In the summer of 2015, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last were in a rented house in Kyoto, coding 18 hours a day. They had closed their San Francisco office to stretch the money they had left.
The first Notion product had not worked. Zhao has said he built it for what he wanted rather than for users, and had learned that people do not want to build apps. So he and Last scrapped it, let their small team go, and started again. Zhao says in Notion's own retrospective that the company moved to Kyoto after it nearly failed in 2015 and rebuilt the application.
Zhao has said he built it for what he wanted rather than for users, and had learned that people do not want to build apps.
Zhao did not start out in Silicon Valley. He has described growing up in a small town in China before moving to Canada. One profile says his mother moved the family to Vancouver while he was in high school, for his education; another names Urumqi as the town. Neither is confirmed in a primary source we could read. He studied cognitive science and fine arts at the University of British Columbia, and has said he did not study computer science. He is a designer by instinct, drawn to making tools.
Notion Labs was founded in 2013 in San Francisco, with Zhao, Akshay Kothari, Chris Prucha, Jessica Lam, Simon Last and Toby Schachman listed as founders. It had a seed of about two million dollars and, as the record notes, early money trouble. What the outside world never saw was how small it was. Notion 2.0 shipped in March 2018 with fewer than ten employees.
The rebuild worked. Notion hit a million users in September 2019. In January 2020 Index Ventures led $50 million at a $2 billion valuation, and by October 2021, with 20 million users, Coatue and Sequoia invested $275 million at $10 billion.
Success had its own near miss. During Covid the product's single database nearly ran out of space, with only weeks to spare, Zhao said on Lenny's Podcast. The design that let Notion move fast had left it with one point of failure.
In January 2026 about $270 million of employee shares were sold in a tender at an $11 billion valuation. Third-party estimates put annual revenue at about $500 million in 2025. Not everything stayed: Notion Mail launched in April 2025 and was set to shut down on September 22, 2026.
Zhao's advice to founders, on the same podcast, is short: reset and start again if you need to. The house in Kyoto is the proof he meant it.