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. 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. So its less about where we are today, but its like, we want to be the place where future companies are operating. That said, with the new investment money, Notion and its backers also want it to be the place companies are operating today. Its almost like you have a brand-new houseyou can decorate however you want, versus the old house, you have to clean, repaint the walls and all that.. 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. 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. 1988-1991 - Team Leader with Centro-Svilluppo Materiali (Centre for Materials Development). Chloe Zhao is a Chinese filmmaker best known for her independent U.S. films Songs My Brother Taught Me, The Rider, and Nomadland. Then okay, you should go back to UX stage, maybe change the UX a little bit so it becomes really easy to implement. The start-up is now in a tricky stage of building on its growth with more established customers. Zhao reached out and asked Last for a meeting. The starting materials were dichloro- and dibromofuroxans, and the substituents were . Guannan Zhang, Jing Wang, Ivan S. Maksymov, Andrew D. Greentree, Jiming Hu, Aiguo . 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. 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. 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. He was educated first at the church school in Ryazan and then at the theological seminary there. Its a story about how for years before Notion, so many pieces of software were just digitized versions of analog office toolstypewriters, file cabinets, desktop ledgers replaced by online document editors, databases and spreadsheets. I was pushed to go talk to people in supermarkets when they were buying ramen. Ivan Zhao started Notion, a productivity software start-up that has made money since 2018, in 2013. Soon after joining Sequoia in 2016, he noticed startups increasingly running their businesses on Notion, using it to send memos or make decks. Zhao was uninterested in school in Beijing, preferring to focus on manga and movies. Its like, everybody can be a designer. When you look there you can only see a little bit in front of you. That said, increasingly, teams need ways to work better together that dont require a ton of time spent in in-person meetings (which slows everyone down), and a way to keep communication focused and action-oriented. Just look at Slack. What did I sign up for? I think the first project was to redesign how people eat ramen noodles. Create digital wireframes and prototypes for corporate website and landing pages. 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. 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. It quickly caught on among techies and early adopters at companies like Samsung and Hearst. 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!. He came to the Slack office, which was brand new and very nicely designed in this midcentury-modern way. 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. Inside Design: I know you take pride in keeping small and nimble. 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. Ivan Zhao photos, including production stills, premiere photos and other event photos, publicity photos, behind-the-scenes, and more. That allowed the start-up to garner new funding. Sean Blanda is the Editorial Director for InVision. Theres a short history of this (and how it influenced Notion) here. He initially raised $2 million, which he spent on developing a product over several years. After . 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., They found a small group of really die-hard fans that carried the product with them. One of the biggest holes we fill is the information gap that emerges on teams that work across too many tools without visibility. Welcome to my portfolio. Yue Zhao Visit Yue Zhao's profile on the York Research Database to: See a full list of publications; Browse activities and projects; Explore connections, collaborators, related work and more; Profile Biography. Ivan Zhao NZ Country HR Leader @ Honeywell, Professional Coach, helping people and organisations grow through driving continuous learning. As a backup, hed applied to Stanford University, knowing that if he got in, he could remain in the country as a student. A collaborative canvas to work on anything from anywhere. 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. Inside Design: It sounds like each person needs to bring more than one skill set to the table. 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. 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. 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!) Zhao sees Last as his product co-founder and Kothari as his business co-founder. He wanted coding to stop being a tiny community of specially educated people. In 2013, Zhao and Last raised about $2 million from angel investorsa mix of friends, family and friends of friends. Disappointingly for the co-founders, it turned out, even if they were Lasts and Zhaos actual friends, non-coders didnt want app-building software. How high is the bar to be considered good at a skill? 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. 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. You have all these other planes of vision. Anyone can read what you share. The romantic goal is: Can we make tools that allow people to use computers like a new medium? 