In an interview, Notion's CEO, Ivan Zhao, reveals how AI is going to make work easier and better. ivzhao has one repository available. Its almost like you have a brand-new houseyou can decorate however you want, versus the old house, you have to clean, repaint the walls and all that.. Is this the simplest mental model we can use? Instead, the company focused primarily on growing the community. As a backup, hed applied to Stanford University, knowing that if he got in, he could remain in the country as a student. I can be a designer. 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. They neednt have worried, and they havent spent it. Bleary from the night before, Notion team members suddenly had to explain to their roommates, spouses and kids that they had to work. Then Bill Gates won, so Microsoft Windows runs everywhere. Thats useful. Movies. They picked Kyoto, almost on a whim, and subleased their spaces in San Francisco. Ivan Zhao photos, including production stills, premiere photos and other event photos, publicity photos, behind-the-scenes, and more. Sometimes I joke, Moby Dick was written by one person. Three of [Herman Melville] probably wouldnt be much faster. Ivan Zhao Founder at Notion Labs. It became how people think, how people communicated. Theres no final pixel-perfect design. It was more for nerdy tech crowds. He offered Last an internship, showing Last the same Notion prototype hed shown Kothari during the investment conversation. Thats why all of Notions functionality fades to the back as soon as you start typing. His dads a school principal, Zhao says with a laugh. This is not surprising if you consider how these tools evolved. Ivan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Notion, shares the artistic vision behind his productivity startup's smashing success. How did it come to be? Zhao: Yes, absolutely. 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. Ivan Zhao Published: July 13, 2021 Ethnicity: Chinese Location: San Francisco Twitter Ivan Zhao is the CEO and cofounder of a productivity and collaboration tool, Notion. But it wont always look like this, says Zhao and Kothari. The gambit worked. 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. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. 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. But within a year or so, he left Inkling and started to assemble his team. Im betting on that most people can create their own tools. It was kind of like despair, I would say. We can reproduce that. And then the web-first application came. Colleagues N/A. That traction attracted venture capitalists and others who wanted to invest in Notion last year. Furoxans are potentially useful heteroaromatic units in pharmaceuticals and agrichemicals. 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. In the early days, 40 years ago, when personal computing started, the lines were blurry. Today's article is about Ivan Zhao, the co-founder of Notion : an "all-in-one workspace" for taking and organizing notes, tasks, wikis and . In 2015, Notion co-founders Simon Last and Ivan Zhao had removed from their lives anything that wasnt writing code and eating noodles. 111 Tw Alexander Dr. Research Triangle Park, NC 27709. Well, very few people.. It was very intense and focused. It was probably one of the best investments we made, says Kothari. Sometimes something is really hard to code. Ivan Zhao NZ Country HR Leader @ Honeywell, Professional Coach, helping people and organisations grow through driving continuous learning. Today, billions of us use computers, yet only 0.34 percent of the global population are software developers. notion.so. There, he learned how to code as a participant in the International Olympiad in Informatics, a grade school mathematics and computer science competition. Congcong Pei, Yu Zeng, Liang Zhao, Jing Zhao, Jingjing Wan. 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. An Alloy Platform of DualFingerprints for HighPerformance Stroke Screening. Zhao: We believe more people should be able to modify the tools they use in their everyday lives and work. Just look at Slack. 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. Zhao: Teams are increasingly tech-savvy, with things like shortcuts and working collaboratively becoming second nature. Art at auction worldwide, auction results, prices, biography and art market information by artprice.com. Just dream of a piece of software, and you should just be able to build that using Notion., I thought it was the single best pitch Id ever seen in my time here, a work of art. Zhao Zhao Biography. It quickly caught on among techies and early adopters at companies like Samsung and Hearst. 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. Just click the "Edit page" button at the bottom of the page or learn more in the Biography submission guide. After a year, he didnt get the H-1B visa hed need to stay working in America. Theyre all kind of ugly, right? He made maybe five websites. The company is hiring for about 75 more positions. So Im saying, and Im seeing, and Im hoping that were in this pendulum swing from one product, Microsoft Office, to too many SaaS products. Frey: What has changed in the nature of work that has created the need for a tool like Notion? Each person were looking for will be similar to what we have now. The ambition of Zhao and his team at Notion can't be contained in any single decade. building products to help people at Intus Care, Loftium, and Mojotech. 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. Theres no legacy code. ), but is out at school. 