This Chinese tech bro fires his entire team and single-handedly saves his company.

So, this is Ivan, and his company, Notion, is dying. Users can’t figure out how to use Notion at this point. The app is constantly crashing. Customers won’t pay for something they find useless. The company has 90 days of cash left before they officially go bankrupt.

Ivan looks to his co-founder, Simon, and realizes they’re about to lose everything. The current product is a disaster. It’s too complex, too slow, and it’s broken.

And that’s when Ivan makes the brutal decision. He fires every single person.

At this point, it’s just him and his co-founder, Simon. There are no severance packages, no goodbyes. There are just two guys left in an empty office. They pack their bags and fly to Japan with one mission: rebuild Notion from zero or watch their dream die.

And this is where the challenge begins.

Ivan has three massive technical hurdles he has to figure out.

The first problem is that Notion tried to do everything in one massive, unstable system, and it kept crashing under its own weight.

The second issue was that pages loaded everything all at once, which made the app extremely slow and unusable for real work.

And the third is that nothing connected to anything else. Notes lived separately from tasks, from documents, and it all existed in isolation. Users had to manually link every single thing.

And now is where the rebuild comes into play.

They reconstructed Notion using modular blocks. They basically built it like Lego pieces. They created infinite flexibility without any stability issues. They built a system that only loads what users actually need, which made it lightning fast.

And the most important thing is they made everything database-driven. This basically meant your meeting notes automatically synced to your project tasks, which automatically linked to members, and it was all one seamless tool.

At this point, he’s been coding 16 hours straight. And the final breakthrough is when he finally figures out how to do real-time collaboration—when people can work on the same page without it crashing.

In late 2017, they have a product that’s not just functional, it’s actually addictive. People love using Notion.

Do you think firing everybody was the right move? Or could he have done the same thing with his original team?