Unheard Roots of Notion 📱

So, we all know Notion, right? It's like that one company we've all heard of or used at some point.

The Notion team has made one of the most useful apps of our time: an app that lets you have your notes app and CRM in one dashboard.

Ever wonder how all of this happened?

Ladies and gentlemen we present to you the Unheard Roots of Notion 📚

The college days 🧑‍🎓

Let’s go all the way back to 2009~2010 when Ivan Zhao was in college studying cognitive science and computer science (pretty smart huh?).

Despite being a pragmatic coder, Ivan developed an interest in fine arts and philosophy during his junior and senior years of college.

He ended up befriending lots artists and soon enough his entire friend group consisted of designers & artists.

Ivan was the only one among his friends that knew how to code so he became the go to coder for artists that needed portfolio websites.

Conception of Notion 1.0 🔨

After building a couple of websites for his friends, Ivan had an epiphany.

What if there was a way for his artist friends to design and build their websites without code?

Ivan knew technology was developing at a rapid pace and he believed it was important to give non-technical people a chance to build things on the internet.

Moving to the dream land 🌉

Ivan knew that if he wanted to build a startup, he needed to move to the land of dreams - Silicon Valley.

Before booking his plane ticket, Ivan created a post on hacker news asking if anyone wanted to hire a designer.

Luckily a couple of people replied and he got a job as a designer at a startup in San Fransisco.

Meeting the one 🥂

While Ivan was in San Fransisco, he ended up meeting Simon Last, who ended up becoming his co-founder. Pretty cool, huh?

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get much information about this mysterious Simon. Hell this is his Linkedin :)

Ivan had the product & design skills while Simon had the technical skills to build the vision of a no-code website builder.

Anddd cut.

Tune in for part 2, it will be published this Friday.

I'm not a fan of long emails that take forever to read, and I bet you feel the same way. That's why we're cutting this issue in half again, woohoo! :)