2) it breaks traditional productivity software into blocks text, lists, tasks, databases, images, etc. Ivan Zhao is on Facebook. We shook hands, [I had to show] I am not a crazy person.. 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. Zhao remembers eight-hour Zooms, day after day, after the crash. Related Investments Aliases N/A. Or sometimes something is really easy to implement but its really hard to design. ACS Applied Bio Materials 2021, 4 (12 . But within a year or so, he left Inkling and started to assemble his team. History. 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. To get users, Zhao and Last hatched a plan to get Notion featured on Product Hunt, a site that lets people submit tech products on daily lists for the community to comment and vote on. Chuck Frey: If you had to summarize what Notion is and what it represents in 10 words or less, how would you describe it? I was playing basketball and found out, and I was like, What the fuck? 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. It didnt work because the product was not understandable for most people. In this way, you get to see how what youre working on fits into the greater whole. He says his artist friends helped him hone his sense of aesthetics, watching movies with his film studies friends, helping his then-girlfriend and her friends with fashion school portfolios. Location. And we still store them in file cabinets only now its all digital. Instead, they found a small group of really die-hard fans that carried the product with them. We think the pendulum is swinging back to a bundled solution. It seemed wrong that only a few people with the ability to code could build websites and other software tools. Published October 13, 2022. It quickly caught on among techies and early adopters at companies like Samsung and Hearst. It was really popular in the 90s, but somehow people forgot that idea for a couple of decades. . Lasts dad visited to appraise Zhao, perhaps suspecting the men were doing things like sneaking into bars. Zhao: We think tools should mimic the way peoples brains work. This time, Zhao offered him a job. Nova Zelndia. Vernal said this focus on nurturing community was key to getting a foothold in the product world. We recently interviewed him to learn the origin story of Notion, and to get his take on the evolving nature of work . 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. Mr. Zhao started Notion after graduating from the University of British Columbia and working at Inkling, a document-sharing start-up in San Francisco. Its like if you studied physics in high school and college and you didnt know who Newton is. 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. In 2015, Notion co-founders Simon Last and Ivan Zhao had removed from their lives anything that wasnt writing code and eating noodles. The company has stayed small, with 42 employees. I love understanding decision making frameworks, both from a technical perspective (such as algorithmic decision making) and from a . Be the first to contribute! It almost ran out of money.. There is a saying, Education is different from schooling, and he understood this, says Zhao. Zhao: We believe more people should be able to modify the tools they use in their everyday lives and work. Their plan involved asking the famed entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant, who had invested in Notion early, to wake up at midnight, when the new days list opened, and to tweet to his followers to vote for Notion on Product Hunt. YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. 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. One of the biggest holes we fill is the information gap that emerges on teams that work across too many tools without visibility. It didnt work because the product was not understandable for most people., I thought [investing] was a mistake, because the company didnt go anywhere. 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. Megan Finnerty is a journalist and storytelling coach. I feel really strongly about that. 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. 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. 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. Notion is staking a claim in a market dominated by giantsMicrosoft and Google, with more than 2 billion users between them. Chloe Zhao is a Chinese filmmaker best known for her independent U.S. films Songs My Brother Taught Me, The Rider, and Nomadland. Most people, he reasoned, wake up and want to use their computers to browse the internet, to write or to solve a work problem. About Ziyu(Ivan) Zhao. Kothari was born and raised in Ahmedabad, a city of 8 million in Indias western Gujarat state. People are used to working in shared documents and project spaces, and constantly communicating with their colleagues through various channels. I dont know. Add a bio, trivia, and more. Bio. Zhao was unfazed by this success. But somewhere during her high school days, she became increasingly interested in a career in films and TV. It would be Kotharis first investment. When you hire the fifth, what will you be you looking for? So thats one thing. See also Other Works | Publicity Listings | Official Sites View agent, publicist, legal and company contact details on IMDbPro You need master level of UX and pixel-perfect design. 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. We want to figure out how to turn incoming capital into Moby Dicks first before getting more capital. 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. Vernal remembers Notions first few offices had a no-shoes policy, and when he sent Sequoia partners to learn about the company, he would remind them to wear good socks. We recently interviewed him to learn the origin story of Notion, and to get his take on the evolving nature of work today and how his modular masterpiece enables it. 2. Competition to tell a compelling story to big companies is fierce. Is this the simplest mental model we can use? Imagine Andy Warhol, right? Those are really good ideas and theres a lot of then. 