Zhao says that 68 percent of the most recent Y Combinator class ran their companies on Notion. Location. Megan Finnerty is a journalist and storytelling coach. Ivan's interest in coding and programming started during his childhood. This reality is not only expensive for businesses, but it has all of their employees jumping and context switching between many apps and tabs all day long just to complete single projects. YSC cookie is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages. 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 Test Drive ZoomInfo's Directories What do you think is going to happen with digital products? As an electrical engineer, I was like, Oh my God! In San Francisco, while Zhao still believed he was right about his grand vision, he realized he was wrong about his market. 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. There, Kothari, liberated because he was paying his own way, took a design thinking bootcamp course just because it sounded like fun. 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. Its more about UX. . 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. 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. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates they copied Xerox PARC. 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. 2. 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. Notion is staking a claim in a market dominated by giantsMicrosoft and Google, with more than 2 billion users between them. Export. It would be Kotharis first investment. 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. 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. 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. And if thats the goal, were still really early with that. As a backup, hed applied to Stanford University, knowing that if he got in, he could remain in the country as a student. more Claim Embed. ! he says with a laugh. At this stage were blocked by our internal process, our team, and distribution. I still remember his pitch. 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. While many start-ups grapple with the fallout from the pandemic, this San Francisco company raised more cash to survive. In 2015, Notion co-founders Simon Last and Ivan Zhao had removed from their lives anything that wasn't writing code and eating noodles. At that time, they declined to meet any venture capitalists or discuss acquiring a higher valuation.. It was unstable. About Ziyu(Ivan) Zhao. Those are really good ideas and theres a lot of then. Then, I realized, it doesnt make sense. Chuck Frey: If you had to summarize what Notion is and what it represents in 10 words or less, how would you describe it? Ivan Zhao is the co-founder of Notion. 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. Adding another person doesnt necessarily give you a higher-quality Moby Dick. It doesnt even necessarily make it faster.. On Wednesday, Notion said it raised $50 million from Index Ventures and other investors that valued it at $2 billion. Your email address will not be published. Last year, Notion expanded its service to larger corporate clients, who typically need armies of sales representatives and who negotiate complicated contracts. They were running out of money. She starred alongside Joana Solnado and Margarida Vilanova in the 2009 television series Sentimentos. 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. 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. Required fields are marked *. 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. 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.. Disappointingly for the co-founders, it turned out, even if they were Lasts and Zhaos actual friends, non-coders didnt want app-building software. 111 Tw Alexander Dr. Research Triangle Park, NC 27709. 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!) Inside Design: It sounds like each person needs to bring more than one skill set to the table. Things looked pretty bad from the outside, too, says Kothari, who had been one of Notions angel investors. Joint/Adjunct . He imagined these people would like Notion so much, theyd keep using it at work. Bleary from the night before, Notion team members suddenly had to explain to their roommates, spouses and kids that they had to work. Nova Zelndia. There, he learned how to code as a participant in the International Olympiad in Informatics, a grade school mathematics and computer science competition. And its flexibility can be used by project managers, productivity superfans, recruiters, executives, product teamspretty much anyone who needs to use computers to get things done (but cant code). View Ivan Zhao's business profile as Co-Founder and CEO at Lookbooks. Ivan Zhao Bellevue, WA. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. The iPhone totally opened up creation, Zhao says. The men didnt yet charge to use Notion; they wanted to grow users first. At MetaLab, a 140-person design agency in Vancouver, Notion has now replaced 12 different tools, including Google Slides and Trello, a list-making service. Zhao sees Last as his product co-founder and Kothari as his business co-founder. 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. 