They need to do pixels, they need to do UX, they need to at least be able to code React. Just look at Slack. Im betting on that most people can create their own tools. He has over 320 original manuscripts published in . These were the kind of people who took it upon themselves to translate the Notion user guide into Korean because it was only available in English; who ran the Notion subreddit, now with 200,000 subscribers, and who ran the Notion Facebook groups in Korea and the Middle East, both with tens of thousands of members. We try to give people a blank canvas that lets them arrange their thoughts in ways that are most helpful to them. And then the web-first application came. And theyre the future Fortune 500 companies, he says. Ivan Zhao, by Cayce Clifford for The New York. 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. We recently interviewed him to learn the origin story of Notion, and to get his take on the evolving nature of work . 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. 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. Zhao remembers the day when he suddenly started making money from it in $.99 cent increments. 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. But if youre truly growing so fast, why not add more people? By Alexa von Tobel, Founder and managing partner, Inspired Capital @. Its brown, Zhao says, pointing to what very much looks like the white background of a Notion page pulled up on a laptop. 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. I can be a designer. He refers to Kothari as a human stem cell, a person who can spot any need in the company, design a plan to do the work, master the work and then eventually hire the right person to lead the new team doing that work. Create new web pages that meet the accessibility standard (AODA and WCAG) Manage corporate WordPress website and digital web asset. Zhaos mom loaned him $150,000 to keep the startup afloat. 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. Frey: What holes does Notion fill that existing productivity, information management and collaboration tools werent addressing? Create press releases and blog posts and keep . They dont write hyper-specific code to do a clever, unique thing an individual person wants to do. Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. I am Ivan Zhao, cofounder/designer of Notion - a unified tool for docs, wikis, and tasks. UX Designer - Corporate Marketing. Enjoy the read! Chuck Frey: If you had to summarize what Notion is and what it represents in 10 words or less, how would you describe it? ! he says with a laugh. 2023 InVisionApp Inc. Allrightsreserved. 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. Those early ideas are really pure. (Kothari still has the email.). I feel really strongly about that. Thats how Vernal and others at Sequoia started seeing Notion pop up. Zhao was unfazed by this success. 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. Well, very few people.. 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. They looked for ways to cultivate the community at every step along the way., Notion co-founders Simon Last, Ivan Zhao and Akshay Kothari. Zhao Zhao Biography. Jani Zhao's age is 30. International model who is known for having earned representation from several different agencies including Stacey Castro Media and . 2) it breaks traditional productivity software into blocks text, lists, tasks, databases, images, etc. It almost ran out of money.. Colleagues N/A. SAN FRANCISCO The spread of the coronavirus has meant feast or famine for technology start-ups. Every team. These men saw computers as a way to help humans be more imaginative, more creative, more capable of leveraging intelligence in ways not yet imagined. It seemed wrong that only a few people with the ability to code could build websites and other software tools. How far along is Notion on its journey? Published October 13, 2022. In the right hands, using Notion feels for non-developers like finally gaining the superpowers of a developer who can set up their own custom software. Before the most recent funding, Notion, which was founded in 2013, had raised $17 million. Front-end stuff you can be taught, its not that hard, right? 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. Today, billions of us use computers, yet only 0.34 percent of the global population are software developers. It didnt work because the product was not understandable for most people. Ivan Zhao NZ Country HR Leader @ Honeywell, Professional Coach, helping people and organisations grow through driving continuous learning. Export. We want to figure out how to turn incoming capital into Moby Dicks first before getting more capital. She feels strongly about cocktails and NPR. Why would I do that? How do you answer cynicism with curiosity? They were running out of money. Notions office is devoid of the typical start-up tchotchkes and clutter. Was that intentional? Just dream of a piece of software, and you should just be able to build that using Notion., I thought it was the single best pitch Id ever seen in my time here, a work of art. Instead, the company focused primarily on growing the community. What was your inspiration or motivation for thinking around this? But if you step back and look at history you have the entire world history to look at. He and Zhao met every six months or so, sharing insights and suggesting possible employees. Guannan Zhang, Jing Wang, Ivan S. Maksymov, Andrew D. Greentree, Jiming Hu, Aiguo . With more people working remotely now and turning to such products, new customer sign-ups hit a new high for Notion in recent weeks. 111 Tw Alexander Dr. Research Triangle Park, NC 27709. So they called Sarah Cannon, an investor at Index Ventures who had been courting Notion for over a year. Ivan Zhao is Founder at Notion. View Site. We started with Notion 1.0, which was all about docs and notes, and then introduced 2.0 with databases in the spring of 2018. About. ACS Applied Bio Materials 2021, 4 (12 . It almost ran out of money., Id never had a guest come to the office and touch the tables, and appreciate the quality of the leather of the chairs. The founders have time to dress properly, and even enjoy the occasional home-cooked meal. 