like #notion check this out #expertise

14 Dec 2023 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:01

The video narrates the origin story of Notion, focusing on college students Evan Zhao and Simon Last who independently built similar plug‑and‑play website‑builder platforms. After meeting, they merged their projects under the name Notion. Early development suffered from an outdated tech stack, causing frequent crashes. In response, the duo fired their team, relocated 6,000 miles to Japan, and spent a year working 18‑hour days, subsisting on ramen, to completely rewrite the app. Their relentless effort culminated in the launch of Notion 2.0 in March 2016, marking the transformation of a struggling startup into a $10 billion company.

Chapters

These college students combined their startup ideas and built a $10 billion company. College students Evan Zhao and Simon Last were studying in separate universities but working on the exact same startup idea. They were both developing a plug-and-play platform that would enable non-technical people to build websites. After running into each other, the two decided to merge their two projects into one. They named it Notion. Unfortunately, they made the grave mistake of building Notion on an outdated tech stack. So after several months of the platform constantly crashing on users, Zhao and Last made a pivotal decision. They fired their entire team, packed their bags, and moved 6,000 miles to Japan. Away from any distractions, they spent the next 12 months coding 18 hours a day to rebuild the entire Notion app from scratch. With a few hours of sleep each night and only taking breaks to eat ramen, they released multiple versions of the app one after the other. Finally, in March of 2016, Zhao and Last launched Notion 2.0.