today but also as they grow and change.

That inspired me. I think about where this could go going forward. Most of the value in the last 20 years, by value I mean money, has been captured by people who own tech companies. Seven of the 10 richest people in the world own tech companies. There’s a divide between those who build software and those who use software. I’m on the user side.

The ability to control how you work the software around your process, instead of changing your process to fit software, can unlock creativity and value for many people. That’s why I’m excited. We see ourselves as that ‘anti-platform’ — not one individual point solution but a horizontal platform that grows and evolves with people, helping them build the tools to live the life they want.

Georgie 12:58

A hundred million users, a $10 billion valuation. Was it always hockey-stick growth and a perfect product everyone obsessed with? Or was there more going on behind the scenes?

Andrew McCarthy 13:13

Notion almost died in 2015. It’s an interesting story, well before my time. Ivan and Simon, our founders, launched Notion in 2013 with a vision to build no-code software building tools. They built it and put it into the market but no one used it because no one knew where to start. They ran out of money and moved to Kyoto, Japan. The rent difference between San Francisco and Japan helped fund the ability to keep working on the product.

When they went there, they realised most work starts with a blank piece of paper or word processing. So they rebuilt Notion as that blank piece of paper and hid all the software-building tools behind it. That’s why today Notion looks like a piece of paper to start but evolves as you use it, allowing you to build workflows.

So no, it wasn’t hockey-stick growth. It was a lot of effort and passion. The vision of Simon and Ivan to work on this project for so long with a long-term horizon inspired me to be part of it.

Georgie 14:34

We have a lot of founders who listen to the show and I love to hear stories like that. I recently listened to the Airwallex episode on 20VC and it was also a real up-and-down story. I hope people building companies listen and know it’s not always what it looks like in the papers.

Last question about Notion’s background and building the product — the interface you mentioned is quite iconic. How important is that UI and UX, that visual way that the product itself is?

Andrew McCarthy 15:13

UI and UX is everything because that’s how you engage and interact. I’ve been thinking more broadly recently about the race to the surface level of applications. Think about having an AI today, and compare it to PCs. Remember the little Intel chip on PCs? I’m a millennial, so yes. HP and others had the PC; Intel made the processing chip inside; a lot of value was captured at the application layer — Windows, Office — on top of which Facebook and Google were built.

Right now, with AI, the hardware is the video and the models are like the Intel chip. There’s a race to the application layer where the value is captured. Today, I buy a laptop trusting it has the best chip; I’m interested in the application layer and usability.

So UI and UX is everything — that’s ultimately how people capture value and interact with the product.

Georgie 16:34

Especially now with AI. There are so many tools and options; it can be overwhelming. Learning one tool takes time away from others, so you risk losing customers.

Andrew McCarthy 16:51

You do.

Georgie 16:52

We’re learning too much, guys. Everyone loved Notion as it was. Why add AI?

Andrew McCarthy 17:00

I think AI is fundamental to productivity. I’ve been thinking about the work I do daily, and I personally feel I’m two to four times more productive today than six months ago. I used to spend 20–30 minutes daily rewriting emails and notes to make them shorter. Remember the saying, ‘I would have written a shorter letter if I had more time’? AI is really good at shortening and simplifying language.

Second, I spend a lot of time searching information across different tools. AI is great at finding information from different parts of an organisation and bringing it to the surface. It’s also great at drafting reports from existing knowledge bases.

Recently, I’ve been using AI meeting notes that record conversations. I dictate to it, and it summarises. I remember watching my dad, a lawyer, using a Dictaphone, then someone typed it up and another person went through the info. It took a while; the AI process takes me five minutes.

So AI to Notion is fundamental productivity. We build blocks that help people achieve their goals — that goes back to our mission.

Georgie 18:17

My dad did law here on campus; we just passed it before. So cool. I’ve been playing with the Notion AI integration, which is part of Notion now — you don’t switch it on or go somewhere else. It does writing assistance, content summaries, data analysis. It launched last week. What do you think people will use most?

