Notion Co-founder: Fit Your Startup Vision Into a Product Form That Users Actually Need | Bolt's Pick

Notion, the productivity tool used and loved by millions, was founded in 2013. Like many startups, its founding team spent considerable effort finding its direction — from holding fast to the vision of "letting everyone build software" to embedding that ambition inside a productivity tool people actually needed. Today, Notion's post-money valuation has surpassed $10 billion. Recently, founder Ivan Zhao appeared on Lenny's Podcast to share his entrepreneurial journey and product thinking. We've compiled and translated portions of the interview; the original video is available via the link at the end.

🔍 Key Takeaways

• Founding story: Broke into tech from a small town through programming competitions; discovered the pain of tool creation while helping artists build websites; founded Notion.
• Product pivot: Spent the first three years on a failed low-code platform, then pivoted to a productivity tool that concealed its no-code capabilities, gradually finding market fit.
• Persistence principles: Don't fear tearing down wrong directions; competitive drive + values-driven motivation; substitute milestone-by-milestone progress for waiting on a single breakout moment.
• Team strategy: No product managers hired until 50 employees; full-stack talent + tool-based collaboration to minimize management overhead; maintain agility through talent density.
• Craft philosophy: Balance function and aesthetics like a carpenter refining furniture; prioritize适配 human behavioral constants over chasing tech trends.
• AI strategy: Use large language models to evolve into an intelligent workflow engine; anticipate SaaS bundling/unbundling cycles; position as horizontal platform to capture consolidation trends.

Image | Interview Show Notes

Part.01

An Atypical Founder's Entrepreneurial Awakening

1) Lenny Rachitsky: As the founder of a tech company valued at over $10 billion, your background is quite unusual. You grew up in a small town in China before breaking into tech. Walk us through your early years — how did you get out and into this industry?

Ivan Zhao: My hometown, Urumqi, is actually a city of over four million people, sitting in the desert of northwest China. A major turning point came when my mother took me to Beijing for school. To get into a good school there, you needed to qualify through competitions. I happened to be obsessed with computer games at the time, so programming was the natural choice — I could spend all day in front of a computer and still advance academically.

After moving to Canada for college, since I already knew how to code, I deliberately didn't major in computer science. I studied arts and sciences instead. Outside class, I mostly played games or made art. Upon graduation, I noticed all my artist friends were struggling to build portfolio websites. As the only "tech person" in the circle, I built sites for four or five friends and suddenly realized: most people have no idea how to use digital tools to create. That sparked an idea — why not build a platform where anyone could easily create tools for their own work and life? That's where Notion began.

2) Lenny Rachitsky: You've mentioned that Notion was founded in 2013, and that the team spent years finding its direction. Compared to today's startups hitting $100M ARR within two years, it's rare to see a company of Notion's scale spend so long in early exploration. What happened during that quiet period, and how did you persist?

Ivan Zhao: We wanted to build a computing tool. The main challenge was discovering the right product form. There seemed to be many possible paths, and we tried many different versions. The first version let anyone build their own software on our platform — so we built a developer tool. Users didn't care. Most people wake up to reports due today and work that needs finishing. They won't spend time optimizing their workflow by creating software. We had friends and investors try the product; the response was lukewarm. But we really wanted to do this, so we kept going.

Only later did we realize we had to hide the vision of "letting everyone build software" inside a product form users actually needed. And productivity tools are what people use every day. That was the key insight for Notion — on the surface, it's a productivity tool, but as you use it deeper, you discover it gives you no-code development capabilities, letting users customize workflows and productivity software.

This shift in thinking took us over two years, because our initial assumption was wrong — the world wasn't what we'd imagined. Most people aren't developers or designers. Most people just care about getting their work done efficiently.

3) Lenny Rachitsky: Many founders face long stretches without visible progress. Beyond "believing the product deserves to exist" and "keeping the team lean to restart," what specifically helped you get the company onto a real growth trajectory?

