One of Notion’s biggest strengths is also one of its biggest challenges, which is that it’s an incredibly flexible product. Startups that do well (or perhaps even don’t do so well) are mostly analysed through the lens of their founders and investors. We launched about two years ago; 1.0 was just notes that you could take and a wiki so that you could collaborate with people. The app can be accessed via most web browsers. Ivan has 2 jobs listed on their profile. Over the next few years, Camille followed Notion’s journey closely before finally joining the company. For a lot of these other tools, we just have to use it, not because we love it but because that that’s what exists. Camille first met Ivan, the Notion founder, in 2015 when First Round Capital invested in the company. As you will learn from conversations below, Notion’s users are quite diverse, and are solving many everyday problems using the product. Its founders, Ivan Zhao and Simon Last, had built their app on a suboptimal tech stack, and it crashed constantly.Their angel investment money dwindling, they faced a brutal choice: Fire their fledgling team of 4 and start over, or run out of cash. You can embed things easily. Notion a singular tool that handles all your work outside email and Slack. Why Notion exists: Ivan Zhao For Ivan, who studied cognitive science in college with a minor in fine arts, Notion started as a personal project and it’s something he’s been at over the past decade. The company claims to be an all-in-one workspace for note-taking, knowledge and data management, project and task management. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Michigan in 1970, specializing in the philosophy of science and conceptual change in, and across, scientific disciplines. But as founders and investors themselves would agree, startups cannot scale or even exist without team members who believe in the mission and nourish the journeys with their amazing skills and passion. He had evaluated the landscape of collaborative productivity tools at that time, and made an educated guess about what the future had in store. And then last year we launched databases and that was the 2.0 version, which kind of seemed like an inflection point, where now you could not only have your notes and your wiki, but also manage your tasks, manage your projects, manage candidates and recruiting, all in a single tool. I had sold my previous company and I had this newfound money that I didn’t know what to do with. On Slack, you can’t actually collaborate on a project… Notion has become a place where you can actually do a lot of your work alongside the synchronous communication. “Notion became a tool for them to stay connected and document all the places she grew up in.”. Ivan Zhao is Co-founder and CEO of Notion, the all-in-one workspace for notes, documents, wikis, projects, and collaboration. Give me a snapshot of where the team is now. “I actually downloaded the software and used it for the first time just 15 minutes before my interview with Akshay (Kothari), but ended up joining the support team to start with,” David tells me. When you get to hundreds of people what tends to happens is that some person or some team tends to have a preference for a specific tool. Notion Labs Chief Executive Ivan Zhao describes the product as “the next generation of Microsoft Office,” which is a little hyperbolic and a lot ambitious. The company, centered around an app that helps non-developers build collaboration tools, has more than one million users and has scaled its product quickly despite having a team of just 27. For sub-100 businesses, you actually don’t need another tool. Notion had previously been valued at $800 million. 2 Best Ways to Enable or Disable Windows 10 Firewall Notifications Top 8 Fixes for Action Center Not Opening in Windows 10 Additional listening: How Zoho works and How Angellist works, Outliers S05 E05 Ivan Zhao: How Notion Works, Outliers S05 E06 Akshay Kothari: How Notion Works, Outliers S05 E07 Camille Ricketts: How Notion Works, Outliers S05 E08 David Tibbitts: How Notion Works. “People don’t care about everybody building their own tools. David Tibbitts below shares an amazing case study of a lady who used Notion to share her Tunasian recipes to train her mother. And that’s where Notion breaks away from the existing “productivity tools” including Evernote and others. Hi, I am Ivan Zhao, cofounder/designer of Notion – a unified tool for docs, wikis, and tasks.We just launched the 1.0 a couple weeks ago, which you can play with the web/Mac app at notion.so (and we are hiring!. Akshay Kothari: [Notion co-founders Ivan Zhao and Simon Last] started Notion six years ago and that’s when I invested. Akshay Kothari, the former head of LinkedIn India and co-founder of Pulse, became an early angel investor in Notion much before joining the company in the summer of 2018. We were kind of in research mode for many years trying to uncover what the market needs were. In 2015, productivity tool Notion nearly died. Over the last year and a half, the company has grown extremely fast. That all rounds up to about 27 which is where we are now. But the notion still lingered. That was the pivot to focusing on notes, wikis and tasks, because that’s actually something that every team needs. They care about getting their problems solved. To give you some background, our goal with Notion is to create the general purpose work tool for a post-file, post-MS Office world. Can you disguise this new creation you have into a better version of Evernote or Trello?”