Zoom

“Like Zoom WebEx is a great example. They probably needed to delete their whole tech stack. And start over again because the platforms had changed because the market had changed in a significant enough way.”

“When someone says to me, I have to take an hour of Zoom, I kind of laugh at them. I said, what law is there on the planet that says a Zoom has to be an hour? I said, frankly, if you get free Zoom, they cut you off in 45 minutes. I said, so what rule is it that…”

“These folks that are working in AI in San Francisco and, you know, interacting with agents all day. Isolated to Zoom, you know, they actually don't have an emotional outlet. So, like, maybe the emotional outlet is coming out through X and through these types o…”

“And today that product is now relabeled as Zoom Virtual Agent. It's part of the contact center business, which is one of the fastest growing lines of business in Zoom. Most people know meetings and Zoom phone. The contact center is actually growing very, very …”

“So a good example would be Major League Baseball. You know, which uses Zoom contact center, and they also do replay with Zoom. If you see the video replay, it's powered by Zoom. So the actual contact center, all the ticketing all of that customer service is al…”

“And if someone writes in with a legitimate complaint, Eric will not only read it, He'll make sure it gets acted on, that it gets fixed, and it's communicated back. I'm talking about an everyday user. You could write in, and if you tagged Eric, he would ask som…”

“We wanted to beat Microsoft to market, and we did beat Copilot to market by a couple of weeks.”

“These five things, it's easy, the five fingers of one hand, problem, root cause, solution, owner, date. And I think this sounds very formulaic. When you think about it sounds very formulaic. It sounds like something you read in the book. But when you actually …”

“Solvy, we got to, we were very lean. We were, we got to eight digit ARR. We launched a product in 17. We exited obviously early 22. We were, I think, 67 or 68 people when we exited the company.”

“I think it is impossible to build a relationship on zoom.”

“Yeah, well, Zoom is the first mistake. They should fly to London. In person, I say you should reject Zoom and always do in person where impossible, where possible.”

“Getting on site is super critical because people don't pay attention on Zoom.”

“This is when you find yourself in a position where someone keeps saying no, no, no, no, no. Because they start associating the physical surroundings with their no. So you can kind of restart the conversation by being like, hold on, I need to go put my dogs in …”

“I will say the last two months have been absolutely wild, but it's more, it's starting to feel like COVID era extrapolation of every single business that we talked about, that the whole world is gonna move towards like remote work only and zoom is gonna be wor…”

“Most people give it access to email. They give it access to their Google Docs, or SharePoint, or Box, Dropbox folders. Most people don't want to start out by giving access to all Zoom calls. Or phones.”

“In COVID in 2020, we formed a group of SaaS CEOs. I think there were 16 of us that got together, we'd meet on Zoom every single week, right? At one stage, 10, 11 of us were public, maybe more, we all had earnings calls, and you know, it was a really good thera…”

“If he knew that, very likely I would probably still be at Cisco, right, to build a solution, right?”

“After I left Cisco, I want to build new solution, but I want to build a consumer solution. I didn't want to build another business solution. Unfortunately, it's really hard to monetize.”

“To start with, I tried to raise seed money from some VCs, and they did not think the world needed to have another solution. Luckily, I got the seed funding from a few of my friends and in Seneca Valley.”

“There were so many solutions out there. The market was extremely crowded. However, I did spend a lot of time on talking with those users. Do you like Skype? Do you like WebEx? I did not see a single happy customer who told me that Really like the existing solu…”

“I still remember early on, at that time, Zoom the subscription cost is less than 10 dollars, nine 99 per month. And some users, they canceled the service. I personally reached out to each of them. And get a Zoom call to understand what's going on.”

“December of 2019. You can have daily meeting participant, you know, I think is around the, on a peak day, around ten million daily meeting participant. And a few months later, in April, May timeframe, all the way jumped to more than three hundred million daily…”

“For the first many years, we didn't have a marketing team at all. Word of mouth, that's the only way for us to market Zoom.”

“That's the reason why, you know, during COVID, even having a certain access traffic, we do not need to change our code. You know, the architecture itself was very scalable.”

“No companies wanted to standardize a single vendor. It's really not as scalable, right?”

“That's how we decided to, you know, let employee back in office twice a week, three days at home, you know, twice a week in the office.”

“To support the traffic, to support the world, we hired over 6000 employees within two years window.”

“We had to go through that very painful, 15%, you know, reduction.”

“I think as a technology for multiplayer, four D simulation gets better and more photo realistic. It's almost going to be like video is the down sampling. And it's like, if we were having this for the immersive communication, we'd say go to legacy analog mode a…”

“And then I called Eric Yon, the founder of Zoom, and said, 1200 people is not going to work. I need 25,000 people. And he's a fan of mine, so he changed the tech so we could do it.”

“Profitable is not enough unless you're utterly insanely profitable like Zoom. For every dollar Zoom brings in, 50 cents goes to the bottom line.”

