The next Zoom does not want to be like Zoom
Zoom: In the previous few months, there hasn’t been one conversation I’ve had about remote work. This doesn’t include a mention of Hopin, a virtual occasions stage last esteemed at $2.1 billion.
For a corporation only a touch older than a year, Hopin encompasses a wild growth story. It grew its ARR from $0 to $20 million in nine months. It scooped up two businesses to differentiate its business, including StreamYard for $250 million just on. And the last financing round of it left the organization’s valuation at $2.1 billion.
Hopin’s development amid Zoom’s fatigue is giving validation to a full crop of remote-work-focused new companies/startups. I see startups within the category sitting in two camps: Either you’re betting that users desire a more passive way to interact with video or you’re betting that users need a more active way to interact with video.
This week, as an example, I wrote about Rewatch, which creates internal private channels for startups to archive all their videoconferencing meetings. The corporate is actually turning live meetings into transcribed documents that employees can sift through on their own time, shifting from synchronous to asynchronous…
In contrast, I also covered Teamflow, a platform that desires to grant a virtual space to companies to recreate the serendipity and productivity of an office. Unlike Rewatch, Teamflow thinks that employees want there to be more live moments during a distributed world.
Both previously in-stealth companies cited Hopin as an example of the necessity for innovation around how we interact virtually. Rewatch and also Teamflow, respectively, see Zoom as a competitoror plug-in but not its inspiration.
As I discussed during this week’s podcast, it’s a dynamic I expect to play out even more over the following few months, as we evolve from a Zoom world to a Zoom alternative world.
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