Ivan Zhao: Simon and I were actually pretty fortunate — our highs weren't that high, and our lows weren't that low. So even in so-called "failure" moments, I never got too down. Whenever I felt a bit defeated, I'd go to sleep, feel much better the next day, and feel ready to try again. I feel lucky to have developed this coping mechanism.

To summarize: don't be afraid to tear things down and start over. Courage matters. Often you've invested massive time and energy, but the "momentum" has only carried you this far and can't take you further. Founders usually start from wanting to build something you hope others will use. But what does it mean to build a product, to commercialize, to have users and revenue? That's the logic of building a product business. It's like a sport — the market is an arena, and if you want your score to look good, you need to keep creating to win. I've been athletic since childhood and love competition, so I enjoy all of this.

But what sustains me more deeply is value-driven motivation. Creating something you want others to use is really about creating your own value. Everyone has their own aesthetics and values, and wants more of that in the world. This is a different drive from pure competition. I only recently realized how fundamentally different they are — competition excites me, but values fulfill me.

Looking back at Notion's history, what I'm proudest of isn't its commercial success. It's that I built a product that truly matches my own philosophy, and it happened to be useful to others. That satisfaction is what carried me through the lows and keeps me moving forward.

4) Lenny Rachitsky: What did finding product-market fit feel like? Notion spent three or four years searching — when did the real turning point arrive?

Ivan Zhao: It was actually a gradual process, with no single explosive moment. It was more like: "Oh great, people are finally interested in our product." Then: "Oh great, users are reaching out to us, even willing to pay." These signals emerged step by step, not overnight.

Perhaps because of this, even in our most disorienting "lost years," we never fully despaired. Even today, we still see Notion as a very small product — there's vast room to grow compared to what it could become.

Our mindset is more about hitting one milestone after another, rather than waiting for some "product-market fit" moment to suddenly arrive. The key question isn't "Have we made it?" but "Are we doing better than last week?"

Part.02

Team Management and the Craftsman's Spirit

5) Lenny Rachitsky: You didn't hire your first product manager until around 50 employees, consistently maintaining a small-team model. This seems obvious in hindsight, but over the past decade it was actually a relatively contrarian choice. What's the deeper logic?

Ivan Zhao: This goes back to our "abstract systems" thinking. Fortunately, Simon, Akshay, and I are all full-stack — I can code, design, talk to customers, even write marketing copy. When you realize three people can run the entire company, you don't need to stack headcount. If you find generalists, you naturally stay lean.

Also, as part of product management, what truly increases management cost is internal communication, not lack of people. Getting everyone to understand things the same way, maintaining aligned thinking — that's extremely difficult. For areas that genuinely need more hands, we prefer solving through better systems and tools. Notion itself is a meta-tool for building other tools.

So we applied the same thinking to running the company. This unexpectedly kept our team lean and made us profitable. The benefit is we don't need to fundraise every 18 to 24 months — we can focus on the product itself.

Because the team is small, we developed an internal concept called "talent density" — we don't count employees, we measure the value density each person creates. Great people want to work with great people, creating a positive compounding effect.

A small team is like an agile minibus — easy to turn and accelerate. A big company is a cumbersome cruise ship. As a leader, you decide who rides this bus. That choice affects not just company velocity but your own work and life experience. Like choosing roommates, you're picking your comrades-in-arms. We maintain a culture of "keep the bus compact, keep it lean."

6) Lenny Rachitsky: I recently visited your office and found the atmosphere remarkably warm. I heard you once had a "no shoes in the office" policy, and that everyone used to eat around one table. You also tested 30 different shades of warm white for the walls. Why do these details matter so much to you?

Ivan Zhao: Two angles:

First, pragmatically: I want the office to be somewhere people want to be. But most offices are designed like hospitals — harsh white ceiling lights, gloomy floor colors, oppressive atmosphere. So we don't use cool white; we choose warmer cream tones. Gentler floor colors. No direct overhead lighting. A cozy office makes people more relaxed and creative. That's why we use home-style furniture, making the office feel more like an art studio, even like home. When the environment is comfortable, people naturally stay longer and ideas flow more easily.

