

The first version of Notion was a tool that non-coders could use to make their own apps. In San Francisco, while Zhao still believed he was right about his grand vision, he realized he was wrong about his market. Zhao compares this to how, prior to the spread of literacy with the invention of the printing press around 1440, only clergy and scribes could read and write, so the rest of the population never composed great works of literature, soul-stirring poetry or world-changing scientific research.
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Most everyone has to download an app or run a piece of software to accomplish a task. Today, billions of us use computers, yet only 0.34 percent of the global population are software developers. In the 1960s and ’70s, these men, particularly Engelbart, envisioned a future in which people used computers to design their own software to accomplish whatever they wanted. These men saw computers as a way to help humans be more imaginative, more creative, more capable of leveraging intelligence in ways not yet imagined.

Zhao was trying to make good on ideas that he describes as romantic, ones developed by his idols: tech pioneers Alan Kay, Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart.
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Zhao, who had learned to code as a child, had a big vision-to enable people to use any computing device with the same creativity and flexibility that they bring to their writing, allowing them to approach devices as a new medium, whatever that might mean someday. In 2013, Zhao and Last raised about $2 million from angel investors-a mix of friends, family and friends of friends. But, in many ways, their biggest challenges are still ahead. The founders have time to dress properly, and even enjoy the occasional home-cooked meal. By all accounts, the mad dash in Kyoto paid off. Today, having added a third co-founder in COO Akshay Kothari and grown from a cult following to more than 20 million users, Notion has a multi-billion-dollar valuation and is aiming to unseat Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace as the enterprise-level collaborative productivity software. They wanted to make software that could empower a global community of everyday people to make their own apps and tools without having to write code, all to unlock new levels of creativity and productivity. The two believed Notion was worth this effort because they were trying to make it into something that would revolutionize people’s relationships with computers and software.
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They were consumed with reinventing a piece of software called Notion, and if they couldn’t figure out how to turn it into an everyday tool people would want to run on their computers or smartphones, they would have laid off their friends, burned through millions in angel investment and wasted years of their lives for nothing. The 20-somethings didn’t mind the drudgery or the lack of personal space. Then, ‘Hey, let’s go out for food.’ Then, we go eat, go back to work, and do it again.” ivan zhao on his time in kyoto “Then, ‘Hey, let’s go out for food.’ Then, we go eat, go back to work, and do it again.” Neither man could speak or read Japanese, but Zhao is from China, and he could read the menus well enough for them to figure out “beef” or “chicken.” (About 70 percent of the writing, Japanese Kanji, was similar to the Chinese Hanzi he grew up reading.) “We were just, code, code, code,” Zhao remembers. In the downstairs of a rented two-story house so small that only a traditional Shoji screen separated their bedrooms, Zhao says they spent 18 hours a day at their laptops, not bothering to dress, clean or cook. And to stretch what money they had left, they’d moved from San Francisco to Kyoto, Japan, which was less than half as expensive. They’d just laid off their only colleagues.

Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. In 2015, Notion co-founders Simon Last and Ivan Zhao had removed from their lives anything that wasn’t writing code and eating noodles. Notion’s co-founders are growing an enduring business by nurturing the creative community.
