Notion wants to end your workplace suffering

Andrew McCarthy speaks in the steady cadence of someone who has spent his life wrestling chaos into order. There’s a quiet conviction beneath his words, a kind of moral clarity that surfaces when the conversation turns to the problem at the heart of modern work. 

“I feel blessed. I think if you look at what gets in the way of clarity, it’s fragmented knowledge across multiple tools and systems we use. We conducted a recent study in Singapore, where we asked Singaporeans about their work habits, and they reported spending 66 minutes per day searching for information across various tools. Which is like the opposite of clarity. You’re spending 66 minutes going around trying to find the right information, spread across different places.”

He is, of course, talking about the condition that has come to define the digital workplace — one of abundance, yet also, paradoxically, one of perpetual lack. Information, content, and collaboration platforms proliferate, but the lines between utility and confusion blur until they’re almost indistinguishable.

McCarthy’s role as general manager of ANZ, SEA, and India at Notion — a company often called the Swiss Army knife of modern productivity — gives him a front-row seat to this phenomenon. The promise that Notion offers is elegant: one digital workspace, infinite possibilities.

Yet the reality, he acknowledges, is more complicated. “Inside an organisation, I think the greatest asset any company has is the collective intelligence of its employees. However, much of the time, that collective intelligence is fragmented. It’s siloed. It’s locked up in different areas. And so companies can’t get clarity — clarity of speed, of decisions, of execution — because they’re constantly searching for things across all these fragments of knowledge that have come from using so many different tools.”

From failure to intuition

Notion was born from this frustration. Founded in 2013 by Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, the company began as a tool to help people build software, democratising a process that, until recently, belonged to those who could write code. But that first version failed to find traction. Users didn’t know what to build, and the platform’s promise was too abstract to land. 

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The founders retreated to Kyoto, rebuilding their vision from the ground up. They hid the complexity, transforming Notion into a note-taking tool so intuitive that it mimicked the simplicity of a blank page. From there, the platform would quietly reveal its power — layer by layer, function by function.

“They started with wanting to build a tool where people could build no-code software. They released that, but no one used it — because people didn’t know what to build, yeah. And then they realised: What’s a tool that a billion people use every day? It’s pen and paper. It’s Word. It’s note-taking. It’s a productivity suite, right?” McCarthy reflects, as if still surprised by the elegance of the solution.

“And so they rebuilt Notion through that lens — let’s start as a productivity tool, where people can take notes in the world’s best word processor — and then let’s hide the software-building blocks behind that.”

This inversion — making complexity invisible so that capability feels simple — would become Notion’s signature. But simplicity is deceptive. “The people I talk to either absolutely love Notion — they just couldn’t live without it — or they don’t get it. And I’ve found it’s pretty binary.”

Yet even the binary, McCarthy believes, is an invitation rather than a verdict. “The path from not getting it to loving it usually comes from being connected to someone who already loves it. Because ultimately, people are way more influenced by their friends and those around them than by any one company or brand.”

This suggests Notion’s real innovation: a platform whose power is unlocked not just through technology, but through people sharing their discoveries — one template at a time, one conversation at a time.

Building blocks and boundaries

To understand Notion’s grip on its most devoted users, one must step into the subcultures that have sprung up around it. There are YouTube channels devoted to advanced workflows, online marketplaces for templates, and user meetups that feel more like creative salons than product briefings. McCarthy is both a participant and an observer in this movement.

“We met with a key customer recently, and they told us they planned their wedding on Notion. And then, on the other extreme, they used it to roll out a full, end-to-end project management system and documentation solution inside their business. And both of those happened on the same platform. I think that’s really meaningful.”

That elasticity — stretching from wedding planning to enterprise documentation — would have been unthinkable for most workplace software even a decade ago. Notion offers a different metaphor: modular building blocks, simple on the surface, endlessly configurable beneath.

This spirit of possibility is the antidote to the suffocation McCarthy remembers from earlier in his career, when creating software meant navigating a labyrinth of gatekeepers and fixed systems. “What landed very quickly with me was this idea — if you could deconstruct software back into individual building blocks, then anyone could build the software they wanted.”

The company’s philosophy is radical in its humility. “The ambition to change the world of software — but the humility to know that it’s not our place to dictate how everyone should use it. It’s our place to build better tools so that people can use them in ways that actually work for them.”

McCarthy’s journey to this mindset was circuitous. He recalls his early years as a non-coder in Silicon Valley, swept up in the intoxicating optimism of the first social commerce startups. “I’ve never been a coder, but I’ve always been interested in tech. When I was in school, I befriended some people on the tech team. And when I was just out of school, I started a business, and then my friend said, ‘You should go to Silicon Valley.’ So I packed up my stuff and moved to Silicon Valley from Sydney.”

