Notion CEO Ivan Zhao: Augmenting Human Intellect

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The Notion community ballooned in March 2018 when David Pierce, then the personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, wrote a glowing review of Notion 2.0. The headline read: “The Only App You Need for Work-Life Productivity.” The article called the updated version a “rare renaissance app.” This new version featured new project management capabilities and relational databases, the kinds of everyday tables and spreadsheets that power countless projects and companies. Notion’s innovation was letting users configure views of those databases in customizable ways, so different people could see the same information presented in different ways. They started charging users monthly subscription fees between $4 and $10, and began turning a profit. 

Zhao was unfazed by this success. He focused instead on evolving the product toward his original vision of empowering people to make their own tools, and on growing Notion as a business. The team was only about eight people, but he had just the person in mind to call to help them grow into their next phase. That summer, Kothari, one of Notion’s angel investors, was working for LinkedIn in India, and was visiting San Francisco. He and Zhao met up, just as they always had. This time, Zhao offered him a job. 

Kothari was born and raised in Ahmedabad, a city of 8 million in India’s western Gujarat state. His parents sacrificed to send him to school in America, so Kothari says he did nothing but study when he got to Purdue University in Indiana. After graduating in 2007 with a degree in electrical engineering, he worked for an alum at a Los Altos, California, investment firm. After a year, he didn’t get the H-1B visa he’d need to stay working in America. As a backup, he’d applied to Stanford University, knowing that if he got in, he could remain in the country as a student. There, Kothari, liberated because he was paying his own way, took a design thinking bootcamp course just because it sounded like fun.

“It’s like, everybody can be a designer. You can be a designer. I can be a designer. And I was like, ‘This sounds amazing,’” Kothari remembers with a laugh. “And we did all sorts of really wonky projects. As an electrical engineer, I was like, ‘Oh my God! What did I sign up for?’ I think the first project was to redesign how people eat ramen noodles. I was pushed to go talk to people in supermarkets when they were buying ramen. And just talk to people in restaurants, observe how they’re eating ramen, and see if you can change something about their experience. And I felt so uncomfortable, but I stuck with it.”

As part of a class project in 2010, he created the news aggregation app Pulse in about six weeks and soon turned it into a business. A year later, Zhao posted on the blog Hacker News that he was moving to San Francisco to find a job. Kothari was a heavy user of the site, visiting multiple times a day to weigh in on conversations, to see what other developers were up to and to recruit. Kothari remembers that when Zhao posted, he shared a game app he’d developed in 2010 called “Three Degrees of Wikipedia,” which is no longer available. Wired wrote about it, and the Apple App Store featured it. Zhao remembers the day when he suddenly started making money from it in $.99 cent increments. “That day felt like Christmas. I was playing basketball and found out, and I was like, ‘What the fuck?!’” he says with a laugh. Kothari said he thought it had a beautiful, clean design, and he happened to be looking for a designer. “I reached out on a whim,” he said. (Kothari still has the email.) 

Zhao chose Inkling instead. Within three years, Kothari had sold Pulse to LinkedIn for $90 million, and Zhao had started Notion. It would be Kothari’s first investment. “I still remember his pitch. And at that point…it was really just the ambition of the project that resonated with me,” Kothari says. “He’s out there, just trying to democratize software, make it so that everybody can put these building blocks together.” Kothari said he was so impressed with the scope of Zhao’s vision that he thought about Notion for months after the pitch, ultimately calling him and offering Zhao a bigger investment. “He was kind enough to take it,” Kothari says.

Over the years, Kothari rose through the ranks at LinkedIn, becoming vice president of product and moving to India’s tech center, Bengaluru, to help run LinkedIn India as it expanded. So by the time the men met up in 2018, Kothari had built new processes, teams and cultures inside a company with thousands of employees all over the world. He was who Notion needed. After a few months convincing his wife that they could reinvent their lives in San Francisco, Kothari joined as chief operating officer. His first job was six months of answering support-desk tickets. He talked to thousands of customers and grew to understand the use cases and depth of the product—setting him up, he says, to figure out how to build out the rest of Notion. Zhao sees Last as his product co-founder and Kothari as his business co-founder. He refers to Kothari as a human stem cell, a person who can spot any need in the company, design a plan to do the work, master the work and then eventually hire the right person to lead the new team doing that work. 

Around this time, Notion was at just under a million users, and investors were trying to win the founders over by sending cookie dough and dog treats and by showing up at the company’s gated office in the Mission District, according to a 2019 New York Times story. Vernal remembers Notion’s first few offices had a no-shoes policy, and when he sent Sequoia partners to learn about the company, he would remind them to wear good socks. Notion was profitable, so the founders didn’t seek official funding rounds. Instead, the company focused primarily on growing the community. They did this, Zhao says, by building relationships with power users. These were the kind of people who took it upon themselves to translate the Notion user guide into Korean because it was only available in English; who ran the Notion subreddit, now with 200,000 subscribers, and who ran the Notion Facebook groups in Korea and the Middle East, both with tens of thousands of members. Zhao saw these people as members of a community, offering them early access to new features, face time with Notion team members and the opportunity to give input on features. He had a hunch that investing in individual users would ultimately get Notion into big companies. He imagined these people would like Notion so much, they’d keep using it at work. Eventually, this hunch would prove right.

