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. Its almost like you have a brand-new houseyou can decorate however you want, versus the old house, you have to clean, repaint the walls and all that.. Zhao says that 68 percent of the most recent Y Combinator class ran their companies on Notion. And just talk to people in restaurants, observe how theyre eating ramen, and see if you can change something about their experience. But somewhere during her high school days, she became increasingly interested in a career in films and TV. He offered Last an internship, showing Last the same Notion prototype hed shown Kothari during the investment conversation. Zhao: We think tools should mimic the way peoples brains work. Also, the software that so many of us used every day couldnt be modified at all. Front-end stuff you can be taught, its not that hard, right? 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 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. making investments at Van Wickle Ventures and Dorm Room Fund. 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. They were consumed with reinventing a piece of software called Notion, and if they couldnt figure out how to turn it into an everyday tool people would want to run on their computers or smartphones, they would have laid off their friends, burned through millions in angel investment and wasted years of their lives for nothing. I was pushed to go talk to people in supermarkets when they were buying ramen. Bugs came from everywhere, Zhao says. 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.). Dr Ivan SEAH Yu Jun . Previously, he was the Editor-in-Chief of Adobes 99U and a founder of Technically Media. A collaborative canvas to work on anything from anywhere. Notions design also distinguishes it, with a restrained, black-and-not-quite-white aesthetic. In a moment of uncertainty, Mr. Kothari said, financing is a signal of stability, which is important for us.. That said, increasingly, teams need ways to work better together that dont require a ton of time spent in in-person meetings (which slows everyone down), and a way to keep communication focused and action-oriented. You can be a designer. This is not surprising if you consider how these tools evolved. Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. He wanted coding to stop being a tiny community of specially educated people. Try to be conservative. 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. It was positively received by Product Hunt and rated #1 Product of the Month. And then I consciously dont do that), why the company is only hiring designers who can code, and why he thinks SaaS is a winner-take-all game won by those who truly appreciate the computer screen as a brand new medium. Kothari and Zhao think a lot about those big enterprises. That has since quadrupled, Mr. Kothari said. 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. When the world changed, they changed their mind, she said. Zhao was unfazed by this success. I studied experimental cosmology (Ph.D. from Princeton in 2010) before switching to statistics (Ph.D. from Cornell in 2015). Notion wants to challenge this status quo. Location. Ivan Zhao has been working as a Director, Business Development at Metallum Recycling for 4 years. A portrait of Engelbart hangs prominently in a first-floor hallway. Zhao chose Inkling instead. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (September 14, 1849 - February 27, 1936) was a Nobel Prize-winning physiologist best known for his classical conditioning experiments with dogs. ! he says with a laugh. 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. 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. 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 . 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. Ivan Zhao Founder at Notion Labs. How high is the bar to be considered good at a skill? He wrote, Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions.. Were all using tools that proscribe very specific workflows that rarely match the way we wish we could think, learn and work. building products to help people at Intus Care, Loftium, and Mojotech. The tones are neutral and warm. View Site. 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. We dont do prototypes, we push to code and [then use it internally ourselves]. By early last year, Notion had nearly one million users. We just launched the 1.0 a couple weeks ago, which you can play with the web/Mac app at notion.so (and. 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. Zhao: Yes, absolutely. Description. 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. People think fast, so they should be able to capture and restructure their thoughts fast too. SAN FRANCISCO The spread of the coronavirus has meant feast or famine for technology start-ups. Its still case by case. All Artists in the art world listed by Artprice.com starting with AAA - ABA, complete index. Joint/Adjunct . On Etsy alone, there are tens of thousands of templatesmeal planning, creating an astrology journal, and bootstrapping startup operations. She feels strongly about cocktails and NPR. Zhao remembers sneaking Last into a nearby bar, the Trick Dog. Ivan Zhao NZ Country HR Leader @ Honeywell, Professional Coach, helping people and organisations grow through driving continuous learning. Before the most recent funding, Notion, which was founded in 2013, had raised $17 million. 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. It was really popular in the 90s, but somehow people forgot that idea for a couple of decades. This matters because the software-replacement opportunity is massive: companies with more than 2,000 employees use an average of 175 pieces of software, and smaller companies use an average of 73, according to Oktas 2021 Business at Work study. This is impossible for most teams to achieve because people are doing work in all kinds of places that arent connected, and people dont think to share. Zhao: We believe more people should be able to modify the tools they use in their everyday lives and work. The colleague mentioned one of the people in the scene, a student at the University of Maryland, College Park, named Simon Last, was doing interesting work. Thats what I mean by creating something that can do many different things, like Lego bricks, but its still fundamentally one product. Eventually, this hunch would prove right. We shook hands, [I had to show] I am not a crazy person.. 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. His major research interest focuses on autoimmune renal diseases, prevention and treatment of CKD. You can view this kind of database as a Kanban board if that helps you visualize tasks better. 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. Youre really left with a completely blank, fresh space designed to feel like a breath of fresh air and spacious opportunity to think deeply. I love understanding decision making frameworks, both from a technical perspective (such as algorithmic decision making) and from a . 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. A year later, Zhao posted on the blog Hacker News that he was moving to San Francisco to find a job. Chlo Zhao has become the second woman in the history of the Oscars to be named best director at this year's Academy Awards in Los Angeles. Ivan Zhao is on Facebook. 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. 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. We got a lot of traction there. Soon, tech insiders, people involved with Y Combinator and other startup incubators, were using it. Be the first to contribute! Then okay, you should go back to UX stage, maybe change the UX a little bit so it becomes really easy to implement. 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. Professor of Medicine Chief of Renal Division, Peking University First Hospital. Then, Hey, lets go out for food. 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