Andrew McCarthy 18:46

The thing that’s blown me away is people using building blocks in combination. Individually, blocks are fantastic, but combined, they unlock a whole new level of value. I spoke to a chief medical officer at a great Australian startup who said they record all internal meetings and intelligence using AI. That feeds into their company knowledge base, which they see as an asset they can build and compound on. Others can search that asset in real time.

That unlocks many new opportunities when you combine these tools to create value and help people get where they want to go.

Georgie 19:34

Yeah. What I found I was doing before was searching in Gemini or ChatGPT, then copy-pasting that into Notion, then going back for more. So it’s good you don’t have to keep switching platforms.

Andrew McCarthy 19:49

Exactly. Most of our work doesn’t happen in 10 different places. Work is a flow, and bringing tools and blocks into that flow removes friction and increases visibility. That’s a huge opportunity for society.

Georgie 20:07

When we first connected, you mentioned the incredible template marketplace, which I haven’t used before but now feel like I have to.

Andrew McCarthy 20:20

Yeah, there’s a marketplace with over 30,000 templates on the platform. Creators have sold a million dollars worth of templates, which blows my mind. Recently, Figma put their internal company operating system on the platform. So startups can operate like Figma and access their docs, templates, OKRs. That creates huge value for startups and entrepreneurs wanting to work like successful companies.

One story that struck me was a student from Nepal who supports himself by building and selling templates on Notion’s marketplace. The ability to build productivity templates or CRMs for small companies and compete with major CRM providers is amazing. When could a university student ever do that before? The building blocks and channel to sell to others creates value on multiple sides. I’m really jazzed about that and proud to work at Notion.

Georgie 21:38

Last question before Q&A. There’s a lot of noise about AI, and I talk to people overwhelmed by it. It doesn’t matter where you are on the spectrum — there are so many products, tools, apps, updates. How do you know between the noise and what’s actually valuable, for the listeners?

Andrew McCarthy 22:10

Harvard did a study recently. They looked at our C-level executives to see if they thought AI was important for the future of the company, and over 90% said yes. And they asked, how well do you think you’re implementing AI today? Only 3% said, okay. It’s a gap I’ve never seen before in history — this gap between aspiration and ambition and what the reality feels like on the ground. So, I think to use AI effectively, there are a couple of tactics I’ve used that I think people could apply here. The first is just getting familiar with the building blocks. It’s really good at, as you mentioned before, improving writing. It’s great at creating a draft document from an existing knowledge base. It’s really good at transcribing conversations and summarising them. It’s good at universal search across different apps. Those are things it’s just good at. So, understanding those building blocks is the first place to start. The second is the opportunity to put those building blocks together in ways that create value for you and your company. For example, if you’re collecting knowledge in one place, make sure that knowledge is captured in the company brain so others can search for it. That creates leverage for the knowledge as well. The third stage is rethinking the end-to-end process and thinking about how you can ultimately optimise it to be more efficient. I heard a great example recently of a startup in Australia performing like a 25-person marketing team with just five people. The way they did that was by breaking down all the parts of the process into blocks — most knowledge work is part knowledge, some intelligent part on top, and some automation on the other side. So, imagine you’re a reporter working on a journal. You have some knowledge, I have some knowledge. That knowledge comes together, you overlay intelligence on top, then the report goes to a process. You can start optimising that whole process effectively. That’s a huge opportunity. So, that’s how I think about it: know the building blocks, start putting them together, then think about the end-to-end process considering the business outcome in a really efficient way.

Georgie 24:15

Love it. I think we might get some questions from the audience now. The next part — oh, well done with all the questions. Incredible. Here’s the top question: I want to know what the most random Notion use case you’ve ever come across is. How are people using it?

Andrew McCarthy 24:36

Uh, so what I would say is beauty is in the eye of the beholder and random to me is someone else’s life. Because one example I saw that was like, wow, was this one gentleman who had done 365 pages of origami. He’d organised his whole origami set. I’m getting cramped — that’s right, should’ve gone to the gym this morning. And he’d used it to organise his origami and I was like, I didn’t know that.

