Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. 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. 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. Ivan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Notion, shares the artistic vision behind his productivity startup's smashing success. The ambition of Zhao and his team at Notion can't be contained in any single decade. 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!. For example, I asked Zhao what is different about how Notion is integrating A.I., compared with Bing or ChatGPT. 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. How far along is Notion on its journey? We shook hands, [I had to show] I am not a crazy person.. Without understanding what youre trying to do, adding more people will actually slow you down. 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) He has over 320 original manuscripts published in . 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 This is not surprising if you consider how these tools evolved. My research include renewable energy, renewable fuels such as Ammonia and Hydrogen, propulsion, combustion and aeroacoustics. To do this, within the next 18 months or so, they will improve Notions project management capabilities, among other features, giving the software the final Lego bricks it needs to take on most SaaS companies, says Zhao. Ivan Zhao photos, including production stills, premiere photos and other event photos, publicity photos, behind-the-scenes, and more. 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. And multiple other people told me that was one of the best pitches that they had seen at Sequoia.. Today, they are transitioning as a business from a startup to a mature company, and transitioning as a product from a tool with a cult followingthe kind that people namedrop in Twitter profiles to show tech-design credto a tool used by the worlds largest companies. They dont write hyper-specific code to do a clever, unique thing an individual person wants to do. I can be a designer. 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. Zhao: We think tools should mimic the way peoples brains work. Notion is staking a claim in a market dominated by giantsMicrosoft and Google, with more than 2 billion users between them. Career Achievements Investments 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. Kothari and Zhao think a lot about those big enterprises. It didnt work because the product was not understandable for most people., I thought [investing] was a mistake, because the company didnt go anywhere. The gambit worked. "We're unique in the way that we're already where you work," Zhao told me. Then okay, you should go back to UX stage, maybe change the UX a little bit so it becomes really easy to implement. Moby Dick is written by one person, he said. 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. One of the biggest holes we fill is the information gap that emerges on teams that work across too many tools without visibility. Lastly, theres a lot of transparency that comes from storing all your knowledge, information and work in one place that your entire team can see and access. Before the most recent funding, Notion, which was founded in 2013, had raised $17 million. A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface. Advanced Functional Materials 2023, 33 (5 . 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. Keep your work, cut your costs. Try to be conservative. Bring your Miro or Mural whiteboards into Freehand. 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. So the product side of Notion is four people or five people. That keeps our workflow really quick. As Notions features become more robust, the tools we make with it will become more complex. We wanted to create a space that was as distraction-free as humanly possible. But if you were to tell me I should read more about architecture and fashion I may answer, Does it help my work? And we did all sorts of really wonky projects. Good luck finding a picture of Ivan online. industry Computer Software. Theyd just laid off their only colleagues. is a journalist and storytelling coach. April 1, 2020. www.nytimes.com. Meet the whiteboard transforming the way teams work together. N/A. It seemed wrong that only a few people with the ability to code could build websites and other software tools. Already today, some Notion-adjacent businesses are making more than $1 million a year by designing clever templates. Notion was profitable, so the founders didnt seek official funding rounds. Chuck Frey: If you had to summarize what Notion is and what it represents in 10 words or less, how would you describe it? So thats one thing. Its like if you studied physics in high school and college and you didnt know who Newton is. He wanted coding to stop being a tiny community of specially educated people. Just click the "Edit page" button at the bottom of the page or learn more in the Biography submission guide. He has significant interests and has gathered experience in clinical psychology research, specifically studying body image concerns, eating disorders, and obesity. It was not really a product, Zhao says. Jani Zhao's age is 30. International model who is known for having earned representation from several different agencies including Stacey Castro Media and . 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. But somewhere during her high school days, she became increasingly interested in a career in films and TV. Software is a lot like that. 3,234 Followers, 1,367 Following, 180 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Ivan Zhao (@ivanhzhao) 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. Last had joined Notion while in college, so as the older founder, Zhao was left to decide how to save the business: And that feels likefuck it. At that time, they declined to meet any venture capitalists or discuss acquiring a higher valuation.. Sequoia partner Mike Vernal, a former Facebook vice president, was an original Notion angel investor back in 2013. 2) it breaks traditional productivity software into blocks text, lists, tasks, databases, images, etc. Within three years, Kothari had sold Pulse to LinkedIn for $90 million, and Zhao had started Notion. The computing pioneers thought everybody would make their own tools, make their own software, Zhao says, returning to a favorite idea. Location. 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. She is the first Asian woman of color to win the Top DGA Award. An Alloy Platform of DualFingerprints for HighPerformance Stroke Screening. She grew up in her hometown as an ordinary kid without any serious expectations of making a career in the show business. Zhao: The all-in-one nature of Notion is very special. However, the applications for furoxan-based compounds have been hampered due to the underdevelopment of their synthetic methods. Each person were looking for will be similar to what we have now. The iPhone totally opened up creation, Zhao says. I love understanding decision making frameworks, both from a technical perspective (such as algorithmic decision making) and from a . As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Nov 2021 - Present1 year 4 months. Congcong Pei, Yu Zeng, Liang Zhao, Jing Zhao, Jingjing Wan. The product with the most votes in 24 hours earns additional promotion, as well as international tech-community hype. Go to the edge of what is still acceptable to your peers and go to the far, far edge of that. After graduating in 2007 with a degree in electrical engineering, he worked for an alum at a Los Altos, California, investment firm. In 2015, productivity tool Notion nearly died. She is best known for being a Model. