In our experience, Kool-Aid flowing is one of the best indicators of real magic at a company. For all the folks picking where to go next out there, here’s what we look for:     •    Evidence they’re winning. Revenue definitely. But also early headliner customers (Turbopuffer, Baseten, Stripe are all great at highlighting their’s), known talent on the early team (Pierre Computer, OpenAI, Anthropic, Thinking Machines all have notably stacked early crews), and (especially if pre-revenue) accolades that industry leaders pay attention to (Physical Intelligence winning the Robot Olympics).     •    A mission that matters to you. You’ll feel pride in your bones making this thing happen.     •    Zaggy vision for the world. The best companies to join are non-consensus and right. Industry experts laughed Etched out of the room. Anthropic was seen as too soft and safety-focused. Do you believe in the future a company is building?     •    Founder aura. Do you feel the pull to impress them and be in their midst? That counts for a lot… because you will have to be.     •    Internal stage for excellent work. Does this company have a way they regularly elevate folks inside for doing interesting things, making things, doing deals? How high is the bar for what they feature at All Hands? What earns a Slack shout out from the CEO? Will you have constant visibility to learn from your highest performing teammates - and maybe become one, too?     •    External platforms encouraged. Do you see people at the company tweeting about their work? On stages at conferences? Hosting their own events? Writing blog posts? Think @jeff_weinstein at Stripe. @ryolu_ at Cursor. @sarahmsachs at Notion. @oneill_c at Baseten. It’s a signal the company invests in people and their ideas.     •    Rituals. Raises eyebrows on the outside, beloved on the inside. The best kind of cult. Vercel wears all black. Hundreds of cursors swarm Figma All-Hands slides as they’re being presented. Stripes used to run up Bernal Hill and played Werewolf in the evenings. Sub-20 Notion ate heaping piles of pasta every Friday at the same restaurant (and yet never needed a nap). Memories are sticky.     •    Strong merch game. Unusual swag people actually want to wear - a sign of deeper care and creativity. Our recent favorite: Gumloop has people bring in their favorite they’d wear everyday if they could and get it embroidered on the spot.     •    Culture heads indulged. Those folks who want to make the place awesome are told to “go for it!” Ben Barry churning out posters at early Facebook (that we can all still recite). Back in the day Dropbox’s famed Blackops squad stocked in-office karaoke studios, made an employee holiday catalog full of odd offerings. Good energy begets good energy.     •    Other people are telling the story. The most honest reviews you’ll get of a place are outside-in, but they come in all forms. Andrej Karpathy tweeting. 100 community members sharing what they built. Customers name dropping the company on stage. The timeline’s inner circle commenting on product launches. See: who responded when Midjourney Medical went live. Join a company that makes friends. Its network will be yours.

"We are not in the business of committing to saying we delivered AGI. We are in the business of delivering work and value to our customers. And most of our customers do not care if we've hit a definition of AGI or not. They care if their ARRs increasing, if their SaaS sprawl is decreasing and their seat based pricing makes sense to them." Talking about AGI as an applied AI company is a distraction. “It’s very flashy, it’s very interesting and it derives no user value” @sarahmsachs

Engineering teams require focus now more than ever. We’ve changed the way we solve for paper cuts in the product while maintaining our speed of shipping: "The second [a bug] comes through Slack it triggers an agent that figures out the right team to send it to. That team’s custom agent will then do a first pass at a task on Claude. We’ll find similar customer feedback bugs if they exist and then tag an on call engineer where they just review a bunch of PRs” - @sarahmsachs

Providing frontier capabilities and collaboration is one of our main goals. We have put a lot of effort to make optionality a core piece of our product, rebuilding the harness to reduce latency and increasing performance on outcome oriented tasks. @sarahmsachs explains more in-depth why we are taking this approach at Notion.

if i get another "John Doe cracked Zip. Your move" notification from linkedin, i'm gonna crack. who has time for this? why does this notification exist? do people know that we get notifications telling us they are playing a game on linkedin?

Introducing External Agents in Notion: Claude + Cursor. Your team already collaborates in Notion. Now your favorite agents do too. Assign them tasks from a board shared with your whole team. @-mention them like teammates. Watch them run.

Our very own @sarahmsachs was featured in @fastcompany’s first-ever "AI 20" list. From the profile: “Notion’s AI has evolved from simple rewriting tools to retrieval-based Q&A and now to what she calls ‘governed AI teammates’ that operate with their own permissions and audit trails. When reasoning models improved enough to complete sequential tasks by themselves, her team rebuilt Notion’s entire AI architecture from scratch to take advantage.” The Fast Company AI 20 list recognizes leaders from research, engineering, business, and policy helping AI diffuse into the economy. Congrats to everyone featured!