The coronavirus pandemic has bruised and battered many technology startups, but it has also boosted a small few. One such company is Zoom, which has shouldered the task of keeping us connected to one another in the midst of remote work and social distancing.

So, of course, we’re absolutely thrilled to have the chance to chat with Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan at Disrupt 2020 online.

Yuan moved to Silicon Valley in 1997 after being rejected for a work visa nine times. He got a job at WebEx and, upon the company’s acquisition by Cisco, became VP of Engineering at the company. He pitched an idea for a mobile-friendly video conferencing system that was rejected by his higher-ups.

And thus, Zoom was born.

Zoom launched in 2011 and quickly became one of the biggest teleconferencing platforms in the world, competing with the likes of Google and Cisco. The company has investors like Emergence, Horizon Ventures, and Sequoia, and ultimately filed to go public in 2019.

With some of the most reliable video conferencing software on the market, a tiered pricing structure that’s friendly to average users and massive enterprises alike, and a lively ecosystem of apps and bots on the Zoom App Marketplace, Zoom was well poised to be a public company. In fact, Zoom popped 81 percent in its first day of trading on the Nasdaq, garnering a valuation of $16 billion at the time.

But few could have prepared the company for the explosive growth it would see in 2020.

The coronavirus pandemic necessitated access to a reliable and user-friendly video conferencing software for everyone, not just companies moving to remote work. People used Zoom for family dinners, cocktail hours with friends, first dates, and religious gatherings.

In fact, Zoom reported 300 million daily active participants in April.

But that growth led to increased scrutiny of the business and the product. The company was beset by security issues and had to pause product innovation to focus its energy on resolving those issues.

We’ll talk to Yuan about the growing pains the company went through, his plans for Zoom’s future, the acceleration in changing user behavior, and more.

It’ll be a conversation you won’t want to miss.

Disrupt 2020 runs from September 14 to September 18, and the show will be completely virtual. That means it’s easier than ever to attend and engage with the show. There are just a few Digital Pro Passes left at the $245 price – once they are gone, prices will increase. Discounts are available for current students and non-profit/government employees. Or if you are a founder you can exhibit and be able to generate leads even before the event kicks off at your virtual booth for $445. Get your tickets today.

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Lightrun, a Tel Aviv-based startup that makes it easier for developers to debug their production code, today announced that it has raised a $4 million seed round led by Glilot Capital Partners, with participation from a number of engineering executives from several Fortune 500 firms.

The company was co-founded by Ilan Peleg (who, in a previous life, was a competitive 800m runner) and Leonid Blouvshtein, with Peleg taking the CEO role and Blouvshtein the CTO position.

The overall idea behind Lightrun is that it’s too hard for developers to debug their production code. “In today’s world, whenever a developer issues a new software version and deploys it into production, the only way to understand the application’s behavior is based on log lines or metrics which were defined during the development stage,” Peleg explained. “The thing is, that is simply not enough. We’ve all encountered cases of missing a very specific log line when trying to troubleshoot production issues, then having to release a new hotfix version in order to add this specific logline, or — alternatively — reproduce the bug locally to better understand the application’s behavior.”

Image Credits: Lightrun

With Lightrun, as the co-founders showed me in a demo, developers can easily add new logs and metrics to their code from their IDE and then receive real-time data from their real production or development environments. For that to work, they need to have the Lightrun agent installed, but the overhead here is generally low because the agent sits idle until it is needed. In the IDE, the experience isn’t all that different from setting a traditional breakpoint in a debugger — only that there is no break. Lightrun can also use existing logging tools like Datadog to pipe its logging data to them.

While the service’s agent is agnostic about the environment it runs in, the company currently only supports JVM languages. Blouvshtein noted that building JVM language support was likely harder than building support for other languages and the company plans to launch support for more languages in the future.

“We make a point of investing in technologies that transform big industries,” said Kobi Samboursky, founder and managing partner at Glilot Capital Partners . “Lightrun is spearheading Continuous Debugging and Continuous Observability, picking up where CI/CD ends, turning observability into a real-time process instead of the iterative process it is today. We’re confident that this will become DevOps and development best practices, enabling I&O leaders to react faster to production issues.”

For now, there is still a bit of an onboarding process to get started with Lightrun, though that’s generally a very short process, the team tells me. Over time, the company plans to make this a self-service process. At that point, Lightrun will likely also become more interesting to smaller teams and individual developers, though the company is mostly focused on enterprise users and, despite only really launching out of stealth today and offering limited language support, the company already has a number of paying customers, including major enterprises.

“Our strategy is based on two approaches: bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up, we’re targeting developers, they are the end-users and we want to ensure they get a quality product they can trust to help them. We put a lot of effort into reaching out through the developer channels and communities, as well as enabling usage and getting feedback. […] Top-down approach, we are approaching R&D management like VP of R&D, R&D directors in bigger companies and then we show them how Lightrun saves company development resources and improves customer satisfaction.”

Unsurprisingly, the company, which currently has about a dozen employees, plans to use the new funding to add support for more languages and improve its service with new features, including support for tracing.

