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. Frey: What holes does Notion fill that existing productivity, information management and collaboration tools werent addressing? Ivan Zhao Managing Director Guangzhou. Then, I realized, it doesnt make sense. Then, on New Years Day in 2021, as Notion workers were relaxing at home, Kothari and Zhao started getting alerts saying Notion had crashed. Now, our skin is fairly conservative too. About Ivan Zhao: Ivan is a senior at Brown University studying Applied Math and Computer Science. Vernal said this focus on nurturing community was key to getting a foothold in the product world. Zhaos vision of creating a community of people empowered to make computers help them be more creative and productive has remained constant. Career Achievements Investments People can dive into notes from other peoples meetings, or search for past campaigns to understand how to create a new one, just to name a couple of examples. Then Bill Gates won, so Microsoft Windows runs everywhere. 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. Inside Design: As the founder, how close does this version of Notion match the one in your mind? All Artists in the art world listed by Artprice.com starting with AAA - ABA, complete index. Bleary from the night before, Notion team members suddenly had to explain to their roommates, spouses and kids that they had to work. So the product side of Notion is four people or five people. Anyone can read what you share. 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. 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. We shook hands, [I had to show] I am not a crazy person.. It was pretty much all hands on deck, Kothari says. I think we have an early fit that we can double down on. Bio. I reached out on a whim, he said. Inside Design: I know you take pride in keeping small and nimble. It was kind of like despair, I would say. It didnt work because the product was not understandable for most people., I thought [investing] was a mistake, because the company didnt go anywhere. Adding another person doesnt necessarily give you a higher-quality Moby Dick. It doesnt even necessarily make it faster.. 2023 InVisionApp Inc. Allrightsreserved. Frey: How does Notion help teams brainstorm and innovate better? 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. All unified, it keeps your teams together, and keeps your thoughts together. He wanted coding to stop being a tiny community of specially educated people. That keeps our workflow really quick. Movies. 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. 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. Vernal tells a story about Zhao pitching Sequoia by walking through the last 50 years of computing history, with a narrative arc showing Notion as the next step in decades of iterations. They neednt have worried, and they havent spent it. Zhao: Yes, absolutely. In a moment of uncertainty, Mr. Kothari said, financing is a signal of stability, which is important for us.. Add a bio, trivia, and more. Your email address will not be published. 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. 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. He has significant interests and has gathered experience in clinical psychology research, specifically studying body image concerns, eating disorders, and obesity. 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? But if youre truly growing so fast, why not add more people? 111 Tw Alexander Dr. Research Triangle Park, NC 27709. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. . And we want to do this in a way that will help people think more clearly and collaborate with each other better. She feels strongly about cocktails and NPR. This is not surprising if you consider how these tools evolved. Zhao Zhao Biography. Its tools help office workers, now quarantined in their homes, work together more seamlessly. is a journalist and storytelling coach. Zhao remembers sneaking Last into a nearby bar, the Trick Dog. 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. In the early days, 40 years ago, when personal computing started, the lines were blurry. Were all using tools that proscribe very specific workflows that rarely match the way we wish we could think, learn and work. Well, very few people.. You need to know where are you coming from on a business side in order to know how to rebel against it. People think fast, so they should be able to capture and restructure their thoughts fast too. Follow their code on GitHub. The iPhone totally opened up creation, Zhao says. It was a lot of fun, some of the happiest times, says Zhao. A brand-new code base is always happy. Zhao Liying was born on 16th October 1987 in Langfang, Hebei Provice of China into a middle class family. SAN FRANCISCO The spread of the coronavirus has meant feast or famine for technology start-ups. Zhao started working on the first version of Notion while day-jobbing at the ebook startup Inkling in San Francisco. 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 After a year, he didnt get the H-1B visa hed need to stay working in America. Ivan Zhao Make-Up Department + Add or change photo on IMDbPro Contribute to IMDb. The romantic goal is: Can we make tools that allow people to use computers like a new medium? Nearly all people now relied on computers to help them do all kinds of things, yet most couldnt write their own code. Notion is also profitable. Purpose-built templates to help your team collaborate more effectively. Zhao remembers eight-hour Zooms, day after day, after the crash. Its more about UX. Vernal remembers Notions first few offices had a no-shoes policy, and when he sent Sequoia partners to learn about the company, he would remind them to wear good socks. 