Notion describes itself as "a bottomless bin of building blocks. Every page you create in Notion will be composed of many "blocks," in the same way a LEGO castle is composed of many LEGO bricks

Each Notion template is like a SaaS app of its own, created by Notion or the Notion community. Notion template creators have the opportunity to monetize their templates. Users can select a starting template amongst hundreds of options and customize it for their or their team’s specific needs.

Microsoft is one of Notion’s biggest competitors. Microsoft launched a direct competitor to the collaborative all-in-one workspace called Microsoft Loop in November 2021. While Microsoft Loop’s initial traction is unclear, it could follow a similar trajectory to Microsoft Teams competing with Slack. After launching in 2016, Microsoft Teams surpassed Slack in DAUs by 2019, reaching 20 million compared to Slack’s 12 million.

Notion successfully achieved a product pivot in 2015 when Ivan and Simon stopped building a product they thought the world would benefit from and listened to their community to tell them what to make.

So this is the problem we face. We exist because shipping software is too complicated. We are obsessed with keeping it simple and making infrastructure feel like magic. This approach has brought us hundreds of thousands of users who spend a lot of time asking for more complexity!Our answer to this and many more conundrums, is Railway v2.

It’s a tall order, but the alternative of settling for the current status quo is even more daunting.

We’ll have succeeded with v2 when two things are true:A user can come to the platform and push a button to deploy ANY service(s) or application(s) of arbitrary complexity, wired seamlessly into their existing infrastructureComplexity isn’t just “magically hidden” but provided incrementally, as layers, just in time and as the user needs it through intuitive interfaces

WebAssembly is necessary not just for its speed, but for its ability to use memory efficiently. It allows us to design highly compact data structures. Web Workers will allow our geometry algorithms to run off-thread, so that they never bog down the fluidity of the user interface.

The future of WebGPU is somewhat less certain than WASM and workers, but we will certainly be evaluating it as it matures. It offers compute shaders in its core specification, which is particularly compelling because it would allow us to offload geometry generation to the GPU.

“90% of our users will never pay us, and that’s by design. It’s really important for us to have a healthy open source community. That’s mission number one.”

Given how much of Grafana’s competitive advantage comes from the quality of their open source community, there is a constant need to maintain the relationship that the company has with the community. Every open source company has to find this same balance between building proprietary functionality while still maintaining the flexibility inherent in their open source model.

The most prominent case was when Amazon AWS (using Elastic’s open-source software, OpenSearch) released a data search tool directly competing with Elastic. In response, Elastic announced plans to change its software license to prevent AWS from using its software. Amazon responded by announcing plans to fork Elastic and maintain the software as a ‘truly open-source option.' All open-source software platforms face the risk of strip mining. Grafana Labs’ open-source offerings are no exception. For monitoring, this threat is lessened because the public cloud vendors have their existing solutions and it's a question of competitiveness vs. replication.

Microsoft has a path to becoming the source of truth for customer data through Azure, which would make it mission-critical to all business software. If Microsoft convinces customers to store their customer data in an Azure warehouse (enriched by LinkedIn’s data) instead of a CRM, then the CRM becomes a simple window through which companies access customer data. Other business applications would then build on top of Azure, not Salesforce. If Microsoft divorces the CRM from the customer data system of record, it commoditizes its complement to beat Salesforce.

But modern teams don’t choose Microsoft, opting for the modern data stack of Fivetran + dbt + Snowflake. Is there a chance Microsoft can win them over?

But owning GitHub doesn’t immediately translate into young developers that love Azure. Microsoft’s task is to gracefully harness its newfound developer love. But you can’t force love, like Google tries to force Meet on its unsuspecting users. Microsoft needs deeper OSS support and developer tooling before pushing users towards Azure.In other words, Azure needs organic adoption to fully penetrate the enterprise.

Execution is critical, but riding an S curve is the path to win in tech.

Traditional wisdom tells us that founders are the only determinant of startup success. Great founders are necessary but not sufficient. Great product theses and fast-growing categories are increasingly the true bottleneck.

The classic consideration for VCs is whether incumbents can copy the startup’s technology before the startup copies the incumbents' distribution. For the past 20 years, the answer was almost always no – startups achieved escape velocity across categories, seemingly immune from incumbents’ distribution power.

Megaproject success can be hard to see when it happens within large companies. Azure and AWS are two of the most successful megaprojects of this century, but were hidden from the public for years, nested inside much larger corporations. Starlink, the global satellite internet network, is only possible given the scale of SpaceX’s core launch business, but could be one of the most successful megaprojects of our time.

The average business today will use 88 applications across their organizations, and business professionals use 9.4 applications per day to complete their work. The application interplay is typically a repetitive chain of actions following an initial trigger. As one example, someone fills out an Airtable interest form, which triggers an email being sent out. That email triggers a meeting being booked, and that meeting populates a set of fields in a CRM.

In a 2021 survey, 88% of SMBs said business automation allows them to compete with larger companies, and 9 out of 10 knowledge workers claim automation improves productivity. Knowledge workers are the majority of the labor force, representing over 100 million workers in the United States, and 82% use or are planning to use automation software.

Wade Foster (CEO), Bryan Helmig (CTO), and Mike Knoop (President) founded Zapier right out of college. Over two days at a Startup Weekend event in Missouri, the trio built a product prototype that would later become Zapier. Their idea was rejected by Y Combinator, but the team continued to build the Zapier on nights and weekends.

Zapier was an early pioneer of the product-led growth sales motion. They made it free for any prosumer to get started without approval from their IT teams. That allowed the company to save on having a large sales team and helped them reach profitability two years after its founding. At their core, Zapier is positioned to make money only when users save time. The more time users save with zaps, the more likely they are to build other connections. The more number of connections, the more money Zapier makes.

Some of the most commonly connected tools on Zapier, like Slack, Salesforce, Google, and even Calendly, have announced workflow integrations products within their existing platforms to upsell their customers and capture the value of their integrations directly. Instead of having to rely on Zapier to connect Calendly to any other application you can build that same integration natively without having to leave Calendly’s platform.

Transfer by Zapier enables customers to process batches of data too large for the traditional Zapier pipeline to process. Transfer strengthens Zapier’s infrastructure to handle larger loads. The more data-centric every company becomes the more they need systems to manage that data. Zapier’s expansion into Transfer places them in the data pipeline market along with companies like Fivetran.

With the 2020 announcement of Google Workspace and Microsoft bundling their productivity suite into Teams, Zapier faces platform risk from these two major productivity suites. Zapier’s top 2 integrations are Google Sheets and Gmail.

Zapier skewed from the traditional way of building a large technology company by focusing on remote work (even paying employees $10,000 to move out of the Bay Area), not taking significant venture funding, building a product-led engine without a traditional sales team (only really adding people to the sales team in 2021), and pursuing profitability rather than growth.