How high is the bar to be considered good at a skill? And then he decided to drop out of school and just work on this full time with me, remembers Zhao. . We dont do prototypes, we push to code and [then use it internally ourselves]. He had a hunch that investing in individual users would ultimately get Notion into big companies. Each person were looking for will be similar to what we have now. Kothari and Zhao talk about this moment as still the early innings of Notion, and see Notion 1.0 as about lists, Notion 2.0 as about databases and the upcoming Notion 3.0 as about whole workflows. 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. Thats useful. 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. Thats how Vernal and others at Sequoia started seeing Notion pop up. Zhao Zhao is an artist who works across media, incorporating objects, performance, video, and painting into his practice. 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. Zhao was uninterested in school in Beijing, preferring to focus on manga and movies. But really, there havent been many big changes to our essential work software in decades. Notion has users in countries including Russia, Japan and Germany. 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. His major research interest focuses on autoimmune renal diseases, prevention and treatment of CKD. I dont know. 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. 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. Previously, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Adobes 99U and a founder of Technically Media. If you've paid much attention over the last few weeks, you may have noticed that AI is having a moment. So thats one thing. 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? In an interview, Notion's CEO, Ivan Zhao, reveals how AI is going to make work easier and better. 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. 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. Inspired by the progressive ideas which D. I. Pisarev, the most eminent of the Russian literary critics of the 1860's and I. M. Sechenov . Theres a short history of this (and how it influenced Notion) here. And we did all sorts of really wonky projects. Now, our skin is fairly conservative too. I still remember his pitch. So the product side of Notion is four people or five people. And just talk to people in restaurants, observe how theyre eating ramen, and see if you can change something about their experience. Originally from Beijing, China, Chloe Zhao was born on 31 March 1982 . Ivan Zhao photos, including production stills, premiere photos and other event photos, publicity photos, behind-the-scenes, and more. 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. He initially raised $2 million, which he spent on developing a product over several years. They were running out of money. By early last year, Notion had nearly one million users. At this stage were blocked by our internal process, our team, and distribution. Do that first, then figure out what skin you put on it. A Ivan Zaho is a Founder at Notion based in San Francisco, California. He is interested in creativity, storytelling, and vibes. Some of the earliest team members had already departed, and retaining the rest was growing more untenable by the day. Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. We were just, code, code, code, Zhao remembers. The site was down for four nerve-wracking hours. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (September 14, 1849 - February 27, 1936) was a Nobel Prize-winning physiologist best known for his classical conditioning experiments with dogs. For example, they want to make Notion capable of publishing into varied content management systems with one click of a button. 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. ! he says with a laugh. Jani Zhao was born on the 19th of October, 1992. However, the applications for furoxan-based compounds have been hampered due to the underdevelopment of their synthetic methods. Advanced Functional Materials 2023, 33 (5 . Most everyone has to download an app or run a piece of software to accomplish a task. 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. Then the internet came along towards the mid-to-late nineties and that sort of breaks apart the monopoly of Microsoft. Bring your Miro or Mural whiteboards into Freehand. Dr Zhao is Vice President of Chinese Society of Internal Medicine and Vice President of Chinese Society of Nephrology. More about Ivan Zhao Selected links Ivan Zhao - Founder - Notion | LinkedIn Do you need to know more about Ivan Zhao? Related Markets 2. Ram Shriram, a venture capitalist who invested in Notion in 2013, said that at many businesses, a lot of the products we use were designed in the 1990s. There is room for new workplace tools that take advantage of the internet and other advances so people can collaborate and have the most up-to-date data while they work, he said. Zhao, who had learned to code as a child, had a big visionto enable people to use any computing device with the same creativity and flexibility that they bring to their writing, allowing them to approach devices as a new medium, whatever that might mean someday. Go to the edge of what is still acceptable to your peers and go to the far, far edge of that. Congcong Pei, Yu Zeng, Liang Zhao, Jing Zhao, Jingjing Wan. In San Francisco, while Zhao still believed he was right about his grand vision, he realized he was wrong about his market. 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. Professor of Medicine Chief of Renal Division, Peking University First Hospital. April 1, 2020. www.nytimes.com. Ivan Zhao Hey there, I'm Ivan! Location. Bugs came from everywhere, Zhao says. Study some history of computing stuff or pioneers of the seventies or sixties. Kothari and Zhao think a lot about those big enterprises. 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. Zhao was trying to make good on ideas that he describes as romantic, ones developed by his idols: tech pioneers Alan Kay, Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart. Export. Zhao: In college, I did freelance work for friends who wanted to build their own websites, and I saw a couple of things. Only those who can code, and sometimes not even them. Growth has been rapid since the 2021 investments. He. more Claim Embed. 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. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. It seemed wrong that only a few people with the ability to code could build websites and other software tools. At one point, Notion ran dangerously low on cash and laid off four employees. 