The Reset: How Notion Rebuilt Itself From a Cold House in Kyoto

In 2015, Ivan Zhao scrapped the code behind his company and laid off everyone who had written it. Then he moved to a two-story house in Kyoto with paper walls and no heat, and started over.

Three years earlier Notion had raised about $2 million from friends, family, and friends of friends. Zhao's pitch was romantic: software that let everyday people build their own tools without writing code. His idols were Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, and Douglas Engelbart, the men who saw computers as instruments for human imagination.

The first product was a no-code app builder. Zhao later admitted it never worked as a product, too complex for anyone outside a "nerdy tech crowd." The stack was wrong too.

They built on a Google web framework called Web Component that crashed constantly. "Bugs came from everywhere," Zhao recalled. "People were losing their content."

By 2015 the money was nearly gone. The team had thinned. Zhao's own angel investor, Akshay Kothari, admitted he thought investing "was a mistake, because the company didn't go anywhere."

Zhao was the older founder, so the call was his. "Fuck it. Let's just reset this," he decided.

He and Simon Last, the co-founder who joined in college, subleased their San Francisco space and picked Kyoto almost on a whim. It cost less than half of San Francisco. Neither spoke Japanese.

They coded 18 hours a day, stopping only for noodles. "We were just, code, code, code," Zhao remembered. "Then, 'Hey, let's go out for food.'"

Here's the detail people skim: before the launch, Zhao's mother lent him $150,000 to keep the lights on. The reset ran entirely on borrowed family money.

They rebuilt Notion on React. Zhao's logic was to hide the tool-making, the way you sugarcoat broccoli. Nobody wakes up wanting to make software.

People wake up wanting to write, to plan, to solve a work problem. So Notion 1.0 looked like a document editor, with the flexibility buried underneath.

In March 2016, Notion 1.0 launched. It took number one product of the day, week, and month on Product Hunt. The company that had been weeks from shutting down became, by 2024, a tool for 100 million people, valued at $10 billion.

Founders retell the reset as a story about refusing to quit. It's more specific than that. Zhao quit the version of Notion that was failing and kept only the dream underneath it.

Most founders pick one of two dead ends. They quit the whole thing, or they defend the broken version to the death.

Zhao walked between them. He killed the code, kept the thesis, and rebuilt around what people actually reach for in the morning.

The first draft was the bug. The dream was sound.