"In 2015, we were weeks away from shutting down. We had built a product that nobody wanted."

On August 15, 2025, Notion co-founder and CEO Ivan Zhao appeared on the Decoder podcast to discuss Notion’s remarkable journey from near-bankruptcy in 2015 to reaching 100 million users in 2024, and his vision for the future of AI-powered productivity tools.

The Near-Death Experience

Ivan Zhao opened with candor about Notion’s darkest moment. “In 2015, we were weeks away from shutting down,” he recalled. “We had built a product that nobody wanted. We were out of money, out of ideas, and our small team was demoralized.”

Rather than give up, Zhao made a radical decision: he went into “monk mode” for nearly two years, rebuilding Notion from the ground up with a completely different philosophy. “I realized we were building what we thought people should want, rather than what they actually needed. So I started over, this time focusing on first principles.”

The Vision: Lego Blocks for Software

Zhao explained Notion’s core innovation: treating software like Lego blocks rather than fixed applications. “For the past 15 years, SaaS evolved into dozens of separate tools—project management here, documentation there, wikis somewhere else. Each company’s digital workspace became an archipelago of information islands.”

“Users spent their day jumping between apps, context-switching constantly. Information was scattered. Communication was fragmented,” Zhao continued. “We took a different path: modular, composable architecture. Instead of fixed tools, we give users building blocks. They can assemble their own workflows and data structures, like building with Lego.”

This philosophy resonated. After launching Notion 2.0 in 2018, the company hit 1 million users. By July 2024, they crossed 100 million—a hundred-fold increase in six years.

Beauty as a Defining Feature

When Patel asked about Notion’s distinctive aesthetic, Zhao became animated. “Beauty isn’t decoration. It’s fundamental to how the tool works. Software that’s visually harmonious creates mental clarity. Ugly software creates cognitive friction.”

Zhao’s background in cognitive science and visual arts shaped this perspective. “I studied how our brains process information. Visual hierarchy, whitespace, typography—these aren’t cosmetic choices. They determine whether using the tool feels effortless or exhausting.”

He draws inspiration beyond software: “I look at Japanese minimalism, Bauhaus design, even architecture. How does a well-designed physical space make you feel? That’s what software should do—fade into the background so you can focus on your thoughts, not the tool.”

The Minimalist Philosophy

Zhao’s personal minimalism extends beyond Notion’s interface. “I eat the same simple meals every day. My apartment is sparse. These aren’t restrictions—they’re liberations. By eliminating trivial decisions, I preserve mental energy for what matters: deep work on hard problems.”

This philosophy informs product decisions. “Every feature we add, we ask: does this make Notion more powerful without making it more complicated? Can a new user still figure it out intuitively? If adding a feature requires adding explanatory text, we’ve failed.”

The AI Integration Challenge

Discussing Notion AI, launched in late 2023, Zhao articulated a careful approach to artificial intelligence. “Many companies bolted AI onto existing products as a party trick. We spent a year figuring out where AI genuinely helps knowledge work: summarizing meeting notes, generating first drafts, querying databases in natural language, finding information across thousands of pages.”

“But AI can’t be the product,” he emphasized. “Notion AI is assistance, not replacement. Users still think, still create, still decide. AI handles rote work—the parts of knowledge work that don’t require human judgment. This frees users for the creative, strategic thinking that AI can’t do.”

Looking forward, Zhao sees AI deepening this support: “Imagine an AI that knows your entire workspace—every document, every project, every decision you’ve made. It becomes a thought partner that can surface relevant context, suggest connections you missed, help you think through complex problems. But you’re still driving.”

The Anti-Growth Growth Strategy

Patel pressed Zhao on an apparent paradox: Notion grew explosively while Zhao maintained a cautious approach to fundraising and scaling. “We raised capital late and sparingly. We didn’t do aggressive marketing. We didn’t chase hockey-stick growth for its own sake.”

“This wasn’t virtue signaling,” Zhao explained. “It was strategic. If you optimize for growth above all else, you start making short-term decisions that hurt the product long-term. You add features to close enterprise deals even though they make the core product worse. You compromise on quality to ship faster.”

Instead, Notion bet on product-led growth. “Make something people love, and they’ll tell their friends. Build features that make teams more effective, and they’ll bring their whole company. This compounds slowly, but durably.”

The strategy worked: Notion’s growth came primarily from word-of-mouth and community evangelism, not paid acquisition. “We have users who’ve created courses teaching Notion, built template marketplaces, run YouTube channels analyzing our features. That’s a creator economy worth hundreds of millions—and we didn’t have to manufacture it. It emerged because people genuinely found value.”

