Keep pulling the thread on Ivan Zhao.
Notion is currently developing an email product to complement its recent calendar launch, targeting software categories with over one billion users.
Notion's CEO Ivan Zhao describes the company's first three to four years, starting in 2013, as the "lost years" due to their struggle to find product-market fit.
During a difficult period, Notion laid off its entire team, reducing from five people to just the two co-founders, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last.
Notion has been profitable for several years and still holds most of the capital it has raised in the bank.
Notion did not hire its first salesperson until after the company surpassed $10 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Notion faced an existential crisis as it was weeks away from running out of capacity on its single Postgres database instance, which would have shut down the service.
To resolve its database scaling crisis, Notion halted all new feature development and assigned nearly every engineer to implement database sharding.
Notion's future AI strategy involves using AI agents to automatically assemble its modular "Lego block" components into custom software for specific vertical use cases.
The first version of Notion was conceived as a developer tool to enable more people to create their own software, but this approach failed to gain traction.
Notion's successful product strategy involved pivoting to a productivity tool to act as a "sugar coat" for its underlying vision of enabling users to create their own software.
In its early years, Notion had to completely restart its codebase after realizing it had built on Google's Web Components technology, which proved to be too new and unstable.
To save money after layoffs, Notion's co-founders moved to Japan, where they found their living and operating costs were lower than in San Francisco.