Every day of the pandemic added more users, and they were running out of database storage. And just talk to people in restaurants, observe how theyre eating ramen, and see if you can change something about their experience. 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. About Ziyu(Ivan) Zhao. Inside Design: How would you recommend designers start learning about the philosophical underpinnings that guide your thinking? Erin Griffith. Related Investments Aliases N/A. 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. I was pushed to go talk to people in supermarkets when they were buying ramen. It was probably one of the best investments we made, says Kothari. Inside Design: As the founder, how close does this version of Notion match the one in your mind? ), but is out at school. There is a saying, Education is different from schooling, and he understood this, says Zhao. How far along is Notion on its journey? Furoxans are potentially useful heteroaromatic units in pharmaceuticals and agrichemicals. Megan Finnerty is a journalist and storytelling coach. Other startups are working to build out similar capabilities; in 2021, Google Workplace added something like Notions interconnectivity with the launch of Smart Canvas, and Microsoft has done the same for 365 with its Fluid Framework upgrade. According to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Zhao was ranked the 136th-richest person in the world, with a net worth . The intention, at least for me, is a much larger market. She is best known for being a Model. He. People were losing their content. Zhao and Last would have to start over using the more stable React Libraries (now the market leader), just as they were burning through the last of their investment. She grew up in her hometown as an ordinary kid without any serious expectations of making a career in the show business. For the next six months, the company stopped building new features and instead focused on strengthening its infrastructure and migrating to multiple databases. It was very intense and focused. Things looked pretty bad from the outside, too, says Kothari, who had been one of Notions angel investors. Then, Hey, lets go out for food. Then, we go eat, go back to work, and do it again., It was not really a product, Zhao says. The present comes from the past. After a year, he didnt get the H-1B visa hed need to stay working in America. 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 They did this, Zhao says, by building relationships with power users. And at that pointit was really just the ambition of the project that resonated with me, Kothari says. Zhao Liying was born on 16th October 1987 in Langfang, Hebei Provice of China into a middle class family. 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. Today, with tens of thousands of templates circulating, Notion reflects that when millions of people are empowered to make their own online tools, they mostly design trackers, project management tools and elaborate tables. Zhao: We think tools should mimic the way peoples brains work. After a few months convincing his wife that they could reinvent their lives in San Francisco, Kothari joined as chief operating officer. Then the internet came along towards the mid-to-late nineties and that sort of breaks apart the monopoly of Microsoft. As Notions features become more robust, the tools we make with it will become more complex. 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. Since last May, its users have organized more than 180 meet-ups in 21 countries and 52 cities. Stop looking at Dribbble. His impression of founders flocking to Notion is more than anecdotal. 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 . He and Zhao met every six months or so, sharing insights and suggesting possible employees. More results. An Alloy Platform of DualFingerprints for HighPerformance Stroke Screening. YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. 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. We try to give people a blank canvas that lets them arrange their thoughts in ways that are most helpful to them. That has since quadrupled, Mr. Kothari said. The best way to do this is to create a database of all tasks across your entire team and organization. Because 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.. It would be Kotharis first investment. She starred alongside Joana Solnado and Margarida Vilanova in the 2009 television series Sentimentos. Be the first to contribute! Adding another person doesnt necessarily give you a higher-quality Moby Dick. It doesnt even necessarily make it faster.. Zhao Zhao is an artist who works across media, incorporating objects, performance, video, and painting into his practice. 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. Ivan Zhao is currently reading Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang (Goodreads Author) bookshelves: currently-reading Want to Read Rate this book 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars Sep 30, 2021 10:35AM See all 11 books that Ivan is reading rss Ivan's Recent Updates "We're unique in the way that we're already where you work," Zhao told me. Zhao saw these people as members of a community, offering them early access to new features, face time with Notion team members and the opportunity to give input on features. Thats how the worlds business runs, thats how people were educated. building products to help people at Intus Care, Loftium, and Mojotech. Take a step back, and see how you can fundamentally solve it. 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. Now, our skin is fairly conservative too. 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. Sometimes something is really hard to code. Welcome to my portfolio. 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. 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. Microsoft Office did that in the 90s. He was educated first at the church school in Ryazan and then at the theological seminary there. Those people have taste; they just dont have good tools., I was like, Holy shit. Its more about UX. We can reproduce that. SAN FRANCISCO The spread of the coronavirus has meant feast or famine for technology start-ups. One of the lucky ones is Notion, a workplace productivity start-up based in San Francisco, whose tools help people organize and track their work. While many start-ups grapple with the fallout from the pandemic, this San Francisco company raised more cash to survive. But it wont always look like this, says Zhao and Kothari. In March 2018, Notion 2.0 was released. When the medium is so new, people have entire green fields in front of them, and there is less thinking about business. Front-end stuff you can be taught, its not that hard, right? 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. . Required fields are marked *. Ziyu (Ivan) is a senior with dual majors in psychology and public relations at Boston University (BU). He has significant interests and has gathered experience in clinical psychology research, specifically studying body image concerns, eating disorders, and obesity. 