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. Career Achievements Investments Were all using tools that proscribe very specific workflows that rarely match the way we wish we could think, learn and work. Tag them by department, assign them to specific people, even give them due dates if you want. We recently interviewed him to learn the origin story of Notion, and to get his take on the evolving nature of work . Ivan Zhao Founder at Notion . 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. 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. And theyre the future Fortune 500 companies, he says. Zhao, 39, consolidated her domination of the category . 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. So thats one thing. It was unstable. What was your inspiration or motivation for thinking around this? He graduated in cognitive science and fine arts and worked at a software company named Inkling, before establishing Notion. Inside Design: When making Notion, do you ever see whats possible and think: I want to push us all the way over here! but you realize you cant quite yet? I wonder what does it take for every company, every team, every student to run on Notion? Inside Design: Youve hired four product designers. Location: San Francisco, CA Add to My Lists. In 2015, productivity tool Notion nearly died. He focused instead on evolving the product toward his original vision of empowering people to make their own tools, and on growing Notion as a business. Moby Dick is written by one person, he said. We just launched the 1.0 a couple weeks ago, which you can play with the web/Mac app at notion.so (and. 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. I was like, Holy shit. Id never had a guest come to the office and touch the tables, and appreciate the quality of the leather of the chairs. Anyone can read what you share. 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. Zhao remembers sneaking Last into a nearby bar, the Trick Dog. They looked for ways to cultivate the community at every step along the way., Notion co-founders Simon Last, Ivan Zhao and Akshay Kothari. As the world pivoted to remote work, signups grew. Sequoia Capital partner Dannie Herzberg is proud to be among Notions power users, running her work life on it. The present comes from the past. The romantic goal is: Can we make tools that allow people to use computers like a new medium? One of the reasons its so popular is that it chains together all the notifications and the communications of the SaaS products together, right? I can be a designer. But if youre truly growing so fast, why not add more people? Zhao reached out and asked Last for a meeting. MetaLab said it used Notion to present work to clients and to collect their feedback all in one place, among other tasks. He came to the Slack office, which was brand new and very nicely designed in this midcentury-modern way. In 2013, Zhao and Last raised about $2 million from angel investorsa mix of friends, family and friends of friends. Inside Design: To me, your view on talent mirrors your product mindset: that all these SaaS tools are going to eventually coalesce into one. 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. On Wednesday, Notion said it raised $50 million from Index Ventures and other investors that valued it at $2 billion. About Ziyu(Ivan) Zhao. Meet the whiteboard transforming the way teams work together. Yet, Zhao says, within a decade, every software company could be considered a competitor, because Notion will eventually be able to make any kind of tool, or will be able to integrate with countless pieces of software. Mr. Zhao started Notion after graduating from the University of British Columbia and working at Inkling, a document-sharing start-up in San Francisco. Soon after joining Sequoia in 2016, he noticed startups increasingly running their businesses on Notion, using it to send memos or make decks. 3,234 Followers, 1,367 Following, 180 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Ivan Zhao (@ivanhzhao) That you will have to have all these skillsets combined in one person? I van Petrovich Pavlov was born on September 14, 1849 at Ryazan, where his father, Peter Dmitrievich Pavlov, was a village priest. Enjoy the read! 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 . 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. After a few months convincing his wife that they could reinvent their lives in San Francisco, Kothari joined as chief operating officer. Publisher. Nobody wakes up wanting to make software. Today, Zhao estimates Notion can consistently replace about a dozen pieces of software like project-management or list-making tools. As an electrical engineer, I was like, Oh my God! More about Ivan Zhao Selected links Ivan Zhao - Founder - Notion | LinkedIn Do you need to know more about Ivan Zhao? Related Investments Aliases N/A. Stop looking at Dribbble. So for a company like Notion, we dont need to do anything just to pick up those ideas and execute. Zhao sees Last as his product co-founder and Kothari as his business co-founder. Zhao started working on the first version of Notion while day-jobbing at the ebook startup Inkling in San Francisco. People think fast, so they should be able to capture and restructure their thoughts fast too. He has over 320 original manuscripts published in . 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. I want Notion, or a company like Notion, to catch that wave. 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. 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