Georgie 25:11

Or just —

Andrew McCarthy 25:12

So he —

Georgie 25:14

Oh, he’d taken —

Andrew McCarthy 25:15

A photo of it. Yeah. He’d then written all the instructions down. He then did a short video on it and documented that every day, right? The 365 days. And then what happened, which is the amazing part, is he went into his workplace. This is how I found out about it. He thought the way we’re organising our knowledge internally felt really clunky and old, so he started organising the internal knowledge of the company using that process. There are now 800 people at the company using Notion. If you think back to our B2C to B2B model — we want to do great jobs for people at home and let them take that into their workplace. Think about how the Apple iPhone evolved. I used the iPhone at home first because it was the best tool to use, I got used to it, and enjoyed it. Then I started to take it into the workplace and wanted to use it there. There are lots of wonderful ways people use Notion, and yeah, I’m continually inspired by how they use it.

Georgie 26:14

I got distracted by this next question. I have thoughts on who this might be and whoever it is, it’s amazing — respectfully. What is your skincare routine? How does someone with your career tenure and three kids have such good skin (in brackets, in a non-creepy way)?

Andrew McCarthy 26:41

Facts. Olay off. I’m 72. No, I’m not. Wait, you’re that Brian —

Georgie 26:51

Johnson.

Andrew McCarthy 26:52

Guy, not him. You’ve got a boy.

Georgie 26:57

Have you heard of Blood Boys in Silicon Valley?

Andrew McCarthy 26:59

No, so —

Georgie 27:01

You can have a teenage boy give you their blood —

Andrew McCarthy 27:05

Yeah.

Georgie 27:06

What, plasma? Yeah, I think old mate does that. Didn’t know that when you voted, did you guys, you were condoning that. Okay. There’s so many great questions. How does your strategy for scaling Notion change as your audience grows?

Andrew McCarthy 27:25

Strategy is focusing on what’s already working. When we look at APAC, we’ve really divided it into some countries to see where there’s the most usage, adoption, and growth. That’s been our strategy globally. Interestingly, the first office outside the US was Japan because Japan had a really strong organic use case. Then there was an office in Dublin and then Korea. The reason why Notion chose Sydney as its APAC headquarters was because of the strength of the community already here and how they’re using it today. So, the answer to that question is: listen to users and customers, continually strive to deliver better solutions to help them meet their needs, and double down on what’s working. That’s probably the simplest way to put it.

Georgie 28:14

Do you still have an office in Kyoto, by the way?

Andrew McCarthy 28:17

There’s an office in Tokyo.

Georgie 28:18

Tokyo.

Andrew McCarthy 28:19

But I didn’t team visit Kyoto.

Georgie 28:21

Yeah. Amazing. What’s the average time a new user spends on a free plan before they convert to a paid user? I’m not sure if you’re that into —

Andrew McCarthy 28:32

Weeds? Yeah, true. Actually, I know the answer to that.

Georgie 28:34

Yeah, yeah.

Andrew McCarthy 28:35

I think the best answer is we want users to continually get value from the solution and then make it easy for them to get more value as well, but I don’t know the time.

Georgie 28:46

What about enterprise customers?

Andrew McCarthy 28:48

Yeah.

Georgie 28:49

Do they build with AI features in Notion?

Andrew McCarthy 28:52

Yeah.

Georgie 28:53

And how do you see partnerships with enterprises evolving?

Andrew McCarthy 28:56

One fact: it’s Toyota. Do you know the Kanban board? Let me use that. Do you know who invented the Kanban board?

Georgie 29:04

What’s the Kanban board?

Andrew McCarthy 29:06

It’s a process to organise projects, right? Oh, okay. It was invented inside Toyota. They invented this thing called the Kanban board. Toyota now use us to do their Kanban board internally, which is a full circle moment, which is inspiring. I would say with enterprises, there’s a really interesting moment in time where a lot of CEOs are asking their teams to adopt AI. This is different from previous technology innovations like cloud, which usually came through a sales-first approach, talking to the IT team. This time, people get introduced to AI at home, start using it, and so the way we’re looking at it is how we can partner with enterprises to help them fulfil their goal to become more productive and adopt AI meaningfully. One of our similar recent successes is focusing on practical applications — things like improving writing, searching across databases, finding information, drafting reports. These are fundamental tasks that knowledge workers do daily, and we’ve been able to move the needle there for companies. The value continues to grow as well.