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. Ivan Zhao Founder at Notion . For a two- or three-year window, Notion was high on our list of companies that we admired from afar, Vernal says. The key to healthy culture and productivity is over-communication and true understanding of what everyone is working on and why its important. I am Ivan Zhao, cofounder/designer of Notion - a unified tool for docs, wikis, and tasks. Im betting on that most people can create their own tools. Location: San Francisco, CA Add to My Lists. Ivan Zhao is the co-founder of Notion. It was positively received by Product Hunt and rated #1 Product of the Month. 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. In his research, he discovered the conditioned reflex, which shaped the field of behaviorism in psychology. N/A. 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. 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. 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. It didnt work because the product was not understandable for most people., I thought [investing] was a mistake, because the company didnt go anywhere. You can be a designer. The capital is not going to add another Moby Dick directly. He currently resides in Philadelphia. Well, very few people.. Inside Design: It sounds like each person needs to bring more than one skill set to the table. Then, on New Years Day in 2021, as Notion workers were relaxing at home, Kothari and Zhao started getting alerts saying Notion had crashed. 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. One of the reasons its so popular is that it chains together all the notifications and the communications of the SaaS products together, right? Notion had previously been valued at $800 million. 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. About Ivan Zhao: Ivan is a senior at Brown University studying Applied Math and Computer Science. She feels strongly about cocktails and NPR. But within a year or so, he left Inkling and started to assemble his team. 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. Its really hard to find good people that can do all those, right? 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. Its like, everybody can be a designer. YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. Im the nerd of the friend circle, so I started coding peoples websites for them. Its like, everybody can be a designer. Career Achievements Investments Its like if you studied physics in high school and college and you didnt know who Newton is. Engelbart conceived of computers as a way to increase humanitys capacity to solve complex problems, not to just run computations, which was the bulk of computer work at the time. Take product ideas from planning to launch and every step in between. Zhao: There are so many apps these days. Zhao sees Last as his product co-founder and Kothari as his business co-founder. Were continuing to grow our functionality, and are excited about whats ahead in 2019. People think fast, so they should be able to capture and restructure their thoughts fast too. Zhao Zhao Biography. Within three years, Kothari had sold Pulse to LinkedIn for $90 million, and Zhao had started Notion. By the start of the pandemic, Notion had about 40 employees and theyd raised about $50 million as an insurance policy against pandemic uncertainty, says Kothari. What are you betting on? Ivan Zhao Founder at Notion Labs. However, when they rolled out this new Notion to their friends, they saw the framework theyd chosen to build with, a Google web framework called Web Component, crashed constantly. 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.. 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. Youre really left with a completely blank, fresh space designed to feel like a breath of fresh air and spacious opportunity to think deeply. A lot of our functionality has been designed in service to that. It can be a product that is as powerful as those five different SaaS tools. 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. It almost ran out of money.. 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. 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. While many start-ups grapple with the fallout from the pandemic, this San Francisco company raised more cash to survive. Menu. 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. Its founders, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, had built their app on a suboptimal tech stack, and it crashed constantly. He wrote, Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions.. Welcome to my portfolio. 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 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 . At its most basic, Notion enables people to use just one interface to make, edit and customize documents; to manage projects; to create information-sharing wikis; and to design all kinds of charts and tables. 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. Weve been able to eliminate a lot of meetings at Notion, for instance, because these discussions take place in a clear way inside the product right next to the work in question. That day felt like Christmas. Notion was profitable, so the founders didnt seek official funding rounds. 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. He identifies as a gay man and is not out at work (only because he's still a student! Notion is emblematic of the kind of technology start-up that may be in a position to survive the shakeout in Silicon Valley. Imagine Andy Warhol, right? Frey: What has changed in the nature of work that has created the need for a tool like Notion? Zhao: The all-in-one nature of Notion is very special. Frey: Whats the origin story of Notion? 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, 39, consolidated her domination of the category . 1988-1991 - Team Leader with Centro-Svilluppo Materiali (Centre for Materials Development). His impression of founders flocking to Notion is more than anecdotal. Zhao chose Inkling instead. About. 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. Notion is staking a claim in a market dominated by giantsMicrosoft and Google, with more than 2 billion users between them. Notion is also profitable. But if you step back and look at history you have the entire world history to look at. That has since quadrupled, Mr. Kothari said. The first version of Notion was a tool that non-coders could use to make their own apps. designer cofounder technology Oftentimes when you are designing and building something, youre shifting constraints. 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 a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. A year later, Zhao posted on the blog Hacker News that he was moving to San Francisco to find a job. Sequoia partner Mike Vernal, a former Facebook vice president, was an original Notion angel investor back in 2013. Its easier to correct this [and move faster] if you know both disciplines. Create digital wireframes and prototypes for corporate website and landing pages. This time, Zhao offered him a job. ACS Applied Bio Materials 2021, 4 (12 . Good luck finding a picture of Ivan online. Notions design also distinguishes it, with a restrained, black-and-not-quite-white aesthetic. 