They wanted to make software that could empower a global community of everyday people to make their own apps and tools without having to write code, all to unlock new levels of creativity and productivity. The two believed Notion was worth this effort because they were trying to make it into something that would revolutionize people’s relationships with computers and software. They were consumed with reinventing a piece of software called Notion, and if they couldn’t figure out how to turn it into an everyday tool people would want to run on their computers or smartphones, they would have laid off their friends, burned through millions in angel investment and wasted years of their lives for nothing. The 20-somethings didn’t mind the drudgery or the lack of personal space. “Then, ‘Hey, let’s go out for food.’ Then, we go eat, go back to work, and do it again.” Neither man could speak or read Japanese, but Zhao is from China, and he could read the menus well enough for them to figure out “beef” or “chicken.” (About 70 percent of the writing, Japanese Kanji, was similar to the Chinese Hanzi he grew up reading.) “We were just, code, code, code,” Zhao remembers. In the downstairs of a rented two-story house so small that only a traditional Shoji screen separated their bedrooms, Zhao says they spent 18 hours a day at their laptops, not bothering to dress, clean or cook. And to stretch what money they had left, they’d moved from San Francisco to Kyoto, Japan, which was less than half as expensive. They’d just laid off their only colleagues. Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. In 2015, Notion co-founders Simon Last and Ivan Zhao had removed from their lives anything that wasn’t writing code and eating noodles.
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