Zoom founder Eric Yuan discusses why he felt compelled to rebuild video conferencing from scratch around 2010 while working as an engineering executive at Cisco/WebEx.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Yuan: Could not find a single happy Skype or WebEx customer
“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…”
What-if
Zoom might have been built inside Cisco if John Chambers had known
“If he knew that, very likely I would probably still be at Cisco, right, to build a solution, right?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Yuan: VCs rejected Zoom's seed round claiming market was saturated
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Yuan: Zoom handled COVID traffic surges without changing its codebase
“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.”
Insight
Eric Yuan: Enterprise Customers Avoid Standardizing on a Single Software Vendor
“No companies wanted to standardize a single vendor. It's really not as scalable, right?”
Assertion Supported
Zoom daily meeting participants skyrocketed from 10 million to 300 million
“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…”