
Refused U.S. visa eight times, Zoom CEO is now a billionaire - petethomas
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-18/u-s-refused-his-visa-eight-times-now-zoom-ceo-is-a-billionaire
======
mattnewport
Zoom is interesting. They don't really seem to have done anything particularly
novel, they just made a product that works better than the competition. We use
Zoom heavily on our fully remote team because it works better than free
alternatives like Skype and paid alternatives that we're already paying for
like Slack.

It's quite refreshing to see a tech company succeed by just making a better
product and expecting that people will be willing to pay for it. They were
able to grow so quickly in part because it was relatively easy for people to
switch from other video conferencing solutions however. I'm not sure they will
be able to build much competitive advantage other than just continuing to be a
better product though. If Slack worked just as well we'd happily use it and
stop paying for an additional service.

~~~
hyperpallium
MBA ideas of an economic moat - lock-in, stickiness, etc - are "dark
patterns".

But there are "light patterns": you can stay ahead in a technological race if
you keep running; sales are easier if you are _known_ as better; you get more
informative feedback if you have more users, etc.

~~~
radiusvector
> MBA ideas of an economic moat - lock-in, stickiness, etc - are "dark
> patterns".

Dramatic statement. I am an SWE and an MBA. There are merits to thinking about
every aspect of the business. Tech/Product is just one - an important one in a
Saas company, but still just one.

> But there are "light patterns": you can stay ahead in a technological race
> if you keep running;

This is another way of saying "build it and they will come". You have to
combine good business/economic sense with great products.

Apple didn't just get to be Apple by staying ahead in a technological race.
Arguably, they are behind a lot of other phone makers in specs. But they have
a lot of people thinking about ecosystems, lock-in, marketing and other "MBA"
concepts.

~~~
ColanR
> There are merits to thinking about every aspect of the business.

This isn't a refutation of the parent - all you've said is that sometimes
those dark patterns are worth exploiting. I'm rarely one for defending an
absolute, so I think it would be far more interesting to say _why_ it is worth
using a 'dark pattern'. So far, it just feels like you're deflecting through
masking the issue.

~~~
brlewis
"Dark pattern" has a more specific meaning than it seems like you're using
here -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern)

~~~
kbutler
"dark pattern" was a phrase in use before that neologism.

[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q="...](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q="dark%20pattern")

------
Ayesh
I'm nobody compared to the person on the story, but I was refused a US visa
that I needed to speak at a tech conference.

The US visa system needs to get out there and see what people are doing. I'm a
full-time freelancer and I am 27. The officer said that I don't have ties to
my home country and that I'm still young...

Damn right I am! I traveled to over 30coubtries so far and had spoken at
various tech conferences. There is a lot of travel history on the passport.
Unless you got to this outdated image of a person that's risk-free, you won't
make it to US. It doesn't matter if your talk is selected among 700 others,
you just won't make it. Bye.

~~~
tptacek
Refused visas for conference presentations is kind of an old story; I can
recall incidents from back in the Bush II era. My guess (uninformed) is that
the concerns are about the distinction between visiting for tourism and coming
here to perform work, especially since the advice I've seen given at some
events is to avoid any mention of the conference when entering the country.

~~~
csomar
That's not smart. As a non-citizen you don't have much rights. If you get
caught lying, you'll be barred from entering the US and you'll probably need
to resolve to court.

How they can find out:

\- Booking of where you are staying.

\- Going through your phone/laptop.

\- Paper/Flyers for your company or the event.

\- A big event is happening and you are kinda fitting the bill for it.

~~~
tptacek
I'm not saying it's smart, I'm saying it's the advice I've heard given.

~~~
csomar
It also the advice that I have heard but it is still a bad advice. Another
advice: don’t tell them you have food so that you avoid going through a
baggage search.

Here is the downside: if a dog catches you, you’ll get a fine. You could avoid
that just by declaring any food you have.

~~~
tptacek
I'm confident you're right. My point was just to reinforce the argument that
CBP has a longstanding concern about whether visitors to the US are here to
conduct business.

------
drfuchs
Similarly, Adi Shamir, bazillionaire founder of RSA (he’s the “S”), couldn’t
get a visa this year to attend the RSA conference.

