Erin Griffith. Hes out there, just trying to democratize software, make it so that everybody can put these building blocks together. Kothari said he was so impressed with the scope of Zhaos vision that he thought about Notion for months after the pitch, ultimately calling him and offering Zhao a bigger investment. Sequoia partner Mike Vernal, a former Facebook vice president, was an original Notion angel investor back in 2013. His impression of founders flocking to Notion is more than anecdotal. Im the nerd of the friend circle, so I started coding peoples websites for them. About. This time, Zhao offered him a job. Does this solve peoples problems in the fewest clicks possible? 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. Lastly, theres a lot of transparency that comes from storing all your knowledge, information and work in one place that your entire team can see and access. Zhao: We think tools should mimic the way peoples brains work. Were continuing to grow our functionality, and are excited about whats ahead in 2019. And at that pointit was really just the ambition of the project that resonated with me, Kothari says. Theyd seen it coming, says Zhao, like a Doomsday clock. Notionist: Your source for tips and education for this powerful productivity tool, Notion Made Simple: A must learning investment for success with this tool, How Valentin Perez amplifies his creativity with Notion, Notion boosts user productivity 20-30%, survey shows, 10 ways you can use Notion to be wickedly creative, Ivan Zhao reflects on the thinking behind Notion. Zhao looked at his portfolio, which featured, among other things, code that enabled peoplekids, presumablyto add body parts to a creature based on their answers to either/or logic gates. The fund-raising was completed in 36 hours last week after the virus pushed Ivan Zhao, Notions founder and chief executive, and Akshay Kothari, Notions chief operating officer, to rethink their previous position of not relying too much on venture capital. You can be a designer. But somewhere during her high school days, she became increasingly interested in a career in films and TV. Ivan Zhao Biography It looks like we don't have any Biography for Ivan Zhao yet. Welcome to my portfolio. Eventually, this hunch would prove right. Purpose-built templates to help your team collaborate more effectively. Topics of Influence N/A. The iPhone totally opened up creation, Zhao says. They wanted to make software that could empower a global community of everyday people to make their own apps and tools without having to write code, all to unlock new levels of creativity and productivity. However, the applications for furoxan-based compounds have been hampered due to the underdevelopment of their synthetic methods. Come on! The 32-year-old founder of Notion says, all while regularly dropping mentions of computing legends Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart as his inspiration. 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. That you will have to have all these skillsets combined in one person? They neednt have worried, and they havent spent it. Its like, everybody can be a designer. Inside Design: I once had someone tell me that every startup or every company is a bet on a yet-to-be-realized future. President of Beijing Society of Immunology. In this interview, we talked about the early days of building Notion and creating a community of passionate users, how he uses Notion in his personal life, the influence of Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart on Notion's design, and much more. Ivan Zhao, the founder of Notion, has created a tool that is remarkably unique: It helps users gain clarity and be more productive in their work - yet each one can design a unique workspace that's tailored to his or her needs. N/A. Joint/Adjunct . 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.so. For the next six months, the company stopped building new features and instead focused on strengthening its infrastructure and migrating to multiple databases. One of the reasons its so popular is that it chains together all the notifications and the communications of the SaaS products together, right? Prof. DAN ZHAO Biography I am currently the Director of Master Engineering Studies and Chair of Research Committee in University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. MetaLab said it used Notion to present work to clients and to collect their feedback all in one place, among other tasks. Ivan Zaho is a Founder at Notion based in San Francisco, California. Your email address will not be published. Bleary from the night before, Notion team members suddenly had to explain to their roommates, spouses and kids that they had to work. 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. 2) it breaks traditional productivity software into blocks text, lists, tasks, databases, images, etc. The intention, at least for me, is a much larger market. I still remember his pitch. Go to the edge of what is still acceptable to your peers and go to the far, far edge of that. I think we have an early fit that we can double down on. The headline read: The Only App You Need for Work-Life Productivity. The article called the updated version a rare renaissance app. This new version featured new project management capabilities and relational databases, the kinds of everyday tables and spreadsheets that power countless projects and companies. Zhao was also recently tapped to direct @marvel's upcoming film The Eternals, making her the third woman, and only the second woman of colour to handle a major movie in the superhero boom Join . Each person were looking for will be similar to what we have now. 100% of the Fortune 100 collaborate with InVision. 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? And to stretch what money they had left, theyd moved from San Francisco to Kyoto, Japan, which was less than half as expensive. He had a hunch that investing in individual users would ultimately get Notion into big companies. ), but is out at school. Frey: How does Notion help individuals and teams to manage their tasks and projects better? That summer, Kothari, one of Notions angel investors, was working for LinkedIn in India, and was visiting San Francisco. And multiple other people told me that was one of the best pitches that they had seen at Sequoia.. 