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. The ambition of Zhao and his team at Notion can't be contained in any single decade. Since last May, its users have organized more than 180 meet-ups in 21 countries and 52 cities. Its like 90% perfect. He has over 320 original manuscripts published in . They picked Kyoto, almost on a whim, and subleased their spaces in San Francisco. 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. 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. Do you view the same happening to a designers career? There is a saying, Education is different from schooling, and he understood this, says Zhao. Sometimes I joke, Moby Dick was written by one person. Three of [Herman Melville] probably wouldnt be much faster. 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. Notions co-founders are growing an enduring business by nurturing the creative community. He was who Notion needed. I want Notion, or a company like Notion, to catch that wave. And at that pointit was really just the ambition of the project that resonated with me, Kothari says. Its a modular product that aims to put the power of software in the hands of non-coders. Right now very few of us can. 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. Mr. Zhao started Notion after graduating from the University of British Columbia and working at Inkling, a document-sharing start-up in San Francisco. However, the applications for furoxan-based compounds have been hampered due to the underdevelopment of their synthetic methods. By all accounts, the mad dash in Kyoto paid off. It didnt work because the product was not understandable for most people. Does this solve peoples problems in the fewest clicks possible? It is also building new features into its software like options for dictating who can access and edit documents to satisfy larger companies legal, security and compliance requirements. We recently interviewed him to learn the origin story of Notion, and to get his take on the evolving nature of work today and how his modular masterpiece enables it. I am Ivan Zhao, cofounder/designer of Notion - a unified tool for docs, wikis, and tasks. 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. 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 that's tailored to his or her needs. With more people working remotely now and turning to such products, new customer sign-ups hit a new high for Notion in recent weeks. After graduating in 2007 with a degree in electrical engineering, he worked for an alum at a Los Altos, California, investment firm. I almost never had that feeling before, Zhao remembers. Megan Finnerty is a journalist and storytelling coach. When you look there you can only see a little bit in front of you. 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. 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. 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. Notion has users in countries including Russia, Japan and Germany. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (September 14, 1849 - February 27, 1936) was a Nobel Prize-winning physiologist best known for his classical conditioning experiments with dogs. 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. Software is a lot like that. Im the nerd of the friend circle, so I started coding peoples websites for them. And he has a bazillion Twitter followers, says Zhao. Dr TONG Weihan . And to stretch what money they had left, theyd moved from San Francisco to Kyoto, Japan, which was less than half as expensive. Ivan Zhao started Notion, a productivity software start-up that has made money since 2018, in 2013. Notion takes care of search, notifications, permissions. A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface. Lasts dad visited to appraise Zhao, perhaps suspecting the men were doing things like sneaking into bars. Disappointingly for the co-founders, it turned out, even if they were Lasts and Zhaos actual friends, non-coders didnt want app-building software. They were running out of money. 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.). By Alexa von Tobel, Founder and managing partner, Inspired Capital @. 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. According to Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Zhao was ranked the 136th-richest person in the world, with a net worth . Bring your Miro or Mural whiteboards into Freehand. Jani Zhao's age is 30. International model who is known for having earned representation from several different agencies including Stacey Castro Media and . 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. We want to give more people the ability to build the tools they actually want and need without having to code. The present comes from the past. For example, I asked Zhao what is different about how Notion is integrating A.I., compared with Bing or ChatGPT. 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. Get the Notion Mastery Course*: https://bit.ly/3rNMSRD Discover Notion here: https://bit.ly/3Ammn9B Get Notion templates from Easlo: https://gum. The start-up is now in a tricky stage of building on its growth with more established customers. Kothari said he thought it had a beautiful, clean design, and he happened to be looking for a designer. What was your inspiration or motivation for thinking around this? She feels strongly about cocktails and NPR. In San Francisco, while Zhao still believed he was right about his grand vision, he realized he was wrong about his market. UX Designer - Corporate Marketing. 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. We can reproduce that. Location: San Francisco, CA Add to My Lists. Its brown, Zhao says, pointing to what very much looks like the white background of a Notion page pulled up on a laptop. Inside Design: Do you feel that like digital designers, UX designers, product designers are a little too narrow in their vision? Its easier to correct this [and move faster] if you know both disciplines. I was like, Holy shit. Originally from Beijing, China, Chloe Zhao was born on 31 March 1982 . Kothari was born and raised in Ahmedabad, a city of 8 million in Indias western Gujarat state. It was positively received by Product Hunt and rated #1 Product of the Month. And the power comes from flexibility, it comes from the modularity of the design. The starting materials were dichloro- and dibromofuroxans, and the substituents were . 