[https://www.cnet.com/news/adi-shamir-couldnt-get-us-visa-
to-...](https://www.cnet.com/news/adi-shamir-couldnt-get-us-visa-to-attend-
rsa-conference-named-for-him/)

~~~
pnw_hazor
We don't know if it is similar. Zoom CEO was probably applying for an investor
immigrant visa which are complicated and could be rejected for many reasons
until the proper documents have been provided.

Shamir sent in a visa request and never heard back from USCIS.

Similarly, his US visa was delayed in 2013 also:
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/17/crypto_guru_shamir_...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/17/crypto_guru_shamir_red_tape_bungle/)

~~~
klipt
Visas are issued by the Department of State, not USCIS. USCIS can adjust the
status of foreigners already within the US but that's not the same thing.

------
thetechlead
Good for him. However, the wind has already turned eastward. Given the
insanity in US immigration policy and xenophobia among the public, talents are
going back to their original countries in flocks. Check out top 20 most
valuable startups in the world - used to be 100% American and now half[ref]
are foreign owned.

edit ref:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unicorn_startup_compan...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unicorn_startup_companies)

~~~
drilldrive
Looking at the listing you provided, the wide majority of the non-American
unicorn startups are from China, with some scattered startups in other eastern
countries. So I think the shift in startup-location speaks more about China's
success in bringing back talent (especially compared to India) versus
America's lack of a grip on talent.

~~~
thetechlead
The trend is more important. US has only 32% of the world's unicorns. Even if
you remove all the Chinese companies, US is 58% of the total, far less than
the number a few years back. India and Southeast Asia are especially doing
well if you put the size of their economies into consideration. In five years,
these unicorns could grow into nowadays Amazon and Facebook, and the same
holds true for the shift in the job market.

------
weiming
The story of being denied a visa appears to be from years/decades ago. He
attended Stanford Business School around 2006. He also worked at Cisco and
WebEx for 10+ years. Heck, Zoom headquarters are in California. Way to spin an
article about a great achievement, Bloomberg.

------
nixgeek
Good for him. Nice to hear about success stories. Zoom is excellent. Markedly
better than WebEx, in my experience.

~~~
techntoke
To be fair anything is better than WebEx. Glad it finally has Linux support in
the browser though, but it was way too late to the game.

------
ademup
Google's constant shifting finally lead us to abandon it in favor of Zoom. We
used Google Hangouts, then Meet for 3 years. Finally switched to Zoom and
happy. It always seems to be 5% better (our marketing guy always used it for
external meetings).

------
bayesian_horse
Selecting immigrants doesn't work, in my opinion.

Regardless of the selection criteria, any screening will deter "desirable"
people. It will not deter those who choose to circumvent that process,
especially those who immigrate "illegaly" or "irregularly", like refugees in
Europe, who are not eligible for asylum, but can't be deported for all sorts
of perfectly valid reasons.

In the end, and we see this all over the world, such screening leads to
adverse effects even considering the intended screening criteria.

~~~
creaghpatr
>Regardless of the selection criteria, any screening will deter "desirable"
people.

Is there any evidence this is true?

~~~
bayesian_horse
At the very least immigrants would need to fill out a ton of paperwork and
endure multiple bureaucratic round trips, assuming the destination country
even has the capacity to deal with all applications.

Then the message behind a detailed screening is: "We consider you as an
extreme risk, which is only worth taking if we can exploit you enough."

You can't bring your spouse or family, at least not without significant
hurdles, and if that process is too easy, screening for the original criteria
is undermined.

Considering restrictive immigration policies against your people, you won't be
able to find a supportive immigrant community and are totally dependent on
fitting in with the locals, and the locals letting you fit in. Just ask
Westerners in Japan.

For any kind of screening to work, you also need a ruthless border control and
immigration enforcement, including mass deportations if neccessary. An
effective enforcement has to - at the least - "inconvenience" anybody looking
remotely like an immigrant, before being shown any paperwork.

Many of these factors don't play out in many countries, but mostly with the
result that the screening doesn't really work that well. The US and Canada
have rather big populations of undocumented immigrants, despite having
detailed and sophisticated "screening" processes.

------
ncmncm
"an American billionaire".

Would be interesting to learn why he was denied eight times, or granted one on
the ninth try.

~~~
muzani
More curious why he even tried 9 times. Australia is very accepting of Chinese
migrants, and there's plenty of talent to hire.

~~~
ikeyany
I know of someone who went on to interview at Google a total of sixteen times.

~~~
mcny
I just failed mine and they said I can only try once a year though?

~~~
ulfw
Well Google was founded 20 years ago so... ;)

------
peteretep
> The U.S. is the favored country

EU needs to up its game on this. It's a travesty we haven't managed to lure
these people to the EU reliably yet.

