In 2015, Notion co-founders Simon Last and Ivan Zhao had removed from their lives anything that wasnt writing code and eating noodles. At that point, thats where Notions idea got formed. Zhao became obsessed with democratizing access to the tool-making ability of coding. The more you can encourage people to share, and the more you can coax ideas and information out of their heads, the better off your team will be long-term. Mr. Zhao said he was wary of bloat slowing the start-up down and degrading the quality of its product. N/A. Ivan Pavlov, in full Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, (born September 14 [September 26, New Style], 1849, Ryazan, Russiadied February 27, 1936, Leningrad [now St. Petersburg]), Russian physiologist known chiefly for his development of the concept of the conditioned reflex. is a journalist and storytelling coach. Do that first, then figure out what skin you put on it. They dont write hyper-specific code to do a clever, unique thing an individual person wants to do. They knew they needed to move Notion onto multiple databases, but they hadnt prioritized it. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. We want to give more people the ability to build the tools they actually want and need without having to code. More about Ivan Zhao Selected links Ivan Zhao - Founder - Notion | LinkedIn Do you need to know more about Ivan Zhao? A Ivan Zaho is a Founder at Notion based in San Francisco, California. 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. Bugs came from everywhere, Zhao says. Be the first to contribute! 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. 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. Those are really good ideas and theres a lot of then. Despite its success, Notions tiny 14-person team has remained heads down and somewhat mercurial. Frey: Whats your vision for how tools can help people to create and express their ideas better? I argue thats the only way to solve a problem. When the work was done, the company celebrated with Zoom karaoke, complete with custom lyrics to Amazing Grace. Zhao, of course, has a copy stored on one of his Notion workspaces. I was playing basketball and found out, and I was like, What the fuck? Go to the edge of what is still acceptable to your peers and go to the far, far edge of that. 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.. I van Petrovich Pavlov was born on September 14, 1849 at Ryazan, where his father, Peter Dmitrievich Pavlov, was a village priest. He says his artist friends helped him hone his sense of aesthetics, watching movies with his film studies friends, helping his then-girlfriend and her friends with fashion school portfolios. We can reproduce that. Take a step back, and see how you can fundamentally solve it. In this way, you get to see how what youre working on fits into the greater whole. Megan Finnerty is a journalist and storytelling coach. Ivan Zhao Bellevue, WA. Use first principles thinking, what some people call systems thinking. Dont base your approach just on copying and tweaking a little bit what other people have done. For the next six months, the company stopped building new features and instead focused on strengthening its infrastructure and migrating to multiple databases. Then the internet came along towards the mid-to-late nineties and that sort of breaks apart the monopoly of Microsoft. Im the nerd of the friend circle, so I started coding peoples websites for them. 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. 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. He had a hunch that investing in individual users would ultimately get Notion into big companies. It seemed wrong that only a few people with the ability to code could build websites and other software tools. The 20-somethings didnt mind the drudgery or the lack of personal space. Zhao: Yes, absolutely. Participate In 2012, as he prepared to graduate, many of his friends needed online portfolios. Join Facebook to connect with Ivan Zhao and others you may know. 2023 InVisionApp Inc. Allrightsreserved. Notion is emblematic of the kind of technology start-up that may be in a position to survive the shakeout in Silicon Valley. While many start-ups grapple with the fallout from the pandemic, this San Francisco company raised more cash to survive. The tide turned that same year when Mr. Zhao released Notions software product. One of the reasons its so popular is that it chains together all the notifications and the communications of the SaaS products together, right? Create press releases and blog posts and keep . 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.. 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. ACS Applied Bio Materials 2021, 4 (12 . I almost never had that feeling before, Zhao remembers. They were consumed with reinventing a piece of software called Notion, and if they couldnt figure out how to turn it into an everyday tool people would want to run on their computers or smartphones, they would have laid off their friends, burned through millions in angel investment and wasted years of their lives for nothing. At this stage were blocked by our internal process, our team, and distribution. The iPhone totally opened up creation, Zhao says. Kothari said he thought it had a beautiful, clean design, and he happened to be looking for a designer. Zhao started working on the first version of Notion while day-jobbing at the ebook startup Inkling in San Francisco. The fund-raising was completed in 36 hours last week after the virus pushed Ivan Zhao, Notions founder and chief executive, and Akshay Kothari, Notions chief operating officer, to rethink their previous position of not relying too much on venture capital. ivzhao has one repository available. Im betting on that most people can create their own tools. You need to know where are you coming from on a business side in order to know how to rebel against it. Inside Design: To me, your view on talent mirrors your product mindset: that all these SaaS tools are going to eventually coalesce into one. If it doesnt feel good, then well go back to code and go back to design. As Notions features become more robust, the tools we make with it will become more complex. 