Jazz mode, founder mode, and using Notion to think

I listened to Brian Halligan interview Ivan Zhao on Long Strange Trip. The episode is framed around Ivan as a “refounder.” A few things stuck.

Jazz band, not marching band. Ivan offers jazz mode as the alternative to founder mode and manager mode. His image is concrete: “We want to be a jazz band, not a marching band.” Hierarchy stays. He defends it directly: “I believe it should be hierarchical. Human nature is hierarchical.” Execution improvises inside the hierarchy, and AI is what lets a smaller, flatter org still hit the beats. He contrasts his shape with Jack Dorsey’s three-layer AI-centric structure and Brian Armstrong’s five-layer player-coach setup. Same problem, three different answers and of course I love a music analogy. I sometimes say my work style is free jazz, I say this a joke, but I work with some insanely smart and creative people and we all need the space to improvise and let our creative minds roam to solve things.

Wartime is fun. I expected the wartime CEO bit to be about pressure and grim resolve. Ivan’s version is the opposite: “Wartime is way more fun. You feel more alive.” The war, in his framing, is the AI moment. The GPT-4 early-access moment in Cancún was, in his words, “a full-body religious experience. This is what changes everything.” Plenty of CEOs would PR-polish a line like that. That he doesn’t is part of why the episode lands.

Brewing beer, not building bridges. “Building with language models is like brewing beer. You cannot truly predict the underlying thing.” A clean way to say what every team shipping LLM features already knows in their bones: the design-first, spec-first muscle memory from non-AI software is the wrong muscle.

And the part I find funny. I still cannot give you a tight one-line definition of Notion. Pages, blocks, databases, sub-pages, queries that read like prose. It runs my life. I plan posts in it. I draft specs in it. Half the cards on my Chaos Dimension board started as Notion pages. I cannot stop using it and I cannot explain it.

That might be the whole point. Get the abstraction right and the product turns into whatever the user is thinking about that day. Well-designed tools fade behind the work. When the work is complicated, that is the only kind of tool worth having.