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. 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. Its tools help office workers, now quarantined in their homes, work together more seamlessly. Bio. 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. His major research interest focuses on autoimmune renal diseases, prevention and treatment of CKD. The product with the most votes in 24 hours earns additional promotion, as well as international tech-community hype. How high is the bar to be considered good at a skill? Ivan Zhao NZ Country HR Leader @ Honeywell, Professional Coach, helping people and organisations grow through driving continuous learning. Menu. 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 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 I love understanding decision making frameworks, both from a technical perspective (such as algorithmic decision making) and from a . On Etsy alone, there are tens of thousands of templatesmeal planning, creating an astrology journal, and bootstrapping startup operations. 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. 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 We were just, code, code, code. What do you think is going to happen with digital products? Despite its success, Notions tiny 14-person team has remained heads down and somewhat mercurial. The tones are neutral and warm. I want Notion, or a company like Notion, to catch that wave. Ivan Zhao Managing Director Guangzhou. 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. Today, Zhao estimates Notion can consistently replace about a dozen pieces of software like project-management or list-making tools. UX Designer - Corporate Marketing. 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. Publisher. The gambit worked. Join Facebook to connect with Ivan Zhao and others you may know. And then he decided to drop out of school and just work on this full time with me, remembers Zhao. Zhao: There are so many apps these days. 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. Its brown, Zhao says, pointing to what very much looks like the white background of a Notion page pulled up on a laptop. 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. 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. Previously, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Adobes 99U and a founder of Technically Media. Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the world more open and connected. And Notions mission is about software tool-making. Even if those tools just look like black-and-not-quite-white document editors at first. Was that intentional? Collaborate in real time on a digital whiteboard. I almost never had that feeling before, Zhao remembers. Kothari and Zhao think a lot about those big enterprises. So for a company like Notion, we dont need to do anything just to pick up those ideas and execute. 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. Kothari said he thought it had a beautiful, clean design, and he happened to be looking for a designer. Its great that people believe in the company and believe in me. About. He imagined these people would like Notion so much, theyd keep using it at work. So the product side of Notion is four people or five people. That allowed the start-up to garner new funding. Zhao says that 68 percent of the most recent Y Combinator class ran their companies on Notion. By Alexa von Tobel, Founder and managing partner, Inspired Capital @. It can be a product that is as powerful as those five different SaaS tools. While many start-ups grapple with the fallout from the pandemic, this San Francisco company raised more cash to survive. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (September 14, 1849 - February 27, 1936) was a Nobel Prize-winning physiologist best known for his classical conditioning experiments with dogs. Take product ideas from planning to launch and every step in between. He had a hunch that investing in individual users would ultimately get Notion into big companies. As a backup, hed applied to Stanford University, knowing that if he got in, he could remain in the country as a student. As an electrical engineer, I was like, Oh my God! You have all these other planes of vision. Zhao chose Inkling instead. Frey: What holes does Notion fill that existing productivity, information management and collaboration tools werent addressing? Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. A lot of our functionality has been designed in service to that. 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. In 2015, productivity tool Notion nearly died. But somewhere during her high school days, she became increasingly interested in a career in films and TV. 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. N/A. Notion was profitable, so the founders didnt seek official funding rounds. Description. 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. 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. Only those who can code, and sometimes not even them. She was head of enterprise sales at Slack when she met Zhao, who visited the offices often to learn from the companys startup journey and lay the groundwork to make Slack Notions first integration. Before the most recent funding, Notion, which was founded in 2013, had raised $17 million. Topics of Influence N/A. 111 Tw Alexander Dr. Research Triangle Park, NC 27709. There, he learned how to code as a participant in the International Olympiad in Informatics, a grade school mathematics and computer science competition. Bugs came from everywhere, Zhao says. Notion's co-founders are growing an enduring business by nurturing the creative community. YSC cookie is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages. That summer, Kothari, one of Notions angel investors, was working for LinkedIn in India, and was visiting San Francisco. Katie. Zhaos mom loaned him $150,000 to keep the startup afloat. We still write documents that mimic paper. It shared a bathroom with a coffee shop, so Last would go in the coffee shop and come out via the bathroom into the bar. 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. Theyre all kind of ugly, right? He made maybe five websites. So by the time the men met up in 2018, Kothari had built new processes, teams and cultures inside a company with thousands of employees all over the world. He came to the Slack office, which was brand new and very nicely designed in this midcentury-modern way. 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. Then Bill Gates won, so Microsoft Windows runs everywhere. . Id never had a guest come to the office and touch the tables, and appreciate the quality of the leather of the chairs. The capital is not going to add another Moby Dick directly. 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. Theres a short history of this (and how it influenced Notion) here. Notions design also distinguishes it, with a restrained, black-and-not-quite-white aesthetic. Last year, Notion expanded its service to larger corporate clients, who typically need armies of sales representatives and who negotiate complicated contracts. If you've paid much attention over the last few weeks, you may have noticed that AI is having a moment. 