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!) 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 thats tailored to his or her needs. Over the years, Kothari rose through the ranks at LinkedIn, becoming vice president of product and moving to Indias tech center, Bengaluru, to help run LinkedIn India as it expanded. Lasts dad visited to appraise Zhao, perhaps suspecting the men were doing things like sneaking into bars. 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. Or, if you have a laptop, you should be using Notion for thinking and collaboration, and communication. Inside Design: It sounds like each person needs to bring more than one skill set to the table. So thats one thing. The founders have time to dress properly, and even enjoy the occasional home-cooked meal. 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. Those are really good ideas and theres a lot of then. Were all using tools that proscribe very specific workflows that rarely match the way we wish we could think, learn and work. 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. Tag them by department, assign them to specific people, even give them due dates if you want. We try to give people a blank canvas that lets them arrange their thoughts in ways that are most helpful to them. I am Ivan Zhao, cofounder/designer of Notion - a unified tool for docs, wikis, and tasks. 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. As he readied Notion for a 2.0 version, Zhao would also reply to users directly on Twitter, building community there by showing that real people were behind the product. New Zealand Ivan Zhao Managing Director Guangzhou. Inside Design: Do you feel that like digital designers, UX designers, product designers are a little too narrow in their vision? In the early days, 40 years ago, when personal computing started, the lines were blurry. The first version of Notion was a tool that non-coders could use to make their own apps. Create press releases and blog posts and keep . Vernal said this focus on nurturing community was key to getting a foothold in the product world. Previously, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Adobes 99U and a founder of Technically Media. 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. Follow their code on GitHub. Congcong Pei, Yu Zeng, Liang Zhao, Jing Zhao, Jingjing Wan. Zhao Liying was born on 16th October 1987 in Langfang, Hebei Provice of China into a middle class family. I van Petrovich Pavlov was born on September 14, 1849 at Ryazan, where his father, Peter Dmitrievich Pavlov, was a village priest. Notions stark black-and-white product offers templates of checklists and projects for, say, bringing on new hires, tracking product development, or managing editorial calendars for marketers. I studied experimental cosmology (Ph.D. from Princeton in 2010) before switching to statistics (Ph.D. from Cornell in 2015). Ivan Zhao NZ Country HR Leader @ Honeywell, Professional Coach, helping people and organisations grow through driving continuous learning. View Ivan Zhao's business profile as Co-Founder and CEO at Lookbooks. Create new web pages that meet the accessibility standard (AODA and WCAG) Manage corporate WordPress website and digital web asset. These men saw computers as a way to help humans be more imaginative, more creative, more capable of leveraging intelligence in ways not yet imagined. I still remember his pitch. Metallum Recycling is part of the HR & Staffing industry, and located in North Carolina, United States. He currently resides in Philadelphia. Kothari remembers that when Zhao posted, he shared a game app hed developed in 2010 called Three Degrees of Wikipedia, which is no longer available. Last year, Notion expanded its service to larger corporate clients, who typically need armies of sales representatives and who negotiate complicated contracts. We realized, in order to be a big software tool, we have to start from a product that is already ubiquitous, that people recognize, and hide the tool-making, hide the programming ability, like how you sugarcoat broccoli. 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. Notions office is devoid of the typical start-up tchotchkes and clutter. 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. I thought it was the single best pitch Id ever seen in my time here, a work of art, he says. 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. In this conversation, Jason talks with Notion's CEO, Ivan Zhao, about what the new AI features mean, and how they might just fu Show Undigital Podcast, Ep An Interview with Notion's CEO Ivan Zhao - Feb 22, 2023 One of the biggest holes we fill is the information gap that emerges on teams that work across too many tools without visibility. 