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. See also Other Works | Publicity Listings | Official Sites View agent, publicist, legal and company contact details on IMDbPro He is interested in creativity, storytelling, and vibes. Theyd seen it coming, says Zhao, like a Doomsday clock. Description. When you look there you can only see a little bit in front of you. 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. Zhao refers to overhead fluorescent lighting as hell. He chose all the furniture and finishes, putting as much thought into the offices as he has into the product. Furoxans are potentially useful heteroaromatic units in pharmaceuticals and agrichemicals. Movies. As a backup, hed applied to Stanford University, knowing that if he got in, he could remain in the country as a student. 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. Herein, we report a new synthetic approach for the synthesis of chloro- and bromofuroxans. In San Francisco, while Zhao still believed he was right about his grand vision, he realized he was wrong about his market. 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!) Most people, he reasoned, wake up and want to use their computers to browse the internet, to write or to solve a work problem. I almost never had that feeling before, Zhao remembers. How high is the bar to be considered good at a skill? Those people have taste; they just dont have good tools., I was like, Holy shit. 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 saying, Education is different from schooling, and he understood this, says Zhao. Zhao remembers eight-hour Zooms, day after day, after the crash. Then the internet came along towards the mid-to-late nineties and that sort of breaks apart the monopoly of Microsoft. Dr Ivan SEAH Yu Jun . I wonder what does it take for every company, every team, every student to run on Notion? Its easier to correct this [and move faster] if you know both disciplines. In 2016, Mr. Zhao borrowed $150,000 from his mother to keep the start-up afloat. It became how people think, how people communicated. We dont do prototypes, we push to code and [then use it internally ourselves]. 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. Frey: Whats the origin story of Notion? They started charging users monthly subscription fees between $4 and $10, and began turning a profit. Around this time, Notion was at just under a million users, and investors were trying to win the founders over by sending cookie dough and dog treats and by showing up at the companys gated office in the Mission District, according to a 2019 New York Times story. Or sometimes something is really easy to implement but its really hard to design. Ivan Pavlov Biographical . 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. We think the pendulum is swinging back to a bundled solution. People think fast, so they should be able to capture and restructure their thoughts fast too. Is this the simplest mental model we can use? Inside Design: How do you stop the undeniable and neverending pressure for you guys to raise more money, go hire a hundred people, to expand? They neednt have worried, and they havent spent it. Its tools help office workers, now quarantined in their homes, work together more seamlessly. 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. Ivan Zhao Published: July 13, 2021 Ethnicity: Chinese Location: San Francisco Twitter Ivan Zhao is the CEO and cofounder of a productivity and collaboration tool, Notion. It quickly caught on among techies and early adopters at companies like Samsung and Hearst. Its founders, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, had built their app on a suboptimal tech stack, and it crashed constantly. Previously, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Adobes 99U and a founder of Technically Media. Zhao was born in Beijing as Zhao Ting. Each person were looking for will be similar to what we have now. In 2015, productivity tool Notion nearly died. In 2015, Notion co-founders Simon Last and Ivan Zhao had removed from their lives anything that wasn't writing code and eating noodles. industry Computer Software. Professor of Medicine Chief of Renal Division, Peking University First Hospital. They looked for ways to cultivate the community at every step along the way., Then, I realized, it doesnt make sense. On the west coast of Canada he learned English from watching Spongebob Squarepants., Zhao attended the University of British Columbia, and, figuring he already understood computer science, focused on cognitive science and art, having picked up photography his senior year of high school. Zhao Liying was born on 16th October 1987 in Langfang, Hebei Provice of China into a middle class family. Theres no final pixel-perfect design. 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. Disappointingly for the co-founders, it turned out, even if they were Lasts and Zhaos actual friends, non-coders didnt want app-building software. Ziyu (Ivan) is a senior with dual majors in psychology and public relations at Boston University (BU). 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. Transformative collaboration for all the work you do. Purpose-built templates to help your team collaborate more effectively. He says this helped him understand how to make Notion more useful, and it gave him a sense of Notions growing communitypeople smitten with the minimalist aesthetic, or who loved customizing templates to make book-reading logs or skincare diaries. 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. 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. Some of the earliest team members had already departed, and retaining the rest was growing more untenable by the day. Frey: How does Notion help individuals and teams to manage their tasks and projects better? Can we give that to non-programmers? Be the first to contribute! A lot of our functionality has been designed in service to that. 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. Publisher. But it wont always look like this, says Zhao and Kothari. All unified, it keeps your teams together, and keeps your thoughts together. Inside Design: To me, your view on talent mirrors your product mindset: that all these SaaS tools are going to eventually coalesce into one. A portrait of Engelbart hangs prominently in a first-floor hallway. Then okay, you should go back to UX stage, maybe change the UX a little bit so it becomes really easy to implement. 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