Laura Padilla, the Head of Global Channel, Platform Sales and BD at Zoom is BACK for her second feature on the podcast.
Today she’s sharing some juicy Zoom details.
During the pandemic we were consumers of Zoom. Now, we get the chance to look back and ask her what it was like on the inside.
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Transcript
Jared Fuller 00:11
All right, what is up, partner up? We're back, Isaac. Next week. This time we'll be meeting up in San Francisco right? fastconnect Yeah, I think when this episode airs, we'll, I'll probably be in an airplane or something. So yeah, we'll have SAS Connect. We're doing a big after party. On the 28th. They got moved. It was the 27th. But it's the 28th. It's the final event of the event. And we're doing the big launch of partner hacker. So if you're there, come on, come check it out. What rumor on the street is champagne fountain and whiskey tasting? I don't know. I can't verify but I've heard these things. Let's it's gonna be a blast to meet up. And actually, we're excited to welcome as a guest today. For her second time. Someone who's also speaking at SAS Connect. Laura pedia Laura, welcome back to partner up.
Laura Padilla 01:01
Thank you excited to be here. Nice to meet you, Isaac. Good to see ya. Likewise.
Isaac Morehouse 01:05
absolutely excited about this.
Jared Fuller 01:07
Yeah, we're seeing if we can get Isaac to break the co host curse. I've gone through three. So he's maybe he's lucky number three. So, Laura, let's talk about the change that happened. Because last time we talked, we were mid swing and pandemic, and zoom went from an awesome app that we were using in b2b tech startups and SAS, to really a household name across every use case, government education, child care, I mean, literally everything. And I think we talked through some of that, that story, for those of you who haven't listened to it, this is a great episode. I think what's happening now is you've gone from how many people in the BD org and zoom to how many people do you have now? Let's let's talk about that first, kind of like the people side of this equation, because I think it's been some incredible growth that people don't realize on the partner side how big this can get.
Laura Padilla 01:56
Yeah. So I think pre pandemic, we're about 60 people on the team, and we're going to be over 300 Now, this year. So the team has just exploded, and we can't hire fast enough from being honest. It's a great time to be a partner.
Isaac Morehouse 02:11
What's it like for you when you're going through? Something like that? How do you do your you said you're interviewing basically all day? How do you find time to like, do your job as well as onboard and hire? Or is it just basically, you just have to give up on everything, but the absolute emergencies and just do onboarding hire like that's got to be crazy, right?
Laura Padilla 02:33
Yeah, no, I mean, you definitely have to prioritize and say no to stuff that isn't important. And you know, I wouldn't say I interview all day long, but yes, like, yours, spend a lot of time hunting people finding talent, you know, and, and as you meet people, which we'll all do at SAS connect to, it's like, I keep people in the back of my mind, actually, you know, for when I'm hiring in the future, as to you know, what skill sets I need. And then you know, you know, I'll remember someone and I'll call him, like, Hey, I met you here, we really need your skill set, I'd love to have you on the team. And so you almost have to always be on and doing that. That's
Isaac Morehouse 03:10
such a great reminder, I've I always I call it a farm team, I always have sometimes it's literally in a spreadsheet somewhere. But at least in the back of my mind, whenever I encounter someone that's like, ooh, they stand out. And that's I tell a lot of people early in their careers, especially, you never know who's watching and who's got you in the back of their mind for when they need to go start hiring. So like, think about the foot you put forward in the world, because you're in somebody's mental Rolodex, whether you know it or not.