Expanding the Platform

Zhao outlined Notion’s recent expansion: “We launched Notion Calendar to bring scheduling into the workspace. Notion Sites lets teams publish beautiful websites directly from their docs—no separate website builder needed. We acquired Skiff to add email and file storage.”

“Each expansion follows the same principle: eliminate context-switching. Instead of jumping from Notion to Gmail to Google Calendar to your website CMS, do it all in one integrated environment. Your data, your workflows, your team’s knowledge—all in one place.”

Critics call this feature bloat. Zhao disagrees: “Bloat is when features don’t integrate, when each addition makes the product more complex to use. What we’re building is more like an operating system for work—powerful but coherent. You only use the parts you need, but when you do need something, it’s already there, connected to everything else.”

The Information Architecture Revolution

Zhao believes Notion enables something more fundamental than productivity: “We’re changing how people think about information. Traditionally, you had files and folders—a hierarchical tree. But knowledge doesn’t work that way. Ideas connect in networks, not neat hierarchies.”

“In Notion, everything is a block. A block can be a paragraph, an image, a database, another page. Blocks can link to each other bidirectionally. A single piece of information can exist in multiple views without duplication. This mirrors how our brains actually work—associations, context, relationships.”

He cited power users: “We have scientists using Notion as a research lab notebook, linking experiments to hypotheses to literature reviews. Writers outlining novels with character databases linked to plot timelines. Product teams connecting user feedback to feature specs to engineering tasks. These aren’t isolated documents—they’re knowledge graphs.”

The Future: Ambient Intelligence

Looking ahead, Zhao painted a picture of ambient intelligence woven into work: “In five years, AI won’t be a chatbot you ask questions. It’ll be a layer that quietly improves everything you do. Writing a document? AI suggests relevant research from your workspace. Planning a project? It surfaces similar past projects and what went well or poorly. Making a decision? It summarizes the context and implications.”

“But—and this is crucial—it stays invisible until needed. You’re not interrupting your flow to ask an AI assistant. The intelligence is just there, helping without announcing itself.”

Zhao sees this as the natural evolution of human-computer interaction: “The best tools disappear. A master carpenter doesn’t think about their hammer—it’s an extension of their hand. That’s what software should become: an extension of your mind, so seamless you forget it’s there.”

On Competition and Copying

When asked about the dozens of Notion clones and competitors, Zhao was philosophical. “Imitation validates that we found something real. But copying features is easy. Copying the underlying philosophy—the commitment to craft, the willingness to rebuild from scratch when something isn’t right, the patience to wait for organic growth—that’s hard.”

“Microsoft, Google, Atlassian—they’ve all added Notion-like features. But they’re constrained by legacy architectures and existing user bases. They can’t rebuild from first principles. Meanwhile, scrappy startups copy our interface but lack the resources to compete on depth and polish.”

Zhao’s confidence comes from Notion’s culture: “We’re still building like a startup—small teams, direct communication, intense focus on craft. But we have the resources to invest in hard technical problems: real-time collaboration at scale, offline-first sync, AI infrastructure. That combination is rare.”

The Billion-User Question

Patel asked if Notion could reach a billion users. Zhao paused before answering: “In theory, yes. Every knowledge worker globally—that’s easily over a billion people. But I don’t think about it that way.”

“I think about whether someone using Notion for five years still loves it. Whether teams discover new ways to use it that we didn’t anticipate. Whether the tool helps people think more clearly, create more effectively, collaborate more seamlessly. Get those things right, and growth takes care of itself.”

Advice for Builders

As the conversation wound down, Zhao offered advice for founders building productivity tools: “First, use your own product obsessively. If you’re not a power user of what you’re building, you’ll miss what matters. Second, be willing to throw away your work and start over. Attachment to existing code kills good products. Third, optimize for long-term craft over short-term metrics.”

“Most importantly,” he concluded, “build tools that respect users’ intelligence. Don’t patronize them with hand-holding and training wheels. Don’t lock them into rigid workflows. Give them powerful primitives and trust them to build something amazing. The best productivity tools are platforms for human creativity, not replacements for human judgment.”

Conclusion: The Long Game

Zhao’s final reflection captured Notion’s ethos: “We’re playing a long game. Software is still in its infancy—we’re maybe where architecture was during ancient Rome. The principles of great software, the design patterns that will last centuries, are still being discovered.”

“Notion is our contribution to that exploration. If in 50 years, people look back and say ‘that’s when we figured out how software should work for thinking and creating’—that would be success. Growth numbers, valuations, market share—those are just scorecards. The real game is building something that fundamentally improves how humans work with information.”

For a founder who nearly gave up a decade ago, Zhao has built not just a successful company, but a new paradigm for productivity software—one that respects craft, trusts users, and plays the long game in an industry obsessed with quarterly metrics.