In 2011, Ivan Zhao posted a message on Hacker News looking for a design job in San Francisco. He had just arrived from Canada, studied cognitive science and fine arts at the University of British Columbia, and was the person in his friend group who knew how to code. The friend group was mostly artists. He had spent years building web pages for them because nobody else could.
Akshay Kothari, then running a news aggregator app called Pulse, saw the Hacker News post and reached out to hire him. It didn’t happen. They stayed in touch anyway.
Two years later, Kothari sold Pulse to LinkedIn for approximately $90 million. Ivan Zhao, by then, had started a company. It would take him five more years of near-failure, a full rebuild from scratch, a move to Japan with no money and no Japanese language skills, and a borrowed $150,000 from his mother before the company became something worth investing in.
Then, in 2019, when he finally started looking for venture capital, the round moved so fast that Index Ventures wrote a $50 million check 36 hours after he began talking to investors. Sequoia decided to invest after looking at the numbers for 30 minutes.
That is the Notion success story: a genuinely hard thing built slowly, then discovered all at once.
What Ivan Zhao Was Actually Trying to Build
The founding thesis for Notion was philosophical before it was practical.
Ivan had grown up thinking about computers not as productivity tools but as creative tools, the most powerful creative substrate humanity had ever built. He had studied cognitive science because he was interested in how people think and how tools could extend thinking. He had studied fine arts because he cared about craft and beauty. He saw a gap between what computers could theoretically enable and what most people were actually able to do with them.
The specific frustration was fragmentation. By the early 2010s, the average knowledge worker was running five or six separate applications to do their work. A notes app. A task manager. A wiki. A project board. A document editor. A spreadsheet. Each had its own interface, its own data format, its own pricing, and none of them talked to each other. The cognitive overhead of managing across all of them was a problem that nobody had solved because each individual tool was optimized for its own use case.
Ivan’s pitch to his first investor, First Round Capital partner Josh Kopelman, was unusual. Instead of talking about competitors or market size, he spent an hour talking about paper. Paper was flexible. Paper didn’t impose structure. You could use it as a note or as a drawing or as a flowchart or as a database. The question was whether software could have the same open-ended quality, the same sense that the user could make it whatever they needed it to be.
The vision: LEGO for software. A set of modular, composable building blocks that anyone could combine into whatever workspace they needed, without writing a single line of code.
First Round wrote the check.
The Wrong Tech Stack
The first version of Notion that Ivan and Simon Last built, starting in 2013, was built on a combination of CouchDB and WebKit. The intention was to support offline-first functionality, which made sense at the time when internet connectivity was less reliable and the design philosophy emphasized local-first computing.
The problem was that CouchDB and WebKit made real-time collaboration nearly impossible. The database couldn’t sync properly with cloud services. Complex interactive features, databases embedded in pages, real-time cursor presence, constant updates from multiple users, kept breaking. Notion’s early users encountered crashes and data loss. The product that was supposed to make information work better was making information unreliable.
By 2015, Ivan and Simon had burned through their initial $2 million seed from First Round and angel investors. They had hired four people. The company was running out of money, the product was fundamentally broken at the infrastructure level, and they had to make a decision.
They could try to fix the existing product incrementally. Or they could acknowledge that the foundation was wrong and start over.
They started over. They laid off all four employees, returned to a two-person team of Ivan and Simon, and borrowed $150,000 from Ivan’s mother to keep the company alive. Ivan later described this period as facing the possibility that the whole thing would simply fail.
The decision to move to Kyoto, Japan came from a combination of desperation and practicality. San Francisco was expensive and distracting. Ivan and Simon sublet their San Francisco apartment, and the difference between the SF rent they were receiving and the Kyoto rent they were paying was enough to live on. They had never been to Japan before. They didn’t speak any Japanese. They went anyway, because the alternative was to fail in a familiar, expensive city.
For approximately a year, they did almost nothing except code, design, and eat ramen. Ivan spent 18 or more hours a day working. Simon coded the backend. The apartment was cheap. The distractions were minimal because there were no social obligations and no professional community to attend events for. They were building something in almost complete isolation.