Jared Fuller 03:38
That's the tagline. I think we talked about that Isaac, because by the time it's going to be unveiled, one of the things that we were saying Laura is, in terms of like our thesis that we're kind of like putting onto the world is around around trust. And so there's the entire theme around what we're doing with partner hacker in this shift to where you said, it's a great time to be in partnerships. The way that we build our careers, is really around the value that we deliver to other people. So your network is your net worth, you heard that really cliche, trite phrase, but I mean, look at it. Now the partner people that I know who actually delivered results years ago, I mean, they're in the highest demand in the world, because they have the proof points they've delivered. And they have that trust. So now I'm sure you've seen that a couple of runs now and you're carrying that into the next phase is for zoom and beyond. I want to unpack that a little bit further around the headcount growth. And you said in you know, in the in the org in the BD org 300 plus people, where are those, where's that headcount sitting? So you have product, you have product marketing, you have sales, you have all of this? How do you think about integrating with those teams whenever you're talking about that scale, because you can't have them all sit proper on the BD team, they're probably embedded. They don't deadline, let's
Laura Padilla 05:01
all sit on my team all 300 report into me. So that is, but, but I'll tell you. And I think we could do a whole other session on helping people like my crazy career journey. And you know, and why I think it's really great for, especially this role to learn different disciplines. So, so I started my career in marketing. And I was always very curious. And I always wanted to learn different stuff. And so I've done everything from marketing, to tech alliances, to operations to programs. And so at zoom, I own partner programs and partner ops. So all the orders that are placed through my partners, I own the order processing team, the DL reg team, all those ops teams, that's a very big part of it, too, is the ops team, right. And so I have partner ops, I have partner programs. And then I have the BD people. And I have the channel people. So I have about 14 direct reports. And I've split them up amongst different functions, right. And so those 300 plus people are split up between kind of the programs and the ops, kind of the strategy, foundational pieces. And then the go to market pieces that all use these core foundational pieces that we built. Right? They all use them for different reasons. But you know, and then the quota carrying people in the field as well. And so the way I was only able to scale it was having a really strong programs and ops function that centralized globally. Right. And so we can rinse and repeat as much as we can. There are certain large partnerships, like we just signed Deutsche Telekom that were like nine months of negotiations right with them, like there's certain partnerships that will never fit the same process that you built, but you build this foundation for like 93% of the partners, right. And then the other seven or 8%, are going to be customized as big strategic partnerships that you have to do differently, right. But even the customized ones have to go through a vetting process by operations and by programs, meaning like, can we operationalize what we want to do with this partner? Right, and it's a pretty detailed process. But yeah, so it's 300 are across all the different disciplines.
Jared Fuller 07:20
The something that I think I came upon a realization, kind of exiting the really scrappy phases of partnerships into having fully embedded functional people across every step of the customer journey marketing, CS sales, product ops, is you really start to realize that the core job of being in partnerships is not to build partnerships, it's to build a program and that program is your product, right? I think it's something I talk about a lot in startups that really, really annoys me is, so many companies are built on the concept of, we know the job to be done for our customers, we have a backlog of stuff we need to do, we prioritize it, we schedule it, and we ship it in product. But when it comes to customer orgs, or like partnerships, that rigor is not there. So you can't do that with people that have a quota and a headcount. And then people that have, you know, content that they have to write, and then they have customers they need to serve. It has to be its own thing. So like program management being your product of what is presented to your partners, I can't imagine it at that scale, like, I would say to everyone, like, the sooner that you can pull in program management and actually have a program manager, the better off you're going to be because otherwise, you're just chasing projects that no one's technically responsible for.
Laura Padilla 08:41
And so you're exactly right. Like, I actually call that team, my service creation prioritization team. They're like my product management team, right. And a lot of people don't view it that way and understand how complicated this is. It's so complicated to design a program someone's going to consume and operationalize, especially across a large public company, right. And so, you know, one of the things I when I also mentor like a pre IPO companies, I talked to them around like you got, if you're gonna go public, you have to prepare for that. Right? There are things that you do as a private company you can't do as a public company, or it's going to how you disrupt your business if you don't address it now from an operational perspective, and from a compliance and security and all the different things right and, and unfortunately, it's a very unsexy thing to talk about. And so sometimes people are like, ah, like, they don't want to listen or hear it. But it's so disruptive if you don't deal with it the right way. And if you handle it the right way, it is explosive the growth you can have right if you really design your program and your operations the right way. Because Because imagine this working and you're just building on top of it, it's just exponential the way you can grow if you do that, right. If you don't do that, right, man, it is a mess. Right and So I'll tell you that, you know, my programs and ops teams at zoom are just like industry, just the best in the industry. I mean, like what we've had to do, and and what they've had to do, and you're running, at the same time as this huge ship of zoom is amassing all these customers. And they're trying to bolt on a brand new program and to systems and operations and new partnerships and all that. And then going from a few 1000 partners before the pandemic to over 10,000. Now, right, across all these different ecosystems we've built and ways routes, we go to Mark and all these different countries. I mean, I have to tell you, you should have them on at some point, because that alone is just a huge, crazy experience. I mean, and I'll tell you, they get beat up the most from everyone, you know, and they're the ones I'm the most protective of as a team. Because I'm like, Man, you guys have no idea what this team has to do to help you guys run your business. So actually be able to book the business.
