FROM A SMALL VISION TO THE BIGGEST VIDEO CONFERENCING PLATFORM: SUCCESS STORY OF ZOOM

5 Fantastic Facts About Zoom:

1. The founder and CEO of Zoom, Eric Yuan, got the idea to create Zoom to avoid a ten-hour-long train journey to meet his girlfriend (now wife) in his university days.
2. Zoom has seen its stock spike more than 100%, which is a high of $559 during the Covid pandemic.
3. Zoom works in partnership with HP to facilitate the expansion of collaboration and video conference rooms.
4. Google has banned the use of Zoom from its employees’ devices and intended them to use Google Meet.
5. Zoom conferencing service allows up to 1 thousand people on a call by default.

Introduction

Zoom Video Communications, Inc is a company headquartered in San Jose, California that provides video telephony and online chat services to meet the remote teleconferencing needs of various people or groups. With the Corona Virus 2019 pandemic outbreak causing cities across the world to be quarantined and schools and universities to close, Zoom had become one of the primary tools for keeping businesses running, students studying and people socializing.

How Zoom Started

The starting of Zoom came from an initial vision, that the Founder and CEO of Zoom, Eric Yuan had as a solution for the inconveniences he was facing during his college days, when he had to take 10-hour long train rides to visit his girlfriend. Later when Eric was a former corporate vice president of Cisco Webex, hearing all the troubles of the customers, he firmly came into believing that he could develop a platform that would make the customers happy by making a video communications solution which he had visioned for long and turn it into reality. So he left Cisco in April 2011 to start his new company, originally named Saasbee, Inc where 40 fellow engineers followed him in his new venture. Today Zoom is a platform where daily meetings of 300 million participants take place. Talk about having a good vision!

The Story Behind Name and Logo

The name of Zoom was initially Saasbee, Inc which was later changed by investor  Jim Scheinman, who is a Founding Managing Partner at Maven Ventures. Scheinman revealed that the story behind the trendy name actually came from a book that they used to read to their kids called “Zoom City.” 

The Zoom logo is very basic and minimal yet with a shade of blue boldness to it.  The logo consists of an icon with a blue circle placed against a white square background with rounded edges and inside the blue circle is an image of a camera facing the right side. The wordmark and a camera emblem on top of it. Zoom has been maintaining its visual brand identity by sticking to the OG logo. 

First Model

A big advantage of Zoom was that it was founded on a video-first philosophy. It didn’t focus on audio or any other things rather focused straightly on the video communication. It released its first iteration beta in 2012 and in 2013 the first version was available to the public. 

Within 5 months, it was being used by one million different users and it became a well-designed and developed video conferencing product. The beta version of Zoom could host conferences with only up to 15 video participants and the 1.0 version could host up to 25.

By 2016, a global research company named Gartner declared Zoom a leader in its quadrant for web conferencing and it continued in 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Tough Time

“The year before I left, every day I did not want to go to the office because I did not see a single happy WebEx customer,” Eric Yuan said. He knew that a large number of video conferencing options were available but those weren’t meeting expectations of customers. But the options we’re talking about were big giants and it was nearly impossible to beat them and and acquire customers. For this reason, he had a very tough time convincing the investors and raising initial money for Zoom.

“I think they were not wrong,” he said. “Because it was indeed crowded. Nobody thought the world needed another video service. However, I spent a lot of time talking to the customers. I knew the market potential was big because nobody liked the existing products.”

But Eric was patient and consistent, so time proved him right and Zoom went public in 2019. Not only that happened, at one point Zoom was the best-performing tech IPO of 2019

Future of Zoom

During the vision keynote of Zoomtopia 2021, Zoom Video Communications, Inc. revealed their future plans for development. It talked about a few new integrations on different categories. 

To empower and engage communities, Zoom Events Conference is a new event type that Zoom plans to make available to allow hosts to organize multi-track and multi-day events in a sophisticated format, with rich functionality, including, event lobby, chat, networking, sponsors, surveys, recordings, analytics, and more.

Few projects for enabling modern workforce: Zoom Video Engagement Center (VEC), Zoom & Oculus Team Up, Live Translation and Transcription, Zoom Rooms Smart Gallery, Hot Desking and few for connecting workstreams: Zoom Apps, Zoom Chat Huddle View, Zoom Phone Video Voicemails, Zoom Continuous Collaboration, Zoom Widget.

Key Milestones of Zoom

2011: Founded in 2011, Zoom is publicly traded and headquartered in San Jose, California.
2012: The company changed its name to Zoom and the very first version of Zoom was released on August 22, 2012.
2013: In January 2013, Zoom 1.0 was released to the world and by May 2013 it had 1 million users.
2014: By June 2014, Zoom had 10 million users. 
2015: One of the most significant updates to the core product to date came in December 2015, with the introduction of Breakout Rooms.
2016: In July 2016, Zoom introduced virtual backgrounds to the core product.
2017: By 2017, Zoom was defined as a “unicorn,” or a private business that was worth over one billion dollars.
2019: In 2019, the business went public and was valued at 16 billion dollars by the end of the day of its initial public offering.
2020: In March 2020, 200 million people used Zoom every day.
On one day in March 2020, the Zoom app was downloaded 2.13 million times.
By June 2020, the company was valued at over $67 billion.
The price of Zoom doubled in early 2020 despite sharing a now-crowded marketplace with Microsoft Teams and Skype, Slack, Facetime, Google Hangouts, and more.