Notion

Ivan Zhao's path to founding Notion began in a small town in China (Yurimuki, 4 million people) in the northwest desert. To gain entry to a good school in Beijing, he won a programming competition—choosing the computer science track because he loved video games and wanted "to play with computers all day long." Later, he moved to Canada and learned English by watching SpongeBob SquarePants to understand cultural context beyond grammar. This unconventional path led him to read Douglas Engelbart's "Augmenting Human Intellect" paper, which became transformative. "Holy shit," Ivan recalls thinking. "If you're making software, if you know how to code or design, this is the highest leverage thing you can do for other people."

Notion launched in 2013 with an ambitious vision: create a Lego-like system for software so everyone could build without coding. But the market didn't care. "The first version, okay, everybody can make and create their software," Ivan explains. "We tried that like a couple years and learned that actually most people just don't care. The majority of people they wake up, they have a report due, they need to get their job done. They don't care creating software to optimize whatever they're doing."

These 3-4 years became what Ivan calls "the lost years." The company rebuilt constantly—including completely rewriting the codebase when they realized they'd bet on an unstable Web Components technology. When momentum stalled and money dried up, Ivan's mother loaned him funds to keep going. To reset morale after laying off the small team down to just him and co-founder Simon, they made a radical decision: sublease their San Francisco office and apartment, and move to Japan to code and design in isolation. "Me and him working so well together, you sort of know what the other is thinking," Ivan recalls. "We just code, code, code, then, hey, let's go for food."

The breakthrough came when Ivan and Simon realized their vision needed repositioning. "Let's hide our vision, which is everybody can create their software in the form factor that people do care," Ivan says. "What kind of tool do people use every day? Productivity software." They rebranded Notion as a productivity suite with powerful no-code features hidden underneath—what Ivan calls the "broccoli and sugar" strategy: give people the sugar (simple productivity features), and hide the broccoli (Lego-like building power) inside.

Once this repositioning took hold, traction came gradually. Ivan and Simon never experienced a binary "product-market fit" moment. "There's never a sexual movement that product market boom, milestone achieve," he notes. "It's more just like, can we do the same as in our head and better than we did last week." Revenue started flowing, investors began reaching out, and word-of-mouth grew.

Notion's success came from staying radically lean. Ivan and Simon were multi-skilled—Ivan could code, design, and sell. Rather than hiring aggressively, they built systems. "We pretty much run everything on Notion," Ivan says. "We use the same mindset to build our company." They didn't hire their first salesperson until hitting $10M ARR, and only hired their first PM at 50 people.

But even with product-market fit, Notion stumbled. Around 2022-2023, the team started shipping features that violated their core philosophy—hard-coding concepts like "sprints" rather than building them as modular Lego pieces. "We shipped non-Lego pieces into our product," Ivan admits. "It took me at least a year, a year and a half to realize that's not the way we should continue building Notion." Customer feedback and engineer complaints made clear the system worked against them. They course-corrected back to first principles.

The closest Notion came to disaster was during COVID. As usage exploded, they hit the limits of their single PostgreSQL database instance—what Ivan calls "a doomsday clock." With only weeks or months before running out of storage space and shutting down completely, the entire company pivoted to solving database sharding. "It was a close call," Ivan recalls. "We just need to go as fast as you can."

Notion has remained profitable and kept most of its venture funding in the bank, proving that bootstrapped financial discipline can work at scale. Ivan continues to emphasize craft—inspiring the team through conference rooms named after timeless tools (original Macintosh, Toshiba rice cooker, Sony transistor radio) that changed the world. "We don't think enough about creating something that lasts," he says.

As a leader, Ivan has had to evolve. He's naturally direct (Chinese communication style), thoughtful, and design-focused—not the archetype of a billion-dollar CEO. But he's picked up storytelling and public speaking as necessary crafts to scale influence. His philosophy remains rooted in balance: don't build purely for yourself (you get no users), but don't build purely for the market (you create a commodity). The sweet spot is building something you genuinely believe the world needs, while having the humility to listen when customers and employees tell you you're wrong.