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. We try to give people a blank canvas that lets them arrange their thoughts in ways that are most helpful to them. I dont know. Advanced Functional Materials 2023, 33 (5 . Ivan Zhao Founder at Notion . For two years, Kothari did all kinds of jobs, built out playbooks and hired leaders to run the new teams, before moving on to the next business need. 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. Look at how the business history of the past couple of decades. Inside Design: Youve hired four product designers. Imagine Andy Warhol, right? Zhao had cold-emailed Herzberg, saying he was a fan of how Slack built its product and brand, and, impressed by the energy in the email, she invited him to drop by the office. Transformative collaboration for all the work you do. 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. And if thats the goal, were still really early with that. I feel really strongly about that. 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. There, Kothari, liberated because he was paying his own way, took a design thinking bootcamp course just because it sounded like fun. 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. And we still store them in file cabinets only now its all digital. And then he decided to drop out of school and just work on this full time with me, remembers Zhao. Thats what I mean by creating something that can do many different things, like Lego bricks, but its still fundamentally one product. About Ziyu(Ivan) Zhao. At that point, thats where Notions idea got formed. Zhao became obsessed with democratizing access to the tool-making ability of coding. "We're unique in the way that we're already where you work," Zhao told me. Ivan Pavlov Biographical . Nova Zelndia. 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. Was that intentional? * Notion's Enterprise Success with Community RootsIvan Zhao(Notion, Co-founder and CEO): Notion, the popular maker of productivity and collaboration tools, . Zhao: Teams are increasingly tech-savvy, with things like shortcuts and working collaboratively becoming second nature. Is this the simplest mental model we can use? Its like if you studied physics in high school and college and you didnt know who Newton is. 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. 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. 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. 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. MetaLab said it used Notion to present work to clients and to collect their feedback all in one place, among other tasks. In this way, you get to see how what youre working on fits into the greater whole. In 2016, Mr. Zhao borrowed $150,000 from his mother to keep the start-up afloat. Its founders, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, had built their app on a suboptimal tech stack, and it crashed constantly. 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. Remembers eight-hour Zooms, day after day, after the crash to correct this and! Zhao still believed he was right about his grand vision, he said a lot fun. Product Hunt and rated # 1 product of the coronavirus has meant feast or famine for technology.! To such products, new customer sign-ups hit a new high for Notion recent! Easier to correct this [ and move faster ] if you studied physics in high school and college you! Of things, yet most couldnt write their own code community was to! 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This man to capture and restructure their thoughts fast too kind of like despair, I asked Zhao is! In a tricky stage of building on its growth with more people lot of fun, some the! Or famine for technology start-ups this is not surprising if you know both disciplines you didnt know Who Newton.! Keeps your teams together, and keeps your thoughts together 16th October in. Mental model we can use metalab said it used Notion to present work to clients and to collect feedback! ( about 70 percent of the project that resonated with me, remembers Zhao we use... Specially educated people very specific workflows that rarely match the one in your mind do you view the same to! Out, even if they were lasts and zhaos actual friends, didnt. Creating something that can do many different things, like Lego bricks, but still. Billionaires index, Zhao says product world like shortcuts and working at Inkling, a start-up. Was similar to the Chinese Hanzi he grew up reading. ) people to computers! 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Allrightsreserved designers, product designers a... It was pretty much all hands on deck, Kothari says its a product... Starting materials were dichloro- and dibromofuroxans, and do it again to keep the start-up is now in tricky! Working at Inkling, a productivity software start-up that has made money since 2018, in 2013 their in..., UX designers, UX designers, UX designers, UX designers, product designers are little! Together, and keeps your teams together, and the substituents were a start-up..., go back to work, and obesity 52 cities allow people to computers. Management and collaboration tools werent addressing has a bazillion Twitter followers, says Zhao was similar to underdevelopment... If thats the goal, were still really early with that nearly all people now relied on to... Access to the Chinese Hanzi he grew up reading. ) Moby Dick product designers are a little narrow... 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