Venture Insights #3: Zipper
"Zipper is how product, marketing, and customer-facing teams work together to deliver incredible customer experiences." - Jassim Latif, COO
The Pitch 💡
“Continuous deployment and increased competition are rapidly changing how software is bought and sold. Customers have more options and more choice: deals start smaller and only grow as customers use and see value from the product. In this world, success is an output of product and go-to-market teams working hand-in-hand to develop and drive adoption of features.
There's no single tool Zipper replaces - it's a layer above project management that streamlines work that's haphazardly happening over documents, spreadsheets, emails, and chat messages today. “ - Zipper
Team 👥
Jassim Latif: Previously Director of Product & Strategic Partnerships @ Slack, Director of BD @ BitGo (backed by Redpoint and Founders Fund), EiR @ Social Capital, various roles @ Google.
Sachin Ranchod: Previously Senior PM @ Slack, Head of BD, EMEA @ Github.
Duretti Hirpa: Previously Staff engineer @ Mailchimp, Senior backend engineer @ Slack, Engineer @ Fastly (Series F, IPO-ed).
Quick news! They’re currently open for the waiting list.The Sparks ✨
The rise of the cross-functional collaborative platform: 5-10 years back was the moment where we saw the rise of creation for collaborative SaaS tools that cater to a specific team (ie: design - Figma, programming - Github, communication - Slack). But today, the increasing complexity of products and services forces companies to take a “horizontal” approach to provide value for customers. Hence, leads to an increase in the collaboration across the team to cut across the traditional functional silos. Another good example but with a narrower focus is jam.dev - collaboration tool for product teams (designer, developer, PM, etc..) which turns any website into a collaborative doc.
A well-blended experienced team: Imagine -- the vast experience in building a product team at one of the very integral communication platform company of a decade, combining with deep technical expertise in developing an all-in-one integrated marketing tool (highest revenue as for 2019 compared to their other competitors) and not to forget the go-to person that responsible for heading the business activity for the Microsoft 3rd largest acquisition till date. Boom!
“Sell the innovation, not the product”: Love this quote by Stewart Butterfield, which I believe applies the same to Zipper. Given the Slack DNA inside the 3 co-founders, they have successfully change the way a lot of people thinking about communication. The ability of them to capture a previously saturated market with numbers of enterprise players had open up the eyes of many VCs and people alike. And the fact that the advancement of the technologies made it possible to shorten the new feature launch to as short as a week time instead of months, makes it crucial for teams to sync in every aspect of the decision. And that “making together decisions, faster and better” is the innovation that they’re selling.
Snapshot 📸
