The team was only about eight people, but he had just the person in mind to call to help them grow into their next phase. If it doesnt feel good, then well go back to code and go back to design. At this stage were blocked by our internal process, our team, and distribution. Required fields are marked *. He imagined these people would like Notion so much, theyd keep using it at work. Their bright, loft-style offices have sisal mat floor coverings, Michel Ducaroys famously curving Togo couches and Alvar Aaltos iconic, simple wooden Artek stools. Dr TONG Weihan . Can we give that to non-programmers? Mr. Zhao started Notion after graduating from the University of British Columbia and working at Inkling, a document-sharing start-up in San Francisco. The romantic goal is: Can we make tools that allow people to use computers like a new medium? N/A. Even though he had started Notion to help humans use computers for more than word processing, he realized this new version would have to be just that, only built with some flexible tool-making capabilities layered incloser to, he imagined, the kind of software his idols had once envisioned. Notion leaders focus on explaining how, for the everyday office worker, it can be used out of the box. People and teams can customize it to greater and greater degrees, but average users can install it and start working immediately, using templates in the Notion catalog. It would be futile and foolhardy to try to compete with Microsoft and Google in a top-down way, to build a similar product and sell against them, says Vernal. Ivan Zhao is also currently the CEO of the company. So they called Sarah Cannon, an investor at Index Ventures who had been courting Notion for over a year. Its founders, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, had built their app on a suboptimal tech stack, and it crashed constantly. About. Just click the "Edit page" button at the bottom of the page or learn more in the Biography submission guide. A collaborative canvas to work on anything from anywhere. Notions design also distinguishes it, with a restrained, black-and-not-quite-white aesthetic. April 1, 2020. www.nytimes.com. Bio. He has over 320 original manuscripts published in . And we want to do this in a way that will help people think more clearly and collaborate with each other better. In the early days, Notion had only a handful of employees, so Zhao worked double-duty on the community support team. 2) it breaks traditional productivity software into blocks text, lists, tasks, databases, images, etc. He had a hunch that investing in individual users would ultimately get Notion into big companies. In March 2016, after the year in Kyoto testing iterations of Notions functionality and design, endlessly pulling up pages on the design software Figma, Zhao editing in one area, Last finessing elsewhere, they launched Notion 1.0. Im the nerd of the friend circle, so I started coding peoples websites for them. People are used to working in shared documents and project spaces, and constantly communicating with their colleagues through various channels. To give you some background, our goal with Notion is to create the general purpose work tool for a post-file, post-MS Office world. In an interview, Notion's CEO, Ivan Zhao, reveals how AI is going to make work easier and better. Zhaos early insights about what makes software ubiquitousthe ability to help people solve everyday life or work problems as easily and intuitively as a document editoris now a key selling point. But really, there havent been many big changes to our essential work software in decades. Bugs came from everywhere, Zhao says. Zhao refers to overhead fluorescent lighting as hell. He chose all the furniture and finishes, putting as much thought into the offices as he has into the product. Professor of Medicine Chief of Renal Division, Peking University First Hospital. Description. They knew they needed to move Notion onto multiple databases, but they hadnt prioritized it. And he has a bazillion Twitter followers, says Zhao. The men didnt yet charge to use Notion; they wanted to grow users first. The company declined to disclose its revenue, but said it had made money since 2018. But, in many ways, their biggest challenges are still ahead. It was really popular in the 90s, but somehow people forgot that idea for a couple of decades. For example, they want to make Notion capable of publishing into varied content management systems with one click of a button. In a perfect world, Zhao sees the next iteration of Notion as changing life as profoundly as the iPhone changed peoples personal and work habits. Inside Design: It sounds like each person needs to bring more than one skill set to the table. Thats what I mean by creating something that can do many different things, like Lego bricks, but its still fundamentally one product. But if youre truly growing so fast, why not add more