Location: San Francisco, CA Add to My Lists. 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. He currently resides in Philadelphia. We want to give more people the ability to build the tools they actually want and need without having to code. We started with Notion 1.0, which was all about docs and notes, and then introduced 2.0 with databases in the spring of 2018. As an electrical engineer, I was like, Oh my God! YSC cookie is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages. Zhao Liying was born on 16th October 1987 in Langfang, Hebei Provice of China into a middle class family. Does this solve peoples problems in the fewest clicks possible? UX Designer - Corporate Marketing. 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. 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. 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. So they called Sarah Cannon, an investor at Index Ventures who had been courting Notion for over a year. 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. 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. But within a year or so, he left Inkling and started to assemble his team. Frey: What holes does Notion fill that existing productivity, information management and collaboration tools werent addressing? Dr Ivan SEAH Yu Jun . The company is hiring for about 75 more positions. Not necessarily capital. He. 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. 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. Meet the whiteboard transforming the way teams work together. 984-287-3702. shanshan.zhao@ nih.gov. Welcome to my tiny corner of the internet where I'm probably tinkering with random software and tools, climbing up walls or buildings, or eating my way through a city. The romantic goal is: Can we make tools that allow people to use computers like a new medium? 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. That traction attracted venture capitalists and others who wanted to invest in Notion last year. The company declined to disclose its revenue, but said it had made money since 2018. Or sometimes something is really easy to implement but its really hard to design. Menu. The killer feature is that it is what you make of it.. 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. 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. 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. I argue thats the only way to solve a problem. Zhao: There are so many apps these days. 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. Published October 13, 2022. 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. A collaborative canvas to work on anything from anywhere. 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. 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. She starred alongside Joana Solnado and Margarida Vilanova in the 2009 television series Sentimentos. They neednt have worried, and they havent spent it. Inside Design: Youve spoken about how designers should look sideways to other fields for inspiration. Nearly all people now relied on computers to help them do all kinds of things, yet most couldnt write their own code. It was not really a product, Zhao says. The first version of Notion was a tool that non-coders could use to make their own apps. Purpose-built templates to help your team collaborate more effectively. 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. Ivan Zhao Managing Director Guangzhou. But, UX and pixel-perfect design take some longer time. The latter earned her several awards, including the Golden Globe for best director. While many are cutting staff and slashing costs as they reel from the outbreaks fallout, others have experienced a surge in demand. For the next six months, the company stopped building new features and instead focused on strengthening its infrastructure and migrating to multiple databases. Today, billions of us use computers, yet only 0.34 percent of the global population are software developers. Right now very few of us can. In another move toward ubiquity, Notion launched the beta version of its public API in 2021, enabling developers to connect Notion to payment systems and customer relationship managers, further rooting it in a workplace software ecosystem. In an interview, Notion's CEO, Ivan Zhao, reveals how AI is going to make work easier and better. A brand-new code base is always happy. He wanted coding to stop being a tiny community of specially educated people. Notion's co-founders are growing an enduring business by nurturing the creative community. And you can filter it to see just your tasks or a colleagues tasks. I was playing basketball and found out, and I was like, What the fuck? And just talk to people in restaurants, observe how theyre eating ramen, and see if you can change something about their experience. So for a company like Notion, we dont need to do anything just to pick up those ideas and execute. 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. ! he says with a laugh. 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. 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. 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. building products to help people at Intus Care, Loftium, and Mojotech. supporting ecosystems at Entrepreneurship Program, BRIC and Tea Time. They knew they needed to move Notion onto multiple databases, but they hadnt prioritized it. It was very intense and focused. 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. In 2012, as he prepared to graduate, many of his friends needed online portfolios. Adding another person doesnt necessarily give you a higher-quality Moby Dick. It doesnt even necessarily make it faster.. On Etsy alone, there are tens of thousands of templatesmeal planning, creating an astrology journal, and bootstrapping startup operations. Zhao was unfazed by this success. Zhao: Yes, absolutely. In enterprise software alone, people use a whole portfolio of software tools, and most of them have very narrow use cases. His impression of founders flocking to Notion is more than anecdotal. A lot of our functionality has been designed in service to that. Kothari was born and raised in Ahmedabad, a city of 8 million in Indias western Gujarat state. In a moment of uncertainty, Mr. Kothari said, financing is a signal of stability, which is important for us.. He and Zhao met every six months or so, sharing insights and suggesting possible employees. We shook hands, [I had to show] I am not a crazy person.. She is the first Asian woman of color to win the Top DGA Award. Sean Blanda is the Editorial Director for InVision. 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. At that point, thats where Notions idea got formed. Zhao became obsessed with democratizing access to the tool-making ability of coding. Nobody knows how to learn how to do them properly. Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the world more open and connected. It was really popular in the 90s, but somehow people forgot that idea for a couple of decades. And since everyone thinks and works differently, this means tools need to be very flexible. Inside Design: I know you take pride in keeping small and nimble. Notions design also distinguishes it, with a restrained, black-and-not-quite-white aesthetic. Chloe Zhao is a Chinese filmmaker best known for her independent U.S. films Songs My Brother Taught Me, The Rider, and Nomadland. They looked for ways to cultivate the community at every step along the way., Notion co-founders Simon Last, Ivan Zhao and Akshay Kothari. Within three years, Kothari had sold Pulse to LinkedIn for $90 million, and Zhao had started Notion. 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. Bleary from the night before, Notion team members suddenly had to explain to their roommates, spouses and kids that they had to work. About. Before the most recent funding, Notion, which was founded in 2013, had raised $17 million. 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. ivzhao has one repository available. Why would I do that? How do you answer cynicism with curiosity? 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. I still remember his pitch. Were continuing to grow our functionality, and are excited about whats ahead in 2019. Megan Finnerty is a journalist and storytelling coach. 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. 2) it breaks traditional productivity software into blocks text, lists, tasks, databases, images, etc. 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. Sometimes something is really hard to code. 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. Frey: What has changed in the nature of work that has created the need for a tool like Notion? Related Investments Aliases N/A. That allowed the start-up to garner new funding. Ivan Zhao Bellevue, WA. Join Facebook to connect with Ivan Zhao and others you may know. Ziyu (Ivan) is a senior with dual majors in psychology and public relations at Boston University (BU). They looked for ways to cultivate the community at every step along the way., Then, I realized, it doesnt make sense. Inside Design: It sounds like each person needs to bring more than one skill set to the table. Front-end stuff you can be taught, its not that hard, right? The key to healthy culture and productivity is over-communication and true understanding of what everyone is working on and why its important. President of Beijing Society of Immunology. As the world pivoted to remote work, signups grew. Previously, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Adobes 99U and a founder of Technically Media. He graduated in cognitive science and fine arts and worked at a software company named Inkling, before establishing Notion. 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. Anyone can read what you share. BIO. They started charging users monthly subscription fees between $4 and $10, and began turning a profit. 111 Tw Alexander Dr. Research Triangle Park, NC 27709. Transformative collaboration for all the work you do. About Ivan Zhao: Ivan is a senior at Brown University studying Applied Math and Computer Science. He also developed an appreciation for aesthetics as a student of traditional Chinese watercolor. This is not surprising if you consider how these tools evolved. It didnt work because the product was not understandable for most people. Every day of the pandemic added more users, and they were running out of database storage. View Site. designer cofounder technology Sequoia Capital partner Dannie Herzberg is proud to be among Notions power users, running her work life on it. Competition to tell a compelling story to big companies is fierce. Microsoft Office did that in the 90s. Frey: Whats the origin story of Notion? It was positively received by Product Hunt and rated #1 Product of the Month. 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. 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. We recently interviewed him to learn the origin story of Notion, and to get his take on the evolving nature of work . Were all using tools that proscribe very specific workflows that rarely match the way we wish we could think, learn and work. Thats how Vernal and others at Sequoia started seeing Notion pop up. 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.. Its tools help office workers, now quarantined in their homes, work together more seamlessly. 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. Theres no final pixel-perfect design. We wanted to create a space that was as distraction-free as humanly possible. Notions co-founders are growing an enduring business by nurturing the creative community. Some of the earliest team members had already departed, and retaining the rest was growing more untenable by the day. Ivan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Notion, shares the artistic vision behind his productivity startup's smashing success. Its like 90% perfect. And to stretch what money they had left, theyd moved from San Francisco to Kyoto, Japan, which was less than half as expensive. Was that intentional? It quickly caught on among techies and early adopters at companies like Samsung and Hearst. He has over 320 original manuscripts published in . That day felt like Christmas. 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. I can be a designer. And its flexibility can be used by project managers, productivity superfans, recruiters, executives, product teamspretty much anyone who needs to use computers to get things done (but cant code). And at that pointit was really just the ambition of the project that resonated with me, Kothari says. And we did all sorts of really wonky projects. Its more about UX. Dr Zhao's field of sub-specialization is in Vitreo-Retinal disease and he performs retina surgery for conditions such as retinal detachment, macular holes and epiretinal membranes, diabetic eye disease (tractional retinal detachment, vitreous hemorrhage) and vitreomacular traction. It seemed wrong that only a few people with the ability to code could build websites and other software tools. I marveled to myself, Who is this man? He is so discerning and so curious., Co-founder Ivan Zhao at Notions San Francisco office, Zhao grew up with his mom in rmq, a city of 4 million in Chinas northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, also known sometimes just as Xinjiang. Notion was profitable, so the founders didnt seek official funding rounds. Theyd seen it coming, says Zhao, like a Doomsday clock. Ivan Zhao Biography It looks like we don't have any Biography for Ivan Zhao yet. N/A. Its really hard to find good people that can do all those, right? 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. You have all these other planes of vision. In this way, Notion lets you capitalize on all of your institutional history and knowledge to keep doing new, exciting things. Ivan Zhao NZ Country HR Leader @ Honeywell, Professional Coach, helping people and organisations grow through driving continuous learning. Theres a short history of this (and how it influenced Notion) here. Welcome to my portfolio. Its easier to correct this [and move faster] if you know both disciplines. Pulse to LinkedIn for $ 90 million, and Zhao had started Notion the next six months or so sharing. 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