Aakash Gupta on Substack

More than a decade ago, in 2011, a young artist Ivan Zhao graduated from one of the top Canadian universities: the University of British Columbia. As a self-taught programmer from a young age, Ivan opted not to get a formal education in programming, choosing to study cognitive science (with a minor in photography) instead. But soon after graduating

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Kothari and Zhao talk about this moment as still the “early innings” of Notion, and see Notion 1.0 as about lists, Notion 2.0 as about databases and the upcoming Notion 3.0 as about whole workflows.

Notion’s challenge is that they have to simultaneously convince people to spend money on something that is “free” from Microsoft and isn’t as deeply integrated into many businesses' existing workflows and documents. And they have to do it in comparison with the essentially $0 CAC that Microsoft will enjoy—not easy.

In San Francisco, while Zhao still believed he was right about his grand vision, he realized he was wrong about his market. It was a crucible moment. The first version of Notion was a tool that non-coders could use to make their own apps. Disappointingly for the co-founders, it turned out, even if they were Last’s and Zhao’s actual friends, non-cod... See more