people? Companies in Career N/A. Inside Design: Youve hired four product designers. The ambition of Zhao and his team at Notion can't be contained in any single decade. Notion AI Nov 2022 Notion for Students Sep 2019 Notion Template Gallery Apr 2019 Read More Contact Ivan Zaho's Phone Number and Email Last Update 1/12/2023 1:37 AM Email i***@makenotion.com Engage via Email Contact Number Engage via Phone Mobile Number Engage via Mobile Company Notion Address His major research interest focuses on autoimmune renal diseases, prevention and treatment of CKD. Inspired by the progressive ideas which D. I. Pisarev, the most eminent of the Russian literary critics of the 1860's and I. M. Sechenov . Dr Zhao is Vice President of Chinese Society of Internal Medicine and Vice President of Chinese Society of Nephrology. Inside Design: How would you recommend designers start learning about the philosophical underpinnings that guide your thinking? It was more for nerdy tech crowds. After a year, he didnt get the H-1B visa hed need to stay working in America. Notion addresses both by making communication in the product more about utility allowing people to collaborate on the same pages at the same time, and to have very targeted asynchronous conversations about specific work (using comments and discussions). Menu. So we went from one thing, Microsoft office, and it became many, many different SaaS products today. We shook hands, [I had to show] I am not a crazy person.. And theyre the future Fortune 500 companies, he says. Notions office is devoid of the typical start-up tchotchkes and clutter. Originally from Beijing, China, Chloe Zhao was born on 31 March 1982 . How far along is Notion on its journey? But, UX and pixel-perfect design take some longer time. Zhaos mom loaned him $150,000 to keep the startup afloat. When the work was done, the company celebrated with Zoom karaoke, complete with custom lyrics to Amazing Grace. Zhao, of course, has a copy stored on one of his Notion workspaces. Join Facebook to connect with Ivan Zhao and others you may know. Sometimes something is really hard to code. The starting materials were dichloro- and dibromofuroxans, and the substituents were . She is best known for being a Model. 2. Zhao Zhao is an artist who works across media, incorporating objects, performance, video, and painting into his practice. Today, having added a third co-founder in COO Akshay Kothari and grown from a cult following to more than 20 million users, Notion has a multi-billion-dollar valuation and is aiming to unseat Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace as the enterprise-level collaborative productivity software. Thats why all of Notions functionality fades to the back as soon as you start typing. The best way to do this is to create a database of all tasks across your entire team and organization. Related Investments Aliases N/A. The present comes from the past. I was pushed to go talk to people in supermarkets when they were buying ramen. History. * Notion's Enterprise Success with Community RootsIvan Zhao(Notion, Co-founder and CEO): Notion, the popular maker of productivity and collaboration tools, . By Alexa von Tobel, Founder and managing partner, Inspired Capital @. Not only does this make all of your teams work easier to find, access, and dig into every day, it also increases transparency and the flow of information throughout teams. He refers to Kothari as a human stem cell, a person who can spot any need in the company, design a plan to do the work, master the work and then eventually hire the right person to lead the new team doing that work. Without understanding what youre trying to do, adding more people will actually slow you down. ! he says with a laugh. Location: San Francisco, CA Add to My Lists. Ivan Zaho is a Founder at Notion based in San Francisco, California. A significant figure among the young post-1980s generation of contemporary Chinese artists, the artist's work often interrogates his home country's institutional systems and politics, appearing anti-authoritarian and non-conformist in its ethos. Front-end stuff you can be taught, its not that hard, right? And then he decided to drop out of school and just work on this full time with me, remembers Zhao. Zhao remembers the day when he suddenly started making money from it in $.99 cent increments. Its like, everybody can be a designer. supporting ecosystems at Entrepreneurship Program, BRIC and Tea Time. Zhao: There are so many apps these days. This is what Im going to do. Theres nothing else that has more leverage to use my skill set than to help people to use their computer beyond just a typewriter. To give you some background, our goal with Notion is to create the general purpose work tool for a post-file, post-MS Office world The company has stayed small, with 42 employees. Today, Zhao estimates Notion can consistently replace about a dozen pieces of software like project-management or list-making tools. Kothari and Zhao talk about this moment as still the early innings of Notion, and see Notion 1.0 as about lists, Notion 2.0 as about databases and the upcoming Notion 3.0 as about whole workflows. Ivan Zhao Managing Director Guangzhou. Publisher. About Ziyu(Ivan) Zhao. He. That kickstarted our product on Product Hunt. Its like 90% perfect. 