We discuss the life story of Notion’s co-founder, Akshay Kothari. Notion is a productivity tool, valued at $10B+ with over 100M users. Akshay grew up in Western India in Ahmedabad, the largest city in the state of Gujarat. He has two brothers, Nikunj & Pranav, and is the middle child. Their family business centered around finance and loan-giving, common for some Indian families at that time. Early on, Akshay was quite terrible at school… once all-consumed by the desire of being a cricket player. A pursuit that his loving mom supported, with the caveat that he must work & practice accordingly if that was his dream. After realizing cricket wasn’t going to be his calling, Akshay took inspiration from his older brother Pranav and made his way to the USA to study engineering at Purdue. Through a series of unfortunate, yet equally fortunate, circumstances Akshay made his way to Stanford for a graduate degree. On his first day, Lehman Brothers collapsed in the Great Financial Crisis. Later in his Stanford tenure, he founded a news reader app called Pulse. That same year, Steve Jobs announced them as his favorite iPad app on stage at WWDC. Later, Pulse was acquired by LinkedIn for $100M. This prompted Akshay’s move to India to spearhead LinkedIn’s growth there, and also a series of angel checks. The first of which was Notion. For four years, the company made minimal progress. When they finally started seeing PMF, Akshay joined as a co-founder alongside Ivan and Simon. Fast forward to the present day, Akshay has been at Notion for just over 7 years.
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