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. He initially raised $2 million, which he. And thats one way. Published October 13, 2022. Or, if you have a laptop, you should be using Notion for thinking and collaboration, and communication. Chlo Zhao has become the second woman in the history of the Oscars to be named best director at this year's Academy Awards in Los Angeles. While many start-ups grapple with the fallout from the pandemic, this San Francisco company raised more cash to survive. 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. (Today, Ravikant has slightly less than a bazillion, at 1.9 million.) Wired wrote about it, and the Apple App Store featured it. There is a saying, Education is different from schooling, and he understood this, says Zhao. At that point, thats where Notions idea got formed. Zhao became obsessed with democratizing access to the tool-making ability of coding. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates they copied Xerox PARC. The first version of Notion was a tool that non-coders could use to make their own apps. How high is the bar to be considered good at a skill? Lets just reset this. Now just the two of them, Zhao and Last wanted to go somewhere cheaper than San Francisco, and somewhere theyd never visited. Mr. Zhao started Notion after graduating from the University of British Columbia and working at Inkling, a document-sharing start-up in San Francisco. Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. Inside Design: Do you feel that like digital designers, UX designers, product designers are a little too narrow in their vision? You cant see it, but you can feel it. Notions biggest differentiator is how users tailor it to their personal or professional needs by incorporating whatever mix of blockscharts, databases, notes, videos, photos, lists, mapsthey want to use to accomplish a task. We were just, code, code, code, Zhao remembers. 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. And just talk to people in restaurants, observe how theyre eating ramen, and see if you can change something about their experience. We think the pendulum is swinging back to a bundled solution. Frey: What holes does Notion fill that existing productivity, information management and collaboration tools werent addressing? And there were no good tools, Zhao said. Description. He was who Notion needed. So we went from one thing, Microsoft office, and it became many, many different SaaS products today. And until more people could do that, Zhao felt that the real promise of human-computer interaction would be limited to the creativity of coders, who tend to write software that solves their own problems, or they write software that people will pay to use. I love understanding decision making frameworks, both from a technical perspective (such as algorithmic decision making) and from a . Chuck Frey: If you had to summarize what Notion is and what it represents in 10 words or less, how would you describe it? History. For a two- or three-year window, Notion was high on our list of companies that we admired from afar, Vernal says. You have all these other planes of vision. BIO. And I was like, This sounds amazing,, The investments we made there allowed us to build Notion in a way that it could serve the teenagers using Notion for their use cases all the way to big enterprises using it., In the next 5 to 10 years, Notion could be the front-end infrastructure for the world. Ivan Zhao is on Facebook. 3,234 Followers, 1,367 Following, 180 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Ivan Zhao (@ivanhzhao) Get the Notion Mastery Course*: https://bit.ly/3rNMSRD Discover Notion here: https://bit.ly/3Ammn9B Get Notion templates from Easlo: https://gum. Do that first, then figure out what skin you put on it. 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. He and Zhao met every six months or so, sharing insights and suggesting possible employees. Notion is also profitable. 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. Notion does this in a couple of ways: 1) It brings all your work into one space so you can close all the many apps and tabs youve been using, and work alongside your team in the same spot, and. Ivan Zhao is Founder at Notion. Look at how the business history of the past couple of decades. After more than a year of pandemic lockdowns, high school and college students started streamlining the overlap of remote school and remote friendship by using Notion to organize their livesand they were talking about it on TikTok. ivzhao has one repository available. The best way to do this is to create a database of all tasks across your entire team and organization. YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. 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 says this helped him understand how to make Notion more useful, and it gave him a sense of Notions growing communitypeople smitten with the minimalist aesthetic, or who loved customizing templates to make book-reading logs or skincare diaries. ! he says with a laugh. Why would I do that? How do you answer cynicism with curiosity? N/A. People think fast, so they should be able to capture and restructure their thoughts fast too. We recently interviewed him to learn the origin story of Notion, and to get his take on the evolving nature of work . Most everyone has to download an app or run a piece of software to accomplish a task. He wrote, Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions.. Update information for Ivan Zhao More at IMDbPro Contact Info: View agent, publicist, legal on IMDbPro Known For Painting Make-Up Department 2015 Hide all | | Edit Filmography Hide Makeup Department (1 credit) Publisher. Kothari was a heavy user of the site, visiting multiple times a day to weigh in on conversations, to see what other developers were up to and to recruit. Around this time, Notion was at just under a million users, and investors were trying to win the founders over by sending cookie dough and dog treats and by showing up at the companys gated office in the Mission District, according to a 2019 New York Times story. A328 David P Rall Building. 