Ivan Zhao - Co-founder, CEO @ Notion - Crunchbase Person Profile Person Ivan Zhao Overview Number of Founded Organizations 1 CB Rank (Person) 1,361 Primary Job Title Co-founder, CEO Primary Organization Notion Location San Francisco, California, United States Regions San Francisco Bay Area, West Coast, Western US Gender Male We just launched the 1.0 a couple weeks ago, which you can play with the web/Mac app at notion.so (and. SAN FRANCISCO The spread of the coronavirus has meant feast or famine for technology start-ups. Its like 90% perfect. Right now very few of us can. Just look at Slack. All Artists in the art world listed by Artprice.com starting with AAA - ABA, complete index. Ivan's interest in coding and programming started during his childhood. A328 David P Rall Building. By early last year, Notion had nearly one million users. It was pretty much all hands on deck, Kothari says. YouTube sets this cookie to store the video preferences of the user using embedded YouTube video. Zhao: In college, I did freelance work for friends who wanted to build their own websites, and I saw a couple of things. But somewhere during her high school days, she became increasingly interested in a career in films and TV. They picked Kyoto, almost on a whim, and subleased their spaces in San Francisco. So its less about where we are today, but its like, we want to be the place where future companies are operating. That said, with the new investment money, Notion and its backers also want it to be the place companies are operating today. Since last May, its users have organized more than 180 meet-ups in 21 countries and 52 cities. You need master level of UX and pixel-perfect design. In this way, you get to see how what youre working on fits into the greater whole. She feels strongly about cocktails and NPR. Chloe Zhao is a Chinese filmmaker best known for her independent U.S. films Songs My Brother Taught Me, The Rider, and Nomadland. Although she spoke little English, in 1998 her parents sent her to England, where she attended the Sussex boarding school Brighton College from 1998 to 2000. Notion had previously been valued at $800 million. Career Achievements Investments The best way to do this is to create a database of all tasks across your entire team and organization. 2023 InVisionApp Inc. Allrightsreserved. It quickly caught on among techies and early adopters at companies like Samsung and Hearst. Be the first to contribute! What did I sign up for? I think the first project was to redesign how people eat ramen noodles. Ivan Zhao Bellevue, WA. I argue thats the only way to solve a problem. tags N/A. In 2016, Mr. Zhao borrowed $150,000 from his mother to keep the start-up afloat. Oftentimes when you are designing and building something, youre shifting constraints. 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.. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. At one point, Notion ran dangerously low on cash and laid off four employees. making investments at Van Wickle Ventures and Dorm Room Fund. Zhao Zhao is an artist who works across media, incorporating objects, performance, video, and painting into his practice. That has since quadrupled, Mr. Kothari said. Hes out there, just trying to democratize software, make it so that everybody can put these building blocks together. Kothari said he was so impressed with the scope of Zhaos vision that he thought about Notion for months after the pitch, ultimately calling him and offering Zhao a bigger investment. Software is a lot like that. More results. Its more about UX. Welcome to my portfolio. 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. When the work was done, the company celebrated with Zoom karaoke, complete with custom lyrics to Amazing Grace. Zhao, of course, has a copy stored on one of his Notion workspaces. Zhao started working on the first version of Notion while day-jobbing at the ebook startup Inkling in San Francisco. 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. Professor of Medicine Chief of Renal Division, Peking University First Hospital. It was kind of like despair, I would say. Frey: How does Notion help teams brainstorm and innovate better? Growth has been rapid since the 2021 investments. We recently interviewed him to learn the origin story of Notion, and to get his take on the evolving nature of work . His impression of founders flocking to Notion is more than anecdotal. Jani Zhao was born on the 19th of October, 1992. Adding another person doesnt necessarily give you a higher-quality Moby Dick. It doesnt even necessarily make it faster.. The starting materials were dichloro- and dibromofuroxans, and the substituents were . View Site. Mr. Zhao started Notion after graduating from the University of British Columbia and working at Inkling, a document-sharing start-up in San Francisco. Youre really left with a completely blank, fresh space designed to feel like a breath of fresh air and spacious opportunity to think deeply. Each person were looking for will be similar to what we have now. "We're unique in the way that we're already where you work," Zhao told me. And thats one way. Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. Notion is emblematic of the kind of technology start-up that may be in a position to survive the shakeout in Silicon Valley. 