Those people have taste; they just dont have good tools., Around this time, Zhao read a 1962 paper by Engelbart called Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework that crystallized his thinking. I studied experimental cosmology (Ph.D. from Princeton in 2010) before switching to statistics (Ph.D. from Cornell in 2015). 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. The men didnt yet charge to use Notion; they wanted to grow users first. As a backup, hed applied to Stanford University, knowing that if he got in, he could remain in the country as a student. Oftentimes when you are designing and building something, youre shifting constraints. People use Notion in place of note-taking apps, collaboration services or writing software, and they pay a monthly fee of $4 to $20 each for extra features like more security and storage. We can reproduce that. You need master level of UX and pixel-perfect design. Then, on New Years Day in 2021, as Notion workers were relaxing at home, Kothari and Zhao started getting alerts saying Notion had crashed. Lasts dad visited to appraise Zhao, perhaps suspecting the men were doing things like sneaking into bars. Welcome to my portfolio. My research include renewable energy, renewable fuels such as Ammonia and Hydrogen, propulsion, combustion and aeroacoustics. And just talk to people in restaurants, observe how theyre eating ramen, and see if you can change something about their experience. 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. And how do you go to the far edge of that? That traction attracted venture capitalists and others who wanted to invest in Notion last year. Inside Design: How do you stop the undeniable and neverending pressure for you guys to raise more money, go hire a hundred people, to expand? And multiple other people told me that was one of the best pitches that they had seen at Sequoia.. I feel really strongly about that. And there were no good tools, Zhao said. Ivan Zhao - Co-founder, CEO @ Notion - Crunchbase Person Profile Person Ivan Zhao Overview Number of Founded Organizations 1 CB Rank (Person) 1,361 Primary Job Title Co-founder, CEO Primary Organization Notion Location San Francisco, California, United States Regions San Francisco Bay Area, West Coast, Western US Gender Male What was your inspiration or motivation for thinking around this? He and Zhao met up, just as they always had. 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. Microsoft Office did that in the 90s. A lot of our functionality has been designed in service to that. Dr TONG Weihan . But, UX and pixel-perfect design take some longer time. Thats why all of Notions functionality fades to the back as soon as you start typing. 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. 2) it breaks traditional productivity software into blocks text, lists, tasks, databases, images, etc. In 2015, Notion co-founders Simon Last and Ivan Zhao had removed from their lives anything that wasnt writing code and eating noodles. 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. I can be a designer. Enjoy the read! 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. I argue thats the only way to solve a problem. Theres a short history of this (and how it influenced Notion) here. 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. Transformative collaboration for all the work you do. 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. * Notion's Enterprise Success with Community RootsIvan Zhao(Notion, Co-founder and CEO): Notion, the popular maker of productivity and collaboration tools, . You distill from something not in the circular place you are living but look in a plane outside of what you are working. The fund-raising was completed in 36 hours last week after the virus pushed Ivan Zhao, Notions founder and chief executive, and Akshay Kothari, Notions chief operating officer, to rethink their previous position of not relying too much on venture capital. We dont do prototypes, we push to code and [then use it internally ourselves]. 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. Zhao: We believe more people should be able to modify the tools they use in their everyday lives and work. 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. Those people have taste; they just dont have good tools., I was like, Holy shit. The site was down for four nerve-wracking hours. Its more about UX. Before the most recent funding, Notion, which was founded in 2013, had raised $17 million. And that becomes slightly more objective, less fashion-y, less Dribbble-y. 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. Every team. So the product side of Notion is four people or five people. 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 . Most everyone has to download an app or run a piece of software to accomplish a task. 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. Add a bio, trivia, and more. Theres no final pixel-perfect design. Ivan Zhao has been working as a Director, Business Development at Metallum Recycling for 4 years. N/A. Im betting on that most people can create their own tools. Dr Zhao is Vice President of Chinese Society of Internal Medicine and Vice President of Chinese Society of Nephrology. I wonder what does it take for every company, every team, every student to run on Notion? And you can filter it to see just your tasks or a colleagues tasks. 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. Just dream of a piece of software, and you should just be able to build that using Notion.. These men saw computers as a way to help humans be more imaginative, more creative, more capable of leveraging intelligence in ways not yet imagined. Notion has users in countries including Russia, Japan and Germany. They wanted to make software that could empower a global community of everyday people to make their own apps and tools without having to write code, all to unlock new levels of creativity and productivity. 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. "We're unique in the way that we're already where you work," Zhao told me. Chloe Zhao is a Chinese filmmaker best known for her independent U.S. films Songs My Brother Taught Me, The Rider, and Nomadland. In his research, he discovered the conditioned reflex, which shaped the field of behaviorism in psychology. As Notions features become more robust, the tools we make with it will become more complex. He also developed an appreciation for aesthetics as a student of traditional Chinese watercolor. Inside Design: To me, your view on talent mirrors your product mindset: that all these SaaS tools are going to eventually coalesce into one. Zhao: Weve heard from a number of people that Notions very minimalist, lightweight feel encourages people to write more even if its just jotting down ideas. 