The product they rebuilt was on a modern web technology stack that could actually support the real-time collaboration, embedded databases, and cross-device syncing they needed. It was slower to build the right way. It was the only way.
Notion 1.0 and the Product Hunt Moment
In March 2018, Notion released version 1.0 publicly. It was named Product Hunt’s product of the day, week, and month simultaneously.
The release was the first time the rebuilt Notion was available to the general public. The product was still early: notes, basic databases, wiki-style pages, a flexible block structure that let users combine content types in ways that no other productivity tool offered. It wasn’t complete. But it was coherent in a way the pre-Kyoto product had never been.
The Product Hunt reception was the first signal that the four years of rebuilding had produced something worth using. Developers, designers, and productivity enthusiasts who found it on Product Hunt started writing about it. They shared their Notion setups on Twitter and Reddit. They made YouTube videos about their workflows. None of this was paid or organized by Notion. It emerged from genuine enthusiasm.
The same pattern repeated with Notion 2.0, released later in 2018, which introduced significantly improved database functionality. Product Hunt’s top product again. More organic sharing. More community formation.
The community was building faster than the company was.
18 People, 1 Million Users, No Marketing Budget
In 2019, Ivan Zhao announced publicly that Notion had reached 1 million users. The company had 18 employees. It had spent its entire existence on a single seed round of approximately $2 million. It had no marketing team, no paid acquisition strategy, and no sales team.
The growth was almost entirely product-led and community-led.
The mechanism was the template ecosystem. Notion’s block-based structure made it easy for users to build sophisticated workspaces and share them as templates. A Notion user who built a project management system for their team could publish the template, and anyone could copy it into their own workspace with a single click. Every template that circulated was a demonstration of what Notion could do, a tutorial, and an advertisement simultaneously.
YouTube became the primary education channel. Notion creators built audiences making videos showing their Notion setups, their productivity systems, their weekly review templates, their content calendars. The most popular of these videos accumulated millions of views. Abi Abdal grew to 4 million subscribers primarily around Notion content. Thomas Frank built a substantial audience doing the same. These creators were not sponsored by Notion in the early period. They made videos about Notion because their audiences wanted to learn from them and Notion was the tool they genuinely used and believed in.
The subreddit at r/Notion built to 346,000 members and became one of the most active productivity communities on Reddit. Thousands of users sharing templates, asking questions about database structures, troubleshooting formulas.
The template marketplace drove approximately 40% of new user installs organically through networks of friends and colleagues. A person who discovered a good template looked at who made it and often followed that creator’s other work. Creators who shared templates gained followers who then shared their templates. The community grew itself.
The freemium model was designed to let people get deep into the product before hitting the paywall. Individual users could use Notion for free indefinitely for personal use. The upgrade moments were natural: you invite a colleague to collaborate, you need advanced permissions, you want to use the API, you need more storage. These were things users discovered they needed after building deep habits on the free plan, not arbitrary feature gates designed to force upgrades at arbitrary moments.
Net revenue retention above 130% meant that the paying customers Notion did acquire expanded their usage over time rather than churning. The land-and-expand dynamic that drove Notion’s enterprise growth later was the same mechanism that operated at the individual level: someone joined free, upgraded to personal pro, started using it for their team, and became the vector for organizational adoption.
The VCs Who Couldn’t Get In Fast Enough
When Ivan Zhao started talking to investors in April 2019, the round moved faster than almost any comparable fundraise in SaaS history.
Index Ventures invested $50 million at a $2 billion valuation within 36 hours of Ivan beginning conversations. Sequoia decided to invest after looking at the numbers for 30 minutes. Pat Grady of Sequoia later said the $10 billion valuation they participated in was “very painful,” meaning they thought they were overpaying and wrote the check anyway.
The metrics that drove this investor frenzy were real and verifiable. 1 million users, growing fast, with virtually no marketing spend. High engagement: the average Notion user spent 2 to 3 hours per day in the product, and the subset who used it as their primary productivity system spent 3 to 4 hours. Revenue that was growing entirely from organic word of mouth. A community that was educating new users faster than any onboarding sequence could.