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. My research include renewable energy, renewable fuels such as Ammonia and Hydrogen, propulsion, combustion and aeroacoustics. Notion is staking a claim in a market dominated by giantsMicrosoft and Google, with more than 2 billion users between them. I am Ivan Zhao, cofounder/designer of Notion a unified tool for docs, wikis, and tasks. Notion has hired seven salespeople, who will not be able to visit clients in person while social distancing is in effect. Zhao remembers eight-hour Zooms, day after day, after the crash. In his research, he discovered the conditioned reflex, which shaped the field of behaviorism in psychology. Try to be conservative. Nearly all people now relied on computers to help them do all kinds of things, yet most couldnt write their own code. YSC cookie is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages. And at that pointit was really just the ambition of the project that resonated with me, Kothari says. Ivan Zhao is also currently the CEO of the company. The start-up is now in a tricky stage of building on its growth with more established customers. I reached out on a whim, he said. Topics of Influence N/A. This topic is getting popular again. It was kind of like despair, I would say. Zhao: Weve heard from a number of people that Notions very minimalist, lightweight feel encourages people to write more even if its just jotting down ideas. Theres a short history of this (and how it influenced Notion) here. 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. To do this, within the next 18 months or so, they will improve Notions project management capabilities, among other features, giving the software the final Lego bricks it needs to take on most SaaS companies, says Zhao. And then I consciously dont do that), why the company is only hiring designers who can code, and why he thinks SaaS is a winner-take-all game won by those who truly appreciate the computer screen as a brand new medium. The best way to do this is to create a database of all tasks across your entire team and organization. Ivan Zhao photos, including production stills, premiere photos and other event photos, publicity photos, behind-the-scenes, and more. Location. Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. BIO. While many are cutting staff and slashing costs as they reel from the outbreaks fallout, others have experienced a surge in demand. Zhao, 39, consolidated her domination of the category . Specifically, ChatGPT and Microsoft's new version of Bing have gotten a lot of attention. The killer feature is that it is what you make of it.. Ivan Zhao Managing Director Guangzhou. As of summer 2022, Notion, which has 70 percent of its users outside of America, had opened offices in Dublin, New York City, Tokyo and Hyderabad, and had onboarded 300 employees, up from about 45 last year. They dont write hyper-specific code to do a clever, unique thing an individual person wants to do. That said, increasingly, teams need ways to work better together that dont require a ton of time spent in in-person meetings (which slows everyone down), and a way to keep communication focused and action-oriented. Front-end stuff you can be taught, its not that hard, right? 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. It was not really a product, Zhao says. He and Zhao met every six months or so, sharing insights and suggesting possible employees. In the downstairs of a rented two-story house so small that only a traditional Shoji screen separated their bedrooms, Zhao says they spent 18 hours a day at their laptops, not bothering to dress, clean or cook. Notion, Maker of Collaboration Software, Raises $50 Million, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/technology/notion-startup-fund-raising.html. Your email address will not be published. We got a lot of traction there. Soon, tech insiders, people involved with Y Combinator and other startup incubators, were using it. History. Do that first, then figure out what skin you put on it. You can view this kind of database as a Kanban board if that helps you visualize tasks better. The more you can encourage people to share, and the more you can coax ideas and information out of their heads, the better off your team will be long-term. What did I sign up for? I think the first project was to redesign how people eat ramen noodles. I argue thats the only way to solve a problem. As a backup, hed applied to Stanford University, knowing that if he got in, he could remain in the country as a student. Im the nerd of the friend circle, so I started coding peoples websites for them. In San Francisco, while Zhao still believed he was right about his grand vision, he realized he was wrong about his market. On Wednesday, Notion said it raised $50 million from Index Ventures and other investors that valued it at $2 billion. Mr. Kothari said Notion could have easily raised more than $50 million, but that amount gives the company at least 10 years of financing to operate. He was who Notion needed. 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. What are you betting on? The tones are neutral and warm. The romantic goal is: Can we make tools that allow people to use computers like a new medium? 