{"podcast":{"title":"Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan","slug":"long-strange-trip-ceo-to-ceo-with-brian-halligan-7578456","podcast_index_feed_id":7578456,"rss_url":"https://feeds.megaphone.fm/CPUAI1584649469","website_url":"https://sequoiacap.com/series/long-strange-trip/","image_url":"https://megaphone.imgix.net/podcasts/a5d56c0e-be95-11f0-a390-4bfad5f96ff0/image/bc1acd14db9edb7f96c9b051c875fe69.png?ixlib=rails-4.3.1&max-w=3000&max-h=3000&fit=crop&auto=format,compress","author":"Sequoia Capital","episode_count":19,"summary":"The CEO rulebook is getting rewritten. Brian Halligan, Sequoia partner and co-founder and longtime CEO of HubSpot, sits down with some of the CEOs who are defining the new one—from hypergrowth AI-native startups to 150-year-old behemoths. Whether you’re an early-stage founder or a scale-up CEO, Brian will be digging for advice you can use on the long strange trip of your own CEO journey.","last_synced_at":"2026-07-23T18:19:13.949420+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/long-strange-trip-ceo-to-ceo-with-brian-halligan-7578456"},"episode":{"title":"Notion’s Ivan Zhao: The Refounder","slug":"notion-s-ivan-zhao-the-refounder","published_at":"2026-05-21T09:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/long-strange-trip-ceo-to-ceo-with-brian-halligan-7578456/notion-s-ivan-zhao-the-refounder","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/long-strange-trip-ceo-to-ceo-with-brian-halligan-7578456","url":"https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/CPUAI5082450475.mp3","audio_url":"https://pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/CPUAI5082450475.mp3","summary":"Ivan Zhao, founder and CEO of Notion, joins me to introduce a new contender in the founder mode debate: jazz mode. Ivan has a different take than Jack Dorsey's circular org chart or Brian Armstrong's player-coach approach. He thinks hierarchy is human nature, and that you can't flatten it away but you can build a company that improvises like a jazz band instead of marching in formation. Notion has roughly 60 ex-founders on staff and a deliberately decentralized structure to make that work. We get into why Ivan rebuilt his engineering org around a barbell — super junior ICs paired with very senior architects — which is the opposite of what most AI-pilled CEOs are doing right now. He explains why building with language models is \"more like brewing beer than engineering a bridge,\" and how Notion's first candidate interview no longer involves a resume. Ivan is the king of refoundings. He's done it twice, once from a small apartment in Kyoto with five employees left, once from Cancun the day he got early access to GPT-4. When I was running HubSpot, I described our scale-up years as boring compared to what's happening now. Ivan's advice for any CEO who's calcified and wondering if it's time to blow it up: feel the AGI first, then trust your body when it tells you to move. 00:00 Introduction 02:22 From Founder Mode to AI Org 11:00 Hiring for Taste and Agency 24:28 Refounding Notion in Kyoto 30:27 Craft Versus Commerce 32:26 When to Refound 34:07 GPT-4 Refounding Shock 45:35 Leadership and Founder Energy 53:17 Sales Culture and Closing Thoughts","meta_description":"Ivan Zhao, founder and CEO of Notion, joins me to introduce a new contender in the founder mode debate: jazz mode. Ivan has a different take than Jack Dor…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3786,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/long-strange-trip-ceo-to-ceo-with-brian-halligan-7578456/episodes/notion-s-ivan-zhao-the-refounder/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/long-strange-trip-ceo-to-ceo-with-brian-halligan-7578456/notion-s-ivan-zhao-the-refounder.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}