This was the paradox Notion had created: a company that had been nearly impossible to fund in its early years, when it was rebuilding from scratch with no product to show, became almost impossible to access when it finally had results.
From April 2019 to October 2021, Notion raised three rounds: $18.2 million in 2019, $50 million at $2 billion valuation in April 2020, and $275 million at $10 billion valuation in October 2021. The Series C in 2021 was led by Coatue Management and Sequoia. Total funding across all rounds reached approximately $352 million, a remarkably small number for a company at $10 billion valuation.
Ivan Zhao deliberately kept his VCs out of the board. There were no VC board seats at Notion. He and Simon Last retained approximately 30% founder ownership. The funding was structured to give Notion capital without giving away control. Every choice about the company’s direction remained with the founders.
The Akshay Kothari Hire and the Enterprise Bet
In the summer of 2018, when Notion was 8 people, Ivan Zhao approached Akshay Kothari about the COO role. Kothari, the person who had tried to hire Ivan off Hacker News seven years earlier, who had sold Pulse to LinkedIn, who had stayed in touch and invested as an angel, left his current role to join a company of 8 people that was generating very limited revenue.
The Kothari hire was a specific kind of strategic choice. Notion had product-market fit with developers, designers, and tech-forward individuals who found it through Product Hunt and YouTube. The question was whether it could become a business, and becoming a business required someone who understood how to operationalize growth, build a sales motion, and manage the transition from community-beloved tool to enterprise software.
Kothari’s background at LinkedIn and Pulse gave him specific understanding of how professional tools spread inside organizations, the bottom-up dynamic where individual employees adopted a product and it spread through teams and eventually became an organizational standard. Notion’s adoption pattern was already following this dynamic; the COO hire was about building the infrastructure to capture it commercially.
From 8 people when Kothari joined to nearly 500 within four years. The enterprise motion he helped build took Notion from a product used by individuals and startups to one used by Adobe, Reddit, Pixar, Figma, Headspace, CodeAcademy, and over 50% of Fortune 500 companies by 2025.
The enterprise sales approach was inbound-led rather than outbound. Because Notion was already embedded in organizations through bottom-up adoption, the sales conversation was not “let us tell you why you should use this” but “your employees already use this, let us help your organization use it officially.” The large installed base of free users already embedded in enterprise organizations meant that enterprise deals closed at 3 to 4 times higher multiples than SMB deals, because the trust and familiarity were already established.
The Template Economy as Product Strategy
One of the less-discussed strategic decisions Notion made was building the template ecosystem as a core product feature rather than a community afterthought.
Templates in Notion were not like templates in other products, where a template is a pre-filled document you modify. Notion templates were shareable workspaces, complete with database schemas, linked views, filters, and automation logic. A good Notion template could be a fully functional project management system, CRM, editorial calendar, or personal finance tracker that someone had spent weeks building and then packaged for others to use in one click.
The template marketplace became an entire secondary economy. Template creators with large followings charged for their premium templates. This was not a Notion business (Notion didn’t take a cut of template sales initially) but it deepened the platform’s ecosystem in ways that benefited Notion regardless. The more time and money people invested in learning and customizing Notion, the higher the switching cost. The more sophisticated the templates in circulation, the more capable the platform appeared to new users discovering it.
The community’s investment in templates was also the best SEO strategy Notion could have asked for. Search results for almost any productivity-related query surfaced Notion templates, tutorials, and community discussions. Organic monthly website traffic grew from 1.5 million visits in June 2022 to 6.9 million in June 2024 without meaningful paid search investment.
Ivan Zhao described his philosophy as: everything we do is about the minimum viable set of building blocks. Instead of building a calendar feature and a table feature and a database feature as separate things, Notion built blocks that users could combine into calendars, tables, and databases. Every additional block type multiplied the capability surface of the product without adding complexity proportional to the number of features. The LEGO metaphor that had anchored the founding vision turned out to be a precise description of a product architecture that generated organic growth better than any growth team would have.