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. The company is hiring for about 75 more positions. Zhao: Yes, absolutely. Originally from Beijing, China, Chloe Zhao was born on 31 March 1982 . Ivan Zaho is a Founder at Notion based in San Francisco, California. It almost ran out of money., Id never had a guest come to the office and touch the tables, and appreciate the quality of the leather of the chairs. At one point, Notion ran dangerously low on cash and laid off four employees. ACS Applied Bio Materials 2021, 4 (12 . Zhao Zhao is an artist who works across media, incorporating objects, performance, video, and painting into his practice. And then he decided to drop out of school and just work on this full time with me, remembers Zhao. Each person were looking for will be similar to what we have now. The gambit worked. Ivan Zhao started Notion, a productivity software start-up that has made money since 2018, in 2013. It can be a product that is as powerful as those five different SaaS tools. At that time, they declined to meet any venture capitalists or discuss acquiring a higher valuation.. And then the web-first application came. A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface. We were just, code, code, code, Zhao remembers. The company has stayed small, with 42 employees. I was playing basketball and found out, and I was like, What the fuck? These were the kind of people who took it upon themselves to translate the Notion user guide into Korean because it was only available in English; who ran the Notion subreddit, now with 200,000 subscribers, and who ran the Notion Facebook groups in Korea and the Middle East, both with tens of thousands of members. Bio. 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. 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. 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. Every day of the pandemic added more users, and they were running out of database storage. More about Ivan Zhao Selected links Ivan Zhao - Founder - Notion | LinkedIn Do you need to know more about Ivan Zhao? * Notion's Enterprise Success with Community RootsIvan Zhao(Notion, Co-founder and CEO): Notion, the popular maker of productivity and collaboration tools, . 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. is a journalist and storytelling coach. Within three years, Kothari had sold Pulse to LinkedIn for $90 million, and Zhao had started Notion. Notion wants to challenge this status quo. He has over 320 original manuscripts published in . There, he learned how to code as a participant in the International Olympiad in Informatics, a grade school mathematics and computer science competition. Megan Finnerty is a journalist and storytelling coach. Its like, everybody can be a designer. Thats useful. Sometimes something is really hard to code. It was pretty much all hands on deck, Kothari says. View Site. Its brown, Zhao says, pointing to what very much looks like the white background of a Notion page pulled up on a laptop. About Ziyu(Ivan) Zhao. Despite its success, Notions tiny 14-person team has remained heads down and somewhat mercurial. I can be a designer. Theres no legacy code. Is this the simplest mental model we can use? notion.so. Zhao Zhao Biography. Erin Griffith. We also built in mechanisms like drag and drop so its easy and intuitive to rearrange your thoughts once they are down on paper, so to speak. 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. 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. Zhao: In Notion, you can create multiple layers of tasks so that its possible for everyone to see everyones tasks team-wide at the top level, and then drill down into individuals tasks at the most granular level. Ivan Zhao - Systems Engineer and Support Lead - Recreational Services | LinkedIn Ivan Zhao Good person with cybersecurity personality for life Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand 303 followers 300. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates they copied Xerox PARC. Notion had previously been valued at $800 million. But it wont always look like this, says Zhao and Kothari. Frey: How are the needs of work teams evolving, and how does Notion reflect that direction? Description. That traction attracted venture capitalists and others who wanted to invest in Notion last year. Join Facebook to connect with Ivan Zhao and others you may know. Notion's co-founders are growing an enduring business by nurturing the creative community. 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. I was like, Holy shit. Eclipsing one million users, Notion (which bills itself as the missing half of Slack) is becoming one of the more interesting and unique productivity tools around. And there were no good tools, Zhao said. 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) I am Ivan Zhao, cofounder/designer of Notion - a unified tool for docs, wikis, and tasks. But within a year or so, he left Inkling and started to assemble his team. What do you think is going to happen with digital products? Its more about UX. Look at how the business history of the past couple of decades. I wonder what does it take for every company, every team, every student to run on Notion? It was a lot of fun, some of the happiest times, says Zhao. There, Kothari, liberated because he was paying his own way, took a design thinking bootcamp course just because it sounded like fun. You have all these other planes of vision. 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. 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