Moving a company to another country is usually presented as an expansion story. For Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, Kyoto became part of a retreat and a restart. The early Notion was struggling, money was limited, and the founders needed to rebuild. The distance between that moment and a widely used workspace makes an attractive success story. The more interesting material lies inside the distance: what a founder should preserve when a product fails, what must be discarded, and how an abstract belief eventually becomes something customers can use. Notion’s history offers no shortcut through those questions. It makes them unusually visible.

A vision larger than a notes app

Zhao and Last began Notion in 2013 with an ambition to let more people shape their own software tools. Zhao’s later reflections connect that mission to an older computing ideal: technology should extend human ability, rather than require everyone to adapt to rigid systems.

That is a powerful direction and a difficult product brief. A tool flexible enough to serve many purposes can be hard to explain. If customers must first imagine what they could build, the software may ask for effort before demonstrating why it deserves attention.

This tension is central to the Ivan Zhao founder story. The ambition was not simply to create another place to type. It was to give people building blocks they could arrange around their own work. The challenge was turning that possibility into an experience that felt inviting rather than unfinished.

For entrepreneurs, broad missions create both strength and risk. They can sustain effort across years, but they do not identify the first useful customer journey by themselves. The founder still has to answer a practical question: what should someone do in the first few minutes, and why would they come back tomorrow?

When the first approach stopped working

Notion’s early years involved repeated attempts to find a product that fulfilled the mission. In his 2024 reflection, Zhao described rebuilding the software four times. He also acknowledged that the company had struggled with the business side of a horizontal tool and had come close to failing.

The Kyoto restart belongs within that longer period. Zhao and Last left San Francisco and rebuilt the product in Japan. Their investor Sequoia’s account describes the pressure of reduced resources and a team that had contracted to the founders.

The significance is not that geographical change creates product-market fit. A different city cannot make an unclear product useful. What the move represented was a willingness to reconsider the working arrangement and technical foundation instead of protecting every earlier decision.

That is a difficult distinction for a founder. The original purpose may still be worthwhile even when the current implementation is not. Abandoning everything can be as unhelpful as defending everything. The hard work is to identify what the evidence challenges: the customer problem, the proposed solution, the underlying technology or the way the product is being introduced.

The rebuild was not an automatic victory

A fresh codebase can feel like a clean beginning. It can also become another way to postpone facing customers. The important question is not whether the new version is more elegant, but whether it makes a valuable behaviour easier and more dependable.

Zhao’s account places the meaningful signs of traction around the Notion 2.0 Product Hunt launch in 2018. That chronology matters. The company began in 2013; its path to an audience was not an immediate response to the first version.

Looking back from a successful outcome can make those years appear inevitable. They were not. Repeated work creates opportunity only when it produces learning that changes the result. A founder needs ways to recognise progress before the eventual biography exists.

Useful evidence might include customers completing a workflow without help, returning to the product for an important task or bringing colleagues into a shared process. These are general examples, not reported early Notion metrics. They illustrate the kind of behaviour that can distinguish a promising rebuild from a technically satisfying exercise. The customer’s experience remains the test, however emotionally important the project has become to its creators.

Flexibility needs an entry point

The product idea associated with Notion combines pages and adaptable structures into a workspace people can shape. Its appeal is also its design challenge. Freedom is useful when a person knows what to do with it; an empty canvas can feel like another task when they do not.

The business problem is therefore partly educational. People need examples, patterns and a first success that shows how the system relates to their own work. A flexible tool cannot assume that its versatility is immediately obvious.

That is why a founder should pay attention to the difference between capability and accessibility. A product may technically support a process while making it difficult for a new customer to discover or maintain. The feature exists, but the value has not yet arrived.

Notion provides a useful setting for thinking about this distinction. The same underlying components can support different working styles, but the experience must help users make choices. For companies building broad platforms, the challenge is to offer guidance without removing agency. A strong starting point should reduce uncertainty while leaving room for the customer’s own judgement and needs.

A community can reveal the product’s possibilities

Flexible software allows customers to demonstrate uses that the original team may not have anticipated. A page structure, a project workflow or a template can become a way for one user to explain the product to another. That creates an interesting relationship between community and product education.

Zhao’s 2024 reflection noted that Notion had passed 100 million users the previous month. That is a historical milestone, not a statement of the company’s current user count. He also revisited the original ambition and the company’s attention to craft.

Scale can make a founder’s early uncertainty disappear from public memory. Remembering the chronology restores a more useful picture: a broad product became understandable through continued refinement and use, rather than through a perfect explanation at the beginning.

Community should not be treated as a free substitute for a company’s responsibilities. Customers still need a dependable product, documentation and support. But their examples can make abstract capabilities concrete. For founders, the question is how to make good practices easier to discover and adapt without pretending that one person’s workflow will suit everyone else.

Craft becomes an operational commitment

Zhao’s public reflections repeatedly return to craft. In a software company, that word can sound aesthetic, but its practical implications are broader. Thoughtful details help people predict what will happen and reduce the effort of moving through a task.

The challenge is consistency. A founder can personally care about a detail and still struggle to build an organisation that maintains that care across many teams and releases. Taste has to become a working discipline: decisions need principles, feedback needs a route and quality needs more than last-minute inspection.

The same applies to flexibility. As users build important processes inside a workspace, unexpected changes can become costly. What once felt like a lightweight personal tool may become part of a team’s operating routine. The company’s obligations grow with the seriousness of the work customers entrust to it.

This is where the story becomes more useful than a simple celebration of perseverance. A product that survives its early years must eventually become reliable at scale. The creative energy that helped it begin has to coexist with maintenance, communication and careful change. Reinvention and dependability are both parts of the founder’s responsibility.

AI returns the story to its original question

Notion introduced its AI offering in a private alpha in November 2022 and made it generally available in February 2023. The company’s account describes work on bringing AI into the existing writing experience rather than treating it as an entirely separate destination.

That episode reconnects with the older mission: what should computing help a person do, and how much control should remain in the person’s hands? A generated answer is not automatically useful simply because it appears quickly. Its value depends on context, accuracy and the user’s ability to assess and change it.

For a workspace product, those questions are especially important because information may already be connected to decisions and responsibilities. An assistant needs a clear place in that working relationship. It should reduce effort without making the underlying process impossible to understand.

The lesson for another founder is to evaluate new technology through an existing customer problem. Adding a fashionable capability can make a product more impressive while making its purpose less clear. A stronger approach asks which difficult step becomes easier, what new failure modes appear and how the user stays able to exercise judgement.

What survived Kyoto

The lasting interest in Zhao’s journey is not the romance of a small room in Japan. It is the separation between a mission and the versions built to express it. The founders were prepared to replace substantial work while continuing to pursue the broader idea.

That does not make every restart wise. It makes a restart a decision that needs evidence and a defined purpose. Founders should be able to explain what has changed in their understanding and why the next attempt has a better chance of helping a real customer.

Explore the workspace at Notion’s official website. Our story on Nooks and its AI sales assistant examines another attempt to place software inside recurring work. For a different perspective on making systems practical, read Karishma Panchal Patel’s founder journey.

Notion’s origin leaves a demanding question for every ambitious builder: which part of the dream deserves your loyalty, and which part of the product needs the courage to change?