Ivan Zhao
Ivan Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Notion Labs, Inc., the company behind Notion, a widely used all-in-one productivity and workspace platform. He co-founded Notion in 2013 alongside Simon Last, and the company has grown to a valuation of approximately ten billion dollars. Zhao studied cognitive science at the University of British Columbia and is known for building a highly flexible, customizable workspace product that blends notes, databases, and project management tools. He has spoken publicly about Notion's product philosophy, organizational structure, and the evolving role of AI in productivity software.
“Notion's ultimate goal is stated by founder and CEO Ivan Zhao, is that it helps us think together in the long run as we have more and more capability.”
Source→“We no longer have a CMO organization... We break up our CMO organization into storytelling, which is closer to product... And then the other part is like serving the sales go-to-market function, like demand gen, lead gen.”
Source→“Jack Dorsey kind of redesigning his company to put AI in the middle and Brian Armstrong doing the same thing.”
Source→“The only reason I know them is I work for this guy, Ray Ozzie. He was obsessed with those two and talked about them constantly.”
Source→“If we ask people who Douglas Engelbart or Alan Kay, those computing pioneers are, most people in tech have no idea... Tech is like industry doesn't know its past.”
Source→“GPT-4 is a religious experience for me... This is what change everything.”
Source→“Notion is AI-native knowledge work platform. Mentioned as the canonical example of a SaaS company successfully refounding as an AI company, with strong product-led growth and a growing enterprise motion.”
Source→“We started a mantra in the company. We want to be a jazz band, not a marching band... I realized I cannot be a marching band person.”
Source→“We intentionally do a lot of acquisitions. We have 50, 60 founders at Notion... Founders are kind of just kind of like little decalcified meathead machinery just trying to break things, right? So keep your regenerating.”
Source→“It's never been easier to start. Man, it's never been harder to scale because like in every little micro segment, if there's a little traction, like there's a hundred competitors two days later.”
Source→“We pair Erica with our head of sale, Pravesh, which is rah, rah, like the meat eater. Banes in his teeth. Perfect pairing.”
Source→“We no longer have a CMO organization... We break up our CMO organization into storytelling, which is closer to product... And then the other part is like serving the sales go-to-market function, like demand gen, lead gen.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.