1991 - 2016 - Various Positions within CSIRO, including Chief Research Scientist, Deputy Chief, and Acting Chief, during which Ivan worked with >50 local & international companies with a net external income of over $20,000,000. At MetaLab, a 140-person design agency in Vancouver, Notion has now replaced 12 different tools, including Google Slides and Trello, a list-making service. While humans were routinely using computers to do this kind of work by the early 2010s, when Zhao was reading this paper, he saw that a crucial element of Engelbarts vision was still missing. She feels strongly about cocktails and NPR. Zhao chose Inkling instead. Before the most recent funding, Notion, which was founded in 2013, had raised $17 million. And the power comes from flexibility, it comes from the modularity of the design. You can view this kind of database as a Kanban board if that helps you visualize tasks better. I am Ivan Zhao, cofounder/designer of Notion a unified tool for docs, wikis, and tasks. Find Ivan's email address, mobile number, work history, and more. We think the pendulum is swinging back to a bundled solution. Soon after joining Sequoia in 2016, he noticed startups increasingly running their businesses on Notion, using it to send memos or make decks. And I was like, This sounds amazing, Kothari remembers with a laugh. Is this the simplest mental model we can use? Specifically, ChatGPT and Microsoft's new version of Bing have gotten a lot of attention. When the medium is so new, people have entire green fields in front of them, and there is less thinking about business. They were consumed with reinventing a piece of software called Notion, and if they couldnt 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. They did this, Zhao says, by building relationships with power users. 1407 S Market St, Benson, North Carolina, 27504, United States. After graduating in 2007 with a degree in electrical engineering, he worked for an alum at a Los Altos, California, investment firm. Herein, we report a new synthetic approach for the synthesis of chloro- and bromofuroxans. When people have all their essential work tools in one place and are able to work there seamlessly together with their team, they get more done, they save a huge amount of time, their thinking is more clear and consistent, and project work flows more smoothly. Today, seven years after that sweaty, exciting time in Kyoto, Last and Zhao are back in San Francisco and Notion is working as an all-in-one collaborative productivity software. Just look at Slack. Competition to tell a compelling story to big companies is fierce. They dont write hyper-specific code to do a clever, unique thing an individual person wants to do. This is what Im going to do. Theres nothing else that has more leverage to use my skill set than to help people to use their computer beyond just a typewriter., They found a small group of really die-hard fans that carried the product with them. And at that pointit was really just the ambition of the project that resonated with me, Kothari says. In the 1960s and 70s, these men, particularly Engelbart, envisioned a future in which people used computers to design their own software to accomplish whatever they wanted. I wonder what does it take for every company, every team, every student to run on Notion? Now, our skin is fairly conservative too. Add a bio, trivia, and more. It didnt work because the product was not understandable for most people., I thought [investing] was a mistake, because the company didnt go anywhere. You can be a designer. In March 2018, Notion 2.0 was released. So its less about where we are today, but its like, we want to be the place where future companies are operating. That said, with the new investment money, Notion and its backers also want it to be the place companies are operating today. I thought [investing] was a mistake, because the company didnt go anywhere, he says. When you look there you can only see a little bit in front of you. Jani Zhao's age is 30. International model who is known for having earned representation from several different agencies including Stacey Castro Media and . Notion was profitable, so the founders didnt seek official funding rounds. Its not trying to be everything to everyone, Justin Watt, MetaLabs director of operations and marketing, said of the software. All Artists in the art world listed by Artprice.com starting with AAA - ABA, complete index. Microsoft Office did that in the 90s. Go to the edge of what is still acceptable to your peers and go to