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. 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. It was pretty much all hands on deck, Kothari says. Movies. 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. And he has a bazillion Twitter followers, says Zhao. 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. I want Notion, or a company like Notion, to catch that wave. Thats useful. 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. And how do you go to the far edge of that? 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? Just look at Slack. Ivan Zhao NZ Country HR Leader @ Honeywell, Professional Coach, helping people and organisations grow through driving continuous learning. Kothari was born and raised in Ahmedabad, a city of 8 million in Indias western Gujarat state. While many are cutting staff and slashing costs as they reel from the outbreaks fallout, others have experienced a surge in demand. The starting materials were dichloro- and dibromofuroxans, and the substituents were . And then I consciously dont do that), why the company is only hiring designers who can code, and why he thinks SaaS is a winner-take-all game won by those who truly appreciate the computer screen as a brand new medium. She feels strongly about cocktails and NPR. Soon after joining Sequoia in 2016, he noticed startups increasingly running their businesses on Notion, using it to send memos or make decks. The first version of Notion was a tool that non-coders could use to make their own apps. He was kind enough to take it, Kothari says. Only those who can code, and sometimes not even them. 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. To make Notion more competitive, the company recently acquired the calendaring company Cron, the software-building company Flowdash, and the cloud integration and workflow automation platform Automate.io. tags N/A. Inside Design: As the founder, how close does this version of Notion match the one in your mind? After a year, he didnt get the H-1B visa hed need to stay working in America. You can be a designer. Zhao was born in Beijing as Zhao Ting. 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. Oftentimes when you are designing and building something, youre shifting constraints. I was like, Holy shit. Welcome to my portfolio. Zhao remembers eight-hour Zooms, day after day, after the crash. Its brown, Zhao says, pointing to what very much looks like the white background of a Notion page pulled up on a laptop. 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. As an electrical engineer, I was like, Oh my God! Sean Blanda is the Editorial Director for InVision. I thought it was the single best pitch Id ever seen in my time here, a work of art, he says. The start-up is now in a tricky stage of building on its growth with more established customers. On Etsy alone, there are tens of thousands of templatesmeal planning, creating an astrology journal, and bootstrapping startup operations. BIO. SAN FRANCISCO The spread of the coronavirus has meant feast or famine for technology start-ups. Bleary from the night before, Notion team members suddenly had to explain to their roommates, spouses and kids that they had to work. 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. Create press releases and blog posts and keep . 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. 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. They need to do pixels, they need to do UX, they need to at least be able to code React. Imagine Andy Warhol, right? Ivan Zhao Managing Director Guangzhou. His dads a school principal, Zhao says with a laugh. 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.. Even better luck trying to invest in his company: We spoke to the designer/founder (who was born in China before moving to Canada as child) about why designers should get their inspiration from other fields (One thing I personally do is go on Dribbble and look at whats popular. Notions design also distinguishes it, with a restrained, black-and-not-quite-white aesthetic. It was unstable. The 32-year-old founder of Notion says, all while regularly dropping mentions of computing legends Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart as his inspiration. It became how people think, how people communicated. 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. 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 people, he reasoned, wake up and want to use their computers to browse the internet, to write or to solve a work problem. Zhao Zhao Biography. 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. Microsoft Office did that in the 90s. You can be a designer. Over the years, Kothari rose through the ranks at LinkedIn, becoming vice president of product and moving to Indias tech center, Bengaluru, to help run LinkedIn India as it expanded. so you can easily build and stack them however you want to solve your problems your own way (made easier with drag and drop, etc.). Not necessarily capital. Collaborate in real time on a digital whiteboard. When you hire the fifth, what will you be you looking for? Someone with little experience can quickly customize using modules like linked databases, task boards, customer queries, and wiki pages. But it wont always look like this, says Zhao and Kothari. 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. Its more about UX. Get the Notion Mastery Course*: https://bit.ly/3rNMSRD Discover Notion here: https://bit.ly/3Ammn9B Get Notion templates from Easlo: https://gum. 2023 InVisionApp Inc. Allrightsreserved. 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. 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. President of Beijing Society of Immunology. Inside Design: I know you take pride in keeping small and nimble. Take product ideas from planning to launch and every step in between. Ivan Zhao is also currently the CEO of the company. I almost never had that feeling before, Zhao remembers. Take a step back, and see how you can fundamentally solve it. A year later, Zhao posted on the blog Hacker News that he was moving to San Francisco to find a job. 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 Not only does this make all of your teams work easier to find, access, and dig into every day, it also increases transparency and the flow of information throughout teams. 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. 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. 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. Tag them by department, assign them to specific people, even give them due dates if you want. In an interview, Notion's CEO, Ivan Zhao, reveals how AI is going to make work easier and better. The killer feature is that it is what you make of it.. Frey: How are the needs of work teams evolving, and how does Notion reflect that direction? Anyone can read what you share. 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