Meet Notion’s Board of Directors

I’m excited to share that Jonathan Chadwick, Pat Grady, Gretchen Howard, Christopher Payne, and Patrick Hsu will join Notion’s very first board of directors.

Notion has a more unusual story with fundraising and board-building than most other startups and tech companies. Typically, a startup’s board is made up of its investors, like venture capitalists. But since we have been profitable from early on in our history, we were not forced to bring investors onto our board if we didn’t want to. Instead, we could hand-pick the best independent board members in the world.

Building a board is like collecting Pokémon. You want to pick people whose craft can supplement the skills of myself and our executive leadership team and give the company what it needs at each stage of growth.

For the past two years, we searched for some of the best board members in the world — and we found them! More on each of them below:

Jonathan Chadwick has spent his career bringing financial, operational, and governance discipline to technology companies to make them more durable. He has seen this movie from many angles: he was CFO and COO of VMware; chairs the audit committees of Zoom and Samsara, and has chaired the audit committees for Stripe and Confluent; and serves on the boards of Databricks, ServiceNow, and many more. Public market investors and founders alike deeply respect Jonathan’s expertise and experience. I appreciate his quiet craft: clear judgement and the discipline to keep making bold bets through many seasons.

Pat Grady packs in the most calories per word in every board meeting. He’s been at Sequoia for almost two decades and now serves as the co-head of the firm, where he has backed companies like Snowflake, Zoom, ServiceNow, OpenAI, and Harvey, along with Notion. What I admire about Pat is the altitude of his thinking and his ability to pattern match across markets and categories. He also proves that you can be both deeply competitive and deeply kind.

Gretchen Howard knows how to scale a company without losing the trust of the people it serves. As COO of Robinhood, she built much of the operating muscle behind the company and shaped its executive bench on the path to IPO. Before that, she spent more than 12 years at Google, first helping to launch, and scale the online advertising business and then as an early partner at Alphabet's independent growth fund CapitalG. She understands the connective tissue of people, recruiting, customer experience, and strategy that takes an ambitious company farther, faster.

Christopher Payne (“0CP”) has spent his career building products that feel simple but take enormous coordination underneath. At DoorDash he helped grow the company from about 70 people into the leading food delivery platform in the U.S., and before that he helped scale Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, and Tinder. He also serves on the board of companies, like Faire and Robinhood, that share Notion’s ambition to empower people around the globe. CP’s super power is to keep companies focused and nimble, as complexity grows.

Patrick Hsu brings a different kind of perspective to our board. He works at the edge of biology, AI, and research, where better tools change what people can discover. Patrick co-founded Arc Institute, teaches at Stanford, invests at Thrive, and has spent his career thinking about how to give ambitious people more leverage against hard problems. I appreciate his long view into the future: he sees AI as a tool to expand what people can do and shares our belief that Notion can help all kinds of teams and businesses (the Fortune 5 Million) think together with AI.

I'm grateful that these leaders said yes to our mission and our customers. And I am looking forward to their wisdom and guidance in this fast-moving world we are in. Welcome to Notion!