Ivan Zhao

BIO

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!) 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. My cofounder and I often joke that this was like the "hot startup topic" of the 90s. Unfortunately, tools for knowledge workers haven't advanced much since then. The state of art is either Google Docs/Quip/Dropbox Paper (multiplayer WordPerfect), or rigid SAAS apps (forms + a table+ some buttons). To end users, all the knowledge and workflows are trapped in different "silos", the best people can do is to duct-tape everything together, previously with emails, nowadays with Slack – Notion is our creation to challenge this status quo of "software as silos". Before tech, I seriously considered a career in photography, as well as academia (cognitive science).