Its great that people believe in the company and believe in me. Ivan Zhao is also currently the CEO of the company. They did this, Zhao says, by building relationships with power users. 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. Zhao: There are so many apps these days. Art at auction worldwide, auction results, prices, biography and art market information by artprice.com. He came to the Slack office, which was brand new and very nicely designed in this midcentury-modern way. Wired wrote about it, and the Apple App Store featured it. Things looked pretty bad from the outside, too, says Kothari, who had been one of Notions angel investors. Can we give that to non-programmers? Zhao: In college, I did freelance work for friends who wanted to build their own websites, and I saw a couple of things. You can view this kind of database as a Kanban board if that helps you visualize tasks better. They need to do pixels, they need to do UX, they need to at least be able to code React. It was really popular in the 90s, but somehow people forgot that idea for a couple of decades. It was kind of like despair, I would say. That you will have to have all these skillsets combined in one person? That has since quadrupled, Mr. Kothari said. He and Zhao met up, just as they always had. 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. 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. Zhao was born in Beijing as Zhao Ting. 1988-1991 - Team Leader with Centro-Svilluppo Materiali (Centre for Materials Development). The company is hiring for about 75 more positions. More about Ivan Zhao Selected links Ivan Zhao - Founder - Notion | LinkedIn Do you need to know more about Ivan Zhao? Be the first to contribute! 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. Collaborate in real time on a digital whiteboard. Engelbart conceived of computers as a way to increase humanitys capacity to solve complex problems, not to just run computations, which was the bulk of computer work at the time. Stop looking at Dribbble. Sequoia partner Mike Vernal, a former Facebook vice president, was an original Notion angel investor back in 2013. I love understanding decision making frameworks, both from a technical perspective (such as algorithmic decision making) and from a . 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. 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 . Nobody knows how to learn how to do them properly. A brand-new code base is always happy. Also, the software that so many of us used every day couldnt be modified at all. Nobody wakes up wanting to make software. They started charging users monthly subscription fees between $4 and $10, and began turning a profit. By early last year, Notion had nearly one million users. We want to give more people the ability to build the tools they actually want and need without having to code. Zhao started working on the first version of Notion while day-jobbing at the ebook startup Inkling in San Francisco. He also developed an appreciation for aesthetics as a student of traditional Chinese watercolor. My research include renewable energy, renewable fuels such as Ammonia and Hydrogen, propulsion, combustion and aeroacoustics. Mr. Zhao started Notion after graduating from the University of British Columbia and working at Inkling, a document-sharing start-up in San Francisco. 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. 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!. "We're unique in the way that we're already where you work," Zhao told me. Go to the edge of what is still acceptable to your peers and go to the far, far edge of that. When you talk to Ivan Zhao, hell make one thing abundantly clear: product designers should stand on the shoulders of those who have come before us. Then the internet came along towards the mid-to-late nineties and that sort of breaks apart the monopoly of Microsoft. 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. And to stretch what money they had left, theyd moved from San Francisco to Kyoto, Japan, which was less than half as expensive. 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. Just look at Slack. More results. Its tools help office workers, now quarantined in their homes, work together more seamlessly. Ivan Zhao is Founder at Notion. Most everyone has to download an app or run a piece of software to accomplish a task. 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. The product with the most votes in 24 hours earns additional promotion, as well as international tech-community hype. After a few months convincing his wife that they could reinvent their lives in San Francisco, Kothari joined as chief operating officer. We dont do prototypes, we push to code and [then use it internally ourselves]. 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. Ivan Zhao Bellevue, WA. Self-driven, highly motivated engineering student seeking to impact society starting from its structural foundations.<br><br>"Take the best that exists and make it better" - Henry Royce<br><br> | Learn more about Ivan Zhao's work experience, education, connections & more by visiting their profile on LinkedIn Study some history of computing stuff or pioneers of the seventies or sixties. At one point, Notion ran dangerously low on cash and laid off four employees. When he was in high school, his mom wanted more for his education, so she moved them to Vancouver. ! he says with a laugh. 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. I reached out on a whim, he said. 984-287-3702. shanshan.zhao@ nih.gov. In San Francisco, while Zhao still believed he was right about his grand vision, he realized he was wrong about his market. 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. Notion, Maker of Collaboration Software, Raises $50 Million. Keep your work, cut your costs. In 2013, Zhao and Last raised about $2 million from angel investorsa mix of friends, family and friends of friends. so you can easily build and stack them however you want to solve your problems your own way (made easier with drag and drop, etc.). Inside Design: I know you take pride in keeping small and nimble. There, he learned how to code as a participant in the International Olympiad in Informatics, a grade school mathematics and computer science competition. Disappointingly for the co-founders, it turned out, even if they were Lasts and Zhaos actual friends, non-coders didnt want app-building software. 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. 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. Why would I do that? How do you answer cynicism with curiosity? 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. At its most basic, Notion enables people to use just one interface to make, edit and customize documents; to manage projects; to create information-sharing wikis; and to design all kinds of charts and tables. 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. About Ziyu(Ivan) Zhao. Tag them by department, assign them to specific people, even give them due dates if you want. 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. Lasts dad visited to appraise Zhao, perhaps suspecting the men were doing things like sneaking into bars. 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. Then, I realized, it doesnt make sense. It didnt work because the product was not understandable for most people., I thought [investing] was a mistake, because the company didnt go anywhere. Published October 13, 2022. 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