This is an editorial pick, not a submission — Talmyn’s own research into a company doing something we think other founders can learn from, published as part of our ongoing Talmyn Startup 100 coverage.
Notion was founded by Ivan Zhao, who set out in the early 2010s to make software creation dramatically easier for people who weren’t professional developers. The company’s early years didn’t go the way that origin story usually gets told: by around 2015, Notion didn’t have product-market fit, and rather than push forward on the same path, Zhao and his co-founder relocated the company to Kyoto and effectively rebuilt the product from scratch. That rebuild is what eventually became the flexible, block-based workspace tool the company is known for today.
Why this made the list
What’s instructive here isn’t the eventual scale — Notion has been reported at a roughly ten-billion-dollar valuation with well over a hundred million users — it’s the willingness to treat an unsuccessful version of the product as a real failure worth restarting from, rather than iterating around the edges of something that wasn’t working. Zhao has described doing this a second time in 2023, restructuring the company’s direction again as AI became central to the product, in what he’s referred to as a “refounding.”
Most startup narratives compress the early failure into a single sentence on the way to the success story. Notion’s is unusual for how openly the founder has talked about the actual mechanics of those resets — moving countries, rebuilding the product, staying a small team well past the point most companies would have scaled headcount instead.
Talmyn’s Startup 100 coverage looks for companies whose growth came from a specific, describable decision, not luck or timing alone. Notion’s willingness to restart from something that wasn’t working is exactly that kind of decision.