the far, far edge of that. Use first principles thinking, what some people call systems thinking. Dont base your approach just on copying and tweaking a little bit what other people have done. It was very intense and focused. Those are really good ideas and theres a lot of then. We want Notion to be as light and simple as you want to be, with the power to do complex things only if and when you want to. As a backup, hed applied to Stanford University, knowing that if he got in, he could remain in the country as a student. I am Ivan Zhao, cofounder/designer of Notion - a unified tool for docs, wikis, and tasks. He offered Last an internship, showing Last the same Notion prototype hed shown Kothari during the investment conversation. His parents sacrificed to send him to school in America, so Kothari says he did nothing but study when he got to Purdue University in Indiana. Fundamentally, Notion is a tool to solve peoples problems. YSC cookie is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages. There is a before and an after. To grow the user base enough to drive this change, Zhao says it will take more than 18 months, of course: In the next 5 to 10 years, Notion could be the front-end infrastructure for the world. In another move toward ubiquity, Notion launched the beta version of its public API in 2021, enabling developers to connect Notion to payment systems and customer relationship managers, further rooting it in a workplace software ecosystem. "We . At that point, thats where Notions idea got formed. Zhao became obsessed with democratizing access to the tool-making ability of coding. The Notion community ballooned in March 2018 when David Pierce, then the personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, wrote a glowing review of Notion 2.0. Guannan Zhang, Jing Wang, Ivan S. Maksymov, Andrew D. Greentree, Jiming Hu, Aiguo . MetaLab said it used Notion to present work to clients and to collect their feedback all in one place, among other tasks. It reinforces organizations to make sure all work being done by everyone rolls up to the same main objectives, and provides transparency for everyone into whats going on and who is doing what at all times. The key to healthy culture and productivity is over-communication and true understanding of what everyone is working on and why its important. Welcome to my tiny corner of the internet where I'm probably tinkering with random software and tools, climbing up walls or buildings, or eating my way through a city. Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the world more open and connected. You have all these other planes of vision. ACS Applied Bio Materials 2021, 4 (12 . Zhao and one of his early Notion colleagues were members of a small scene of people passionate about visually oriented programming environments who followed each other on Twitter, sharing projects and insights. Theres been kind of a big unbundling where the old guard like Microsoft Office has been broken down into many separate apps for documents, spreadsheets, notes, etc. Then okay, you should go back to UX stage, maybe change the UX a little bit so it becomes really easy to implement. He said, art is whatever you can get away with.. Take product ideas from planning to launch and every step in between. Its a story about how for years before Notion, so many pieces of software were just digitized versions of analog office toolstypewriters, file cabinets, desktop ledgers replaced by online document editors, databases and spreadsheets. Nobody wakes up wanting to make software. Inside Design: Do you feel that like digital designers, UX designers, product designers are a little too narrow in their vision? Oftentimes when you are designing and building something, youre shifting constraints. And its flexibility can be used by project managers, productivity superfans, recruiters, executives, product teamspretty much anyone who needs to use computers to get things done (but cant code). Previously, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Adobes 99U and a founder of Technically Media. Someone with little experience can quickly customize using modules like linked databases, task boards, customer queries, and wiki pages. Youre really left with a completely blank, fresh space designed to feel like a breath of fresh air and spacious opportunity to think deeply. He talked to thousands of customers and grew to understand the use cases and depth of the productsetting him up, he says, to figure out how to build out the rest of Notion. Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. 