Isaac Morehouse 11:03
Yeah, well, I'm really curious about because something that's come up often on this show is measurement, right? How do you measure partner? What what what role are your partner programs playing versus you know, what's coming through other channels, it's very hard to measure things like influence. And I imagined added to that is a problem that companies that grow very, very fast, like zoom did during the pandemic, when you're growing really fast, it's very hard to tell what's working and what's not working, because all the feedback looks up into the right. And so it's like, how do you face that problem of first measuring, but then just in nested within an environment where everything's growing almost no matter what you do? How do you tell when something isn't working? Or you need to make adjustments?
Laura Padilla 11:48
Yeah, so every partner type I have we measure differently. So it just, they're all here for a different purpose, right. And so when you have reseller partners or your master agent partners, they're here to drive net new revenue for the company. So that's pretty easy. Because if there's a quota assigned to that, right, and what you do is you look at organic growth for the company, organic growth by a region, and then you correlate that to how you're doing as an overlay function to that, right. And so if you're growing faster than the company, and you're growing faster than the region, you're doing well, right. If we're growing at the same pace, people can argue that, oh, you're just, you know, riding the wave of whatever else is happening, right? And so our job is really hard, and that we have to always do more. That's right. It's funny
Isaac Morehouse 12:41
show, Jared, it reminds me of like two episodes ago, when you said on the personal level, if the company's growth curve is like this, your personal growth curve within the company needs to exceed that. Otherwise, you're gonna, you know, just flatline. And that's, that's a really extreme way to look at within those programs. Like, you got to exceed the growth of that that market that you're playing in. Otherwise, everyone will say, Yeah, you got lucky, right?
Jared Fuller 13:04
Well, what's crazy is that scale, that you're still looking at it through that framework, how we measured the, like, the Marketo. Alliance, when I was adrift. It was like we were doing so much that we weren't set up to track everything. There's no way it was too big for us at that stage. So all that we did is we just looked at the Marketo, you know, accounts that we were closing in comparison to the rest of our, you know, the organic, and we benchmark that and it had to be growing faster. And that's how we looked at it. I mean, even at the board level. I mean, so we were looking at, hey, we signed this giant alliance with Marketo. How's it doing? That's actually how we ended up getting connected with Pat Grady, I believe, because I was like, hey, Pat, I need to get in touch with Zoom, we got some stuff to do. And then I think he hit up. Because we shared Sequoia, obviously, as an investor. That's, that's funny that you, you still look at it at that scale in a new region under that same lens. Because if you're underneath that channel doesn't necessarily work very well. If you're growing slightly above, then that's like the expectation, you're like, Okay, that's what we need for the region. It needs an overlay function so that I'm going to key into that word, because a lot of companies in the startup phase, they're, they're understanding, hey, how do I build this program, and a lot of times people think of it as a channel, which can imply like business unit, you're bringing the leads, you sell them, and then you service them. And that's a line item that makes the CFO happy. Because it's very clean from a forecasting and financial planning. When it's an overlay, then all of that's kind of combined. From an ops and strategic standpoint, when you say overlay, that means that the partner organization and the partners are working with the direct customer team for that customer.
Laura Padilla 14:46
Yeah, so what it means is there's an ad assigned to the account or actually owns a customer account, right? But the partner team will support that ad and that customer right and the partner obviously involved in it. but they don't own the account. Right ownership is still the AES. Right? And so that's what I mean by overlay. Now, not every, every company designs can design this so differently, right and what value is right? At zoom, it was very much like revenue, revenue revenue, you gotta show me how much revenue you're driving his organization but but like by large strategic alliances organization that does have partnerships with like, you know, Salesforce and apple and Oracle and all those big partnerships, that isn't measured that way, because they're not driving revenue in the same way, there's no reseller agreement there, right. And so, we're looking at that and around integrations and use cases, customer adoption, customer sat, right, that eventually you can look at customer adoption, more granularly around, you know, dollars, right. But those partnerships take a long time to build and get to a point where then you can show that and then obviously, co marketing as well as part of, you know, how much influence in share voice and demand gen and things are coming as a result of kind of CO marketing these two companies together, right, but, but also you could argue marketplaces like, I could argue a marketplace shouldn't be an overlay function, right, you would have a partner rep, you know, who would be part of the marketplace sales team, and they work with those partners on making sure they put integrations up in the marketplace that they drive demand to that integration, right. And that causes more sales. So some functions should be overlay, and some probably don't have to be.