Second, personal aesthetic values: Just as ergonomic chairs protect your spine, I believe visual experience affects mental state. If a chair is ugly or wall colors clash, it creates visual burden — like "visual pain." The best approach is simply preventing these visual elements from "hurting" us.

The office itself is the physical embodiment of Notion's product philosophy. When you treat the company itself as a product, many management problems solve themselves.

7) Lenny Rachitsky: You've quoted Jobs: "There's a tremendous amount of craftsmanship between a great idea and a great product." How does this manifest in Notion's product philosophy?

Ivan Zhao: The key word for me is "craftsmanship." Our company's core philosophy is "craftsmanship and values." Craftsmanship represents your skills and taste; values are your personal beliefs and how you see the world. The word craftsmanship is interesting — it's like injecting your values into domain expertise. There are always compromises in this process, but how do you make "smart compromises" to create something new and useful?

My wife often jokes that I'm like a carpenter. I suppose this has always been my mental model for building Notion — like a carpenter refining a cabinet, requiring both aesthetic intuition and joinery skill. Making the wooden cabinet more beautiful, more functional, better to the touch. This demands aesthetic direction, technical ability to execute, and constant weighing and optimization in your mind or on paper. That's craftsmanship to me. And whether building products, businesses, or companies, the feeling is the same.

8) Lenny Rachitsky: Balancing pragmatism with craft aesthetics, and feature velocity with quality — how do you make trade-offs, and how do you think about them?

Ivan Zhao: This is crucial for product builders and founders alike. There's no free lunch — you always give up something to gain something. The key is: what are you giving up? More fundamentally, at any given moment, are you giving up the right things?

Markets and user needs differ at different times, so making correct trade-offs is itself a form of craftsmanship. Markets are dynamic, especially in the AI era — the optimization direction keeps shifting, requiring us to constantly adjust how we trade off and adapt to new technologies.

For example, I see large language models as a new material — like how aluminum enabled air travel, semiconductors enabled computers. Every technological breakthrough unlocks new opportunities and thus new trade-offs. Founders must find balance between technological development and human behavior, making products, making trade-offs.

But human behavior patterns remain relatively stable. Since we left Africa, our fundamental cognitive patterns haven't changed much. Though each generation creates new things, most people aren't eager to learn new things after 16. So entrepreneurship requires many trade-offs — technological, behavioral, and packaging these elements into products and businesses. Our task is finding the optimal intersection across these dimensions, building a product with enduring value, or at least something more lasting.

9) Lenny Rachitsky: In your journey to becoming the leader-founder you are today, what self-breakthrough surprised you most? Was there any growth trajectory completely beyond expectations?

Ivan Zhao: If you've used Notion over the past three years, you may have noticed we launched some not-great features roughly two years ago. It wasn't until 2024 that I could finally say we've reached an ideal state across speed, quality, and values alignment. For the year to year and a half before that, we were somewhat lost, shipping features that didn't match Notion's values or my own.

Notion's longtime philosophy has been "software like Lego," but during that period we added things that weren't "Lego bricks."

We're still cleaning up the consequences of those misguided decisions, having recognized the problem. If you build a product that attracts people with the same values, then when you over-adjust for revenue and competition, forcing new things, resistance naturally emerges internally and even among users. We'd shipped products that, in retrospect, didn't fit Notion's style. It took me over a year to realize this wasn't the path for Notion — we had to return to our original Lego-like building approach. We made many adjustments since, and now finally feel back on track.

The biggest lesson: build what aligns with your values. That's the most fundamental thing, at least for me.

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AI-Era Tool Ecosystem Planning

10) Lenny Rachitsky: As a platform product spanning multiple domains, what unique methodologies have you developed?