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. The first version of Notion was a tool that non-coders could use to make their own apps. How far along is Notion on its journey? Inside Design: Youve spoken about how designers should look sideways to other fields for inspiration. Its easier to correct this [and move faster] if you know both disciplines. 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. You have all these other planes of vision. Nobody wakes up wanting to make software. YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. 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. That day felt like Christmas. As an electrical engineer, I was like, Oh my God! 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. 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. Zhao: The all-in-one nature of Notion is very special. Id never had a guest come to the office and touch the tables, and appreciate the quality of the leather of the chairs. 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. Ivan Zhao is also currently the CEO of the company. 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. Study some history of computing stuff or pioneers of the seventies or sixties. Ivan Zhao is on Facebook. Zhaos mom loaned him $150,000 to keep the startup afloat. They neednt have worried, and they havent spent it. 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. Good luck finding a picture of Ivan online. building products to help people at Intus Care, Loftium, and Mojotech. And thats one way. 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. Nova Zelndia. * Notion's Enterprise Success with Community RootsIvan Zhao(Notion, Co-founder and CEO): Notion, the popular maker of productivity and collaboration tools, . 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. (Kothari still has the email.). Lets just reset this. Now just the two of them, Zhao and Last wanted to go somewhere cheaper than San Francisco, and somewhere theyd never visited. Do you view the same happening to a designers career? I am Ivan Zhao, cofounder/designer of Notion - a unified tool for docs, wikis, and tasks. Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. Or, if you have a laptop, you should be using Notion for thinking and collaboration, and communication. 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. Welcome to my portfolio. Nov 2021 - Present1 year 4 months. Inside Design: I once had someone tell me that every startup or every company is a bet on a yet-to-be-realized future. Publisher. Inside Design: How would you recommend designers start learning about the philosophical underpinnings that guide your thinking? The ambition of Zhao and his team at Notion cant be contained in any single decade. Theres a short history of this (and how it influenced Notion) here. The gambit worked. more Claim Embed. Katie. Zhao: In college, I did freelance work for friends who wanted to build their own websites, and I saw a couple of things. They picked Kyoto, almost on a whim, and subleased their spaces in San Francisco. Zhao reached out and asked Last for a meeting. 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. So you dont have to go out there to hunt for whats new. In 2016, Mr. Zhao borrowed $150,000 from his mother to keep the start-up afloat. 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 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. Ivan Zhao - Systems Engineer and Support Lead - Recreational Services | LinkedIn Ivan Zhao Good person with cybersecurity personality for life Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand 303 followers 300. 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. Guannan Zhang, Jing Wang, Ivan S. Maksymov, Andrew D. Greentree, Jiming Hu, Aiguo . Frey: Whats the origin story of Notion? Frey: How does Notion help individuals and teams to manage their tasks and projects better? Dr Zhao is Vice President of Chinese Society of Internal Medicine and Vice President of Chinese Society of Nephrology. Last year, Notion expanded its service to larger corporate clients, who typically need armies of sales representatives and who negotiate complicated contracts. And we want to do this in a way that will help people think more clearly and collaborate with each other better. Eclipsing one million users, Notion (which bills itself as the missing half of Slack) is becoming one of the more interesting and unique productivity tools around. 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. Come on! The 32-year-old founder of Notion says, all while regularly dropping mentions of computing legends Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart as his inspiration. Zhao chose Inkling instead. 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. 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. The product with the most votes in 24 hours earns additional promotion, as well as international tech-community hype. ), but is out at school. Each person were looking for will be similar to what we have now. It can be a product that is as powerful as those five different SaaS tools. 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. . And to stretch what money they had left, theyd moved from San Francisco to Kyoto, Japan, which was less than half as expensive. But if youre truly growing so fast, why not add more people? 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