Congrats to GoodNotes for Winning Apple’s iPad App of the Year Award — Building the Future of Collaboration
In 2019, my son Brandon introduced me to a magical app called Goodnotes. An iPad app that he loves and spends countless hours on, using it to take notes, draw diagrams, and annotate all his Physics textbooks.
No other app has ever captured so much joy and attention of Brandon wanting to learn. So I decided to buy an iPad just to try the app myself. This is when I realized I finally met the gold-standard of note-taking tools. It was clear that a lot of thought had gone into the design of this app and I was intrigued who was behind this beautiful product.
As serendipity would have it, six months later, I returned to Hong Kong, my hometown, to co-host a FoundersHK dinner event with my partner Edith and a group of local tech founders in Wanchai. During the meal, I was excited to discover and meet such a vibrant and impressive group of founders and my biggest surprise came when I learned that the magical app that my son loves was actually developed by a native Hong Kong founder, Steven Chan.
Steven and I immediately hit it off and began regularly discussing the future of collaboration, ideation, and note taking. I was constantly impressed by Steven’s keen eye for product development, his passion for collaboration and global perspective and understanding of growth and distribution — qualities which I could only previously find in Silicon Valley. It’s clear that times have changed since I first founded BEA Systems. Silicon Valley is no longer the only place to find world class talent.
In 2021, my team at Race Capital and I decided to commit and participate as their only investor & backer. Since then GoodNotes grew the team to over 100 employees and 19 million active users worldwide and is currently the #1 iPad app on the worldwide ranking chart, beating out other apps such as YouTube, Chrome, and Netflix.
I feel fortunate to be part of Goodnotes journey in the past 3 years. It has been a privilege to see Steven flourish as a great CEO, how Goodnotes grew globally, and now being recognized as the Apple’s iPad App of the Year becoming the core app building the future of collaboration.
I believe Steven and the GoodNote’s team will redefine how collaboration is done across all digital platforms and open up huge opportunities by bringing previously undigitized notes online for the very first time. Goodnotes will become the de facto learning ecosystem and continue to inspire many to take notes, share notes and empower everyone to collaborate with each other.
And this is just the beginning.
