Aakash Gupta on Substack

In San Francisco, while Zhao still believed he was right about his grand vision, he realized he was wrong about his market. It was a crucible moment. The first version of Notion was a tool that non-coders could use to make their own apps. Disappointingly for the co-founders, it turned out, even if they were Last’s and Zhao’s actual friends, non-cod... See more

After many years of building and tens of millions of users, Notion now describes itself this way: “Every department’s work. In one tool.”  You can almost feel their internal struggle with language—the search for the right words. How can you describe something that is genuinely novel? What happens when something is so fundamentally different th... See more

More than a decade ago, in 2011, a young artist Ivan Zhao graduated from one of the top Canadian universities: the University of British Columbia. As a self-taught programmer from a young age, Ivan opted not to get a formal education in programming, choosing to study cognitive science (with a minor in photography) instead. But soon after graduating

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Assess the potential and spot the openings:  “We spent a lot of time thinking about ‘What is the market for this?’ Spreadsheets have been around forever, but most of the time, people use them to track objects: people, companies, simple tables. They're not doing modeling and number crunching, which they were invented for,” says Ofstad. “And wh

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