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. One of the lucky ones is Notion, a workplace productivity start-up based in San Francisco, whose tools help people organize and track their work. As Notions features become more robust, the tools we make with it will become more complex. Its founders, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, had built their app on a suboptimal tech stack, and it crashed constantly. Is this the simplest mental model we can use? It was a lot of fun, some of the happiest times, says Zhao. Or, if you have a laptop, you should be using Notion for thinking and collaboration, and communication. Zhao, 39, consolidated her domination of the category . Menu. So the product side of Notion is four people or five people. She feels strongly about cocktails and NPR. 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. We recently interviewed him to learn the origin story of Notion, and to get his take on the evolving nature of work today and how his modular masterpiece enables it. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (September 14, 1849 - February 27, 1936) was a Nobel Prize-winning physiologist best known for his classical conditioning experiments with dogs. 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. Previously, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Adobes 99U and a founder of Technically Media. "We're unique in the way that we're already where you work," Zhao told me. 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. Metallum Recycling. "We . Bio. tags N/A. Herein, we report a new synthetic approach for the synthesis of chloro- and bromofuroxans. Megan Finnerty is a journalist and storytelling coach. Zhao looked at his portfolio, which featured, among other things, code that enabled peoplekids, presumablyto add body parts to a creature based on their answers to either/or logic gates. So we went from one thing, Microsoft office, and it became many, many different SaaS products today. 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. Thats why all of Notions functionality fades to the back as soon as you start typing. But somewhere during her high school days, she became increasingly interested in a career in films and TV. Inside Design: Youve spoken about how designers should look sideways to other fields for inspiration. 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. It became how people think, how people communicated. 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 . Just look at Slack. I thought [investing] was a mistake, because the company didnt go anywhere, he says. We want to figure out how to turn incoming capital into Moby Dicks first before getting more capital. Your email address will not be published. Oftentimes when you are designing and building something, youre shifting constraints. 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. The ambition of Zhao and his team at Notion cant be contained in any single decade. And if thats the goal, were still really early with that. Ivan Zhao: Tools that let you work the way your brain works. But if you were to tell me I should read more about architecture and fashion I may answer, Does it help my work? Those people have taste; they just dont have good tools., I was like, Holy shit. The computing pioneers thought everybody would make their own tools, make their own software, Zhao says, returning to a favorite idea. In his research, he discovered the conditioned reflex, which shaped the field of behaviorism in psychology. You distill from something not in the circular place you are living but look in a plane outside of what you are working. Notion, Maker of Collaboration Software, Raises $50 Million, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/technology/notion-startup-fund-raising.html. 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. building products to help people at Intus Care, Loftium, and Mojotech. The start-up is now in a tricky stage of building on its growth with more established customers. Then from there, the tool that people used to think and work is Microsoft Office and it was one monolithic tool, maybe with a suite of different programs. New Zealand Ivan Zhao Managing Director Guangzhou. Vernal remembers Notions first few offices had a no-shoes policy, and when he sent Sequoia partners to learn about the company, he would remind them to wear good socks. It was really popular in the 90s, but somehow people forgot that idea for a couple of decades. At this stage were blocked by our internal process, our team, and distribution. His major research interest focuses on autoimmune renal diseases, prevention and treatment of CKD. An Alloy Platform of DualFingerprints for HighPerformance Stroke Screening. Frey: Whats your vision for how tools can help people to create and express their ideas better? 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. 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. In 2013, Zhao and Last raised about $2 million from angel investorsa mix of friends, family and friends of friends. Other startups are working to build out similar capabilities; in 2021, Google Workplace added something like Notions interconnectivity with the launch of Smart Canvas, and Microsoft has done the same for 365 with its Fluid Framework upgrade. Zhao: We believe more people should be able to modify the tools they use in their everyday lives and work. Zhao: In Notion, you can create multiple layers of tasks so that its possible for everyone to see everyones tasks team-wide at the top level, and then drill down into individuals tasks at the most granular level. Topics of Influence N/A. View Site. Biography of Ivan Pavlov, Father of Classical Conditioning. About. Colleagues N/A. ), but is out at school. I think we have an early fit that we can double down on. Instead, the company focused primarily on growing the community. Ivan Zhao Founder at Notion Labs. Transformative collaboration for all the work you do. A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface. 