2023 InVisionApp Inc. Allrightsreserved. The 32-year-old founder of Notion says, all while regularly dropping mentions of computing legends Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart as his inspiration. We were just, code, code, code. Today, billions of us use computers, yet only 0.34 percent of the global population are software developers. Bleary from the night before, Notion team members suddenly had to explain to their roommates, spouses and kids that they had to work. is a journalist and storytelling coach. Notion had previously been valued at $800 million. Today, they are transitioning as a business from a startup to a mature company, and transitioning as a product from a tool with a cult followingthe kind that people namedrop in Twitter profiles to show tech-design credto a tool used by the worlds largest companies. Notion is staking a claim in a market dominated by giantsMicrosoft and Google, with more than 2 billion users between them. Biography of Ivan Zhao Last update: November 30, 2022 Career Ivan Zhao is currently Chief Executive Officer at Notion Labs - View - Notion Labs org chart Create your alert to follow the career of Ivan Zhao. Biography of Ivan Pavlov, Father of Classical Conditioning. Notion has hired seven salespeople, who will not be able to visit clients in person while social distancing is in effect. That traction attracted venture capitalists and others who wanted to invest in Notion last year. Do that first, then figure out what skin you put on it. (Today, Ravikant has slightly less than a bazillion, at 1.9 million.) Zhao, 39, consolidated her domination of the category . The ambition of Zhao and his team at Notion cant be contained in any single decade. That you will have to have all these skillsets combined in one person? Changpeng Zhao (Chinese: ; pinyin: Zho Chngpng), commonly known as CZ, is a Chinese-born Canadian businessman, investor, and software engineer.Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume as of July 2022.. 1988-1991 - Team Leader with Centro-Svilluppo Materiali (Centre for Materials Development). Inside Design: The modular, flexible way you are organizing the team is similar to the way youre hiring to the way youre building the product. Moby Dick is written by one person, he said. They looked for ways to cultivate the community at every step along the way., Then, I realized, it doesnt make sense. Zhao: We believe more people should be able to modify the tools they use in their everyday lives and work. After a few months convincing his wife that they could reinvent their lives in San Francisco, Kothari joined as chief operating officer. People use Notion in place of note-taking apps, collaboration services or writing software, and they pay a monthly fee of $4 to $20 each for extra features like more security and storage. Zhao: Yes, absolutely. Erin Griffith. Zhao was uninterested in school in Beijing, preferring to focus on manga and movies. Zhao had cold-emailed Herzberg, saying he was a fan of how Slack built its product and brand, and, impressed by the energy in the email, she invited him to drop by the office. At its most basic, Notion enables people to use just one interface to make, edit and customize documents; to manage projects; to create information-sharing wikis; and to design all kinds of charts and tables. I reached out on a whim, he said. And Notions mission is about software tool-making. Even if those tools just look like black-and-not-quite-white document editors at first. Inside Design: How do you stop the undeniable and neverending pressure for you guys to raise more money, go hire a hundred people, to expand? tags N/A. I marveled to myself, Who is this man? He is so discerning and so curious. Herzberg liked Zhao so much that she downloaded Notion immediately. Export. The colleague mentioned one of the people in the scene, a student at the University of Maryland, College Park, named Simon Last, was doing interesting work. I van Petrovich Pavlov was born on September 14, 1849 at Ryazan, where his father, Peter Dmitrievich Pavlov, was a village priest. Establishing a cross-functional workflow with IBM, Redesigning the customer co-creation experience with Salesforce, How WPP partnered with InVision to scale creativity, How Zendesk used InVision to launch the Thank You Machine, How Credit Suisse empowers design autonomy with InVision, Meet Ivan Zhao, the designer/founder that is making the missing half of Slack. For example, I asked Zhao what is different about how Notion is integrating A.I., compared with Bing or ChatGPT. He initially raised $2 million, which he spent on developing a product over several years. Then, on New Years Day in 2021, as Notion workers were relaxing at home, Kothari and Zhao started getting alerts saying Notion had crashed. Most everyone has to download an app or run a piece of software to accomplish a task. So you dont have to go out there to hunt for whats new. It set itself apart from competitorswhich also include Dropbox, Atlassian and Oraclethrough a growing set of clever, built-for-purpose templates such as to-do lists, product roadmaps and client databases. And multiple other people told me that was one of the best pitches that they had seen at Sequoia.That story he told to Sequoia is the