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Ivan Zhao: evaluation

6 Mar 2025 Lenny's Podcast Notion’s lost years, its near collapse during Covid, staying small to move fast, the joy and suffering of building horizontal, more | Ivan Zhao (CEO and co-founder)

“Then it took another year to realize to build this out, but in the middle of that I realized we built on the wrong technical foundation.”

— Ivan Zhao

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Speaker
Ivan Zhao
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
evaluation
Recorded
6 Mar 2025
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…Wow. The other thing I've heard is that you threw away your code every time, so you rebuilt it many times. You threw away the code each time. That's true. Actually, it took us four year to get somewhere. First two year is that you build too much like developer product. Nobody cares. It took us two year to realize we need to build a productivity tool. Then it took another year to realize to build this out, but in the middle of that I realized we built on the wrong technical foundation. So eight, 10 years ago, there's computing before. Right now, all the web app runs on React. Before React wins, there's a competing technology called Web Component from Google. And it makes sense. Web Component feels like a Lego-like, the building block-like, and we're betting on that technology. And then we realize because it's so new, it's just so unstable. It don't know where the bug come from. It's from your source code or from the underlying libraries? Then we have to restart the company, rebuild the whole thing. Otherwise, we're going to run out of time. So we set a code base. We set a company so we can build on our own more orthodox technology foundation. How did you actually stay solvent all this time? A lot of people want to keep working at an idea. Oftentimes they need to pay the bills. How practically were you able to keep working for three to four years? I know there's a story of your mom loaning you some money during that time.…

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