Ivan Zhao: First, no regrets. Second, I don't think about anything beyond this. Because from day one, our vision was creating "the Lego of software," and Lego is fundamentally a horizontal platform that enables more possibilities. That's always been our direction.

But in execution, one crucial lesson was that segmentation matters. Different people want different things from "Lego." Only hardcore Lego fans care about the bricks' details; most users want pre-assembled Lego sets. They want to open the box and find components ready to use. This became especially clear as we moved into higher-end B2B markets. In enterprise, you must provide solutions, not just components. Enterprise customers care about optimizing business and reducing risk — they need "Lego sets," not individual "bricks." Understanding this took me a long time. I was immersed in "brick" mode until realizing we needed to think more in "set" terms. Had I recognized this earlier, we could have adjusted strategy sooner.

If you're building vertical software, your "box" is your vertical domain. You typically target one or two user groups; the market itself constrains your direction — straightforward. But when you hit the ceiling, you're constrained. The advantage of horizontal platform software is there are no market "walls." At least in our domain, we don't need to cover the entire software market. But the problem is you must build your own "wall" to optimize go-to-market and distribution, helping users and your sales team clearly understand your product's positioning in their minds. That's why "solutions" is one of my favorite internal terms — it guides sales and product teams to think this way. But simultaneously, you must keep building "bricks" behind the scenes, or you'll trap yourself in poor positioning like we did with our project management features.

11) Lenny Rachitsky: You seem to be deeply integrating large language models into your product architecture?

Ivan Zhao: We completely didn't anticipate large language models. For anyone building tools, this was a gift from heaven — it fundamentally changed the materials we could work with.

One key insight: AI integrates well into users' daily workflows, especially in writing, task management, and project management. So our first AI feature was an AI writing assistant. Then we realized AI excels at reasoning, understanding, and search — especially when all information lives on one platform, its search capabilities far exceed traditional methods. This showed us AI's potential in "bundled" products, particularly in horizontal tools.

So our second AI product was AI Q&A and connectors, using Notion's internal information to provide answers and integrating with external tools like Jira and Zendesk to meet diverse user needs. But ultimately, we want more information flowing back into Notion's core platform.

The third direction is more exciting. A longtime challenge for Notion: despite offering abundant "Lego bricks," not everyone can build a complete system from scratch. Traditionally there's always a split between "builders" and "users." But AI excels at combining and assembling information — especially since Sonnet 3.5, its code generation has improved dramatically, and programming is fundamentally "assembling" different modules. This means all the "Lego bricks" we've built over five or six years can now be automatically assembled by AI, creating personalized software and intelligent agents for different vertical domains. This is what excites me most — and we never anticipated it.

12) Lenny Rachitsky: Any other insights on building horizontal platform products and bundling strategies worth sharing?

Ivan Zhao: Markets rise and fall like tides. There are only two ways to build a business: bundling and unbundling. The Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms opens with: "The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide." Business follows the same cycle — in early PC era, we saw vertical software unbundling with dBase; in the '90s Microsoft rebundled with Office; SaaS era unbundled again into hundreds of vertical tools. Today the average enterprise uses nearly a hundred SaaS products — this fragmentation has nearly hit a breaking point.

As AI matures and macroeconomics shift, the market is turning toward a new bundling cycle. But markets may later turn back to unbundling again; understanding this trend is crucial for businesses.

The key is reading the trend: choosing vertical solutions is like building a specialized yacht; horizontal platform solutions are like building a general-purpose port — each has strategic value, but requires different blueprints.

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📮 Further Reading

Linear Bolt Bolt is Linear Capital's dedicated investment program for early-stage, global-market-facing AI applications. It embodies Linear's investment philosophy, focusing on technology-driven transformative projects, aiming to help founders find the shortest path to their goals. Whether in operational speed or investment approach, Bolt's commitment is lighter, faster, more flexible. In 2024, Bolt has already invested in 11 AI application projects including Final Round, Xin Guang, Cathoven, Xbuddy, and Midreal.