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Notion for VCs
Gmail's interface has barely moved since 2004, and VC inboxes feel that age more than most. A live look at what Notion built instead.
What this session covered
Gmail's core interface has barely changed since 2004, and VC inboxes, buried under cold pitches and diligence threads, feel that age more than most. Andrew Milich from the Notion Mail team, whose own encrypted email startup was acquired by Notion in February 2024, walked through why Notion built a mail product at all and demoed it live for a room full of the people who would use it.
Top talking points
The perverse incentive inside inbox labels. The more labels you create to stay organised, the more manual tagging tax you pay every day. The system rewards effort with more effort rather than less.
Email as a database, not a chronological list. The core idea is to apply the same database logic that makes Notion pages useful, with custom views, AI applied labels from a plain language prompt and to do style grouping, so what matters surfaces regardless of when it arrived.
Scheduling that reads the thread. A live demo showed a scheduling button that reads the email context itself and books against Notion Calendar availability, with no separate scheduling link and no back and forth.
Snippets for the emails you send constantly. Reusable, personalisable templates aimed at exactly the repetitive mail investors send. The rejection email was the example that landed hardest in the room: fast and consistent while still personal.
AI drafting from your own investment notes. Rather than generic AI reply text, drafts can pull directly from linked Notion pages, so a reply carries real detail from the fund's own diligence rather than boilerplate.
Where the product stood at the time. Public release was targeted for early 2025. Support was limited to Gmail and Google Workspace, with mobile apps still in progress.
A future worth watching: Forms plus Mail. An audience question about combining Notion Forms with Mail to collect portfolio company KPIs prompted Andrew to confirm it was not built yet, though it was clearly on his radar.
Who was on this session
- Andrew Milich, Notion Mail, Notion.
About the Venture Summit
This session was part of the IndianVCs Venture Summit, three days of conversations with more than twenty investors and allocators on LP fundraising, portfolio support, and the tools reshaping how funds operate. The full set of recordings lives on our YouTube channel.
The takeaway
The real pitch is not a feature list. It is a bet that the inbox should work like the rest of an investor's toolkit, structured around what a deal needs next rather than the order things happened to arrive.
