When Zoom announced Zapps last month - the name has since been wisely changed to Zoom Apps - VC Twitter immediately started speculating that Zoom could make the leap from a successful video conferencing service to become a launch pad for startup innovation. It definitely caught the eye of former ProWellTech writer and current Signal Fire investor Josh Constine, who tweeted that "Zoom's new" Zapps "app platform will crush or create a lot of startups."
Zoom's new "Zapps" app platform will crush or crush many startups. https://t.co/HYtxmaO91R
Dark day for virtual event ticketing apps, as Zoom does it on its own
Great day for whiteboards and task managers, as it leaves them to the platform partners pic.twitter.com/KCYRDteDIi
- Josh Constine -SignalFire (@JoshConstine) 14 October 2020
As the use of Zoom exploded during the pandemic and became a key tool for business and education, the idea of using a video conferencing platform to build a series of adjacent tools makes a lot of sense. As the pandemic ends, we've learned enough about remote working that the need for tools like Zoom will remain long after we get it all clear to go back to schools and offices.
We are already seeing promising startups like Mmhmm, Docket and ClassEdu built with Zoom in mind, and these companies are attracting the attention of investors. In fact, some investors believe Zoom could be the next big startup ecosystem.
Go beyond videoconferencing
Salesforce pioneered Zoom more than ten years ago when it opened its platform to developers and later launched the AppExchange as a distribution channel. Both were revolutionary ideas at the time. Today we see Zoom building on that.
Jim Scheinman, a founding managing partner of Maven Ventures and an early investor in Zoom (who is credited with the company name), says he has always viewed the service as a potential platform game. "I said publicly, before anyone knew it, that Zoom is the next big open platform on which to build billion-dollar companies," Scheinman told me.
He says he spoke to Zoom's leadership about opening the platform to outside developers several years ago prior to the IPO. It wasn't really a priority at that point, but COVID-19 pushed the idea to the fore. "After the IPO and COVID, with Zoom's tremendous growth on both the business and consumer side, it has become very clear that an app market is now a critical growth area for Zoom, which creates a huge scalability opportunity for fledgling startups, "he said.
Jason Green, founder and CEO of Emergence Capital (another first investor in Zoom and Salesforce) agrees: "Zoom believes that adding functionality to the core Zoom platform to make it more functional for specific use cases is an opportunity to build a partner ecosystem similar to what Salesforce has done with the AppExchange in the past. "
Building the platform
Before a platform can be successful with developers, it requires a critical mass of users, a bar that Zoom has clearly surpassed. It also needs a set of developer tools to connect to the various services on the platform. So the substantial user base acts as a ready-to-boot market. Finally, it requires a way to distribute those creations in a market.
Zoom worked on the developer components and involved industry veteran Ross Mayfield, who has been part of two collaborative startups in his career, to run the developer program. He says the Zoom Apps development toolset has been flexibly designed to allow developers to build applications the way they want.
For starters, Zoom created WebViews, a way to incorporate functionality into an application like Zoom. To build WebView in Zoom, the company created a JS kit, which in combination with existing Zoom APIs allows developers to create functionality within the Zoom experience. "So we're giving developers a lot of flexibility in the experience they create with WebViews and using our very rich set of APIs that are part of the existing platform and creating some new APIs to build the experience," he said.
