Heute • 1 Std. 9 Min.

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. [Hier gehts direkt zur Umfrage](web.appin.io/#/survey/RCGdUbcgn)