Jared Fuller 16:36
It's, you mentioned, marketplace. I think that is an interesting intersect for kind of like breaking apart and measuring it separately, especially because whatever you make the pivot from, let's say, like an integration directory to like an actual marketplace, where you kind of make that pivot from, hey, we integrate with the standard stuff to now you have people building on Zoom, and then you have users utilizing zoom and kind of like a whole new way. So like, I had a front row seat to seeing zoom apps being developed. I'm an advisor at a company that built before the Zoom app marketplace was even live. And then I invested in a company that now has one. So like, notably, the use case is so amazing, because what it does is it attends the calls. And if you're a researcher, what you're doing is the old world is you'd record a conversation, and then you'd go back to the transcript, and you highlight the important parts. So that that synthesis would take like an hour after every call. Now with the Zoom app, it's a you see the transcript kind of in real time coming through, and you just press the spacebar, and it auto highlights. So like you go back to your transcript, and it's already annotated, like in real time. So you have these really novel things that are changing, not just workflow integrations, but how people are using the product that happened during the pandemic, the Zoom app marketplace in zoom apps. I mean, that's what you're old.
Laura Padilla 17:57
Oh, yeah, I mean, it's a little bit older, just the concept and all that. But yeah, we are really doubling down on that now. And moving from, you know, a SaaS application to this whole platform concept is really, I mean, it's evolution of a company, right, but also where zoom has to go right now, because our tech and our architecture is so amazing. If you think about all the things that come to build the meetings, application, everybody used during the pandemic, right, the video engine, all the different pieces around that, I mean, being able to extract some of that value, so that people can consume those things in a different way, and be able to build off of it, it's just been amazing to see I mean, we have hundreds of ISV partners now building all these different applications and use cases for, you know, embedding zoom into whatever they're doing right everywhere, from like, large telecom companies to education, health care, media, entertainment, I mean, there's so many different use cases for people and then our new video SDK engine, which is the actual engine that the meeting's application uses with it without it being packaged up, gamers are taking that and building gaming applications off just the video engine. And you can think about so many different use cases as well for that. And so that's definitely the next phase of where we're going. And the marketplace. You know, right now is an integration marketplace hosting some of these cool integrations. But the next phase will be monetization in that marketplace, too. And so zoom, but also developers will be able to sell right their integrations to people off the market.
Isaac Morehouse 19:34
Can I ask you culturally, while the shift was going on, because I'm always really, really interested in like, like company culture, there's like a DNA of a company, right? And that is very, very important for how they unfold that I've always seen zoom, or at least experienced that as a user, as a very consumer focus focused on the end user and the product experience, which is how you they can come out and beat Google at video meetings, right? They just built a better video meeting platform. And so it's like, okay, there's an application, they just have this obsession with making the best video meeting meeting tool. How do you transition? Because you don't want to lose that you want to retain that customer focus. But how do you become a culture that cares about developers and this platform and this ecosystem? What kind of things were going on internally in the company to kind of bring that about? Is it is it bringing in people who already have that from working at someplace that's that is very developer focused, like a stripe or something? Or is it what's you know what, what goes on to make that to make that turn?
