Evan Zhao and Simon Last built separate website builders in college, merged them into Notion, then moved to Japan for a year. They coded 18 hours a day to rebuild the platform from scratch, launching Notion 2.0 in March 2016. The company is now worth $10 billion.
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 Unfortunately, they made the grave mistake of building Notion on an outdated tech stack.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.
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