Who is Khe Hy?
Writer and course creator. Known for the RadReads newsletter and a four-year run of step-by-step Notion guides covering GTD, PARA, formulas and databases.
This page recognises Khe Hy for what they have contributed to the Notion community. It is written independently, it is not an endorsement, and it does not mean they use thePlus.so.
“I want to work out whether Khe Hy is worth learning from before I copy his Notion setup or sign up for anything he sells.”
This page traces what he published about Notion, when he published it, and where that work sits inside a much larger writing project. It does not evaluate his current AI consultancy, and it does not price or rate his courses, most of which are no longer on sale.
In May 2019 he ran Notion through a six-point audit and published the scorecard. Search got two stars and integrations got one, while collaboration and what he called creative juju both got five. His own stack at the time was OmniFocus for tasks, Evernote for notes, Google Docs for writing and Dropbox for files, and the essay was framed as an honest question: does this new arrival justify the switching cost of migration, learning curve and habit change?
The answer turned into a four-year assignment. His Notion and digital organization archive collects 28 posts dated May 2019 to January 2023, running from a beginner tutorial through GTD and PARA setups, formulas, an advanced databases walkthrough, the Notion API after it opened in 2021, and a long piece on building dashboards. They were written for a specific reader: someone who already had a productivity method and wanted to know whether it would survive the move into Notion.
All of that was the second act of a Wall Street career. He was promoted to Managing Director at BlackRock at 31 and left the industry at 35, and the newsletter he started in 2015 ran under the line Your guide to an examined life. Its Substack lists over 30,000 subscribers. He stopped the weekly edition in June 2025 and now runs LaTour AI, an AI training and strategy consultancy for buy-side investment firms.
A Managing Director at 31, off Wall Street at 35
The RadReads YouTube channel states his background in two lines: "Youngest Managing Director at BlackRock (31) and left Wall Street at 35." He has a computer science degree from Yale and spent fifteen years on hedge fund and quant fund research before walking out. The reason he gives for leaving is a family one. His eldest daughter had just been born, and he wanted to test whether it was possible to put family ahead of his peak earning years, a period he later named the Magic Window. They had savings and were long-time renters who did not spend much, so he took the bet. RadReads began in 2015 as the record of that decision, covering entrepreneurship, fatherhood, money and mortality.
Notion had to earn a slot in the quiver
The 2019 essay opens on surfing. You pick a quiver of boards for the conditions you expect, so what is the right quiver of apps for everyday digital life? He set his criteria before passing judgement: capture speed, navigation, search, integrations, collaboration, and whether the app brought out his most creative self. Notion lost points for feeling laggy, for having no advanced search, and for missing Zapier, IFTTT and email connections, and he called the web clipper "meh". What won him over was the page model. Being able to add hierarchy and navigation in a few clicks was, in his words, "a game changer IMO", and watching a bulleted course outline turn each module into its own page struck him as "a true gift from the heavens". He had already had flings with Trello and Quip and was flirting with Airtable and Coda, so the piece reads as a working review by someone weighing up one more migration.
The guides went where Notion had no manual
Through 2020 the archive filled up with method translations. February brought a piece on formulas, March covered how to set up GTD in Notion with a free template and how to lay out Tiago Forte's PARA method, and July brought an advanced databases tutorial. Alongside those came posts on backlinks, the web clipper, the timeline view, and a straight comparison of Notion against Airtable. In March 2022 he published Learn Notion, a free course built from short videos on files and pages, the sidebar, backing up a workspace, blocks and page design, duplicating other people's templates, the clipper, sharing permissions, and the template button. He also ran a paid cohort called Supercharge your Productivity with Notion, advertised in a banner at the top of the essays. One aside from a 2020 post marks out where he stood in the template economy: "I don't sell Notion templates, opting instead to provide them to our students and alums."
He filed Notion under $100 an hour work, then left for AI
In April 2020, while the Notion guides were coming out almost monthly, he published the piece RadReads is best known for: The magic of doing $10,000 per hour work. Its matrix sorts work by skill and leverage, and the $100 an hour quadrant, which he described as "busywork at scale", is where he filed productivity gurus, Zapier automations, text expanders and shiny tools including Superhuman, Hey.com and Notion. He kept publishing the tutorials anyway. The last Notion post is dated January 2023. In January 2025 he took a course on building apps with AI, started a second newsletter called Future-Proof Your Career with AI, and stopped the weekly RadReads edition that June. In September 2025 he published a post titled I went back to work, ending ten semi-retired years and announcing LaTour AI, which trains hedge funds, private equity firms, family offices and allocators on AI workflows. He also co-hosts a podcast, Invest with AI, with Brett Caughran.
Why Khe Hy is on this list
Through 2019 and 2020 the Notion community had enormous enthusiasm and very little teaching material, and Hy filled part of that gap for working professionals. His guides took methods people already ran, GTD, PARA, weekly reviews, personal wikis, reading notes, net worth tracking, and showed how each one lands inside Notion, dated and illustrated closely enough that they now double as a record of what the app could and could not do at the time. His first essay is one of the few contemporary reviews that scored Notion honestly on search and integrations while it was still winning converts. And he handed the accompanying templates to his students instead of putting them up for sale, at a point when selling Notion templates was becoming a business in its own right.
We wrote this from public sources and we would rather get it right than get it first. If you are Khe Hy and something here is wrong, missing, or you would prefer this page did not exist, tell us and we will fix or remove it.
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