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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. It set itself apart from competitorswhich also include Dropbox, Atlassian and Oraclethrough a growing set of clever, built-for-purpose templates such as to-do lists, product roadmaps and client databases. About. Frey: How are the needs of work teams evolving, and how does Notion reflect that direction? Notion Labs Inc is a startup based in San Francisco, founded in 2013 by Ivan Zhao, Chris Prucha, Jessica Lam, Simon Last and Toby Schachman. And at that pointit was really just the ambition of the project that resonated with me, Kothari says. 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. BIO. But within a year or so, he left Inkling and started to assemble his team. Ivan Zhao Co-founder, Notion # 39657 10,809 followers 246 following 3,240 points Follow About Activity Upvotes 5 Hunted 1 Collection Stacks About notion.so Links Twitter Interests Productivity Badges 5 Top Product Veteran Maker History Notion One workspace. Its brown, Zhao says, pointing to what very much looks like the white background of a Notion page pulled up on a laptop. I love understanding decision making frameworks, both from a technical perspective (such as algorithmic decision making) and from a . She feels strongly about cocktails and NPR. A collaborative canvas to work on anything from anywhere. 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. 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. Frey: What holes does Notion fill that existing productivity, information management and collaboration tools werent addressing? Soon after joining Sequoia in 2016, he noticed startups increasingly running their businesses on Notion, using it to send memos or make decks. When people have all their essential work tools in one place and are able to work there seamlessly together with their team, they get more done, they save a huge amount of time, their thinking is more clear and consistent, and project work flows more smoothly. Frey: Whats the origin story of Notion? When you hire the fifth, what will you be you looking for? April 1, 2020. www.nytimes.com. I still remember his pitch. By Alexa von Tobel, Founder and managing partner, Inspired Capital @. Guannan Zhang, Jing Wang, Ivan S. Maksymov, Andrew D. Greentree, Jiming Hu, Aiguo . Frey: How does Notion help individuals and teams to manage their tasks and projects better? You need to know where are you coming from on a business side in order to know how to rebel against it. Inside Design: Do you feel that like digital designers, UX designers, product designers are a little too narrow in their vision? Publisher. Oftentimes when you are designing and building something, youre shifting constraints. Bring your Miro or Mural whiteboards into Freehand. A brand-new code base is always happy. Export. We think the pendulum is swinging back to a bundled solution. And you can filter it to see just your tasks or a colleagues tasks. On Wednesday, Notion said it raised $50 million from Index Ventures and other investors that valued it at $2 billion. Ivan Zhao, by Cayce Clifford for The New York. 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. Right now very few of us can. I thought it was the single best pitch Id ever seen in my time here, a work of art, he says. And if thats the goal, were still really early with that. (Today, Ravikant has slightly less than a bazillion, at 1.9 million.) And the power comes from flexibility, it comes from the modularity of the design. Its a modular product that aims to put the power of software in the hands of non-coders. History. Mr. Zhao said he was wary of bloat slowing the start-up down and degrading the quality of its product. Zhao remembers sneaking Last into a nearby bar, the Trick Dog. He graduated in cognitive science and fine arts and worked at a software company named Inkling, before establishing Notion. Frey: What has changed in the nature of work that has created the need for a tool like Notion? Your email address will not be published. The company declined to disclose its revenue, but said it had made money since 2018. We recently interviewed him to learn the origin story of Notion, and to get his take on the evolving nature of work . They dont write hyper-specific code to do a clever, unique thing an individual person wants to do. While many start-ups grapple with the fallout from the pandemic, this San Francisco company raised more cash to survive. His impression of founders flocking to Notion is more than anecdotal. And there were no good tools, Zhao said. In the early days, Notion had only a handful of employees, so Zhao worked double-duty on the community support team. And to stretch what money they had left, theyd moved from San Francisco to Kyoto, Japan, which was less than half as expensive. Frey: Notions interface seems to do a great job of getting out of the way so users can focus on what they want to create. He has over 320 original manuscripts published in . We started with Notion 1.0, which was all about docs and notes, and then introduced 2.0 with databases in the spring of 2018. Adding another person doesnt necessarily give you a higher-quality Moby Dick. It doesnt even necessarily make it faster.. 