Laura Padilla 20:38
Well, because zoom in itself has been adopted everywhere with so many different use cases. And COVID also just exploded the ways people were so creative with how they wanted to use Zoom, right, that what we saw was a need to open up the platform now for more customization. Because that's those are the requests we were getting people just wanted to customize the way they use the product. And it wasn't friendly for that, right. And so as a result, we said we have to do this. And yes, we hired a lot more product management and engineering, people who understand platform to be able to open up the platform, build, make the API's more rich, the SDK is more rich, all the different use cases around it. But you know, at the heart of what zoom does is customer happiness. And so because customers were just saying, I want to customize the way I use it, we did that. Now, the cool thing is, you know, if you're thinking about that, you know, as like customer happiness, it's really cool to see customers saying, Hey, I have the package SAS application, but I want to actually be able to use the video SDK, and put that you know, somewhere else, you know, and be able to use Zoom in a different way customized for customer application I have internally or for whatever use case that may be. And so it's been really driven by customer demand. And so but now it's a very laser focused, you know, area of the business. And we also know that's how zoom has been accelerated scrub.
Isaac Morehouse 22:09
Yeah, I love that. I love that it comes from the customer, it starts with their their demands, and then you say, Okay, well, let's make it easier, let's do this for you. And then let's make it easier for those of you who want to do some of these things yourselves by providing these tools. And then you kind of get, you kind of get further further abstracted in sort of the production cycle of new features and new apps by by letting customers and others eventually partners in on the process at an earlier and earlier stage. Right? Where instead of you building a feature for them, you let them build a future for themselves. And then you create something where a third party can build a feature and sell it to them. It's it's just a it's like a natural process that seems to have unfolded because of your customer focus.
Laura Padilla 22:51
Yeah, we also have customers who consume us in various ways. They'll have the meetings app for a certain set of their business. They'll now use the API's integrate the API's for something else for their business. And now they're using isn't a bunch of different ways. It's all zoom, but it's just used differently or consumed differently.
Jared Fuller 23:07
One question tying together the marketplace is part of what you were just going through is, how close is the organization or the team to bubbling up, like just talking again, about one of the companies I saw go through this process, and then seeing them, here's what's so crazy, you talking about the customer demand. So I've seen a four person company, build a zoom app, get demand from Fortune 500 customers, and then presenting to you know, I mean, we're talking big business units, lots of users, 50 people that would be using this application, and then all of a sudden, the dynamic change, when they launched the Zoom app, they're like, Wait a second. So we can just do this now, right from zoom. And then moving that into procurement, like those types of things. It's just that wouldn't have existed prior to this. And it changes everything. So for example, that customer group, that company is now driving value in every single conversation. So now their pitch deck for every meeting, every demo, everything has the Zoom app in it. That's so crazy to me that like companies don't see like, Hey, you're not even there. They're not on payroll, there's nothing there. But every single big meeting, and now they're raising a bunch of money. They're hiring dozens of people. I mean, are those things highlighted? Like how did the after state kind of seems obvious, but it seems like for a lot of companies that before state is like, how do you how do you? How did you think about that? Are there any kind of cool stories that have highlighted the fact that this is now core to how people might go to market around Zoom is they're putting you in their deck and saying, Hey, here's how we integrate? Here's what we do for our customers.
Laura Padilla 24:47
Yeah, I mean, we're we're definitely seeing that like, like I was talking there's a company in Indonesia largest carrier that has a super app for their customers, right? And so they added zoom into this For that
Jared Fuller 25:00
Super App, I've just I've heard so many BD buzzwords, I've never heard Super App.
Laura Padilla 25:05
Okay. Yeah, they call it that. And so basically what it is it's an app that has apps within the app, basically. And so like you have your mobile device, and you have like, the telecom cell app, you know, and within, there's other apps within it, right? And so, for example, they've put us into there. And then there's, I mean, yeah, there's just so many different use cases around, especially healthcare and education are big ones, especially during the pandemic, all the things you saw with telemedicine people, you know, education on,
Jared Fuller 25:36
I did, actually, yeah, I use that where I'm like, I'm 90%. Sure this is zoom, but it wasn't the zoom thing that I was used to seeing.