COVID, 100 Million Users, and the Revenue Trajectory
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Notion’s user base quintupled. The same structural shift that drove Loom, Zoom, and every other remote collaboration tool drove Notion: the sudden global transition to remote work created demand for tools that let teams organize and communicate asynchronously, and Notion’s all-in-one positioning made it uniquely suited to replace the chaotic mix of tools that most teams had been running.
By 2022, Notion had 20 million users. By 2024, it had 100 million. That 5x growth in two years reflected both the pandemic tailwind and the organic community-driven expansion that had been building since 2018.
Revenue grew in parallel, from $3 million in 2019 to $31 million in 2021 to approximately $100 million ARR by the end of 2021 to an estimated $400 million in 2024. The pace was fast but calibrated: the 2021 valuation of $10 billion at $31 million ARR represented 322 times ARR, a multiple that required flawless execution to grow into. Notion has been executing on exactly that, growing revenue approximately 19 times between 2021 and 2025 while the valuation moved only about 10%, compressing the multiple to something much closer to public market norms.
The ratio of individual to company customers shifted from 90:10 to 50:50 by 2023, driven by Notion AI’s penetration into enterprise. Over 50% of Fortune 500 companies now have teams using Notion, including Salesforce and Intel. The enterprise motion that Akshay Kothari helped build is now the growth engine for a company that started as a cult product among individual productivity enthusiasts.
Notion AI, Acquisitions, and the Expanding Surface
In 2022 and 2023, Notion moved aggressively into AI with the launch of an AI writing assistant integrated directly into the workspace. By 2023, Notion AI had become one of the most widely adopted AI features in enterprise software, available as an add-on subscription rather than baked into the base pricing.
The acquisitions told the story of where the platform was expanding. Automate.io in 2021 added workflow automation between Notion and other apps. Cron in 2022, a well-regarded calendar application, eventually became Notion Calendar in 2024. FlowDash in 2022 added database and workflow capabilities. Skiff in 2024 brought privacy-focused document collaboration tools.
Each acquisition addressed a workflow that Notion users were leaving the product to handle elsewhere. The long-term logic of the platform was always consolidation: why use six tools when you can use one? Each acquisition reduced the number of reasons to leave.
In April 2025, Notion released Notion Mail, an AI-powered Gmail client integrated with Notion AI for drafting, organizing, and scheduling. The move signaled the direction clearly: Notion is building toward becoming the operating system for knowledge work, the single application where documents, projects, databases, calendar, email, and AI assistance all exist in one coherent workspace rather than five separate applications that do not talk to each other.
What the Notion Story Is Really About
The investor Pat Grady said the $10 billion valuation was “very painful” to pay. He paid it anyway. That gap, between how painful a price feels and what the underlying asset is actually worth, is where the Notion story lives.
Ivan Zhao built the product four times, including one complete ground-up rebuild in a Japanese city where he knew nobody and couldn’t read the signs. He borrowed $150,000 from his mother to keep the company alive when it had no revenue and a product that didn’t work. He made no attempt to raise venture capital for years after the product launched, growing to 1 million users on a $2 million seed. When he finally did raise, he structured the deals to keep VC board influence minimal, preserved 30% founder ownership alongside Simon Last, and built the company profitably enough that it now has more cash on hand than it has raised in its entire existence.
That last fact is the one worth sitting with. A company that raised $352 million total and has more than that in cash has not been burning investor money. It has been generating returns on it.
The Notion pitch to First Round was about paper. The flexibility of paper. The way paper doesn’t impose structure. The possibility that software could have the same open-ended quality.
That pitch turned into a product used by 100 million people in 2024, generating $400 million in annual revenue, trusted by over half of the Fortune 500, and expanding toward email, calendar, and AI in a way that makes the “all-in-one workspace” claim less aspirational and more literally true with each passing year.
Ivan Zhao’s stated philosophy: an ode to the computing pioneers, software can augment human intellect. An ode to the craft, software can and should be beautiful.
The product they built from his brother’s kitchen table and a Japanese apartment and a borrowed $150,000 from his mother is, by most measures, both of those things.
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