The builder who went to Kyoto to save his company
The year was 2015. Ivan Zhao and his co-founder Simon Last had burned through their funding, let go of their team, and watched their product fail to land with anyone. Most founders pivot. Zhao went to Japan.
He and Last relocated to Kyoto - a city that costs half as much to live in as San Francisco - and rebuilt the entire Notion codebase from scratch. For eight months, the schedule was simple: code, eat, sleep, repeat. Eighteen-hour days. No team. No distractions. Just a blank code file and a vision that computing should be something everyone could participate in, not just 0.34% of the global population.
The product that came out of that Kyoto winter is the one that eventually signed up 100 million people. But the path there wasn't clean. Ivan Zhao rebuilt Notion at least four times. His mother gave him a $150,000 loan to help launch Notion 1.0 in March 2016. The company took five years to reach meaningful traction. Word of mouth did what millions in paid marketing couldn't.
Zhao grew up in Ürümqi, a city of four million in China's northwestern Xinjiang region, learned traditional Chinese watercolor as a child, learned to code through competitive mathematics Olympiads, and learned English - genuinely - from watching SpongeBob SquarePants after his mother moved them to Vancouver. He studied cognitive science and fine arts at the University of British Columbia. When most of his peers were chasing startup gold in Silicon Valley, he was thinking about Douglas Engelbart's 1968 "Mother of All Demos" and wondering why computing's original promise - that everyone could shape their own tools - had been quietly abandoned.
Notion is his answer to that question.
I was like, 'Holy shit. This is what I'm going to do.' There's nothing else that has more leverage to use my skill set than to help people to use their computer beyond just a typewriter.
- Ivan Zhao
Today, Notion sits at an $11 billion valuation with $600 million in annual revenue. Zhao still holds roughly 30% of the company - an unusually large stake for a founder who has raised over $615 million. That number is not an accident. Zhao has been deliberate about keeping dilution low, the team lean, and the mission intact. Over 35 former founders currently work at Notion. The company was profitable - or near-profitable - long before it scaled its headcount.