The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 13 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
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.”
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?”
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.”
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?”
Maples: Winning products rarely match the initial pitch, including Twitter and Lyft
“Time and again, the product that ends up winning is not the product that you see when you're doing a seed investment. Yeah, that was true of Twitter. It was true of Twitch. It was true of Lyft. It was broadly true of Okta, although not quite as true. It was tr…”
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…”
Zoom famously instituted a hybrid work policy requiring two days in-office
“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.”
Zoom hired over 6,000 employees in two years during COVID
“To support the traffic, to support the world, we hired over 6000 employees within two years window.”
Eric Yuan personally video called every early customer who canceled their subscription
“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.”
Eric Yuan initially intended to build consumer software, not an enterprise product
“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.”