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. 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 viral videos, Gen Z power users would show off the ways theyd customized Notion to help them get more out of their hobbies and to collaborate on school projects. 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. This topic is getting popular again. He also developed an appreciation for aesthetics as a student of traditional Chinese watercolor. Today, having added a third co-founder in COO Akshay Kothari and grown from a cult following to more than 20 million users, Notion has a multi-billion-dollar valuation and is aiming to unseat Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace as the enterprise-level collaborative productivity software. The ambition of Zhao and his team at Notion cant be contained in any single decade. Ivan Zhao Hey there, I'm Ivan! 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. Their bright, loft-style offices have sisal mat floor coverings, Michel Ducaroys famously curving Togo couches and Alvar Aaltos iconic, simple wooden Artek stools. 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. Zhao, 39, consolidated her domination of the category . Three years into building their startup, they scrapped the code powering their app. Location. Keep your work, cut your costs. This version had Notions iconic, black-and-not-quite-white look, and the ability to do word processing, of course, as well as to make drag-and-drop to-do lists and wikis, and it had more than 30 document templates for things like product roadmaps. Thats how the worlds business runs, thats how people were educated. Zhao refers to overhead fluorescent lighting as hell. He chose all the furniture and finishes, putting as much thought into the offices as he has into the product. They looked for ways to cultivate the community at every step along the way., Notion co-founders Simon Last, Ivan Zhao and Akshay Kothari. Inside Design: Youve spoken about how designers should look sideways to other fields for inspiration. Those people have taste; they just dont have good tools., I was like, Holy shit. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. 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. Or, if you have a laptop, you should be using Notion for thinking and collaboration, and communication. Thats how Vernal and others at Sequoia started seeing Notion pop up. 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. Chloe Zhao is a Chinese filmmaker best known for her independent U.S. films Songs My Brother Taught Me, The Rider, and Nomadland. He says this helped him understand how to make Notion more useful, and it gave him a sense of Notions growing communitypeople smitten with the minimalist aesthetic, or who loved customizing templates to make book-reading logs or skincare diaries. Or sometimes something is really easy to implement but its really hard to design. They neednt have worried, and they havent spent it. Stop looking at Dribbble. 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 He initially raised $2 million, which he. Ivan Zhao started Notion, a productivity software start-up that has made money since 2018, in 2013. 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. Zhao remembers eight-hour Zooms, day after day, after the crash. And we did all sorts of really wonky projects. We can reproduce that. So we went from one thing, Microsoft office, and it became many, many different SaaS products today. 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. Zhao: There are so many apps these days. Ivan Pavlov, in full Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, (born September 14 [September 26, New Style], 1849, Ryazan, Russiadied February 27, 1936, Leningrad [now St. Petersburg]), Russian physiologist known chiefly for his development of the concept of the conditioned reflex. I almost never had that feeling before, Zhao remembers. Nova Zelndia. Since last May, its users have organized more than 180 meet-ups in 21 countries and 52 cities. Frey: Whats your vision for how tools can help people to create and express their ideas better? Colleagues N/A. The company is hiring for about 75 more positions. 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. ), but is out at school. So thats one thing. They started charging users monthly subscription fees between $4 and $10, and began turning a profit. They looked for ways to cultivate the community at every step along the way., Then, I realized, it doesnt make sense. Mr. Zhao started Notion after graduating from the University of British Columbia and working at Inkling, a document-sharing start-up in San Francisco. Zhao was born in Beijing as Zhao Ting. Notion, Maker of Collaboration Software, Raises $50 Million, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/technology/notion-startup-fund-raising.html. In a perfect world, Zhao sees the next iteration of Notion as changing life as profoundly as the iPhone changed peoples personal and work habits. 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