the tip of the iceberg,” says Damico. Today SAP uses Crocodoc to send PowerPoints to users of its iPad app. LinkedIn uses it in its Recruiter product, which lets job screeners view the Word and PDF resumes of Linked members. Edmodo uses it in classrooms.
Until very recently, Crocodoc consisted solely of its four founders—Damico, Peter Lai, Matt Long, and Bennett Rogers. Now Damico says the company is “aggressively hiring” (it has four open positions). After a May 1 announcement about its partnership with Dropbox, SAP, LinkedIn, and Yammer, the company received “an overwhelming amount of interest,” Damico says. “Literally, we haven’t been able to keep up with it.” The number of documents the company is converting, which was already in the “millions per month,” doubled within 30 days after the announcement, he says.
Of course, the digital document business is a venerable and cut-throat one, where the old guard (think Microsoft, Xerox, and EMC) isn’t likely to move aside without resistance. But Damico says he isn’t worried that some deep-pocketed incumbent will come up with a competing document viewer. “We’ve been developing this for years now, and I think we have reached a point where our domain expertise runs so deep that it would be hard for anyone to move as quickly as we can,” he said. “Plus, we do have some protections around the IP.”
If there was a single inflection point for Crocodoc, Damico told me in May, it was winning Yammer as a customer for the white-label version of the viewer. So I asked him this week whether he expects to keep his flagship customer, now that it’s becoming part of Microsoft.
“Yammer is still using Crocodoc’s viewer as a core part of their service,” he says. “While Microsoft has a great online version of its document editing tools, they’re not built for embedding into other products and don’t come close to Crocodoc in terms of rendering quality, security, or ease of integration. As long as Yammer continues to focus on building the best possible experience for their users, their ongoing use of Crocodoc’s viewer should be a no-brainer.”
