We just launched the 1.0 a couple weeks ago, which you can play with the web/Mac app at notion.so (and. His first job was six months of answering support-desk tickets. We want Notion to be as light and simple as you want to be, with the power to do complex things only if and when you want to. Chloe Zhao is a Chinese filmmaker best known for her independent U.S. films Songs My Brother Taught Me, The Rider, and Nomadland. Zhao remembers the day when he suddenly started making money from it in $.99 cent increments. This topic is getting popular again. Notion has hired seven salespeople, who will not be able to visit clients in person while social distancing is in effect. 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. It was a lot of fun, some of the happiest times, says Zhao. We were just, code, code, code. 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.. Zhaos mom loaned him $150,000 to keep the startup afloat. Thats why all of Notions functionality fades to the back as soon as you start typing. 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. That day felt like Christmas. Imagine Andy Warhol, right? . Frey: What has changed in the nature of work that has created the need for a tool like Notion? His impression of founders flocking to Notion is more than anecdotal. Its like, everybody can be a designer. For a two- or three-year window, Notion was high on our list of companies that we admired from afar, Vernal says. ACS Applied Bio Materials 2021, 4 (12 . He identifies as a gay man and is not out at work (only because he's still a student! New Zealand Ivan Zhao Managing Director Guangzhou. A lot of our functionality has been designed in service to that. Ivan Zhao started Notion, a productivity software start-up that has made money since 2018, in 2013. 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. Mr. Zhao said he was wary of bloat slowing the start-up down and degrading the quality of its product. In 2013, Zhao and Last raised about $2 million from angel investorsa mix of friends, family and friends of friends. I studied experimental cosmology (Ph.D. from Princeton in 2010) before switching to statistics (Ph.D. from Cornell in 2015). Yet, Zhao says, within a decade, every software company could be considered a competitor, because Notion will eventually be able to make any kind of tool, or will be able to integrate with countless pieces of software. Inside Design: Do you feel that like digital designers, UX designers, product designers are a little too narrow in their vision? It was more for nerdy tech crowds. They dont write hyper-specific code to do a clever, unique thing an individual person wants to do. We were just, code, code, code, Zhao remembers. April 1, 2020. www.nytimes.com. While many start-ups grapple with the fallout from the pandemic, this San Francisco company raised more cash to survive. Zhao was born in Beijing as Zhao Ting. In enterprise software alone, people use a whole portfolio of software tools, and most of them have very narrow use cases. Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. Advanced Functional Materials 2023, 33 (5 . Before the most recent funding, Notion, which was founded in 2013, had raised $17 million. BIO. Notion is emblematic of the kind of technology start-up that may be in a position to survive the shakeout in Silicon Valley. You can be a designer. She is the first Asian woman of color to win the Top DGA Award. Ivan Zhao Founder at Notion . It almost ran out of money.. Theyre all kind of ugly, right? He made maybe five websites. Zhao, who had learned to code as a child, had a big visionto enable people to use any computing device with the same creativity and flexibility that they bring to their writing, allowing them to approach devices as a new medium, whatever that might mean someday. After a few months convincing his wife that they could reinvent their lives in San Francisco, Kothari joined as chief operating officer. He and Zhao met up, just as they always had. 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. Moby Dick is written by one person, he said. For two years, Kothari did all kinds of jobs, built out playbooks and hired leaders to run the new teams, before moving on to the next business need. The computing pioneers thought everybody would make their own tools, make their own software, Zhao says, returning to a favorite idea. Sometimes I joke, Moby Dick was written by one person. Three of [Herman Melville] probably wouldnt be much faster. . Update information for Ivan Zhao More at IMDbPro Contact Info: View agent, publicist, legal on IMDbPro Known For Painting Make-Up Department 2015 Hide all | | Edit Filmography Hide Makeup Department (1 credit) We dont do prototypes, we push to code and [then use it internally ourselves]. The first version of Notion was a tool that non-coders could use to make their own apps. Then, Hey, lets go out for food. Then, we go eat, go back to work, and do it again. Neither man could speak or read Japanese, but Zhao is from China, and he could read the menus well enough for them to figure out beef or chicken. (About 70 percent of the writing, Japanese Kanji, was similar to the Chinese Hanzi he grew up reading.). People use Notion in place of note-taking apps, collaboration services or writing software, and they pay a monthly fee of $4 to $20 each for extra features like more security and storage. A collaborative canvas to work on anything from anywhere. 