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 By navigating this website you agree to our cookie policy. In viral videos, Gen Z power users would show off the ways theyd customized Notion to help them get more out of their hobbies and to collaborate on school projects. Try to be conservative. Study some history of computing stuff or pioneers of the seventies or sixties. He wanted coding to stop being a tiny community of specially educated people. But Shana Fisher, an investor at Third Kind Venture Capital who had earlier backed the start-up, cautioned Mr. Zhao about raising too much capital because it could be distracting. It didnt work because the product was not understandable for most people. The two believed Notion was worth this effort because they were trying to make it into something that would revolutionize peoples relationships with computers and software. Export. 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. Zhaos vision of creating a community of people empowered to make computers help them be more creative and productive has remained constant. Those are really good ideas and theres a lot of then. It is also building new features into its software like options for dictating who can access and edit documents to satisfy larger companies legal, security and compliance requirements. We just launched the 1.0 a couple weeks ago, which you can play with the web/Mac app at notion.so (and we are hiring!) Its great that people believe in the company and believe in me. One of the biggest holes we fill is the information gap that emerges on teams that work across too many tools without visibility. Zhao, 39, consolidated her domination of the category . The company has stayed small, with 42 employees. 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 Test Drive ZoomInfo's Directories Already today, some Notion-adjacent businesses are making more than $1 million a year by designing clever templates. Today, Zhao estimates Notion can consistently replace about a dozen pieces of software like project-management or list-making tools. In this way, you get to see how what youre working on fits into the greater whole. Were all using tools that proscribe very specific workflows that rarely match the way we wish we could think, learn and work. Stop looking at Dribbble. Notion wants to challenge this status quo. I argue thats the only way to solve a problem. Zhao: Teams are increasingly tech-savvy, with things like shortcuts and working collaboratively becoming second nature. People can dive into notes from other peoples meetings, or search for past campaigns to understand how to create a new one, just to name a couple of examples. By the start of the pandemic, Notion had about 40 employees and theyd raised about $50 million as an insurance policy against pandemic uncertainty, says Kothari. "We're unique in the way that we're already where you work," Zhao told me. I was like, Holy shit. Collaborate in real time on a digital whiteboard. On Wednesday, Notion said it raised $50 million from Index Ventures and other investors that valued it at $2 billion. Their bright, loft-style offices have sisal mat floor coverings, Michel Ducaroys famously curving Togo couches and Alvar Aaltos iconic, simple wooden Artek stools. He was kind enough to take it, Kothari says. Theres a short history of this (and how it influenced Notion) here. New Zealand Ivan Zhao Managing Director Guangzhou. 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. Metallum Recycling. This version had Notions iconic, black-and-not-quite-white look, and the ability to do word processing, of course, as well as to make drag-and-drop to-do lists and wikis, and it had more than 30 document templates for things like product roadmaps. Frey: What has changed in the nature of work that has created the need for a tool like Notion? 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. Notion, Maker of Collaboration Software, Raises $50 Million. There, he learned how to code as a participant in the International Olympiad in Informatics, a grade school mathematics and computer science competition. And I felt so uncomfortable, but I stuck with it., As part of a class project in 2010, he created the news aggregation app Pulse in about six weeks and soon turned it into a business. Per Vulture, she grew up as "a rebellious child and a poor student," but her father become a top executive at successful steel company Shougang Group. Only those who can code, and sometimes not even them. The present comes from the past. As the world pivoted to remote work, signups grew. 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. Megan was part of the team that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism; and her methods have helped more than 7,000 people tell stories in front of more than 100,000 people. About Ivan Zhao: Ivan is a senior at Brown University studying Applied Math and Computer Science. That kickstarted our product on Product Hunt. That has since quadrupled, Mr. Kothari said. Vernal tells a story about Zhao pitching Sequoia by walking through the last 50 years of computing history, with a narrative arc showing Notion as the next step in decades of iterations. On the west coast of Canada he learned English from watching Spongebob Squarepants., Zhao attended the University of British Columbia, and, figuring he already understood computer science, focused on cognitive science and art, having picked up photography his senior year of high school. Ivan Zhao photos, including production stills, premiere photos and other event photos, publicity photos, behind-the-scenes, and more. We shook hands, [I had to show] I am not a crazy person.. Follow their code on GitHub. Notions design also distinguishes it, with a restrained, black-and-not-quite-white aesthetic. 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