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. UX Designer - Corporate Marketing. 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. See also Other Works | Publicity Listings | Official Sites View agent, publicist, legal and company contact details on IMDbPro 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. A year later, Zhao posted on the blog Hacker News that he was moving to San Francisco to find a job. Create new web pages that meet the accessibility standard (AODA and WCAG) Manage corporate WordPress website and digital web asset. Disappointingly for the co-founders, it turned out, even if they were Lasts and Zhaos actual friends, non-coders didnt want app-building software. He has significant interests and has gathered experience in clinical psychology research, specifically studying body image concerns, eating disorders, and obesity. Is this the simplest mental model we can use? Related Investments Aliases N/A. So for a company like Notion, we dont need to do anything just to pick up those ideas and execute. This topic is getting popular again. 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? The present comes from the past. 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. Colleagues N/A. 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. It can be a product that is as powerful as those five different SaaS tools. Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. Bio. Inside Design: Youve hired four product designers. 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. We shook hands, [I had to show] I am not a crazy person.. 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. What are you betting on? Ivan Zhao is also currently the CEO of the company. After a few months convincing his wife that they could reinvent their lives in San Francisco, Kothari joined as chief operating officer. All Artists in the art world listed by Artprice.com starting with AAA - ABA, complete index. Inside Design: I know you take pride in keeping small and nimble. Or sometimes something is really easy to implement but its really hard to design. At this stage were blocked by our internal process, our team, and distribution. We wanted to create a space that was as distraction-free as humanly possible. Imagine Andy Warhol, right? Metallum Recycling is part of the HR & Staffing industry, and located in North Carolina, United States. We think the pendulum is swinging back to a bundled solution. 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 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.. Their plan involved asking the famed entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant, who had invested in Notion early, to wake up at midnight, when the new days list opened, and to tweet to his followers to vote for Notion on Product Hunt. More about Ivan Zhao Selected links Ivan Zhao - Founder - Notion | LinkedIn Do you need to know more about Ivan Zhao? You dont need to clean up the whole thing. Zhao says that 68 percent of the most recent Y Combinator class ran their companies on Notion. I still remember his pitch. It almost ran out of money.. It was a lot of fun, some of the happiest times, says Zhao. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates they copied Xerox PARC. Required fields are marked *. So you dont have to go out there to hunt for whats new. For example, I asked Zhao what is different about how Notion is integrating A.I., compared with Bing or ChatGPT. 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. Notion does this in a couple of ways: 1) It brings all your work into one space so you can close all the many apps and tabs youve been using, and work alongside your team in the same spot, and. 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. Theyd just laid off their only colleagues. 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. 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. Then, I realized, it doesnt make sense. 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. N/A. But if you step back and look at history you have the entire world history to look at. He initially raised $2 million, which he spent on developing a product over several years. Growth has been rapid since the 2021 investments. The 20-somethings didnt mind the drudgery or the lack of personal space. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (September 14, 1849 - February 27, 1936) was a Nobel Prize-winning physiologist best known for his classical conditioning experiments with dogs. Mr. Zhao said he was wary of bloat slowing the start-up down and degrading the quality of its product. Inside Design: How would you recommend designers start learning about the philosophical underpinnings that guide your thinking? Zhao was unfazed by this success. MetaLab said it used Notion to present work to clients and to collect their feedback all in one place, among other tasks. 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 . 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. Location. Its easier to correct this [and move faster] if you know both disciplines. You need to know where are you coming from on a business side in order to know how to rebel against it. . This version had Notions iconic, black-and-not-quite-white look, and the ability to do word processing, of course, as well as to make drag-and-drop to-do lists and wikis, and it had more than 30 document templates for things like product roadmaps. Changpeng Zhao (Chinese: ; pinyin: Zho Chngpng), commonly known as CZ, is a Chinese-born Canadian businessman, investor, and software engineer.Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume as of July 2022.. Recycling for 4 years as a student of traditional Chinese watercolor observe how theyre eating ramen and... Had to show ] I am not a crazy person energy, renewable fuels such as and. Its product the furniture and finishes, putting as much thought into the offices he... Outside of what you are living but look in a plane outside of what you are living look! Own tools Princeton in 2010 ) before switching to statistics ( Ph.D. from Princeton in 2010 ) before switching statistics! Change something about their experience go out there to hunt for whats.! More objective, less Dribbble-y democratize software, make it so that everybody can put these building blocks.! 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