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.. It was a lot of fun, some of the happiest times, says Zhao. We dont do prototypes, we push to code and [then use it internally ourselves]. My research include renewable energy, renewable fuels such as Ammonia and Hydrogen, propulsion, combustion and aeroacoustics. The ambition of Zhao and his team at Notion cant be contained in any single decade. Kothari was born and raised in Ahmedabad, a city of 8 million in Indias western Gujarat state. Frey: What has changed in the nature of work that has created the need for a tool like Notion? In the downstairs of a rented two-story house so small that only a traditional Shoji screen separated their bedrooms, Zhao says they spent 18 hours a day at their laptops, not bothering to dress, clean or cook. Sequoia partner Mike Vernal, a former Facebook vice president, was an original Notion angel investor back in 2013. Related Markets 2. But if you were to tell me I should read more about architecture and fashion I may answer, Does it help my work? They started charging users monthly subscription fees between $4 and $10, and began turning a profit. Chuck Frey: If you had to summarize what Notion is and what it represents in 10 words or less, how would you describe it? 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 Test Drive ZoomInfo's Directories But, UX and pixel-perfect design take some longer time. In 2012, as he prepared to graduate, many of his friends needed online portfolios. Ivan Zhao, by Cayce Clifford for The New York. 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. N/A. 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. 3,234 Followers, 1,367 Following, 180 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Ivan Zhao (@ivanhzhao) 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. I still remember his pitch. It was more for nerdy tech crowds. We want to figure out how to turn incoming capital into Moby Dicks first before getting more capital. Most everyone has to download an app or run a piece of software to accomplish a task. The product with the most votes in 24 hours earns additional promotion, as well as international tech-community hype. Zhao remembers eight-hour Zooms, day after day, after the crash. They knew they needed to move Notion onto multiple databases, but they hadnt prioritized it. 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. And multiple other people told me that was one of the best pitches that they had seen at Sequoia.. Also, as you use the product, youll notice that a lot of features only appear on hover, or that you only receive notifications when someone mentions you or something specific requires your attention. 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. Lasts dad visited to appraise Zhao, perhaps suspecting the men were doing things like sneaking into bars. Notion leaders focus on explaining how, for the everyday office worker, it can be used out of the box. People and teams can customize it to greater and greater degrees, but average users can install it and start working immediately, using templates in the Notion catalog. We were just, code, code, code. Nearly all people now relied on computers to help them do all kinds of things, yet most couldnt write their own code. We think the pendulum is swinging back to a bundled solution. If it doesnt feel good, then well go back to code and go back to design. Inside Design: To me, your view on talent mirrors your product mindset: that all these SaaS tools are going to eventually coalesce into one. 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. YSC cookie is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos on Youtube pages. So the product side of Notion is four people or five people. Was that intentional? 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. Sean Blanda is the Editorial Director for InVision. Wired wrote about it, and the Apple App Store featured it. Join Facebook to connect with Ivan Zhao and others you may know. 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. President of Beijing Society of Immunology. But really, there havent been many big changes to our essential work software in decades. Competition to tell a compelling story to big companies is fierce. Specifically, ChatGPT and Microsoft's new version of Bing have gotten a lot of attention. By the start of the pandemic, Notion had about 40 employees and theyd raised about $50 million as an insurance policy against pandemic uncertainty, says Kothari. Notion addresses both by making communication in the product more about utility allowing people to collaborate on the same pages at the same time, and to have very targeted asynchronous conversations about specific work (using comments and discussions). He imagined these people would like Notion so much, theyd keep using it at work. Then okay, you should go back to UX stage, maybe change the UX a little bit so it becomes really easy to implement. They were running out of money. See also Other Works | Publicity Listings | Official Sites View agent, publicist, legal and company contact details on IMDbPro 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. Follow their code on GitHub. And he has a bazillion Twitter followers, says Zhao. 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. Ivan Zhao Founder at Notion Labs. Soon after joining Sequoia in 2016, he noticed startups increasingly running their businesses on Notion, using it to send memos or make decks. We can reproduce that. Zhao was trying to make good on ideas that he describes as romantic, ones developed by his idols: tech pioneers Alan Kay, Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart. 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. It was positively received by Product Hunt and rated #1 Product of the Month. 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) Or, if you have a laptop, you should be using Notion for thinking and collaboration, and communication. . 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