In this episode of Second Acts, Krish is joined by Akshay Kothari, co-founder at Notion.

Akshay shares notes on: The founding insight behind his first startup, Pulse (acq. by LinkedIn in 2013) and how that led him to Notion, the now-storied Kyoto reset that transformed a flailing, early version of the product, how the idea of building “malleable software” can be traced back to the origins of modern computing, what’s informing Notion’s agent-native second act and its multi-layered moat, learning to price work/intelligence over seats/platforms, how Notion's Custom Agents made usage-based monetization an incontestable choice, why Akshay turns to the necessary pragmatism of Buffet and Munger, defiant narratives, and much more.

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Chapters:

00:00 — Episode highlights

03:31 — Pulse

06:12 — The Kyoto reset

08:58 — “Everything is a block”

11:16 — Malleable software

13:27 — Sugar-coated broccoli

15:26 — Selling work

19:15 — Switzerland of LLMs

23:32 — Pricing intelligence-as-a-service

31:22 — Margins and agents

35:02 — Think Together

38:39 — Freeing demos

42:13 — Munger’s valley

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Referenced:

Notion

Pulse

Ivan Zhao

Douglas Engelbart

Alan Kay

Augmenting Human Intellect

Malleable software

Custom Agents

Notes from Token Town

Landing on usage-based pricing

Think Together

Notion Media Fellows

Poor Charlie's Almanack

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Connect with Akshay:

LinkedIn

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Connect with Krish:

LinkedIn

X

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About Chargebee:

Chargebee helps thousands of recurring revenue businesses unlock second acts of scale with transformative AI monetization infrastructure.