one Zhao started piecing together in college, when he read Engelbarts paper about how humans could someday use computers to become more powerful problem solvers. Ivan Zhao Co-founder, Notion # 39657 10,809 followers 246 following 3,240 points Follow About Activity Upvotes 5 Hunted 1 Collection Stacks About notion.so Links Twitter Interests Productivity Badges 5 Top Product Veteran Maker History Notion One workspace. Ivan Zhao - Co-founder, CEO @ Notion - Crunchbase Person Profile Person Ivan Zhao Overview Number of Founded Organizations 1 CB Rank (Person) 1,361 Primary Job Title Co-founder, CEO Primary Organization Notion Location San Francisco, California, United States Regions San Francisco Bay Area, West Coast, Western US Gender Male We wanted to create a space that was as distraction-free as humanly possible. Inside Design: As the founder, how close does this version of Notion match the one in your mind? A Ivan Zaho is a Founder at Notion based in San Francisco, California. Also, the software that so many of us used every day couldnt be modified at all. Zhao: Teams are increasingly tech-savvy, with things like shortcuts and working collaboratively becoming second nature. Sequoia partner Mike Vernal, a former Facebook vice president, was an original Notion angel investor back in 2013. Zhao remembers eight-hour Zooms, day after day, after the crash. Ivan Zhao Founder at Notion San Francisco, California, United States 7K followers 500+ connections Join to view profile Notion Company Website Activity I spent most of my 2022 planning my. Tag them by department, assign them to specific people, even give them due dates if you want. Although she spoke little English, in 1998 her parents sent her to England, where she attended the Sussex boarding school Brighton College from 1998 to 2000. Thats useful. Ivan Zhao Hey there, I'm Ivan! And then the web-first application came. Notion gives you a birds eye view of everything your team is working on and then lets you drill down into the smallest details if and when you want. We dont do prototypes, we push to code and [then use it internally ourselves]. Its great that people believe in the company and believe in me. The computing pioneers thought everybody would make their own tools, make their own software, Zhao says, returning to a favorite idea. Since last May, its users have organized more than 180 meet-ups in 21 countries and 52 cities. Transformative collaboration for all the work you do. And thats one way. Instead, the company focused primarily on growing the community. Joint/Adjunct . In a moment of uncertainty, Mr. Kothari said, financing is a signal of stability, which is important for us.. But it wont always look like this, says Zhao and Kothari. Colleagues N/A. Frey: Notions interface seems to do a great job of getting out of the way so users can focus on what they want to create. Its like if you studied physics in high school and college and you didnt know who Newton is. However, when they rolled out this new Notion to their friends, they saw the framework theyd chosen to build with, a Google web framework called Web Component, crashed constantly. Yue Zhao Visit Yue Zhao's profile on the York Research Database to: See a full list of publications; Browse activities and projects; Explore connections, collaborators, related work and more; Profile Biography. This is impossible for most teams to achieve because people are doing work in all kinds of places that arent connected, and people dont think to share. He saw the idea of people being able to make their own software as integral to their ability to be creative, to shape their own environments, to create culture and value. (Kothari still has the email.). A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface. This is not surprising if you consider how these tools evolved. The killer feature is that it is what you make of it.. Movies. This matters because the software-replacement opportunity is massive: companies with more than 2,000 employees use an average of 175 pieces of software, and smaller companies use an average of 73, according to Oktas 2021 Business at Work study. Theres no final pixel-perfect design. We still write documents that mimic paper. Sequoia Capital partner Dannie Herzberg is proud to be among Notions power users, running her work life on it. Metallum Recycling. Ivan Zhao: Tools that let you work the way your brain works. Congcong Pei, Yu Zeng, Liang Zhao, Jing Zhao, Jingjing Wan. You dont need to clean up the whole thing. Growth has been rapid since the 2021 investments. They neednt have worried, and they havent spent it. N/A. Frey: What has changed in the nature of work that has created the need for a tool like Notion? Zhao was born in Beijing as Zhao Ting. In this way, Notion lets you capitalize on all of your institutional history and knowledge to keep doing new, exciting things. 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