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For two years, Kothari did all kinds of jobs, built out playbooks and hired leaders to run the new teams, before moving on to the next business need. By the start of the pandemic, Notion had about 40 employees and they’d raised about $50 million as an insurance policy against pandemic uncertainty, says Kothari. They needn’t have worried, and they haven’t spent it. As the world pivoted to remote work, signups grew. After more than a year of pandemic lockdowns, high school and college students started streamlining the overlap of remote school and remote friendship by using Notion to organize their lives—and they were talking about it on TikTok. In viral videos, Gen Z power users would show off the ways they’d customized Notion to help them get more out of their hobbies and to collaborate on school projects. 

Then, on New Year’s Day in 2021, as Notion workers were relaxing at home, Kothari and Zhao started getting alerts saying Notion had crashed. They’d seen it coming, says Zhao, like a Doomsday clock. Every day of the pandemic added more users, and they were running out of database storage. They knew they needed to move Notion onto multiple databases, but they hadn’t prioritized it. 

Bleary from the night before, Notion team members suddenly had to explain to their roommates, spouses and kids that they had to work. The site was down for four nerve-wracking hours. “It was pretty much all hands on deck,” Kothari says. Zhao remembers eight-hour Zooms, day after day, after the crash. For the next six months, the company stopped building new features and instead focused on strengthening its infrastructure and migrating to multiple databases. When the work was done, the company celebrated with Zoom karaoke, complete with custom lyrics to “Amazing Grace.” Zhao, of course, has a copy stored on one of his Notion workspaces. “It was probably one of the best investments we made,” says Kothari. “Because the investments we made there allowed us to build Notion in a way that it could serve the teenagers using Notion for their use cases all the way to big enterprises using it.” 

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Kothari and Zhao think a lot about those big enterprises. Today, they are transitioning as a business from a startup to a mature company, and transitioning as a product from a tool with a cult following—the kind that people namedrop in Twitter profiles to show tech-design cred—to a tool used by the world’s largest companies. Growth has been rapid since the 2021 investments. As of summer 2022, Notion, which has 70 percent of its users outside of America, had opened offices in Dublin, New York City, Tokyo and Hyderabad, and had onboarded 300 employees, up from about 45 last year. The company is hiring for about 75 more positions. Competition to tell a compelling story to big companies is fierce. Other startups are working to build out similar capabilities; in 2021, Google Workplace added something like Notion’s interconnectivity with the launch of Smart Canvas, and Microsoft has done the same for 365 with its Fluid Framework upgrade. 

Zhao’s early insights about what makes software ubiquitous—the ability to help people solve everyday life or work problems as easily and intuitively as a document editor—is now a key selling point. Notion leaders focus on explaining how, for the everyday office worker, it can be used “out of the box.” People and teams can customize it to greater and greater degrees, but average users can install it and start working immediately, using templates in the Notion catalog. In another move toward ubiquity, Notion launched the beta version of its public API in 2021, enabling developers to connect Notion to payment systems and customer relationship managers, further rooting it in a workplace software ecosystem. To make Notion more competitive, the company recently acquired the calendaring company Cron, the software-building company Flowdash, and the cloud integration and workflow automation platform Automate.io. 

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. For example, they want to make Notion capable of publishing into varied content management systems with one click of a button. To do this, within the next 18 months or so, they will improve Notion’s project management capabilities, among other features, giving the software the final “Lego bricks” it needs to take on most SaaS companies, says Zhao. 

In a perfect world, Zhao sees the next iteration of Notion as changing life as profoundly as the iPhone changed people’s personal and work habits. “The iPhone totally opened up creation,” Zhao says. “There is a before and an after.” To grow the user base enough to drive this change, Zhao says it will take more than 18 months, of course: “In the next 5 to 10 years, Notion could be the front-end infrastructure for the world. Notion takes care of search, notifications, permissions. Just dream of a piece of software, and you should just be able to build that using Notion.” 

Zhao’s vision of creating a community of people empowered to make computers help them be more creative and productive has remained constant. Vernal tells a story about Zhao pitching Sequoia by walking through the last 50 years of computing history, with a narrative arc showing Notion as the next step in decades of iterations. “I thought it was the single best pitch I’d ever seen in my time here, a work of art,” he says. “And multiple other people told me that was one of the best pitches that they had seen at Sequoia.”

That story he told to Sequoia is the one Zhao started piecing together in college, when he read Engelbart’s paper about how humans could someday use computers to become more powerful problem solvers. It’s a story about how for years before Notion, so many pieces of software were just digitized versions of analog office tools—typewriters, file cabinets, desktop ledgers replaced by online document editors, databases and spreadsheets. Today, with tens of thousands of templates circulating, Notion reflects that when millions of people are empowered to make their own online tools, they mostly design trackers, project management tools and elaborate tables. Already today, some Notion-adjacent businesses are making more than $1 million a year by designing clever templates. On Etsy alone, there are tens of thousands of templates—meal planning, creating an astrology journal, and bootstrapping startup operations. But it won’t always look like this, says Zhao and Kothari. As Notion’s features become more robust, the tools we make with it will become more complex. 

“In the early days, 40 years ago, when personal computing started, the lines were blurry. The computing pioneers thought everybody would make their own tools, make their own software,” Zhao says, returning to a favorite idea. “And Notion’s mission is about software tool-making.” Even if those tools just look like black-and-not-quite-white document editors at first.