Our guest today grew up in India, the middle of three brothers who
all came to the US to study. He describes his life as a series of
plans that did not work out, and of turns that ended up better than
any plan precisely because of that. Instead of one of his dream
universities he went to Purdue, instead of investment banking he
joined a family office in Silicon Valley, and when his work visa
did not come through in 2008, he started at Stanford, in the very
week Lehman Brothers collapsed. A class that required students to
ship a product within eleven weeks gave birth to the news app
Pulse, which was later acquired by LinkedIn. There he led the
international business as VP Product, until a chance breakfast with
Ivan Zhao changed everything. He had backed Ivan’s startup Notion
as an angel investor in 2013, his first investment after selling
Pulse. For four years he watched the team search for its path, and
at times thought his money was gone. When Notion finally took off
in 2018, he joined as employee number eight, with the mandate to do
“everything except product”. Today he is Chief Operating Officer
and has built support, sales, marketing, customer success, people,
legal and finance, each over six to nine months, before finding an
experienced leader to carry the function forward. He sees the
people he hired as his real legacy at Notion. We were especially
touched by a ritual he helped shape. Every Friday, someone at the
company spends 45 minutes telling their life story, and it was Ivan
himself who went first. For more than nine and a half years, this
podcast has been exploring how work can strengthen people rather
than wear them down. In more than 580 episodes, we have talked with
more then 700 personalities about what has changed for them and
what still needs to change. What can we learn from a life in which
the most important turns were never planned? How does a company
transform itself with AI from the inside out, and what does that
mean for the people who work there? And why does he see the biggest
opportunity of our time in small and medium sized businesses? One
thing is clear. To solve the challenges we face today, we need
fresh impulses. So we keep searching for methods, role models,
experiences, tools and ideas that bring us closer to the core of
New Work. And from the very beginning, we have been asking whether
everyone can truly find and live what they really, really want deep
inside. You’re listening to On the Way to New Work, today with
Akshay Kothari. [Hier](https://linktr.ee/onthewaytonewwork) findet
ihr alle Links zum Podcast und unseren aktuellen Werbepartnern Wir
wollen euch besser kennenlernen! ️ Was beschäftigt euch, welche
Themen interessieren euch und was wünscht ihr euch von On the Way
to New Work? Nehmt an unserer 5-minütigen Umfrage teil und
gestaltet den Podcast mit. Als Dankeschön verlosen wir u. a. 2
Tickets fürs OMR Festival 2027, AirPods Pro, einen OMR Report sowie
eine Übernachtung für zwei im Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten Hamburg.
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