Ivan Zhao nearly shut Notion down twice. Today it’s a $10 billion company used by over 100 million people — built without a sales team, almost no advertising, and a product philosophy so obsessive it borders on art.
Born in China and raised with an early passion for computing and philosophy, Ivan Zhao studied cognitive science at the University of British Columbia before moving to San Francisco. A self-taught programmer with the sensibility of a designer, he has described Notion as a “software lego for the mind.” Intensely private, rarely interviewed, and deeply product-focused, Zhao is one of Silicon Valley’s most unusual CEOs — one who would rather ship a beautiful feature than give a keynote.
Origin
A vision borrowed from computing’s earliest dreamers
Ivan Zhao didn’t set out to build a productivity app. He set out to build something older and stranger: a tool that could represent any kind of human knowledge, in any structure, in any form. His references weren’t Slack or Trello — they were Doug Engelbart’s demo of the mouse and hypertext in 1968, and Ted Nelson’s vision of a non-linear information system called Xanadu.
Zhao and co-founder Simon Last started Notion in 2013 with that almost philosophical ambition: create a single tool that could be a document, a database, a kanban board, a wiki, a spreadsheet, or all of them at once — built from composable blocks that anyone could arrange. It was a beautiful idea. It was also extremely hard to build.
The first version, launched in 2016, was buggy and slow. It crashed constantly. Zhao later admitted the codebase was so broken they had to start from scratch. The team relocated to Kyoto, Japan — cheap rents, fewer distractions, Buddhist temples nearby — to rebuild the entire product. They had almost no money and no certainty it would work.
The Kyoto rebuild
In 2016, with the product broken and funding nearly exhausted, Zhao and Last moved the entire company to Kyoto, Japan. Living frugally and coding obsessively, they rewrote Notion from the ground up over 18 months. When they relaunched, the product was transformed — and so was the team’s conviction.
The relaunch
Going viral without trying
Notion relaunched in 2018 with a Product Hunt post that shot to the top of the leaderboard overnight. The new version was fast, elegant, and — critically — flexible in a way no productivity tool had been before. Users could build anything: a personal wiki, a content calendar, a project tracker, a reading list, a CRM. The product didn’t tell you what to make. It handed you blocks and got out of the way.
Word spread through the kind of communities where it mattered most: designers, developers, students, and startup founders. YouTube tutorials proliferated without any encouragement from Notion. Reddit threads debated the best templates. A cottage industry of Notion template creators emerged, selling their setups for $5 to $50 on Gumroad. Notion hadn’t built a sales team. Its users were doing the selling for free.
“We want Notion to feel like a home you build yourself — not a hotel room someone else designed.”— Ivan Zhao, Co-Founder & CEO, Notion
Growth timeline
From broken beta to $10 billion
2013 — Founded
Ivan Zhao and Simon Last begin building Notion in San Francisco with an ambitious vision inspired by early computing pioneers.
2016 — First launch & crisis
Notion 1.0 launches but the codebase is unstable. The team relocates to Kyoto, Japan, and rebuilds the entire product from scratch over 18 months.
2018 — Relaunch & viral growth
Notion 2.0 debuts on Product Hunt and tops the charts. Organic community growth explodes. The template economy is born spontaneously.
2019 — Series A
Raises $10M from Index Ventures. Launches Notion for Teams and free education plan for students and teachers worldwide.
2021 — Unicorn & beyond
Raises $275M at a $10B valuation. Surpasses 20M users. Hires its first sales team to pursue enterprise customers after years of entirely bottoms-up growth.
2023–24 — Notion AI
Launches Notion AI across all plans — writing assistant, auto-summariser, Q&A over workspace. User base crosses 100M. Positions itself as an AI-native workspace.
What they got right
Four things Notion did differently
Blocks as the atomic unit
Every piece of content in Notion — a paragraph, a to-do, a table — is a block. This makes the product infinitely composable without requiring any technical skill.
Community as the growth engine
Notion never ran ads. Its users built the templates, made the tutorials, and recruited their teams. The product earned evangelists, not customers.
Free for education, forever
Students got full Notion access free. They graduated, joined companies, and brought Notion with them — one of the most elegant long-term growth strategies in SaaS.
Design as a moat
Notion is beautiful in a way its rivals simply are not. That aesthetic wasn’t accidental — Zhao hired designers before salespeople, and it shows in every pixel.
What’s next
The AI workspace and the battle against Microsoft
Notion’s biggest competitive threat has always been Microsoft — specifically the combination of Teams, Word, Excel, and SharePoint that most large companies already pay for. For years, Notion’s answer was simplicity and beauty. Now it has a second answer: AI that actually understands your work.
Notion AI, integrated directly into the workspace, allows users to query their entire company knowledge base in plain English, auto-generate meeting summaries, draft content, and fill databases from unstructured notes. For knowledge workers, it is the closest thing yet to having an assistant who has read everything your company has ever written.
An IPO remains the logical next step, though Zhao has been characteristically unhurried about it. Notion is reportedly profitable or near-profitable, which removes the urgency that pushes most startups to the public markets. When it does list, it will do so as one of the most influential software products of its generation — one that started as a philosophy project in a Kyoto apartment and ended up on the desks of 100 million people.
“Most software tells you how to work. We wanted to build something that disappears — that just becomes the shape of whatever you’re trying to think.”— Ivan Zhao, Co-Founder & CEO, Notion
© 2026 Enterprise Insider. Figures based on publicly available funding disclosures, company announcements, and industry reports. This article is for informational and editorial purposes only.