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. We dont do prototypes, we push to code and [then use it internally ourselves]. N/A. The tide turned that same year when Mr. Zhao released Notions software product. But if you step back and look at history you have the entire world history to look at. He imagined these people would like Notion so much, theyd keep using it at work. Zhao remembers sneaking Last into a nearby bar, the Trick Dog. (Today, Ravikant has slightly less than a bazillion, at 1.9 million.) In the 1960s and 70s, these men, particularly Engelbart, envisioned a future in which people used computers to design their own software to accomplish whatever they wanted. 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. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates they copied Xerox PARC. Zhao chose Inkling instead. The company is hiring for about 75 more positions. It was positively received by Product Hunt and rated #1 Product of the Month. 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!) Its like 90% perfect. A lot of our functionality has been designed in service to that. 2023 InVisionApp Inc. Allrightsreserved. And Notions mission is about software tool-making. Even if those tools just look like black-and-not-quite-white document editors at first. Ivan Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Notion, shares the artistic vision behind his productivity startup's smashing success. It was very intense and focused. Someone with little experience can quickly customize using modules like linked databases, task boards, customer queries, and wiki pages. 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 . We want to give more people the ability to build the tools they actually want and need without having to code. Theres been kind of a big unbundling where the old guard like Microsoft Office has been broken down into many separate apps for documents, spreadsheets, notes, etc. His first job was six months of answering support-desk tickets. It was not really a product, Zhao says. You have all these other planes of vision. 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. For example, they want to make Notion capable of publishing into varied content management systems with one click of a button. He currently resides in Philadelphia. With more people working remotely now and turning to such products, new customer sign-ups hit a new high for Notion in recent weeks. So you dont have to go out there to hunt for whats new. Disappointingly for the co-founders, it turned out, even if they were Lasts and Zhaos actual friends, non-coders didnt want app-building software. They knew they needed to move Notion onto multiple databases, but they hadnt prioritized it. But Shana Fisher, an investor at Third Kind Venture Capital who had earlier backed the start-up, cautioned Mr. Zhao about raising too much capital because it could be distracting. We wanted to create a space that was as distraction-free as humanly possible. 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. 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. 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. 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. This time, Zhao offered him a job. Congcong Pei, Yu Zeng, Liang Zhao, Jing Zhao, Jingjing Wan. 3,234 Followers, 1,367 Following, 180 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Ivan Zhao (@ivanhzhao) ACS Applied Bio Materials 2021, 4 (12 . Sequoia Capital partner Dannie Herzberg is proud to be among Notions power users, running her work life on it. That day felt like Christmas. We can reproduce that. Im betting on that most people can create their own tools. Originally from Beijing, China, Chloe Zhao was born on 31 March 1982 . It almost ran out of money.. You can be a designer. Nobody wakes up wanting to make software. Bleary from the night before, Notion team members suddenly had to explain to their roommates, spouses and kids that they had to work. It reinforces organizations to make sure all work being done by everyone rolls up to the same main objectives, and provides transparency for everyone into whats going on and who is doing what at all times. Does this solve peoples problems in the fewest clicks possible? The romantic goal is: Can we make tools that allow people to use computers like a new medium? We think the pendulum is swinging back to a bundled solution. Every team. Were all using tools that proscribe very specific workflows that rarely match the way we wish we could think, learn and work. And now the pendulum is swinging back towards something more bundled up again. This topic is getting popular again. 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 . Its great that people believe in the company and believe in me. Inside Design: Youve hired four product designers. Were continuing to grow our functionality, and are excited about whats ahead in 2019. A portrait of Engelbart hangs prominently in a first-floor hallway. Those are really good ideas and theres a lot of then. By early last year, Notion had nearly one million users. Wired wrote about it, and the Apple App Store featured it. The two believed Notion was worth this effort because they were trying to make it into something that would revolutionize peoples relationships with computers and software. Ivan Zhao Founder at Notion San Francisco, California, United States 7K followers 500+ connections Join to view profile Notion Company Website Activity I spent most of my 2022 planning my. A Ivan Zaho is a Founder at Notion based in San Francisco, California. What was your inspiration or motivation for thinking around this? Related Markets 2. 