984-287-3702. shanshan.zhao@ nih.gov. Zhaos mom loaned him $150,000 to keep the startup afloat. I love understanding decision making frameworks, both from a technical perspective (such as algorithmic decision making) and from a . Simon is a designer and engineer residing in SanFrancisco. When the medium is so new, people have entire green fields in front of them, and there is less thinking about business. And just talk to people in restaurants, observe how theyre eating ramen, and see if you can change something about their experience. So we went from one thing, Microsoft office, and it became many, many different SaaS products today. We got a lot of traction there. Soon, tech insiders, people involved with Y Combinator and other startup incubators, were using it. This is not surprising if you consider how these tools evolved. 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. 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 . It was positively received by Product Hunt and rated #1 Product of the Month. Zhao: There are so many apps these days. Youre really left with a completely blank, fresh space designed to feel like a breath of fresh air and spacious opportunity to think deeply. Location. Frey: How are the needs of work teams evolving, and how does Notion reflect that direction? 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. Zhao: We believe more people should be able to modify the tools they use in their everyday lives and work. Just click the "Edit page" button at the bottom of the page or learn more in the Biography submission guide. It became how people think, how people communicated. Kothari and Zhao talk about this moment as still the early innings of Notion, and see Notion 1.0 as about lists, Notion 2.0 as about databases and the upcoming Notion 3.0 as about whole workflows. While many are cutting staff and slashing costs as they reel from the outbreaks fallout, others have experienced a surge in demand. What was your inspiration or motivation for thinking around this? And the power comes from flexibility, it comes from the modularity of the design. It would be Kotharis first investment. Purpose-built templates to help your team collaborate more effectively. 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. 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. In the downstairs of a rented two-story house so small that only a traditional Shoji screen separated their bedrooms, Zhao says they spent 18 hours a day at their laptops, not bothering to dress, clean or cook. Notions office is devoid of the typical start-up tchotchkes and clutter. Then the internet came along towards the mid-to-late nineties and that sort of breaks apart the monopoly of Microsoft. The gambit worked. 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. Ivan Zhao Bellevue, WA. When he was in high school, his mom wanted more for his education, so she moved them to Vancouver. I want Notion, or a company like Notion, to catch that wave. Its a modular product that aims to put the power of software in the hands of non-coders. The killer feature is that it is what you make of it.. Wired wrote about it, and the Apple App Store featured it. And we want to do this in a way that will help people think more clearly and collaborate with each other better. Ivan Zhao Make-Up Department + Add or change photo on IMDbPro Contribute to IMDb. The first version of Notion was a tool that non-coders could use to make their own apps. How did it come to be? Or sometimes something is really easy to implement but its really hard to design. Stop looking at Dribbble. About Ziyu(Ivan) Zhao. It was kind of like despair, I would say. 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. She feels strongly about cocktails and NPR. Notion is also profitable. 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. When the world changed, they changed their mind, she said. A328 David P Rall Building. She feels strongly about cocktails and NPR. Were all using tools that proscribe very specific workflows that rarely match the way we wish we could think, learn and work. Financing is a signal of stability, which is important for us, said Akshay Kothari, Notions head of operations. Its like, everybody can be a designer. Notion, Maker of Collaboration Software, Raises $50 Million, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/technology/notion-startup-fund-raising.html. And then he decided to drop out of school and just work on this full time with me, remembers Zhao. Their angel investment money dwindling, they faced a brutal choice: Fire their fledgling team of 4 and start over, or run out of cash. Its founders, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, had built their app on a suboptimal tech stack, and it crashed constantly. You can be a designer. But if you step back and look at history you have the entire world history to look at. 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. By all accounts, the mad dash in Kyoto paid off. 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.. President of Beijing Society of Immunology. Kothari was born and raised in Ahmedabad, a city of 8 million in Indias western Gujarat state. Related Markets 2. Because 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.. We try to give people a blank canvas that lets them arrange their thoughts in ways that are most helpful to them. Ram Shriram, a venture capitalist who invested in Notion in 2013, said that at many businesses, a lot of the products we use were designed in the 1990s. There is room for new workplace tools that take advantage of the internet and other advances so people can collaborate and have the most up-to-date data while they work, he said. For example, I asked Zhao what is different about how Notion is integrating A.I., compared with Bing or ChatGPT. Zhao was unfazed by this success. Theyre all kind of ugly, right? He made maybe five websites. She was head of enterprise sales at Slack when she met Zhao, who visited the offices often to learn from the companys startup journey and lay the groundwork to make Slack Notions first integration. The computing pioneers thought everybody would make their own tools, make their own software, Zhao says, returning to a favorite idea. 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