Ben Lang on Notion, Building a Community, and the Art of Angel Investing

On today’s episode of Startups On Demand, I am joined by Ben Lang, Angel Investor and former Head of Community at Notion – a freemium productivity and note-taking web app. We talk about his work system, how he started as an entrepreneur, his matchmaking skills with “CoronaCrush,” and the art of angel investing.

Omri: Thank you so much for taking the time, Ben. People might know you from Product Hunt, Notion, and your matchmaking skills. The first thing that I want to ask you is what your system is like? What does your day-to-day look like? Because it really seems like you’re everywhere and that you have time to do all these things, and you probably use Notion a lot

Ben: I do use Notion a lot. Well, my schedule changed a lot after I left Notion. I was there for about 5 years up until a few months ago and I was pretty heads down focused on Notion, and then when I left, I decided to just do a bunch of things. So I’ve been doing a bunch of angel investing as well as a couple of projects and kind of getting deeper in the community side if you will. I try to block out as much time as possible every day and just have time to focus. I keep a few blocks for calls during the afternoons and evenings. Most of my time is just pretty heads down building out scalable ways to support the projects I’m working on, support the communities I’m building out, and that’s really how I spend most of my time. 

Omri: Do you use Notion as a productivity tool?

Ben: Yes, I use Notion for my personal life, I use it with my wife, for our relationship. I use it for the projects I’m working on and I use it to collaborate with companies. It’s definitely where I spend most of my time when I’m online.

Omri: In terms of helping people, where is that coming from? How do you have the time to do that with all those projects?

Ben: I try to find the highest leverage ways I can help people and I found that there are certain ways where I can do that, and so Product Hunt is one of them. It doesn’t take me too much effort and because I was a very early Product Hunt user. I’ve just been very active since the beginning and it’s very easy for me to help out with that versus getting on a one-hour brainstorming call to talk about community building and marketing efforts. I try to do that but I can’t with all the folks that I’m chatting with, so it’s for me it’s just kind of finding the highest leverage ways I can continue to help people and there’s a couple ways I try to do that. 

Omri: I would guess that your inbox is pretty full, both on the email side and on the DM side. Is that correct?

Ben: Well, I’m a big inbox zero guy. My email is usually clean. I try every few days sometimes – it takes some time. And about once or twice a day, I go through Twitter and LinkedIn DMs which I use pretty actively so I don’t do inbox zero there. But I do it on WhatsApp, which I think is a little unique. I archive all of my WhatsApp messages. Anything that’s left in my WhatsApp or my email are things that I need to actually work on.

Omri: What is your process of deciding which startup to invest in?

Ben: I definitely try to screen and I try to be as communicative as I can in an async way and so I try to be very responsive on email, Twitter, and LinkedIn. That being said, going from all those messages to calls, I do try to kind of screen things out just because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to get anything done and I kind of just have my own criteria for what I’m looking for and what the types of Investments I’m looking to make.

Watch the full interview here.