I’ve joined Notion. As I enter my second month, I’ve been reflecting on what led me here and the future I’m excited to help shape. A quote frequently shared at Notion ties a narrative through my own career as well:
We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.
Maybe Marshall McLuhan said it. Maybe John Culkin. Whoever did, they nailed something fundamental about human progress — and about where we’re headed next.
The “last mile” problem with AI
My time at Shortwave taught me two crucial things about the present moment:
- Reasoning APIs will drastically change society — Ignore the noise and goalpost shifting. The overhang between what is possible with tools built in the past 24 months and what has already been built is enormous, and it continues to grow each month. The way we create and use software is changing in fundamental ways. New generational companies are being built.
- Superhuman AI alone is not enough — Large language models have a “last mile” problem with the real world. Chat interfaces are an offramp, not an end state. There is fertile ground for innovation in delivering superhuman AI to users in a way that integrates seamlessly with their everyday workflows.
Personal AI assistants will understand everything about your world — both digital (your emails, chats, docs, todos) and physical (conversations you have, places you go, things you do at home). The technology is rapidly falling into place. Every major tech company is working towards something with this rough shape. But the winners in this space won’t just be the ones with the best AI models — they’ll be the ones who solve that last mile. Who figure out how to weave AI into the fabric of daily life without making it feel bolted on. Who extend the user’s mind rather than replace it.
Solving that last mile requires rethinking the fundamental primitives of productivity tools. Many players will try — your tech giants, your AI labs, and countless hungry startups — but few will be able to break outside the current paradigms enough to take full advantage of this new technology. Notion has spent years mastering this art: distilling the software sprawl of the 2000s into a simple, powerful set of building blocks upon which users can create their own workflows.
My journey with Notion
I first encountered Notion in 2016, but it wasn’t until 2020 that everything clicked. That’s when it became my personal “second brain” and our company backbone at Shortwave. Notion taught me something crucial about software: rich capabilities can emerge from simple building blocks.
My oldest email from Notion, dated August 2016. Images no longer resolve and Notion's ambitions have grown well beyond just word processing.
I used Notion to build what Tiago Forte describes as a second brain for my personal life:
A second brain is a trusted place outside your head where you can collect and organize your most important ideas and insights.
Notion nails this with a block-based editor that starts simple but scales to whatever you need:
- Pages nest infinitely and interlink, allowing organization without the constraints of traditional folders
- Pages can embed rich content, from PDFs to tweets to interactive Figma mocks
- Databases morph between views — lists, tables, charts, calendars, kanban boards
- Templates and automations simplify tedious tasks and ensure consistency
At Shortwave, Notion became our knowledge base. Important ideas, decisions, and documents flowed through it. Planning notes evolved into product requirements, which grew into engineering specs, which turned into marketing copy.
What makes Notion special is how it bridges worlds. It’s equally at home organizing your personal reading list or being a startup’s central nervous system. That’s rare. That’s powerful.
Shaping tools is an iterative process
That McLuhan quote I mentioned? It misses something crucial. It’s not a one-way street — it’s a continuous loop. We shape our tools. They shape us. We shape them again, differently, because we’re different. The world is different.
In the age of AI, this loop is accelerating. AI influences how we build and interact with our tools themselves, tightening the feedback loop and smoothing over that last mile with every iteration.
My life has been shaped by Notion. I used it to tame my digital world. I used it to create my company. I used it to organize the job search which landed me here. I will continue to use it to explore my passions and make the most out of this life.
And now it’s time for me to shape it in return. I can’t think of a more exciting and interesting loop to be part of.