Chris Tottman

I invest with imagination rather than critical analysis and this can set me out as something of an outsider. I am attracted to painful market problems and counter intuitive solutions and with this approach we find extremely rare founders dedicated to solving some of the greatest challenges this and the next generation of businesses face. This fosters my great passion for the seemingly impossible problem meeting the truly exceptional founder. It also means that early on I am mostly operating on the edge of my ability but I like to think with massive pattern recognition earned over 30 years in business (I know I don't act old enough!).

A start-up's world can be very hard and unpredictable but my light is always on and my mind is always open through thick and thin, good and bad. For me, everything we do as investors should enable our founders to learn faster and grow stronger. For me this is critical. Our goal is to enable the building of big, beautiful and enduring companies. Ones that create new successful generations of entrepreneurs and leaders. We help our founders and teams every step of the way with empathy, insights, people and capital and I am very passionate about the speed within which we are industrialising the value-added systems that Notion provides.

Lastly, as a Founder of Notion, I am a custodian of a beautiful culture full of ambition, openness, candour and fun but focused aggressively on realising potential. When you combine this challenging environment with the venture world it is most suited to those with a winning mentality who leave their ego at the door. I work hard at this.For me, Notion is a way of life.

Companies: Adfenix, Admix, Brightpearl (acquired), DueDil, Easol, Elevaate (acquired), HeyJobs, Localz, Loop, NewVoiceMedia (acquired), StatusToday, Triptease, Unbabel, Vizolution, Wercker (acquired)