HOW TO BUILD A $10 BILLION COMPANY
Notion is changing the way people communicate and collaborate. Cofounder and CEO Ivan Zhao has an unusual philosophy about how to do it-which anyone can follow. by JASON FEIFER
To build a great business, you must change people's behavior. But...how?
Many entrepreneurs can't do it. They craft a solution with love and care, enter a marketplace with optimism and expectations, and believe that their idea is so valuable that people will immediately see its genius. But too often, consumers look at the new product or service and think, I don't need that. And then it dies.
Ivan Zhao has thought a lot about this. Because at first, his product died too.
Back in 2013, Zhao believed that lots of people wanted to build apps and websites-but they were too hard to build. That's why he created a company called Notion, which helped people build digital products easily. But nobody wanted it. Flop.
What happened next has become lore in tech circles: Zhao and his cofounder Simon Last moved from San Francisco to Kyoto, Japan, where they disconnected from the world of hypergrowth tech founders to refocus their startup (and eventually were joined by a third cofounder, Akshay Kothari). They developed a new vision for Notion, rebuilding it as a flexible collaboration and productivity tool. Zhao calls it "Lego for software"-which will make sense to anyone who's used Notion, and is a little hard to imagine for anyone who hasn't. In short, imagine a blank page with infinite building capabilities.
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