Laura Padilla 25:44
Yeah, exactly. I'm sure it was the API or the SDK, customize the branding, or took the branding off. And the you just saw the video engine around that. But yeah, I mean, I'm sure you guys are seeing it everywhere. And then zoom events, which was a COVID. Baby, meaning like, you know, yoga teachers, you know, bartender doing a cocktail mixer thing, whatever, they can all do that over over zoom. And they can register people pay for it, do all those things online via zoom, right, run their events, on Zoom maps, right, because we were using that before using us for b2c use cases. But we weren't built for that, right. You know, Zoom was really always at the line of business. So you guys are talking about developers, and developers is a newer community we're focusing on and we're getting better at it. You know, we are focusing on a community, community marketing team and a developer, advocate team. And all those are newer for zoom, because we always focus on the line of business user was it's we're all b2b, right? It's really what we focused on was b2b. And so we're just starting to have a voice within that community now. But all the use cases and things that they're you know that these developers come up is are super creative. It's really
Jared Fuller 26:59
cool. And in the the evangelism and community what's interesting, Isaac, and I've been having lots of conversations around this inflection point and what some smart people like Jay McBain said the decade of the ecosystem, we're kind of calling it the era of ecosystems. It your the way that you go about getting those developers to build is not ads. It's not salespeople in cold emails, it's it's something different. You mentioned a key word you said community, and probably partners as well, that feels like a really good litmus test and kind of proof point to say the the go to market is fundamentally kind of shifting right now. Because hey, here's a new business initiative, and traditional marketing. And traditional sales is really off the table. It's about building a community and having a great experience that those people go, Oh, absolutely. If there's a video use case, you want to be a part of zooms community in use Zoom and build on Zoom. And it's the support for like getting access to the API's. What happens after they come to you as well. So
Laura Padilla 27:58
there's all things like, for example, we're building a developer support team. You know, I mean, we had done that before, because it'd be a support team for developers and ISV partners that are developing off of the API's and SDKs. So, I mean, I think, Jay is absolutely right. The job now of like, a partner leader, is so different, you know, and I tend to not like the word channel myself, because I feel like the word channel means like that old legacy, you know, just reseller community, which they're important, right. But I think nowadays, you know, when you look at the products and tech, especially the cool products, you know, I mean, you want partners who add more value than just actually selling the product, right? The smart partners now also have developers, you know, and they're able to customize for their customers or wrap services around it, to support around it right, do more than just procurement for their customers. And those are the partners that are going to survive as well. And those are the partners that I personally also want to work with closer, right, because I know they'll make it stickier for their customers don't want to stay with Zoom long term, because they're adding that value to
Isaac Morehouse 29:17
the customers what I love about we're where zoom kind of lives because Jared said, we've been talking a lot about this ecosystems moment. And that it's, you know, you can't just rely on direct sales, direct marketing, to hit people, they're getting overwhelmed with information. So if you're building a product, and you're sort of, you know, go to market strategy, you need to think about the ecosystems that your customers live in. And in for almost any kind of application, your target market and when it could be a consumer app, or it could be a business app. One of the places they live is zoom there on Zoom a lot for a lot of different reasons. And so you think about how, without requiring them to disrupt their normal patterns, how can you get your solution in front of them where they already Live and spend time. So I mean, it could be anything from a, maybe it's a recipe sharing app and people are on Zoom, talk talking about cooking. And if there's a simple way to or whatever it might be right? It could there could be so many different ways in which the conversations people are already having, I used to run a community where it was all remote. And people, all these young people, they wanted to watch movies together, but they lived in different cities. And so they hooked up some janky way to use Zoom and to like somebody would have it showing the screen of a movie they were playing, and they would all sit there in the chat. And they would talk and laugh. And you're thinking if if you're building some kind of app for shared experiences like that, or a book club app, a good reads or something, people are already probably having their book club meetings on Zoom, can you insert your product into that surface area that they that they already are treading, rather than trying to get them to introduce a new habit into their life, and there's just something so cool about zoom playing that part it is it is a watering hole itself, it is the public square, or millions of tiny public squares, where customers of all different kinds are living their daily lives. So thinking strategically, from a builder standpoint, it just starts to really like the my imagination starts going crazy.