The venture failed, but the lesson endured: join a rocket ship already in flight. “When I came back to Australia, I realised — you’re better off getting on a rocket ship that’s taking off than trying to start a rocket ship from scratch. And so since then, I’ve been really focused on helping high-growth companies roll out through the region.”

In a region as varied as his remit, from bustling Mumbai to the buttoned-down towers of Singapore, he insists on leading with community and local stories, not dogma.

“Our approach to rolling out across Asia Pacific has been, first, the acknowledgement that while there are some things that bind the region together, every country has its own culture, its way of doing things — customs, trends, interests. And being able to support the community members who were already here, well before me — people who were getting their friends to use Notion, who were already using it effectively — that’s been key to how the market has grown.”

The AI accelerator

The arrival of artificial intelligence has significantly accelerated Notion’s trajectory of democratising creation. “AI removes the complexity in the background. And now we’re in a world where you can just type in, ‘Create me a customer tracker,’ or ‘Build me a wedding registrar,’ and the solution will go and do that for you behind the scenes.”

AI, in McCarthy’s telling, is not a replacement for human ingenuity, but an accelerator — an interface that makes creation more direct. “We’ve been able to help people get to where they want to go, and move through that complexity by using AI as the interface. Which I feel is really valuable.”

The marketplace crystallises this dynamic, flattening hierarchies and upending expectations. “That’s what the marketplace enables, right? It gives anyone the chance to build new workflows and software, put it on the marketplace, and have it downloaded — or even sold — to other people.”

Yet this freedom comes with trade-offs. The quest to create tools that are flexible enough for every need can overwhelm new users. The company’s response has been to surround users with examples and guides — ways in, rather than prescriptions.

At its best, Notion’s approach pushes back against endless software sprawl. “The average company went from using eight software apps in 2015 to well over 100 in the 2020s. And a lot of that’s been driven by incentives — there are a lot of people with strong incentives to keep selling more software to companies. We have a different view. Sometimes, when you’re looking to get more done with less complexity, the answer lies in consolidating software — bringing it back to its foundational building blocks.”

The paradox is that the very abundance Notion has helped unlock now risks overwhelming the clarity it set out to provide. “One customer said to me that Notion is the company’s long-term memory. I found that framing really interesting. They said, ‘Slack is our short-term memory, and Notion is our long-term memory.’”

The company’s challenge now is to ensure that this long-term memory remains accessible rather than becoming another digital archive. “Having the right integrations in place — being able to connect to the right systems — helps unlock that value more effectively.”

Time as the final measure

When McCarthy speaks of productivity, his language shifts. The cadence slows, and a more reflective tone enters. “I think that productivity, ultimately, is about getting more time back. And the one finite asset we all have is time. I haven’t met anyone who enjoys searching for information across different systems. And I also don’t believe that we, as humans, were designed to sit and move data from one spreadsheet to another.”

The toll of fragmentation is not abstract. It seeps into the margins of everyday life. “I’ve definitely been in situations where I’d find myself getting angry at something minor over the weekend — and then realise it was just a build-up of all the frustrations from the week spilling over.”

This is where Notion’s mission becomes personal. “So for me, if you’re able to shift that — even a little — you’re not just freeing up more time to spend with people you love or doing the things you enjoy, you’re also turning up to those moments with a more positive mindset.”

It is a philosophy that runs counter to much of the technology industry, where innovation is often measured by the number of features shipped and markets captured. McCarthy is attuned to the quiet dignity of ordinary lives.

“I’m very much a family person as well. I’m proud to be a father of three kids, and I genuinely want to do something that I think they can be proud of. Sometimes that can feel like a contradiction — because I’m throwing myself more into work and spending time away from the kids — but I think those two drivers: being involved in helping a once-in-a-generation company roll out through Asia Pacific, and doing something meaningful that makes my family proud… those are the things that really get me going in the morning.”

He returns to the hope that technology might serve the individual, not the other way around. “My hope is that the future becomes more human. And I believe that by consolidating technology back to a simpler, one-canvas experience — and using technology and AI to move the non-human parts into the background — we can help make that happen.”

In McCarthy’s world, the ultimate promise of Notion lies not in the sophistication of its features but in the quiet power it returns to users — the power to choose, to create, to reclaim time. It is a vision that resists spectacle, preferring the steady work of knitting together fragments until something like clarity is restored.