Zoom: Full Screen Ahead
Zoom: Full Screen Ahead
Founder & CEO Eric Yuan Joins Greylock’s Iconversations
The Ides of March 2020 marked a veritable reintroduction of Zoom to most of the world, as a tsunami of consumers suddenly, unexpectedly needed a platform for virtual connection and real-time collaboration — not only for work, but for family dinners, classes all the way from primary school to post-secondary programs, weddings, and everything in between.
But the company, founded as an enterprise technology nine years earlier, was initially more underdog than pack leader, having entered an already-crowded market with less initial funding than many of its competitors. So how did Zoom, under the leadership of founder and CEO Eric Yuan, zoom ahead?
According to Yuan, by spending a lot of time talking to customers — and, still now, not getting comfortable or arrogant as the incumbent. He saw where competing products failed to keep customers happy, and pushed in those spaces in order to survive.
“When it comes to software as a service, if your service is not good, customers have flexibility,” says Yuan. “ In particular, for our market, it’s very easy to switch to other solutions. That’s why we have to look at everything from the customer perspective.”
Yuan began his career as one of Webex’s first 20 employees, back in 1995, writing code. He was promoted all the way to VP of engineering when Cisco acquired Webex in 2007. He saw the need for not only a better product, but a better business model, and left to launch Zoom in 2011.
Self-learning, self-motivation, and gratitude reign supreme in hiring choices as well as product ideation at Zoom — and those tenets account for Yuan trusting his instincts with the freemium (vs. free trial) business model and accessible price-point that so directly launched the company to the fore.
Here, as part of the Iconversations series, Yuan talks with Greylock General Partner Sarah Guo about the path of real-time, virtual collaboration so far — and where he sees it heading. (For starters, Yuan says, “I think we just started.”)
You can watch the interview on YouTube here, and you can listen to the conversation here.
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