Georgie 30:23

Everyone’s learning Python and AI, but not logic. Everyone’s learning Canva but not design. Do you think we should focus on fundamentals first, then hype? Or are frameworks, UI, UX, or tools on top more important?

Andrew McCarthy 30:44

The way I think about this is around the business outcome — what business outcome are you looking to achieve, and how can technology help deliver that efficiently? Notion’s approach has been to build really flexible horizontal building blocks or Lego that help people build processes effectively. If you come back to the goal, you can usually find the best way to get there.

Georgie 31:12

These questions are really good. This is the last one with eight upvotes: What do non-tech companies get wrong about AI adoption? How should they change?

Andrew McCarthy 31:23

Has everyone read ‘Software is Eating the World’ by Marc Andreessen? It’s a post from 2011 that’s worth reading. The argument is that most companies are becoming tech companies. If you were a retailer 25 years ago, being a retailer was fine. But as technology evolves, you have to understand technology, how it helps with processes, go-to-market, and how the internet impacts that. So, a lot of companies now are becoming AI-first companies as well, and it’s getting hard to distinguish between tech and non-tech — tech is working its way into all organisations. A great way to start is to look at the individual building blocks of what AI is good at, then develop a process based on that. A two-by-two framework I’ve found helpful is mapping what AI is good at versus the risk. If it’s a high-risk environment and AI’s not very good at it, don’t do it. If it’s low risk and AI is good at it, do it. That framework helps organisations understand how to adopt AI.

Georgie 32:42

There’s someone in the audience, I won’t call them out specifically, but they’ve got an incredible candle business called House of Scandal and for marketing are using AI — which is not a tech business but using AI for marketing campaigns, which is pretty incredible.

Andrew McCarthy 33:01

I think the future’s so bright. Especially for students entering the workforce. Often something that holds people back is experience and knowledge in a sector, but anyone can join a company now and leverage the collective intelligence that already exists. I’ve heard examples of people new to firms delivering the same output as someone who’s been there 10 years because they’re leveraging the organisation’s collective intelligence. That’s super exciting — not just for amazing candle businesses but for any business. You can create leverage, opportunity, and a new world for yourself and the world. Yes.

Georgie 33:45

The future is bright, and what’s even brighter and spicier is the rapid-fire questions. Andrew, I’ve got five questions here for you. Are you ready?

Andrew McCarthy 33:55

No.

Georgie 33:57

If you didn’t work at Notion, where would you be?

Andrew McCarthy 34:01

I would want to be a sports star, but I was never quite — I was never good enough.

Georgie 34:07

At what sport?

Andrew McCarthy 34:10

I would’ve loved to. My kids love all the swimmers like Emma McKean. I remember, actually, at the Olympics a few years ago, my youngest kids thought Emma Wiggle and Emma McKean were the same person. I thought, this person is the best I’ve ever seen in my life. They’re hand-hand because it’s like, go, go. So I’d be a sports star, but I’m not physically gifted enough to do that.

Georgie 34:36

You did get a cramp before. Maybe you lost your sports star side. Maybe a figure skater would be the closest I’d get to sport. Well, I don’t know.

Andrew McCarthy 34:48

Can you do 360?

Georgie 34:53

No.

Andrew McCarthy 34:54

What’s the attraction?

Georgie 34:57

I can lift my leg high in yoga. I feel like I do that thing you know, that —

Andrew McCarthy 35:02

That.

Georgie 35:02

Yeah. Thanks. I can’t do that.

Andrew McCarthy 35:04

Like —

Georgie 35:05

I wasn’t supportive of you at all, and you were so supportive of me, so I’m humbled.

