Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom, details the company's CAC payback periods across customer segments.
Insight
Yuan: Designing SaaS for artificial customer lock-in is the wrong approach
“We never wanted to make our services sticky. The reason why I think that is wrong direction, because the reason why you want to make it sticky, you always say, hey, this customer don't switch to others. I think that's wrong approach.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Cisco doubted Zoom's vision, believing enterprise collaboration belonged in social networking
“At that time, they saw it is, you know, they focused on the social networking. At that time, they saw the overall, the collaboration strategy should be around the social networking. I have a different opinion, and they probably thought, I do not understand the…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Yuan: Zoom has achieved over 100% year-over-year growth for several years
“I think a minimum is 100%, you know, over the past several years, right? You know, and we got to the growth, you know, faster, right? I think that that's kind of a minimum is 100% over the past several years.”
Disclosure
Eric Yuan: Zoom's ultimate goal is connecting one billion users
“I, again, our goal is to connect a billion users to use Zoom.”
Disclosure
Yuan: Zoom will not sell, contrasting with WebEx's early acquisition
“No, no, no. We don't want to sell the company. And by the way, you know, I was not a CEO, right? So WebEx, you know, the two co-founders and You know, they are already a public company. They wanted to sell the company back in, you know, in our case, you know, …”
Assertion Supported
Top WebEx engineers left Cisco to join Zoom shortly after launch
“I left at Cisco end of June of 2011, and that's how I started Zoom, and one month later, some top Webex engineers, they quit and followed me to start, to join Zoom.”