Software is a lot like that. 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. Zhao compares this to how, prior to the spread of literacy with the invention of the printing press around 1440, only clergy and scribes could read and write, so the rest of the population never composed great works of literature, soul-stirring poetry or world-changing scientific research. Also, as you use the product, youll notice that a lot of features only appear on hover, or that you only receive notifications when someone mentions you or something specific requires your attention. Mr. Zhao started Notion after graduating from the University of British Columbia and working at Inkling, a document-sharing start-up in San Francisco. Nov 2021 - Present1 year 4 months. People think fast, so they should be able to capture and restructure their thoughts fast too. It was positively received by Product Hunt and rated #1 Product of the Month. It was pretty much all hands on deck, Kothari says. 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. I argue thats the only way to solve a problem. ACS Applied Bio Materials 2021, 4 (12 . They need to do pixels, they need to do UX, they need to at least be able to code React. They were running out of money. 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. Mr. Zhao started Notion after graduating from the University of British Columbia and working at Inkling, a document-sharing start-up in San Francisco. On Wednesday, Notion said it raised $50 million from Index Ventures and other investors that valued it at $2 billion. You can be a designer. More results. All Artists in the art world listed by Artprice.com starting with AAA - ABA, complete index. 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 Front-end stuff you can be taught, its not that hard, right? Dr TONG Weihan . They did this, Zhao says, by building relationships with power users. Its not trying to be everything to everyone, Justin Watt, MetaLabs director of operations and marketing, said of the software. She is the first Asian woman of color to win the Top DGA Award. But really, there havent been many big changes to our essential work software in decades. 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. In a moment of uncertainty, Mr. Kothari said, financing is a signal of stability, which is important for us.. About Ziyu(Ivan) Zhao. 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. 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. And Notions mission is about software tool-making. Even if those tools just look like black-and-not-quite-white document editors at first. 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. Zhao: In Notion, you can create multiple layers of tasks so that its possible for everyone to see everyones tasks team-wide at the top level, and then drill down into individuals tasks at the most granular level. Ivan Zhao Bellevue, WA. It seemed wrong that only a few people with the ability to code could build websites and other software tools. Inside Design: Do you feel that like digital designers, UX designers, product designers are a little too narrow in their vision? N/A. Its still case by case. Sometimes I joke, Moby Dick was written by one person. Three of [Herman Melville] probably wouldnt be much faster. As a backup, hed applied to Stanford University, knowing that if he got in, he could remain in the country as a student. And then he decided to drop out of school and just work on this full time with me, remembers Zhao. Get the Notion Mastery Course*: https://bit.ly/3rNMSRD Discover Notion here: https://bit.ly/3Ammn9B Get Notion templates from Easlo: https://gum. Adding another person doesnt necessarily give you a higher-quality Moby Dick. It doesnt even necessarily make it faster.. So you dont have to go out there to hunt for whats new. Frey: What holes does Notion fill that existing productivity, information management and collaboration tools werent addressing? Notion is also profitable. For example, they want to make Notion capable of publishing into varied content management systems with one click of a button. Zhao: We believe more people should be able to modify the tools they use in their everyday lives and work. Thats how the worlds business runs, thats how people were educated. Megan Finnerty is a journalist and storytelling coach. 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. If you've paid much attention over the last few weeks, you may have noticed that AI is having a moment. I love understanding decision making frameworks, both from a technical perspective (such as algorithmic decision making) and from a . He has over 320 original manuscripts published in . 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. Dr Ivan SEAH Yu Jun . Collaborate in real time on a digital whiteboard. He also developed an appreciation for aesthetics as a student of traditional Chinese watercolor. New Zealand Ivan Zhao Managing Director Guangzhou. Its like, everybody can be a designer. It was kind of like despair, I would say. Ivan Zhao Hey there, I'm Ivan! Then, Hey, lets go out for food. Then, we go eat, go back to work, and do it again. Neither man could speak or read Japanese, but Zhao is from China, and he could read the menus well enough for them to figure out beef or chicken. (About 70 percent of the writing, Japanese Kanji, was similar to the Chinese Hanzi he grew up reading.). Thats why all of Notions functionality fades to the back as soon as you start typing. Wired wrote about it, and the Apple App Store featured it. In an interview, Notion's CEO, Ivan Zhao, reveals how AI is going to make work easier and better. 111 Tw Alexander Dr. Research Triangle Park, NC 27709. He had a hunch that investing in individual users would ultimately get Notion into big companies. The founders have time to dress properly, and even enjoy the occasional home-cooked meal. But somewhere during her high school days, she became increasingly interested in a career in films and TV. 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 Frey: How does Notion help individuals and teams to manage their tasks and projects better? It was very intense and focused. Career Achievements Investments And I was like, This sounds amazing,, 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., In the next 5 to 10 years, Notion could be the front-end infrastructure for the world. Theyd seen it coming, says Zhao, like a Doomsday clock. Export. Or sometimes something is really easy to implement but its really hard to design. 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. Try to be conservative. Zhao sees Last as his product co-founder and Kothari as his business co-founder. We just launched the 1.0 a couple weeks ago, which you can play with the web/Mac app at notion.so (and we are hiring!) We shook hands, [I had to show] I am not a crazy person.. 2) it breaks traditional productivity software into blocks text, lists, tasks, databases, images, etc. Mr. Zhao said he was wary of bloat slowing the start-up down and degrading the quality of its product. 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. 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. Menu. 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. 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. 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. History. A Ivan Zaho is a Founder at Notion based in San Francisco, California. So they called Sarah Cannon, an investor at Index Ventures who had been courting Notion for over a year. 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) She grew up in her hometown as an ordinary kid without any serious expectations of making a career in the show business. An Alloy Platform of DualFingerprints for HighPerformance Stroke Screening. 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. And that becomes slightly more objective, less fashion-y, less Dribbble-y. 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 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. Every day of the pandemic added more users, and they were running out of database storage. Right now very few of us can. . And multiple other people told me that was one of the best pitches that they had seen at Sequoia.. 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. I reached out on a whim, he said. People eager to work there have gone to surprising lengths for attention one recently sent a package of cupcakes decorated with his own face and the words Hire me!. The intention, at least for me, is a much larger market. Zhao chose Inkling instead. 2023 InVisionApp Inc. Allrightsreserved. Guannan Zhang, Jing Wang, Ivan S. Maksymov, Andrew D. Greentree, Jiming Hu, Aiguo . This is impossible for most teams to achieve because people are doing work in all kinds of places that arent connected, and people dont think to share. notion.so. When he was in high school, his mom wanted more for his education, so she moved them to Vancouver. 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. All unified, it keeps your teams together, and keeps your thoughts together. 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. Join Facebook to connect with Ivan Zhao and others you may know. Colleagues N/A. And just talk to people in restaurants, observe how theyre eating ramen, and see if you can change something about their experience. They should be able to code React Ivan S. Maksymov, Andrew D.,... Back as soon as you start typing wrote about it, and keeps your thoughts together to code.... Education, so they called Sarah Cannon, an investor at Index Ventures who had been courting for... That they had seen at Sequoia positively received by product Hunt and rated # 1 product of the Month information! On this full time with me, remembers Zhao about it, and they were out... Ventures and other software tools was one of the best pitches that they had seen at... 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