What do the students who use Notion do or know that you don’t?

Andrew McCarthy 35:17

I’ve seen some students recently toggle between different AI models to get better outcomes. It’s a really interesting way to use AI. They ask a question to OpenAI or ChatGPT and get an answer. Then they go to Anthropic and say, ‘Pick holes in this answer.’ Then they take it back to OpenAI and say, ‘Pick holes in this answer.’ It’s part of the reason now that in Notion you can toggle between different AI models. You have the enterprise version of ChatGPT and Claude, a tool you can toggle between. That’s a really interesting way of getting diversity of thought and opinion and poking holes in things by leveraging models effectively. That’s what they taught me.

Georgie 35:56

Yeah, I really love that dropdown because sometimes you’re just like, ‘Ah, I can’t be bothered, I’ll just take that answer.’ But if it’s that easy, yeah, it’s quite good.

You’re going to a dinner party and get to invite two people from the tech industry. Who are they?

Andrew McCarthy 36:19

Jack Dorsey who did Twitter — he had this line, ‘Great design is speed to understanding.’ I’ve taken that a lot in my life. And Io, who’s our CEO. I’m not sure what I’d say to them because they’re both masters of their craft. I think I’d just get water. I’d sit there and say, ‘Hey, want your drinks?’ I’d love to hear them vibe on all things tech and craft.

Georgie 36:46

We both have children, and something that’s a while away for us but increasingly concerns me is: what skills should they have in this age of AI? The things I thought were most prestigious, requiring the best scores, like law, are now some of the most disrupted industries with AI. So skills-wise, what do you think is important and what would you tell them?

Andrew McCarthy 37:17

The answer starts by looking at what AI is not good at. It’s not called creativity. It’s good at looking through big data sets and producing the most likely result of what it’s already seen. But creativity is fundamentally human. I think creativity and relationship-building will be really important because ultimately AI should be a tool to help us. Those will be consistent for fraternity.

Georgie 37:48

Love it. Last question, similar to before: was there any Notion page that blew your mind or changed how you approach life?

Andrew McCarthy 38:02

I saw one today that really touched me. Vanessa, head of community, shared some feedback she received from a university student. They said they’d been journaling their life at university. They saw a post from their freshman year asking, ‘What is depression? Will it end?’ Then, three years later, they saw a post saying, ‘I love life.’ They wrote a note to Vanessa saying it was wonderful to see the journey of their life. They’d captured all their journals and photos in Notion over time. That really struck a chord with me because ultimately we’re all human. The ability to connect with yourself, see how you’ve changed, and look back on your own life artifacts is really impactful. That human element — not technology — of a person finding themselves was wonderful.

Georgie 39:03

That’s beautiful. You’ve been such a great sport.

Andrew McCarthy 39:10

Thanks.

Georgie 39:13

You peaked. Is there anything you haven’t peaked at yet to come?

Andrew McCarthy 39:24

The best is yet to come.

Is there anything you’d like to shout out to the listeners?

Andrew McCarthy 39:24

Two things. Firstly, thank you for coming and thank you for listening online. We’re really aware that our success depends on the success of our customers and users. A lot of you have been with Notion longer than I have. I’ve only been there a year but using Notion for many years. Thank you for being early adopters, thank you for using the tool, and thank you for giving us feedback to help us improve. That’s heartfelt from the start. Secondly, we really want to support the startup ecosystem here. We’re giving any startup six months free access to Notion Plus AI to use the tool and build out a team. There’s a QR code and a link on the website. Ultimately, we want to help wonderful startups take on the world and do what they want to do. We’re grateful for your support and here to help. Thank you.

Georgie 40:15

Can we get a huge clap? Thank you for listening to In The Blink of AI. You can check out the show notes for anything discussed in this week’s episode, and we’ll be back next week. This podcast was produced by Day One with music by Dan Hansen and visual artwork by Sophie Tyrell. If you loved the episode, please tell your mates and share AI news. Please share your thoughts and suggestions to Georgina Rose Healy at gmail.com.