In spring 2015, Ivan Zhao sat in a small Kyoto apartment, staring at a product he’d decided to kill. Three years of work and millions of dollars from family and friends were down the drain.
The problem wasn’t effort, it was focus. Zhao admitted he selfishly built something he wanted to use, “not something people actually needed.” Acknowledging mistakes and pivoting under pressure became key markers of his leadership style.
Fast forward a decade and 100 million people now use Notion. Zhao pulled the company back from the edge of bankruptcy by building with purpose, setting ego aside and staying flexible.
The University of British Columbia graduate drew inspiration from San Francisco’s computing visionaries from the 1960s and 1970s, including Douglas Engelbart. Driven to help non-coders create their own tools, he raised about $2 million in funding from friends and family.
With money running out, Zhao moved to Kyoto, Japan with his co-founder Simon Last in 2015, as the cost of living was almost half that of San Francisco. There, they spent 18 hours a day writing code.
Eventually, things started to click, with this period forging Zhao’s guiding principles of staying lean, community-centric, and focusing on craft first. Zhao likes to use the metaphor of Notion being like Lego for software. Instead of people having to use 20+ different SaaS products, Zhao wanted to bundle things together neatly.
Notion took off in 2018 after a viral Product Hunt feature. Zhao started to understand why people liked the software, saying “We call it sugar-coated broccoli. People don’t want broccoli, but they’ll eat it if it’s wrapped in sugar.”
Notion hit one million users by late 2019, with Zhao not afraid to roll up his sleeves. On Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast, he described personally replying to support messages. He wasn’t pandering to users as a marketing tactic, he genuinely wanted feedback to improve the product.
The pandemic triggered explosive growth with the surge in remote work, straining servers as millions joined in weeks. Zhao said Notion was weeks away from maxing out capacity. He quickly repositioned engineers away from new features and towards scaling infrastructure. His crisis leadership meant that Notion survived and thrived.
Notion had 20 million users and a $10 billion valuation by October 2021, although Zhao didn’t rest on his laurels. The company soon became one of the first AI trailblazers in the industry, launching an OpenAI-powered product weeks before ChatGPT hit the market.
His vision is not to replace workers, but to add an “AI teammate” to the mix. What’s for sure is he has never stopped being a builder, even since his days in that Kyoto apartment.