2. 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. They did this, Zhao says, by building relationships with power users. 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. In a moment of uncertainty, Mr. Kothari said, financing is a signal of stability, which is important for us.. Inside Design: Do you feel that like digital designers, UX designers, product designers are a little too narrow in their vision? 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.. Furoxans are potentially useful heteroaromatic units in pharmaceuticals and agrichemicals. Front-end stuff you can be taught, its not that hard, right? Be the first to contribute! Zhao reached out and asked Last for a meeting. In enterprise software alone, people use a whole portfolio of software tools, and most of them have very narrow use cases. It was a crucible moment. 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. 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. And at that pointit was really just the ambition of the project that resonated with me, Kothari says. Zhaos vision of creating a community of people empowered to make computers help them be more creative and productive has remained constant. 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. Welcome to my tiny corner of the internet where I'm probably tinkering with random software and tools, climbing up walls or buildings, or eating my way through a city. Add a bio, trivia, and more. Zhao had cold-emailed Herzberg, saying he was a fan of how Slack built its product and brand, and, impressed by the energy in the email, she invited him to drop by the office. 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 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. He has over 320 original manuscripts published in . Simon is a designer and engineer residing in SanFrancisco. The men didnt yet charge to use Notion; they wanted to grow users first. I wonder what does it take for every company, every team, every student to run on Notion? Participate A328 David P Rall Building. By all accounts, the mad dash in Kyoto paid off. How high is the bar to be considered good at a skill? Moby Dick is written by one person, he said. Just dream of a piece of software, and you should just be able to build that using Notion.. About Ivan Zhao: Ivan is a senior at Brown University studying Applied Math and Computer Science. She feels strongly about cocktails and NPR. Today, billions of us use computers, yet only 0.34 percent of the global population are software developers. 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? We got a lot of traction there. Soon, tech insiders, people involved with Y Combinator and other startup incubators, were using it. But it wont always look like this, says Zhao and Kothari. making investments at Van Wickle Ventures and Dorm Room Fund. Ivan Zhao Founder at Notion . He was educated first at the church school in Ryazan and then at the theological seminary there. 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. Notion, Maker of Collaboration Software, Raises $50 Million. And I was like, This sounds amazing, Kothari remembers with a laugh. He came to the Slack office, which was brand new and very nicely designed in this midcentury-modern way. Bring your Miro or Mural whiteboards into Freehand. Ivan Zhao is on Facebook. That allowed the start-up to garner new funding. Purpose-built templates to help your team collaborate more effectively. 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!. Ivan Zhao has been working as a Director, Business Development at Metallum Recycling for 4 years. In 2016, Mr. Zhao borrowed $150,000 from his mother to keep the start-up afloat. About four months ago, CEO Ivan Zhao moved his 25-strong team from another Mission office to this new, "secret" location wedged among residences along a tree-lined street. Enjoy the read! Sean Blanda is the Editorial Director for InVision. Chloe Zhao is a Chinese filmmaker best known for her independent U.S. films Songs My Brother Taught Me, The Rider, and Nomadland. Ivan Zhao Biography It looks like we don't have any Biography for Ivan Zhao yet. We still write documents that mimic paper. The best way to do this is to create a database of all tasks across your entire team and organization. 1991 - 2016 - Various Positions within CSIRO, including Chief Research Scientist, Deputy Chief, and Acting Chief, during which Ivan worked with >50 local & international companies with a net external income of over $20,000,000. You cant see it, but you can feel it. Notions biggest differentiator is how users tailor it to their personal or professional needs by incorporating whatever mix of blockscharts, databases, notes, videos, photos, lists, mapsthey want to use to accomplish a task. 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. Erin Griffith. 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. Then, I realized, it doesnt make sense. Since last May, its users have organized more than 180 meet-ups in 21 countries and 52 cities. It was probably one of the best investments we made, says Kothari. In 2015, Notion co-founders Simon Last and Ivan Zhao had removed from their lives anything that wasn't writing code and eating noodles. Ivan Zaho is a Founder at Notion based in San Francisco, California. 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. 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. Look at how the business history of the past couple of decades. 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. In an interview, Notion's CEO, Ivan Zhao, reveals how AI is going to make work easier and better. On Etsy alone, there are tens of thousands of templatesmeal planning, creating an astrology journal, and bootstrapping startup operations. 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