Notion's community meet at Hyderabad's T-Hub was 'so fun it tired me out,': CEO Ivan Zhao

Notion CEO and co-founder Ivan Zhao at the community meet in T-Hub, Hyderabad

Notion co-founder and CEO Ivan Zhao who was in Hyderabad last week to strategise on the expansion of their Hyderabad engineering office, held a one and a half hour community meet up with 120 users of the productivity platform.

As part of Notion Community, members host events, lead groups, make videos, build and share Notion templates, and so on.

In the community meet-up which was held in T-Hub, Zhao shared with users the founding story of Notion, upcoming project management launch, monetisation, and so on.

"We had a community Q&A for an hour and a half with a lot of people. There were many people: from personal users, to many students who use notion," said Zhao in an exclusive interview to Moneycontrol.

[caption id="attachment_10475261" align="alignnone" width="1200"] Notion CEO's community meet up announcement at T-Hub, Hyderabad[/caption]

Also read: India one of our most important regions, Hyderabad our only engineering office outside US: Notion CEO Ivan Zhao

"There were also people who represented (the enterprise community). There was a woman who represented enterprise customers. They use Notion in their company. It was a good mix of people and so I had a lot of questions to answer. It was really fun. I talked for an hour and a half. I was so tired by then,"  Zhao said.

[caption id="attachment_10475221" align="alignnone" width="1600"] Notion CEO and co-founder Ivan Zhao at the community meet-up event at T-Hub in Hyderabad[/caption]

Notion's Hyderabad office has the company's second largest engineering team. It was established in 2021, after the company acquired automate.io. The engineering team in Hyderabad is headed by Uday Bhaskar - ex engineer founding member of Uber Eats.

During the interview, Zhao emphasised on the importance of India for the company and said, "Hyderabad is our only engineering office outside the US. And that’s why I am here. We are expanding this office. We will figure out a strategy, what’s the next roadmap for this office."

[caption id="attachment_10475231" align="alignnone" width="1600"] Notion CEO and co-founder Ivan Zhao at the community meet-up event at T-Hub in Hyderabad[/caption]

Born in China, Zhao moved to Canada as a child. He graduated from the University of British Columbia, specialising in Cognitive Science. Before founding Notion in 2013, Zhao worked at an education publishing startup called Inkling.

The company gained immense popularity during Covid-19, with users take a liking to its minimalist look and the flexibility it offered in terms of note taking, creating knowledge bases, and so on.

In February this year, Notion released its artificial based writing assistant Notion AI for its users. In the future, Zhao plans to expand Notion AI, which is currently limited to its writing use cases, to knowledge base and project management segment of the platform. Notion AI uses vendors Microsoft-backed OpenAI to tune its model.