Map

Early-stage reality vs the retold version

Wiki conceptstartupsproduct ↳ show in map Markdown
title
Early-stage reality vs the retold version
type
concept
summary
"Early Notion" and "early Figma" stories skip the messy parts; what early actually looks like is a sequence of bets that mostly don't work, made by people who are mostly uncertain
tags
startups, product
sources
sail-muddy-lessons
created
2026-05-06
updated
2026-05-06

Argument from sail-muddy-lessons: the "early stage" stories people reference get told in retrospect, after the messy part has been cleaned up into a narrative. The version with shape isn't the real experience.

What "early Notion" actually was

Notion's commonly-referenced "early days" are usually post-relaunch. The part most people skip:

  • Ivan Zhao and Simon Last laid off their fledgling team of four
  • Sublet the San Francisco office
  • Moved to Kyoto to rebuild from scratch
  • Ivan coding 18 hours a day in a two-story house with shoji-screen bedrooms

Sources: Figma's 2019 interview, Sequoia profile.

What "early Figma" actually was

Dylan Field dropped out of Brown in 2012 on a Thiel Fellowship. Index Ventures led a ~$4M seed in 2013, Greylock led a $14M Series A in 2015 — both before any public product. Field and Evan Wallace spent nearly four years in stealth building a WebGL rendering engine that could run a professional design tool entirely in the browser. A team of fewer than ten people for most of it. Public launch September 2016. PMF arguably 2017-2018.

When people say "early Figma" they mean the tool designers love. They don't mean three years of two guys writing a custom 2D renderer with nothing to show.

What early actually feels like

A sequence of bets that mostly don't work, made by people who are mostly uncertain, in a context that mostly doesn't make sense to anyone watching. If it already looked like it was working, it probably wouldn't be early.

This matters because the survivor-story version of "early" sets unrealistic expectations both for founders (about their own progress) and for outside observers (about how products that eventually work should look in their early stages).

Implication

The most-referenced examples of "scrappy early-stage success" had multiple silent years of rebuilding, secret R&D, or pivots before becoming legible. Stubbornness gets credit only after the fact. While you're in it, stubbornness and foolishness look the same from outside — which is why reps-as-pattern-recognition is the more durable framing than "believe in the vision."

Linked from