Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. He. He came to the Slack office, which was brand new and very nicely designed in this midcentury-modern way. YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. In another move toward ubiquity, Notion launched the beta version of its public API in 2021, enabling developers to connect Notion to payment systems and customer relationship managers, further rooting it in a workplace software ecosystem. Software is a lot like that. When he was in high school, his mom wanted more for his education, so she moved them to Vancouver. Some of the earliest team members had already departed, and retaining the rest was growing more untenable by the day. Katie. He had a hunch that investing in individual users would ultimately get Notion into big companies. 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. So we went from one thing, Microsoft office, and it became many, many different SaaS products today. 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. It quickly caught on among techies and early adopters at companies like Samsung and Hearst. 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. And I was like, This sounds amazing,, 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., In the next 5 to 10 years, Notion could be the front-end infrastructure for the world. Lasts dad visited to appraise Zhao, perhaps suspecting the men were doing things like sneaking into bars. Notions stark black-and-white product offers templates of checklists and projects for, say, bringing on new hires, tracking product development, or managing editorial calendars for marketers. Zhao: Teams are increasingly tech-savvy, with things like shortcuts and working collaboratively becoming second nature. Ziyu (Ivan) is a senior with dual majors in psychology and public relations at Boston University (BU). Zhao says that 68 percent of the most recent Y Combinator class ran their companies on Notion. By all accounts, the mad dash in Kyoto paid off. We want to give more people the ability to build the tools they actually want and need without having to code. After a year, he didnt get the H-1B visa hed need to stay working in America. At that time, they declined to meet any venture capitalists or discuss acquiring a higher valuation.. He wanted coding to stop being a tiny community of specially educated people. 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. Ivan Zhao is Founder at Notion. 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 got a lot of traction there. Soon, tech insiders, people involved with Y Combinator and other startup incubators, were using it. Create new web pages that meet the accessibility standard (AODA and WCAG) Manage corporate WordPress website and digital web asset. Most everyone has to download an app or run a piece of software to accomplish a task. We think the pendulum is swinging back to a bundled solution. Add a bio, trivia, and more. You can be a designer. He and Zhao met every six months or so, sharing insights and suggesting possible employees. The computing pioneers thought everybody would make their own tools, make their own software, Zhao says, returning to a favorite idea. 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. 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. Or sometimes something is really easy to implement but its really hard to design. Zhao: We think tools should mimic the way peoples brains work. Zhao Zhao Biography. When you look there you can only see a little bit in front of you. In enterprise software alone, people use a whole portfolio of software tools, and most of them have very narrow use cases. 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. I thought it was the single best pitch Id ever seen in my time here, a work of art, he says. I can be a designer. Zhao sees Last as his product co-founder and Kothari as his business co-founder. Thats what I mean by creating something that can do many different things, like Lego bricks, but its still fundamentally one product. 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. 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 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!) And that becomes slightly more objective, less fashion-y, less Dribbble-y. 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. 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. Create press releases and blog posts and keep . * Notion's Enterprise Success with Community RootsIvan Zhao(Notion, Co-founder and CEO): Notion, the popular maker of productivity and collaboration tools, . He identifies as a gay man and is not out at work (only because he's still a student! 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.. He talked to thousands of customers and grew to understand the use cases and depth of the productsetting him up, he says, to figure out how to build out the rest of Notion. Colleagues N/A. While many are cutting staff and slashing costs as they reel from the outbreaks fallout, others have experienced a surge in demand. Its like if you studied physics in high school and college and you didnt know who Newton is. Zhao was uninterested in school in Beijing, preferring to focus on manga and movies. He was kind enough to take it, Kothari says. Nov 2021 - Present1 year 4 months. . 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. Id never had a guest come to the office and touch the tables, and appreciate the quality of the leather of the chairs. Take a step back, and see how you can fundamentally solve it. 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 chose Inkling instead. Ivan Zhao started Notion, a productivity software start-up that has made money since 2018, in 2013. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates they copied Xerox PARC. He is interested in creativity, storytelling, and vibes. 111 Tw Alexander Dr. Research Triangle Park, NC 27709. Notion has hired seven salespeople, who will not be able to visit clients in person while social distancing is in effect. In this way, Notion lets you capitalize on all of your institutional history and knowledge to keep doing new, exciting things. Is this the simplest mental model we can use? 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. Were continuing to grow our functionality, and are excited about whats ahead in 2019. Find Ivan's email address, mobile number, work history, and more. Frey: How does Notion help individuals and teams to manage their tasks and projects better? Youre really left with a completely blank, fresh space designed to feel like a breath of fresh air and spacious opportunity to think deeply. Financing is a signal of stability, which is important for us, said Akshay Kothari, Notions head of operations. MetaLab said it used Notion to present work to clients and to collect their feedback all in one place, among other tasks. So they called Sarah Cannon, an investor at Index Ventures who had been courting Notion for over a year. The 20-somethings didnt mind the drudgery or the lack of personal space. Previously, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Adobes 99U and a founder of Technically Media. The best way to do this is to create a database of all tasks across your entire team and organization. People can dive into notes from other peoples meetings, or search for past campaigns to understand how to create a new one, just to name a couple of examples. 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. Regularly dropping mentions of computing legends Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart as business. An app or run a piece of software to accomplish a task embedded youtube video and early adopters at like. Dual majors in psychology and public relations at Boston University ( BU ), said Kothari. 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