☉ Sunny Operator (sol/acc)

This very-incorrect premise (Notion being a Bending Spoons target, or at all comparable to Airtable) surfaces from time to time. I don't think @NotionHQ should engage with it (it's a leading question and even the comparison to Airtable does Notion a huge disservice), but as an early investor and big Notion bull, I'm happy to do so. This is not based on any insider info / not endorsed by the company but I know them pretty well outside-in. (I have a 3,000 article on Notion I wrote a couple of months ago that I need to finalize and publish, but in the meantime this is a brief TL;DR.) 1. Notion is growing far, far faster. Airtable was at 15-20% towards the end. Notion's is not publicly disclosed but all signs point to 70%+. I'm pretty sure they're approaching $1B in ARR. 2. Airtable's attempts at building AI into the core product mostly all sucked. Like Omni was just *really* bad. The first thing they had that sort of worked (maybe?) was Hyperagent, which was a totally different product which didn't benefit from Airtable, or pour benefit back into Airtable. Notion AI on the other hand is fundamentally woven into Notion and actually completely changes the way Notion can be used (this is part of the longer post, but some examples below). 3. Notion has completely rearchitected the product for primitives that are AI native. MCP, CLI, API — basically every bit of Notion can be used from inside Claude / Codex etc. Airtable never got there. 4. UI is really important because most people aren't systems thinkers in their head. They're visual thinkers. I would argue UI is *more* important in an agentic era, not less. 5. Airtable's main building block was a user-friendly database... it's unlucky for them but this was the least-defensible thing in the era of agents + Supabase etc. Notion has the building blocks needed for the context graph (company + personal) — dozens of primitives like a markdown editor (deceptively hard to build well), databases, tables, html blocks, gantts, charts, dashboards.... these would make no sense for each company to build for itself. Sure you can go use an open source thing or string together a bunch of components but this is really really annoying and <<1% of people want to build or maintain this (speaking as one of those people... I've built all of these components before for startups I founded). 6. Notion is leaning into this — the context layer / store of knowledge & skills for your agents — if you look at their announcements and new releases. TBH the main problem with Notion (as a company / product) is storytelling. They don't explain how you can use it well — to be fair, this is hard since there's so much there. But nevertheless, this is the company's responsibility to educate users. I consider myself a power user and I still feel like I'm barely scratching the surface. 7. The best products — even if they're hard to grok and use — will win in the agentic era, because agents are smart enough to understand the best tool for the need and adopt it. The importance of educating users might actually decline. This would be the best thing to happen to Notion, because a) they have an incredible product, b) their weakness has been educating users so that may gradually becoming irrelevant, and c) it's agent friendly. 8. On usage & adoption: 70% of Notion's user base is outside the US (a post by Ivan just yesterday). It has a ton of penetration and those who love it really love it (like me!). AI usage / MCP usage is rapidly ramping — 9x and 60x in the last year (again, see the post by Ivan yesterday). So I would argue all of these users are really early in the curve. 9. Look at the talent they're attracting. There have been many, many talented ex-founders who have joined the company in the last 6-12 mos. These folks have their pick — they could start a new company, or join one of the model labs, etc. They would not join a dying company! And they're choosing to join Notion. 10. Finally: Notion did a tender in Dec 2025 at $11B — this was the price investors paid for common stock. This was GIC, Sequoia, and Index, so about as blue chip as it gets. They don't raise a bunch of additional capital in tranched rounds because they've been profitable for a long time and they don't need to.