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. Meet the whiteboard transforming the way teams work together. The key to healthy culture and productivity is over-communication and true understanding of what everyone is working on and why its important. You need to know where are you coming from on a business side in order to know how to rebel against it. Furoxans are potentially useful heteroaromatic units in pharmaceuticals and agrichemicals. She is the first Asian woman of color to win the Top DGA Award. Previously, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Adobes 99U and a founder of Technically Media. Location: San Francisco, CA Add to My Lists. "We're unique in the way that we're already where you work," Zhao told me. As he readied Notion for a 2.0 version, Zhao would also reply to users directly on Twitter, building community there by showing that real people were behind the product. Notions innovation was letting users configure views of those databases in customizable ways, so different people could see the same information presented in different ways. This is what Im going to do. Theres nothing else that has more leverage to use my skill set than to help people to use their computer beyond just a typewriter. We wanted to create a space that was as distraction-free as humanly possible. Try to be conservative. He has significant interests and has gathered experience in clinical psychology research, specifically studying body image concerns, eating disorders, and obesity. 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. Theyd seen it coming, says Zhao, like a Doomsday clock. Keep your work, cut your costs. Kothari was born and raised in Ahmedabad, a city of 8 million in Indias western Gujarat state. Zhao was born in Beijing as Zhao Ting. Vernal said this focus on nurturing community was key to getting a foothold in the product world. Bio. Look at how the business history of the past couple of decades. Zhao was unfazed by this success. Ivan Zhao is also currently the CEO of the company. She feels strongly about cocktails and NPR. But really, there havent been many big changes to our essential work software in decades. His first job was six months of answering support-desk tickets. Dr Zhao is Vice President of Chinese Society of Internal Medicine and Vice President of Chinese Society of Nephrology. His dads a school principal, Zhao says with a laugh. Your email address will not be published. Why would I do that? How do you answer cynicism with curiosity? Zhao: In college, I did freelance work for friends who wanted to build their own websites, and I saw a couple of things. Notions co-founders are growing an enduring business by nurturing the creative community. 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!) Collaborate in real time on a digital whiteboard. 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. Kothari was a heavy user of the site, visiting multiple times a day to weigh in on conversations, to see what other developers were up to and to recruit. Ivan Pavlov Biographical . Welcome to my portfolio. He was kind enough to take it, Kothari says. 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. 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 an interview, Notion's CEO, Ivan Zhao, reveals how AI is going to make work easier and better. Frey: Whats the origin story of Notion? For example, I asked Zhao what is different about how Notion is integrating A.I., compared with Bing or ChatGPT. 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. Just click the "Edit page" button at the bottom of the page or learn more in the Biography submission guide. 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. Every day of the pandemic added more users, and they were running out of database storage. 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. In 2012, as he prepared to graduate, many of his friends needed online portfolios. BIO. Zhao chose Inkling instead. Self-driven, highly motivated engineering student seeking to impact society starting from its structural foundations.<br><br>"Take the best that exists and make it better" - Henry Royce<br><br> | Learn more about Ivan Zhao's work experience, education, connections & more by visiting their profile on LinkedIn He is interested in creativity, storytelling, and vibes. It set itself apart from competitorswhich also include Dropbox, Atlassian and Oraclethrough a growing set of clever, built-for-purpose templates such as to-do lists, product roadmaps and client databases. 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. They dont write hyper-specific code to do a clever, unique thing an individual person wants to do. Then okay, you should go back to UX stage, maybe change the UX a little bit so it becomes really easy to implement. Sequoia Capital partner Dannie Herzberg is proud to be among Notions power users, running her work life on it. As Notions features become more robust, the tools we make with it will become more complex. And since everyone thinks and works differently, this means tools need to be very flexible. Zhao: Teams are increasingly tech-savvy, with things like shortcuts and working collaboratively becoming second nature. (Today, Ravikant has slightly less than a bazillion, at 1.9 million.) Or, if you have a laptop, you should be using Notion for thinking and collaboration, and communication. In 2015, productivity tool Notion nearly died. Dr TONG Weihan . It was a crucible moment. Zhao Liying was born on 16th October 1987 in Langfang, Hebei Provice of China into a middle class family. This time, Zhao offered him a job. Thats how Vernal and others at Sequoia started seeing Notion pop up. He. 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. 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. YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. And until more people could do that, Zhao felt that the real promise of human-computer interaction would be limited to the creativity of coders, who tend to write software that solves their own problems, or they write software that people will pay to use. 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 . I am Ivan Zhao, cofounder/designer of Notion - a unified tool for docs, wikis, and tasks. 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. Katie. Zhao: We think tools should mimic the way peoples brains work. The gambit worked. I love understanding decision making frameworks, both from a technical perspective (such as algorithmic decision making) and from a . N/A. 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