. “Engineers at Notion only built the building blocks; they didn’t try to build a wiki, a project management software. For Ivan, who studied cognitive science in college with a minor in fine arts, Notion started as a personal project and it’s something he’s been at over the past decade. I joined about a year ago, there were about 10 people at the beginning of this year and now we’re close to 30. Akshay Kothari: [Notion co-founders Ivan Zhao and Simon Last] started Notion six years ago and that’s when I invested. “A lot of my friends are artists. If you would have been part of the tech community you would have definitely run into Notion at one point or the other. It was started by Ivan Zhao, and is headquartered in San Francisco. In fact, Akshay even tried hiring Ivan during 2013 while he was still building Pulse, the startup acquired by LinkedIn. Great products are built on ideologies and insane beliefs of their founders who are outliers. Work tools startup Notion, which recently reached a reported $800 million valuation, isn’t on the verge of a big SoftBank round. Camille, a former journalist with WSJ and Venturebeat, worked as a communications manager at Tesla among other assignments before joining First Round Capital to set up its amazing storytelling platform, The Review. We try to take that spirit in the modern sense.”. The company was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Are those needs universal for big and small teams? RED Academy User Experience Design Certificate JAN 2017 - APR 2017. Notion is a collaboration platform with modified markdown support that integrates kanban boards, tasks, wikis, and databases. I wanted to build a software that gave people more than just a document or a web page,” he tells me. Work collaboration startup Notion cozies up to Silicon Valley’s top accelerators. Notion was founded by Ivan Zhao. “It’s like if you studied physics in high school and college and you didn’t know who Newton is. The idea of Notion isn’t just to offer a tool that users can apply to solve their problems, but to allow them to build their own versions of Notion and keep solving their existing and future problems. I think Slack is one of those enterprise tools that people at companies actually like. I invested in Notion, so that’s my connection. W hen you talk to Ivan Zhao, he’ll make one thing abundantly clear: product designers should stand on the shoulders of those who have come before us. In terms of the original idea, we were thinking about how people who didn’t know how to code could build things like tools and software that were really useful. Personal computing has been around for nearly half a century and the software of today isn’t a lot different from the 70s. More in Windows. In this podcast he shares some of the most amazing used cases for Notion that make Notion what it is. -Ivan Zhao. Since you joined do you think the idea has shifted at all? Everything else is actually on Notion, like our application tracking system for recruiting inside Notion, our sales CRM is in Notion, our wiki obviously is, our project management as well — no, we don’t use Jira. In its own words, Notion was built to bring together many of the tools/functionality we use at work to one place, reducing the number of … She now leads a team of 7 marketers at Notion, which has around 50 employees. It’s still a really small engineering team. Shape By Alexa von Tobel , Founder and … So Notion becomes this kind of central nervous system for all of the work that people are doing. What are the barriers for satisfying the customers with 100+ employees. More in Internet and Social. I wrote about the company’s partnership with some of tech’s top accelerators and venture capital firms last month. In those situations, Notion plays well with other tools. But much of what Ivan Allen College is today was unimaginable in the late 1980s when President John Crecine proposed a controversial notion: raising the profile of liberal arts at an engineering school and creating a college devoted solely to such work. Listen to this conversation with David to learn more about how Notion listens to its users and engages with the communities to keep evolving the future of its product. Ivan Zhao learned to code as a kid trying to model video games He studied programming in elementary school. A note back then from Notion founder Ivan Zhao: “Notion wants to challenge this status quo of ‘software as silos.’ For the 1.0 release, we are bundling real-time documents, wiki-like organization, and lightweight tasks into a unified tool that can handle pretty much all your team's knowledge needs – … “Imagine one product that you can mould into any tool you like. “A lot of companies offer user incentives, from cash rewards to Amazon gift cards, but we are really lucky to have users who keep telling us what they want next in the product,” he says. The fund-raising was completed in 36 hours last week after the virus pushed Ivan Zhao, Notion’s founder and chief executive, and Akshay Kothari, Notion’s chief operating officer, to rethink their previous position of … With 30 people, we pretty much run the entire company, except for using Slack for internal communication and Intercom for external communication like talking to customers. Not in the near term. “A lot of my friends are artists. The app blends everyday work apps into one. Please do not reproduce without the expressed written consent of Ivan Zhao. We have 2 people in marketing and 2 people in sales. Ivan Zhao, co-founder of Notion, found himself in this exact position in 2015. I guess the only realization has been that not everyone wakes up wanting to build software, but everyone wakes to solve problems. How to Listen to Spotify Offline on Mobile and Windows 10 3 Ways How Google Photos Will Count Against Google Drive Storage Founded by Chris Prucha, Ivan Zhao, Jessica Lam, and Simon Last in 2016, Notion is backed by investors that include Elad Gil, Felicis Ventures, First Round Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Thibaud Elziere and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Notion started in 2012 as Canopy Technologies. “I don’t know of many companies that are being built the way Notion is being built,” Akshay tells me in this podcast. 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