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. But if you were to tell me I should read more about architecture and fashion I may answer, Does it help my work? 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. 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. In San Francisco, while Zhao still believed he was right about his grand vision, he realized he was wrong about his market. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. I want Notion, or a company like Notion, to catch that wave. Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. This is not surprising if you consider how these tools evolved. 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. 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!) 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. Dr Ivan SEAH Yu Jun . Welcome to my portfolio. 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. Beyond that, the fact that you can add any variety of things to Notion docs images, videos, embeds from 400+ other apps means you can cobble together a lot of different modes of expression, inspiration pieces, and creative ideas in one place. In the future, Notion will be tackling this even more directly giving people even more capability to shape the tools they use for an increasingly wider variety of applications. Self-driven, highly motivated engineering student seeking to impact society starting from its structural foundations.<br><br>"Take the best that exists and make it better" - Henry Royce<br><br> | Learn more about Ivan Zhao's work experience, education, connections & more by visiting their profile on LinkedIn And theyre the future Fortune 500 companies, he says. 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. He initially raised $2 million, which he. 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. Frey: How does Notion help teams brainstorm and innovate better? The intention, at least for me, is a much larger market. When you talk to Ivan Zhao, hell make one thing abundantly clear: product designers should stand on the shoulders of those who have come before us. Ivan Pavlov, in full Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, (born September 14 [September 26, New Style], 1849, Ryazan, Russiadied February 27, 1936, Leningrad [now St. Petersburg]), Russian physiologist known chiefly for his development of the concept of the conditioned reflex. 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. That allowed the start-up to garner new funding. 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. How did it come to be? Notion had previously been valued at $800 million. Find Ivan's email address, mobile number, work history, and more. It was positively received by Product Hunt and rated #1 Product of the Month. He is interested in creativity, storytelling, and vibes. 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. 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. Since last May, its users have organized more than 180 meet-ups in 21 countries and 52 cities. 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. Stop looking at Dribbble. Ivan Zhao is also currently the CEO of the company. Sequoia partner Mike Vernal, a former Facebook vice president, was an original Notion angel investor back in 2013. 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. He came to the Slack office, which was brand new and very nicely designed in this midcentury-modern way. After a few months convincing his wife that they could reinvent their lives in San Francisco, Kothari joined as chief operating officer. And multiple other people told me that was one of the best pitches that they had seen at Sequoia.. Inside Design: Do you feel that like digital designers, UX designers, product designers are a little too narrow in their vision? 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. 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. MetaLab said it used Notion to present work to clients and to collect their feedback all in one place, among other tasks. He offered Last an internship, showing Last the same Notion prototype hed shown Kothari during the investment conversation. 1988-1991 - Team Leader with Centro-Svilluppo Materiali (Centre for Materials Development). Nearly all people now relied on computers to help them do all kinds of things, yet most couldnt write their own code. The site was down for four nerve-wracking hours. Ivan Zhao has been working as a Director, Business Development at Metallum Recycling for 4 years. And if thats the goal, were still really early with that. Kothari and Zhao think a lot about those big enterprises. Originally from Beijing, China, Chloe Zhao was born on 31 March 1982 . When the medium is so new, people have entire green fields in front of them, and there is less thinking about business. Their angel investment money dwindling, they faced a brutal choice: Fire their fledgling team of 4 and start over, or run out of cash. One of the reasons its so popular is that it chains together all the notifications and the communications of the SaaS products together, right? We wanted to create a space that was as distraction-free as humanly possible. A portrait of Engelbart hangs prominently in a first-floor hallway. I am Ivan Zhao, cofounder/designer of Notion - a unified tool for docs, wikis, and tasks. Topics of Influence N/A. Before the most recent funding, Notion, which was founded in 2013, had raised $17 million. Ivan Zhao Biography It looks like we don't have any Biography for Ivan Zhao yet. Notion has hired seven salespeople, who will not be able to visit clients in person while social distancing is in effect. He also developed an appreciation for aesthetics as a student of traditional Chinese watercolor. Its still case by case. Sometimes something is really hard to code. Do that first, then figure out what skin you put on it. In 2013, Zhao and Last raised about $2 million from angel investorsa mix of friends, family and friends of friends. Anyone can read what you 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. 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