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. His first job was six months of answering support-desk tickets. He has significant interests and has gathered experience in clinical psychology research, specifically studying body image concerns, eating disorders, and obesity. Ivan Zhao Biography It looks like we don't have any Biography for Ivan Zhao yet. Sequoia led Notions 2021 round of $250 million. His dads a school principal, Zhao says with a laugh. Look at how the business history of the past couple of decades. Nobody knows how to learn how to do them properly. Inside Design: Youve hired four product designers. Just click the "Edit page" button at the bottom of the page or learn more in the Biography submission guide. 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. 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. 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. But somewhere during her high school days, she became increasingly interested in a career in films and TV. Ivan Zhao NZ Country HR Leader @ Honeywell, Professional Coach, helping people and organisations grow through driving continuous learning. We can reproduce that. Anyone can read what you share. 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. Every team. A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface. According to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Zhao was ranked the 136th-richest person in the world, with a net worth . In the right hands, using Notion feels for non-developers like finally gaining the superpowers of a developer who can set up their own custom software. Ivan Zhao: Tools that let you work the way your brain works. 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. Its like 90% perfect. Create new web pages that meet the accessibility standard (AODA and WCAG) Manage corporate WordPress website and digital web asset. Theres no final pixel-perfect design. I was like, Holy shit. 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. 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. Frey: How are the needs of work teams evolving, and how does Notion reflect that direction? In 2012, as he prepared to graduate, many of his friends needed online portfolios. 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. ivzhao has one repository available. Stop looking at Dribbble. He was who Notion needed. 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. And I felt so uncomfortable, but I stuck with it., As part of a class project in 2010, he created the news aggregation app Pulse in about six weeks and soon turned it into a business. Thats what I mean by creating something that can do many different things, like Lego bricks, but its still fundamentally one product. But it wont always look like this, says Zhao and Kothari. Disappointingly for the co-founders, it turned out, even if they were Lasts and Zhaos actual friends, non-coders didnt want app-building software. 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. Zhaos mom loaned him $150,000 to keep the startup afloat. Frey: Whats your vision for how tools can help people to create and express their ideas better? The product with the most votes in 24 hours earns additional promotion, as well as international tech-community hype. You can view this kind of database as a Kanban board if that helps you visualize tasks better. * Notion's Enterprise Success with Community RootsIvan Zhao(Notion, Co-founder and CEO): Notion, the popular maker of productivity and collaboration tools, . The ambition of Zhao and his team at Notion cant be contained in any single decade. Kothari was born and raised in Ahmedabad, a city of 8 million in Indias western Gujarat state. We got a lot of traction there. Soon, tech insiders, people involved with Y Combinator and other startup incubators, were using it. And now the pendulum is swinging back towards something more bundled up again. 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. Instead, they found a small group of really die-hard fans that carried the product with them. Instead, the company focused primarily on growing the community. 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. By all accounts, the mad dash in Kyoto paid off. 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. There is a whole Notion-adjacent economy, filled with quirky templates, like this album credit tracker for Beyonces Renaissance, created by Notion-optimization consultant Frances Odera Matthews. Things looked pretty bad from the outside, too, says Kothari, who had been one of Notions angel investors. Without understanding what youre trying to do, adding more people will actually slow you down. 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. 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. Or, if you have a laptop, you should be using Notion for thinking and collaboration, and communication. She grew up in her hometown as an ordinary kid without any serious expectations of making a career in the show business. When the medium is so new, people have entire green fields in front of them, and there is less thinking about business. We want to figure out how to turn incoming capital into Moby Dicks first before getting more capital. Its a modular product that aims to put the power of software in the hands of non-coders. Nearly all people now relied on computers to help them do all kinds of things, yet most couldnt write their own code. Not necessarily capital. 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. Their bright, loft-style offices have sisal mat floor coverings, Michel Ducaroys famously curving Togo couches and Alvar Aaltos iconic, simple wooden Artek stools. It was more for nerdy tech crowds. Inside Design: Youve spoken about how designers should look sideways to other fields for inspiration. 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. How far along is Notion on its journey? 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. His parents sacrificed to send him to school in America, so Kothari says he did nothing but study when he got to Purdue University in Indiana. So you dont have to go out there to hunt for whats new. They knew they needed to move Notion onto multiple databases, but they hadnt prioritized it. Sometimes something is really hard to code. Adding another person doesnt necessarily give you a higher-quality Moby Dick. It doesnt even necessarily make it faster.. In 2013, Zhao and Last raised about $2 million from angel investorsa mix of friends, family and friends of friends. You distill from something not in the circular place you are living but look in a plane outside of what you are working. 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. 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.