Jared Fuller 31:15
That's, um, Isaac, you nailed something so important that like, the other thing that Laura that we're trying to evangelize everywhere is like, the next generation of companies that go and disrupt the old way, I think they start in places like zoom. So like I mentioned, that company, I was talking about that for employees, I mean, the first, they really had nothing, the first go to market thing they had was zoom. That's how they went to market. Right? That's where everything started to change. That's just not normal for the how you build a great company playbook. Right? Like, where is that in the MBA program? Like you start in other ecosystems, but it's just seems so natural whenever you frame it up like that way. Are you seeing just kind of like an anecdote? Have you seen people's spin off? And like, zoom? I'm aware, I don't know that it's too public. But there's like a zoom fund, right? Like you're making investments back in people that are actually starting and doing this. I mean, that's another indicator that this ecosystem is really full cycle, you're recruiting developers building community, and then you're also backing and funding them? Kind of for the first time as well. No, absolutely.
Laura Padilla 32:19
Yeah. So there is that there are companies that we see are cool. And we think our disruptive, innovative, also adding value to zoom, we're happy to fund that as part of the Zoom apps fund. But we've also seen companies that are use Zoom and din derivatives of things that impact zoom, like the company called, like, class edu, for example, you know, there, they basically customized an instance of zoom using our API's and SDKs for the edu marketplace, right? So imagine, you know, your UI for zoom, but customized for a teacher, right? So we have, you know, lots of partners that are doing a lot of like I said creative things around the API's and SDKs. But they are doing kind of what you were talking about Isaac, thinking of zoom is like the central hub, and saying, Well, what can I derive from this for different customers for different use cases for different users? Right? And and now that our, our developer toolkit is becoming so rich, you know, it's only exploding what we're seeing more and more, I think the Zoom app marketing the marketplace now I think has 1000s of integrations. And then the Zoom apps, which is in the within the UI, I think we're still only seen about 100 or so apps that are built for that. But we're that's a little bit more time intensive that we have to get involved in that. But we're going to make that much more self service in the future as well. What's
Jared Fuller 33:51
What's the thing that stood out to you, you know, kind of looking back through this crazy experience? Because if you look at the I can't I don't think I could say no, there was another company that had a better, you know, a rose to the challenge. How about that not better outcome, but rose to the challenge than zoom over the past two years globally? Like if you really think about it, yeah, Salesforce did well, lots of people had to go, Okay, finally, we're getting on CRM legacy businesses. But it was like, you had a tech vertical business and maybe a couple of ancillary verticals. But then you became a ubiquitous vertical, like, you, it's like you ate all verticals at once. I don't know that. There's another analog to that, you know, you called up investors, advisors, you know, public market, people are like, hey, what's the playbook for this? How do we serve everyone in the world at once? Like looking back at that chaos and the growth? What do you think you're going to you know, the like the the main takeaways, or do you think you need some time to kind of like decompress from that right. I'm just kind of curious how you can kind of now that you've launched the Zoom app marketplace, there's more stability last time, it was in the midst of the chaos, you're still hiring, but what's, what do you think the takeaway from that story is what do You think is learned? It's like a first time lesson because it's the first time anyone in the world seen this happen in tech?
Laura Padilla 35:05
Yeah, you know what? I'm definitely going to have to decompress and think about that at some point, whatever I slow down a little bit,
Jared Fuller 35:12
that was my club to say, I want you to think about it. And then we're going to have you write about it on partner hacker as a, as a, as a guest. So happy to
Laura Padilla 35:21
do that. But I mean, look, initially, I would say that I've learned so much around well, first people, because even though obviously, the tech and we had to, you know, open up all these servers and storage and all of them, like just the just the back datacenter stuff, just think about that, right? The usage just went through the roof, right. And so all of our data center teams were round the clock having to turn on all these servers, right?
Isaac Morehouse 35:50
Cloud providers, by the way, I was paying attention to the AWS GCP stuff that like you had to like, You got to be like, wait a second, we're even like, depends, we have to, we're so big that we need to go to Google. Well, in addition to crazy, some of the crazy issues you never thought of because you weren't serving these verticals. Like I remember all the sudden, like security and waiting rooms and passwords became a big thing, which no one had ever thought about as a zoom user for years. I never thought about that, because no one was trying to hack into my Zoom classroom, you know?
