Notion

OpenAI

Notion

Notion uses freemium pricing. The free plan is generous — unlimited pages and blocks for individuals.

The Plus plan is $10/user/month for small teams. Business is $18/user/month.

Enterprise is custom-priced. The free tier is intentionally powerful enough that individuals and small teams can use it forever without paying.

The revenue comes when those individuals bring Notion to their companies and entire organizations adopt it.

Notion also has an AI add-on at $10/member/month that adds AI writing assistance, summarization, and Q&A across your workspace.

OpenAI

OpenAI makes money primarily through API access and subscriptions. The API charges developers per token (roughly per word) for using GPT models in their applications.

ChatGPT Plus costs $20/month for individual users, ChatGPT Team is $25-30/user/month, and ChatGPT Enterprise is custom-priced. Microsoft pays OpenAI licensing fees and also resells OpenAI models through Azure OpenAI Service.

OpenAI's annualised revenue ran past $13 billion during 2025 and kept climbing from there, which is the kind of growth curve that normally only exists in a pitch deck.

Notion

Ivan Zhao studied cognitive science at the University of British Columbia, obsessed with the idea that computers should be creative tools, not just consumption devices. He was inspired by pioneers like Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart who envisioned computers as tools for thought.

In 2013, he started Notion with the idea of building a tool that combined documents, databases, and project management into one flexible workspace.

The first version of Notion launched in 2015 and basically nobody cared. The product was too abstract.

People didn't understand what it was or why they needed it. The company burned through its initial funding.

By 2015, Notion was nearly dead — Zhao had to lay off almost the entire team.

With the last of his money, Zhao kept just one engineer — Simon Last — and moved to Kyoto, Japan, where the cost of living was a fraction of San Francisco. For over a year, Zhao and Last rebuilt Notion from scratch in a tiny apartment.

They rewrote the entire product, making it simpler and more intuitive. The 2.0 version launched in March 2018.

This time, it clicked. Product Hunt loved it.

Twitter loved it. Within months, Notion was growing 50% month over month.

OpenAI

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a nonprofit AI research lab. The founding donors — including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Jessica Livingston — pledged $1 billion with a mission to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) that would benefit all of humanity.

The idea was that AI was too important and too dangerous to leave in the hands of Google alone.

Sam Altman became chairman while Greg Brockman (former CTO of Stripe) became president. Ilya Sutskever, one of the most respected AI researchers alive, left Google Brain to become chief scientist.

The early team was stacked with world-class researchers who published their work openly — hence "Open" AI.

But AI research turned out to be staggeringly expensive. Training large models required millions of dollars in compute.

In 2019, OpenAI created a "capped-profit" subsidiary — investors could earn up to 100x their money, but profits beyond that would flow to the nonprofit. Microsoft invested $1 billion.

The mission was still to save humanity. The method now involved making a lot of money first.

Notion

Notion grew almost entirely through organic love. The product was so flexible that users built incredible things with it and shared them on Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit.

Template creators built entire businesses around selling Notion templates. YouTubers made "my Notion setup" videos that got millions of views.

Notion didn't need a marketing team because its users were the marketing team.

The template ecosystem was a massive growth driver. Notion made it easy to duplicate and share templates.

Productivity influencers and creators built elaborate systems — life dashboards, second brains, CRM systems, content calendars — and shared them with their audiences. Every shared template was a free advertisement for Notion.

The community strategy was deliberate. Notion hired community managers early and empowered super-users to become Notion ambassadors.

There are Notion meetups in cities worldwide. Notion Campus Leaders run groups at universities.

The company understood that for a tool this flexible, community was the best way to teach people what's possible.

OpenAI

ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 was the growth strategy — it just wasn't planned that way. The team expected a modest research preview.

Instead, ChatGPT hit 1 million users in 5 days and 100 million monthly active users in 2 months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The product went viral because it felt like magic — for the first time, anyone could have a natural conversation with a machine that seemed to understand them.

The Microsoft partnership provided distribution at massive scale. Microsoft integrated OpenAI models into Bing, Office 365 (Copilot), GitHub (Copilot), and Azure.

Overnight, hundreds of millions of Microsoft users had access to OpenAI technology. Microsoft's $13 billion investment was the largest AI bet in history and gave OpenAI nearly unlimited compute.

The API created an ecosystem. Thousands of startups built products on top of OpenAI's models — from customer service bots to coding assistants to content generators.

Each API customer locked themselves into OpenAI's ecosystem, creating switching costs and recurring revenue.

Notion

The "too flexible" problem. Notion can do almost anything, which means new users often stare at a blank page and have no idea where to start.

The learning curve isn't steep, but it's wide. People give up before discovering the product's power.

Every Notion user remembers the moment it finally "clicked" — but many potential users never reach that moment.

Enterprise adoption has been slower than expected. Notion is beloved by startups and small teams, but large enterprises need things like advanced permissions, audit logs, compliance certifications, and admin controls.

Building enterprise features while keeping the product simple for individuals is a constant tension. Companies like Confluence (Atlassian) have decades-long enterprise relationships that are hard to displace.

Performance at scale has been a persistent complaint. Notion pages with hundreds of blocks or large databases can become sluggish.

The app has improved significantly but power users with massive workspaces still hit performance walls. For a tool that promises to replace multiple apps, it needs to be as fast as each individual app it replaces.

OpenAI

The board crisis of November 2023 nearly destroyed the company. The nonprofit board fired Sam Altman as CEO on a Friday, citing a loss of confidence.

Within 48 hours, 95% of employees threatened to quit and follow Altman to Microsoft. By Tuesday, Altman was reinstated and the board was restructured.

The incident exposed the fundamental tension between OpenAI's nonprofit governance and its for-profit ambitions — a tension it finally addressed in late 2025 by restructuring the business as a public benefit corporation sitting under the original nonprofit.

The cost of training frontier models is eye-watering. Each new GPT generation costs hundreds of millions to train.

OpenAI is reportedly spending over $7 billion annually on compute. The company is burning through cash faster than almost any startup in history, which is why it keeps raising at higher and higher valuations.

If revenue growth slows before costs stabilize, the math gets ugly.

Safety concerns are not going away. Multiple prominent researchers have left OpenAI over disagreements about the pace of development versus safety research.

Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist who was central to the board's decision to fire Altman, left in 2024 to start a safety-focused AI lab. The public debate about whether OpenAI is moving too fast — and whether its safety commitments are genuine — grows louder with every capability improvement.

Notion

Notion is a workspace that combines notes, docs, wikis, project management, and databases into one tool. Pages can contain any mix of text, tables, kanban boards, calendars, galleries, and embedded content.

Notion Databases are the power feature — structured data that can be viewed as tables, boards, timelines, or calendars. Templates let users start with pre-built setups for everything from CRM to habit tracking.

Notion AI adds writing assistance, summarization, and the ability to ask questions about your workspace content. Notion Sites turns any Notion page into a published website.

OpenAI

ChatGPT is the consumer chatbot — the product that made AI mainstream overnight. The flagship GPT models are multimodal, handling text, images, and audio in one system.

The OpenAI API lets developers integrate GPT into any application. DALL-E generates images from text descriptions.

Whisper transcribes and translates audio. Sora generates videos from text prompts.

GPT Store lets users create and share custom GPT agents. ChatGPT Enterprise gives businesses a private, secure version of ChatGPT with admin controls and no data training.

Notion

Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Coatue Management, Dragoneer Investment Group

OpenAI

Microsoft ($13B), Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Tiger Global, SoftBank, a16z