“Pay me 500 bucks, and a bunch of people paid 500 bucks, and people are still paying 500 bucks, and I said, as an ongoing thing, if you want to meet me every single month for three hours, because I'm learning AI myself, it's 3000 dollars a year, and a percentag…”

“When Sequoia invested in Zoom, they didn't want to raise capital, right? They were profitable. They were doing really well.”

“Even the CEOs of zoom and Klarna are doing earnings calls as video avatars.”

“Zoom does not tell you what's happening in an office. You don't know if you have a tyrant running a country for you unless you're there. And you're going and having coffee with someone, you're having breakfast with someone, you're having dinner with them, a be…”

“I mean, we're gearing up to be ready to IPO. We want to be an IPO ready company. We recently, you mentioned Zoom. We brought in Kelly, who led their IPO, and she's been a fantastic addition to the team. She was their CFO. So, so our goal is to be ready. When w…”

“We actually spent like three months trying to build a zoom competitor. We had this whole idea of like, what if the presentation was the like video platform and it was all kind of like one little, like Hub that you have the meeting in.”

“I'm glad to see that just literally this week, we were seeing Mongo even Okta, which had been struggling, Box last, the other day, Zoom, which is, you know, which is not exactly a rocket ship anywhere, but seeing growth re-accelerate because of AI, it's like, …”

“So, you know, made investments in things like zoom or ways at Qualcomm, which weren't my deals, but they were deals that were intended to be, Hey, let's keep our eyes and ears on four G and five G evolution.”

“You will need to do this working theory more and more, the more the AI sets up these calls and meetings for you, because you yourself may not know as much about this company as your AI does, but if it got the meeting for you, the person who comes to the Zoom W…”

“It is impossible to stay focused on a meeting for a full day over Zoom. My general rule of thumb is that you should take a break every hour if it's virtual, and every two to three hours if it's in person.”

“New people entering the workforce had a much worse experience, right? And so the COVID was sort of a, there was this sort of dichotomous experience where if you were like a 20 or 30 year veteran of a company and like a high ranking official, it was Absolutely …”

“We've really found that for our demos, we actually do much better with a demo over Zoom than we do a demo on campus, because we want everybody kind of looking at the screen and, you know, you can do that in a more intimate way if you're sitting at your desk th…”

“When Klarna delivered updated quarterly earnings on Monday, it was his AI avatar that presented the highlights, according to the company's YouTube video. And then after him, Zoom CEO Eric Wan he followed suit using his avatar for initial comments.”

“And so for longer meetings, like co-working sessions, or product sprints, or, you know, M&A discussions that are 6:07 hours long, Zoom is terrible.”

“Now, of course, the technology is there. Of course, you could zoom someone. But it doesn't feel like you're in the same room with someone who grew up on your street and the serendipity and all of that gives it a kind of human magic that I think sometimes we lo…”

“I think A digital SE like this is Brian Halligan's digital one on Delphi is going to come to the zooms. The human it's a person is going to be there. And I brought this up and Dara said, give me another release and this will be full duplex. Like my AI and Bria…”

“Post-COVID, once the Zoom era started, and once everyone started understanding remote, it's the easiest thing in the world to sell now. People just get it, and they know it's possible, and they expect it to work.”

“It's very hard for audiences to stay focused for an hour or two hours on Zoom, and so I shared a concept I called the state change method, about how every three to five minutes you should have a state change of some sort, whether that's switching from gallery …”

“I actually think within 12 months, this agent human combination, I think every single zoom, every single meeting. Every sales rep, every cast member, every person human should come with their AI.”

“Of companies like zoom, where zoom for many, many years was not doing very well. Zoom was positioned as this video chat solution for businesses. And up until 2019, they were not doing so hot. They're getting beat by all the other people.”

“If somebody is talking, trying to overpower a boardroom or a Zoom meeting, use their name. They'll stop.”

“But Zoom isn't, Zoom is growing zero percent now, right?”

“Like, at all. I mean, I'll get on Zooms with Teams, but no one-on-one meetings, no one-on-one it just doesn't scale. So I've moved as much as possible to an async world.”

“I do think like a company like Zoom went public because there, you know, it's a very profitable business growing fast. They went public because private, public companies they compete with were constantly like, well, Zoom, it's a tiny business. Like, why do you…”

“It would have been, it was going to be priced at two hundred million dollar post money valuation, and this, again, remember the company was at around two million in revenue, And this was a hundred X revenue in 2014, right?”

“Eric himself was miscalculating churn. Specifically, he was counting upgrades from, you know, low tier to high tier as churn. He was counting pausing as a churn. And so he was unnecessarily burdening the business with churn.”

“It was competitive both because the, there was early growth, but also because the company was profitable. And so we didn't have to raise capital.”

“That fund, I believe was fund three, which is the same fund that has Zoom. It's the same fund that has some other really large outcomes. And so that fund is already at a, I think it's a 16 times DPI.”

“Zoom returned it, you know, more than 10.”