ivan zhao

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

Vernal said this focus on nurturing community was key to getting a foothold in the product world. “It would be futile and foolhardy to try to compete with Microsoft and Google in a top-down way, to build a similar product and sell against them,” says Vernal. “Instead, they found a small group of really die-hard fans that carried the product with th... See more

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.