Laura Padilla 36:19
So that's, that's exactly right. And so, I have learned so much about the whole business soup to nuts, that, you know, I think at one point, I could definitely run a company, just from like, all the stuff that I've learned everything from security, compliance, you know, all the international things that, you know, data residency, all those pieces that, you know, we learned from also around all the different routes to market, you know, and how partnerships play into that things to do things not to do, right. And, you know, also, I do also think that when things are organically working and growing, you know, that's when you should probably dive in, and really figure out what you can extract in it, right? Because I mean, you guys all been in this partner world where, you know, you can push really hard to a partner or try something, and it's just so hard and you keep pushing at it, and you're like, man, you know, and at some point, you got to make a call, whether I'm going to keep trying this out, or I'm just going to let it go. And we obviously had the opposite of zoom, I would say that, and I said this to my whole team, you know, this is a BD person's dream this job because like, you know, in other smaller companies I was at, you're constantly begging for people to partner with you. Right? And at zoom, people were just coming through the door. Right, that issue with us was more? How do we resource? How do we select the right partners? Right? How do we invest the right way? And also, um, you talked about in the beginning of the, you know, the podcast, Jared, but like, the one thing that we have to be excellent at is cross functional collaboration. And what I mean by that is, like, I think one thing I'm pretty good at is like, how do I get resources from engineering from Product Management? How do I build the right case, from finance, to be able to say, I need this, you know, to be able to get this done? What is the ROI model, look for that, right? Advocating for your team across all these different cross functional pieces, to be able to build a business, you have to be excellent at in this job, if you are not, don't even go into this business, right? Because you have to be an excellent negotiator, person, persuade a lot of it is internal. You know, I've spent more time on internally, advocacy around like, here's why I need all these different people in all these different areas, whether it's billing finance, we know whatever it is, because eventually we're going to give you this return. Right?
Jared Fuller 38:57
What and what a way, inspirational way to end because I think my take on what you just said is you have to be the entrepreneur, you have to be the CEO of you know, the ecosystem of the business. And that's why I've had this season I've been saying the smartest people that I know that really crush it in partnerships is because they have a passion for growing the moat, right for achieving that market vision in marketing, in sales in CES and product innovation and serving the customer. And you can't it's not just partnerships. It's business proper. Right and I'll call it right now. Like we're gonna see, Laura will push you towards it. We're gonna see you leaving from the C suite as CEO definitely 100% You absolutely should.
Isaac Morehouse 39:44
Thank you, Jared. I put some money on that prediction.
Jared Fuller 39:48
Yeah, I bet I'd take the over under no problem. Let's go. She's she's gonna be having lots lots and lots of opportunities like that. We'll just try to push you to do more. More startup. I do you definite it'd be fortune 500. But I think you could grow something to given the growth you went through. So, Laura, you're gonna tell us more about the story too. It's as connected. We'll see you there. Look forward to hanging out. And everybody partner up. SAS Connect. You've probably aren't making a ticket last minute of Tuesday, wherever you hear this. So supernodes the next one with crossbeam we'll see in Philly there. And the launch of partner hacker.com is right around the corner two days from now whenever this goes live. So, Isaac anything else? Yeah, I
Isaac Morehouse 40:32
would throw out two other two other announcements that we mentioned you've probably seen around the we're doing a live debate may 5. On the death of portals. You've probably seen our way over the top ridiculous landing page death of portals live.com floating around if you want to go register to be a part of EZ it's hilarious. It's it's WWE theme. So we got Jay McBain ship Rogers, Rick VandenBosch and Jimmy, how's it going to be talking about that concept. And then we are doing a course a partner hacker and sassy sales course we've partnered together for the partner manager accelerator course. And the cohort. It's open now registration just opened. early registration ends I think may 7, because the the thing is June 7. So if you want to get a discounted early registration, you can go to sassy sales, like S A S Y, pretty pretty good name sassy sales leadership.com. And you can find their partner partner manager accelerator course there that you can go register for. So those are the two things I wanted to get out there.
Jared Fuller 41:34
All right, we'll head with the plugs. I've taken my cameras course with sassy sales. He taught me everything I needed to know about being a VP of sales when I had no idea so it's not just us partnering with him. It's fantastic course for partner managers. And then also shout out will Taylor is in the house. We got to next we got to head of partnerships at partner hacker now. So we had our first actual other market hired employee, Isaac and I don't count. Ella she's producing into been cranking but yeah, growing. So all right, partner up. Partner hacker. We'll see you on the website. Laura. Thanks so much. Thank you. Bye
