Notion: How Two People in Kyoto Built a $600M Business Without a Sales Team
In the winter of 2015, Ivan Zhao was coding in his underwear in a two-story house in Kyoto with paper walls and no heating.
He didn’t speak Japanese. His co-founder Simon Last didn’t either. They’d just laid off their entire team. His mother had lent him $150,000 to keep the company alive because there was nobody else to ask. They ate noodles every day, reading kanji well enough to tell beef from chicken, came home, and coded for another eighteen hours.
They were building Notion. For the second time. The first version hadn’t worked. So they scrapped everything... the codebase, the architecture, the product decisions, all of it... and started over from nothing.
Ten years later the company does $600 million in revenue, has 100 million users, and has never had a VC on its board.
Here’s how that actually happened.
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The Kyoto reset
By 2015, Ivan Zhao had burned through most of his $2 million seed round and had nothing to show for it. The product was built on the wrong technical stack... CouchDB and WebKit, optimized for offline-first functionality that turned out to be the wrong bet entirely. Sync was broken. The interface was a mess. He laid off the entire team. That left two people: Zhao and co-founder Simon Last.
They closed the San Francisco office and moved to Kyoto. Not a calculated strategic relocation. More like controlled desperation. Japan was cheaper. They didn’t know anyone there. Neither of them spoke Japanese. They survived by reading menus well enough to tell beef from chicken. Zhao’s mother lent him $150,000 to keep the lights on.
They spent 18 hours a day rebuilding the product from scratch. New codebase, new architecture, new everything. Coded in their underwear. Went out for noodles. Came back and coded more. For a year.
What came out of that year was Notion 1.0. Launched March 2016. Hit #1 product of the day, week, and month on Product Hunt.
The business that almost didn’t raise
Here’s what’s strange about Notion’s funding history.
2019 Series A: $10 million at $800 million valuation. Team still under ten people. Revenue: $3 million. That’s a 267x revenue multiple, which is either visionary investor conviction or peak Silicon Valley madness depending on who you ask.
2020 Series B: $50 million at $2 billion valuation. Index Ventures wired the money 36 hours after Zhao started looking. Sequoia made their decision after reviewing the numbers for thirty minutes.
2021 Series C: $275 million at $10 billion valuation. Led by Coatue and Sequoia.
Total raised across twelve years: $343 million. Not a single investor got a board seat. Zhao still owns at least 30% of the company. That almost never happens at this scale. Most founders are diluted into irrelevance long before $10 billion. Zhao structured every round to sell 2-3% equity at most... which is why seed investors are sitting on roughly 370x returns on paper.
The reason he could do this: he didn’t need the money badly enough to give anything away. Which is a function of running lean for so long that he had leverage in every negotiation.
No sales team. No marketing budget. Just templates.
Notion’s entire distribution strategy for the first five years was product-led growth and community. No outbound sales. No paid acquisition. No growth team running experiments on the signup funnel.
What they had was a template ecosystem. Notion shipped 30 templates when they launched. The community built thousands more. Every template was a use case... project management, personal CRM, reading lists, startup operating systems, study trackers. Each one was a demonstration of what Notion could do without Notion having to explain it. Users became recruiters. The average Notion power user has introduced it to at least three other people. That’s not marketing. That’s product.
Revenue numbers tell the story of what happens when a product grows through genuine utility rather than spend:
2019: $3M → 2020: $13M → 2021: $31M → 2022: $67M → 2023: $250M → 2024: $400M → 2025: $600M
The jump from $67M to $250M in a single year is not a sales motion. That’s a product that hit an inflection point... partly the return-to-office wave, partly enterprise adoption, partly a TikTok moment in early 2021 that crashed their servers and brought in a wave of users who’d never heard of productivity software before.
80% of Notion’s 100 million users are outside the United States. They never ran a localization campaign. People in Korea and Japan and Brazil just started using it and telling other people.
Why no board seats matters more than people realize
The single most underrated decision in Notion’s history is the board structure.
Most companies at $100M ARR have four or five VCs sitting on their board telling them to expand into enterprise, build a sales team, launch a second product line, grow headcount faster. The board meeting becomes a quarterly negotiation between the founder’s instincts and investors’ pattern-matching from other companies.
Zhao never had that conversation. Every product decision was his. When users complained about the mobile app for three years straight, he shipped it when it was right, not when the board got uncomfortable. When the market was pushing everyone toward feature bloat in 2018 and 2019, Notion stayed narrow. When the AI wave hit, they moved fast... Notion AI launched November 2022, two weeks before ChatGPT. Now more than 50% of customers pay for AI features. That timing and that speed comes from a company where one person can make the call.
You cannot maintain that kind of decision velocity with five investors in the room.
The actual numbers
$600M ARR in 2025. 100 million users. 4 million paying customers. Over 50% of Fortune 500 companies using it. ~800 employees total, which means roughly $750,000 in revenue per employee. Profitable, or close to it. More cash on the balance sheet than they’ve raised in their entire history.
IPO likely 2026. At current trajectory, $1 billion ARR by then. Public market comp probably $15-20 billion.
From two people coding in their underwear in Kyoto on a $150,000 loan from a founder’s mother.
The thing that’s easy to miss in Notion’s story is that none of the outcomes were inevitable.
Zhao could have pivoted the thesis when the first product failed. He could have taken the board seats when investors wanted them. He could have hired a sales team and chased enterprise earlier. He could have launched five products instead of one. Every one of those decisions would have been defensible. Rational even. Most founders in his position would have made at least one of them.
He didn’t. Not because he had better information. Because he had a specific kind of stubbornness about the problem he was trying to solve... and enough self-awareness to know that the itch to do something different was almost never a signal about strategy. It was usually just impatience with the difficulty of the thing he was already doing.
That’s not a business insight. It’s a psychological one.
And it’s probably the hardest thing to teach.
See you Friday—bring a problem worth staying with.
Tom