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. I van Petrovich Pavlov was born on September 14, 1849 at Ryazan, where his father, Peter Dmitrievich Pavlov, was a village priest. And just talk to people in restaurants, observe how theyre eating ramen, and see if you can change something about their experience. In 2015, productivity tool Notion nearly died. Zhao reached out and asked Last for a meeting. After . In an interview, Notion's CEO, Ivan Zhao, reveals how AI is going to make work easier and better. 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. This time, Zhao offered him a job. About Ivan Zhao: Ivan is a senior at Brown University studying Applied Math and Computer Science. 100% of the Fortune 100 collaborate with InVision. Were all using tools that proscribe very specific workflows that rarely match the way we wish we could think, learn and work. With more people working remotely now and turning to such products, new customer sign-ups hit a new high for Notion in recent weeks. 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. 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. Some of the earliest team members had already departed, and retaining the rest was growing more untenable by the day. industry Computer Software. When he was in high school, his mom wanted more for his education, so she moved them to Vancouver. About Ziyu(Ivan) Zhao. Erin Griffith. 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. Notion is staking a claim in a market dominated by giantsMicrosoft and Google, with more than 2 billion users between them. Zhao and one of his early Notion colleagues were members of a small scene of people passionate about visually oriented programming environments who followed each other on Twitter, sharing projects and insights. Zhao: Weve heard from a number of people that Notions very minimalist, lightweight feel encourages people to write more even if its just jotting down ideas. N/A. A year later, Zhao posted on the blog Hacker News that he was moving to San Francisco to find a job. 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. They were running out of money. 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. 984-287-3702. shanshan.zhao@ nih.gov. 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. Congcong Pei, Yu Zeng, Liang Zhao, Jing Zhao, Jingjing Wan. Ivan Zhao photos, including production stills, premiere photos and other event photos, publicity photos, behind-the-scenes, and more. 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. Adding another person doesnt necessarily give you a higher-quality Moby Dick. It doesnt even necessarily make it faster.. That keeps our workflow really quick. * Notion's Enterprise Success with Community RootsIvan Zhao(Notion, Co-founder and CEO): Notion, the popular maker of productivity and collaboration tools, . Originally from Beijing, China, Chloe Zhao was born on 31 March 1982 . Last year, Notion expanded its service to larger corporate clients, who typically need armies of sales representatives and who negotiate complicated contracts. 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. Inside Design: I once had someone tell me that every startup or every company is a bet on a yet-to-be-realized future. Zhao started working on the first version of Notion while day-jobbing at the ebook startup Inkling in San Francisco. 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. 2. At that point, thats where Notions idea got formed. Zhao became obsessed with democratizing access to the tool-making ability of coding. 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. Study some history of computing stuff or pioneers of the seventies or sixties. 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. Most people, he reasoned, wake up and want to use their computers to browse the internet, to write or to solve a work problem. Im the nerd of the friend circle, so I started coding peoples websites for them. Ivan Zhao is also currently the CEO of the company. Inside Design: Youve hired four product designers. Notions design also distinguishes it, with a restrained, black-and-not-quite-white aesthetic. Already today, some Notion-adjacent businesses are making more than $1 million a year by designing clever templates. It was really popular in the 90s, but somehow people forgot that idea for a couple of decades. 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. She grew up in her hometown as an ordinary kid without any serious expectations of making a career in the show business. 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