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. 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. 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. 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) Ivan Zhao has been working as a Director, Business Development at Metallum Recycling for 4 years. 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 a journalist and storytelling coach. Zhao: In college, I did freelance work for friends who wanted to build their own websites, and I saw a couple of things. Some of the earliest team members had already departed, and retaining the rest was growing more untenable by the day. Create press releases and blog posts and keep . 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. Most people, he reasoned, wake up and want to use their computers to browse the internet, to write or to solve a work problem. Moby Dick is written by one person, he said. 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. Follow their code on GitHub. View Ivan Zhao's business profile as Co-Founder and CEO at Lookbooks. Ivan Zhao, by Cayce Clifford for The New York. You can view this kind of database as a Kanban board if that helps you visualize tasks better. 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. notion.so. Thats why all of Notions functionality fades to the back as soon as you start typing. He has over 320 original manuscripts published in . We want to figure out how to turn incoming capital into Moby Dicks first before getting more capital. In 2012, as he prepared to graduate, many of his friends needed online portfolios. Zhao remembers eight-hour Zooms, day after day, after the crash. Its not trying to be everything to everyone, Justin Watt, MetaLabs director of operations and marketing, said of the software. He graduated in cognitive science and fine arts and worked at a software company named Inkling, before establishing Notion. 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. Its like, everybody can be a designer. supporting ecosystems at Entrepreneurship Program, BRIC and Tea Time. Within three years, Kothari had sold Pulse to LinkedIn for $90 million, and Zhao had started Notion. Financing is a signal of stability, which is important for us, said Akshay Kothari, Notions head of operations. They dont write hyper-specific code to do a clever, unique thing an individual person wants to do. But, UX and pixel-perfect design take some longer time. It was positively received by Product Hunt and rated #1 Product of the Month. You can be a designer. 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. ! he says with a laugh. 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. Then from there, the tool that people used to think and work is Microsoft Office and it was one monolithic tool, maybe with a suite of different programs. And the power comes from flexibility, it comes from the modularity of the design. That keeps our workflow really quick. A brand-new code base is always happy. It was not really a product, Zhao says. Youre really left with a completely blank, fresh space designed to feel like a breath of fresh air and spacious opportunity to think deeply. 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. Imagine Andy Warhol, right? Ivan Pavlov Biographical . Get the Notion Mastery Course*: https://bit.ly/3rNMSRD Discover Notion here: https://bit.ly/3Ammn9B Get Notion templates from Easlo: https://gum. Mr. Zhao said he was wary of bloat slowing the start-up down and degrading the quality of its product. It quickly caught on among techies and early adopters at companies like Samsung and Hearst. A Ivan Zaho is a Founder at Notion based in San Francisco, California. Notion Labs Inc is a startup based in San Francisco, founded in 2013 by Ivan Zhao, Chris Prucha, Jessica Lam, Simon Last and Toby Schachman. And since everyone thinks and works differently, this means tools need to be very flexible. A year later, Zhao posted on the blog Hacker News that he was moving to San Francisco to find a job. Disappointingly for the co-founders, it turned out, even if they were Lasts and Zhaos actual friends, non-coders didnt want app-building software. Frey: How does Notion help teams brainstorm and innovate better? Does this solve peoples problems in the fewest clicks possible? 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. Or, if you have a laptop, you should be using Notion for thinking and collaboration, and communication. 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. 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. This is not surprising if you consider how these tools evolved. For example, they want to make Notion capable of publishing into varied content management systems with one click of a button. 2023 InVisionApp Inc. Allrightsreserved. Your email address will not be published. Joint/Adjunct . I still remember his pitch. 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. so you can easily build and stack them however you want to solve your problems your own way (made easier with drag and drop, etc.). April 1, 2020. www.nytimes.com. More about Ivan Zhao Selected links Ivan Zhao - Founder - Notion | LinkedIn Do you need to know more about Ivan Zhao? Inside Design: To me, your view on talent mirrors your product mindset: that all these SaaS tools are going to eventually coalesce into one. It was pretty much all hands on deck, Kothari says. In 2015, Notion co-founders Simon Last and Ivan Zhao had removed from their lives anything that wasnt writing code and eating noodles. Specifically, ChatGPT and Microsoft's new version of Bing have gotten a lot of attention. 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 . The site was down for four nerve-wracking hours. Frey: Whats the origin story of Notion? Ivan Zhao is Founder at Notion. And if thats the goal, were still really early with that. 1407 S Market St, Benson, North Carolina, 27504, United States. The tide turned that same year when Mr. Zhao released Notions software product. Nearly all people now relied on computers to help them do all kinds of things, yet most couldnt write their own code. Keep your work, cut your costs. 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. Even better luck trying to invest in his company: We spoke to the designer/founder (who was born in China before moving to Canada as child) about why designers should get their inspiration from other fields (One thing I personally do is go on Dribbble and look at whats popular. 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. What did I sign up for? I think the first project was to redesign how people eat ramen noodles. You distill from something not in the circular place you are living but look in a plane outside of what you are working. MetaLab said it used Notion to present work to clients and to collect their feedback all in one place, among other tasks. Ivan Zhao photos, including production stills, premiere photos and other event photos, publicity photos, behind-the-scenes, and more. 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