Suse, the well-known German open-source company that went through more corporate owners than anybody can remember until it finally became independent again in 2019, has long been a champion of Cloud Foundry, the open-source platform-as-a-service project. And while you may think of Suse as a Linux distribution, today’s company also offers a number of other services, including a container platform, DevOps tools and the Suse Cloud Application Platform, based on Cloud Foundry. Today, right in time for the bi-annual (and now virtual) Cloud Foundry Summit, the company announced the launch of version 2.0 of this platform.

The promise of the Application Platform, and indeed Cloud Foundry, is that it allows for one-step application deployments and an enterprise-ready platform to host them.

The marquee feature of version 2.0 is that it now includes a new Kubernetes Operator, a standard way of packaging, deploying and managing container-based applications, which makes deploying and managing Cloud Foundry on Kubernetes infrastructure easier.

Suse President of Engineering and Innovation Thomas Di Giacomo also notes that it’s now easier to “install, operate and maintain on Kubernetes platforms anywhere — on premises and in public clouds,” and that it opens up a new path for existing Cloud Foundry users to move to a modern container-based architecture. Indeed, for the last few years, Suse has been crucial to bringing both Kubernetes support to Cloud Foundry and Cloud Foundry to Kubernetes.

Cloud Foundry, it’s worth noting, long used its home-grown container orchestration tool, which the community developed before anybody had even heard of Kubernetes. Over the course of the last few years, though, Kubernetes became the de facto standard for container management, and today, Cloud Foundry supports both its own Diego tool and Kubernetes.

“Suse Cloud Application Platform 2.0 builds on and advances those efforts, incorporating several upstream technologies recently contributed by Suse to the Cloud Foundry Community,” writes Di Giacomo. “These include KubeCF, a containerized version of the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime designed to run on Kubernetes, and Project Quarks, a Kubernetes operator for automating deployment and management of Cloud Foundry on Kubernetes.”

Virtual events are the new norm for product rollouts in 2020, with Slack taking to the internet earlier today to talk about a new part of its service called Slack Connect.

On the heels of Apple’s lengthy and pretty good virtual WWDC that took place earlier this week, Slack’s event, part experiment and part press conference, was called to detail the firm’s new Slack Connect capability, which will allow companies to better link together and communicate inside of their Slack instance than what was possible with its shared channels feature. The product was described inside of a business-to-business context, including examples about companies needing to chat with agencies and other external vendors.

In its most basic form, Slack is well-known for internal chat functionality, helping teams talk amongst themselves. Slack Connect appears to be a progression past that idea, pushing internal communications tooling to allow companies to plug their private comms into the private comms of other orgs, linking them for simple communication while keeping the entire affair secure.

Slack Connect, a evolution past what shared channels offered, includes better security tooling and the ability to share channels across 20 orgs. The enterprise SaaS company is also working to give Connect-using companies “the ability to form DM connections independent of channels,” the company told TechCrunch.

The product could slim down email usage; if Slack Connect can let many orgs chat amongst themselves, perhaps fewer emails will be needed to keep different companies in sync. That said, Slack is hardly a quiet product. During his part of the presentation, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield noted that the service sees up to 65 million messages sent each second at peak times.

According to the CEO, Slack Connect has been piloted for a few months, and is now available for paid plans.

Slack shares are off 3.8% today, before the news came out. Its broader company cohort (SaaS) are also down today, along with the market more broadly; investors don’t appear to have reacted to this piece of news, at least yet.

At a time where IT has to help employees set up and manage devices remotely, a service that simplifies those processes could certainly come in handy. Apple recognized that, and acquired Fleetsmith today, a startup that helps companies do precisely that with Apple devices.

While Apple didn’t publicize the acquisition, it has confirmed the deal with TechCrunch, while Fleetsmith announced the deal in a company blog post. Neither company was sharing the purchase price.

The startup has built technology that takes advantage of the Apple’s Device Enrollment Program allowing IT departments to bring devices online as soon as the employee takes it out of the box and powers it up.

At the time of its $30 million Series B funding last year, CEO Zack Blum explained the company’s core value proposition: “From a customer perspective, they can ship devices directly to their employees. The employee unwraps it, connects to Wi-Fi and the device is enrolled automatically in Fleetsmith,” Blum explained at that time.

Over time, the company has layered on other useful pieces beyond automating device registration like updating devices automatically with OS and security updates, while letting IT see a dashboard of the status of all devices under management, all in a pretty slick interface.

While Apple will in all likelihood continue to work with Jamf, the leader in the Apple device management space, this acquisition gives the company a remote management option at a time where it’s essential with so many employees working from home.

Fleetsmith, which has raised over $40 million from investors like Menlo Ventures, Tiger Global Management, Upfront Ventures and Harrison Metal will continue to sell the product through the company website, according to the blog post.

The founders put a happy on the face on the deal, as founders tend to do. “We’re thrilled to join Apple. Our shared values of putting the customer at the center of everything we do without sacrificing privacy and security, means we can truly meet our mission, delivering Fleetsmith to businesses and institutions of all sizes, around the world,” they wrote.