~~~
ghobs91
Until you improve on the pitiful salaries offered in Europe's tech industry,
that's not going to change.

~~~
guitarbill
Eh, some people will be tempted, knowing that their children will get a decent
education that doesn't cost the world, healthcare, gun violence, etc. But
you're right, we'll likely never convince the people who have never
experienced another culture and who value money over everything. Edit: Even if
we did pay more, the language barrier is still pretty high.

~~~
qaq
The above list makes sense for people outside of tech. People in tech have
most of the above in US. Some countries in Europe have pretty competitive comp
like Switzerland (Denmark, Norway have decent comp too but its getting
destroyed by high taxes)

~~~
nstart
Curious about the comment on Norway taxes. They are high but the benefits
offered are very good for citizens. Education and healthcare being top
benefits. Also the culture contributes a lot to viewing it more positively
from what I understand.

I don't work in Norway but I've been researching it as a possible location to
migrate to in the future. Curious if there are any citizens from Norway who'd
be interested in adding information to this though.

~~~
qaq
I think the situation is very skewed when comparing tech sector because of how
competitive things are in US the comp packages can be far beyond of what you
get as "free" gov. services in a place like Norway.

------
soniman
"America succeeded in spite of Americans" \- Immigrants

------
ceejayoz
Well done. Zoom's the only video conferencing app I've come across that has
been reliably pleasant to use.

~~~
mc32
They have some weird tiers where the max length of a web meeting is something
silly like 40 mins. Ok laugh, why do people need more than 40 mins, but this
makes that tier useless because any serious company is going to have people
who need to meet over 40 mins. So it’s a tier of service which exists for the
sole purpose of upsell.

~~~
vincentmarle
You mean, like, a profitable business model?

If you’re a “serious company” then surely you can pay for a great service like
this.

------
sumanthvepa
I'm curious, why would a Chinese citizen feel compelled to apply for a Visa 8
times, to start a business? Surely it is far easier and faster for a Chinese
citizen to start a company in China? I would imagine that capital would be
almost as easily available, as would labor. As for market access, surely just
opening branch office in Silicon Valley would have served the purpose? If high
quality American engineers, were needed, that too could be achieved by opening
a branch office. Why go to all the trouble of emigrating from China? Am I
missing significant context here, was the visa granted the 8th time an
investor visa?

~~~
asdfasgasdgasdg
I have a sense (perhaps unfounded) that it's difficult for Chinese tech
companies to make inroads outside of China. This is because of the Chinese
government's role as a kingmaker within its own tech industry, and because of
concerns of IP theft, surveillance, and state-backed hacking from the Chinese
government. Big firms outside of China do not trust Chinese software firms
with their data. As a big time software company in China, you can only really
sell to Chinese buyers, with a few rare exceptions.

On the other hand, a US company can operate essentially anywhere but China.
Maybe he thought he had a better shot on his own merits outside China. Maybe
he didn't want to get in bed with the party, or maybe he was just a guy who
was enamored of the dream that was Silicon Valley in the 80s through the 00s.

------
Nition
As someone who owns a Zoom H2 recorder this thread was initially confusing.
Apparently there are two major companies called Zoom.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Video_Communications](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Video_Communications)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Corporation)

~~~
jcl
You're not the only one who was confused... Apparently there is _yet another_
Zoom company -- the one whose ticker symbol happens to be "ZOOM" \-- who has
seen an increase of 54,000% in share price since March, purely on news of Zoom
Video's IPO.

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/zoom-ipo-stock-
soared-54000-per...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/zoom-ipo-stock-
soared-54000-percent-for-very-bad-reason/)

------
jquery
Zoom deserves the huge pop for adding the "touch up face" feature to the
desktop app. I can look fresh for meetings even if I'm running haggard from
taking care of an infant. :)

Seriously though, that's one of those small features that shows real love and
care was put in the product. I was skeptical of Zoom when I switched to it but
it quickly became my favorite video conferencing software by a mile.

~~~
inflatableDodo
>Zoom deserves the huge pop for adding the "touch up face" feature to the
desktop app.

Heh, I remember that from 'The Jetsons' \-
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0idWiHiasKg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0idWiHiasKg)

They should have labelled it 'Morning Mask'.

------
DyslexicAtheist
the problem with proprietary tools like Zoom (and Skype, hell even Slack) is
that people are forced to use them when working for remote companies. At least
if they want to keep that job. But ofc you're still using your own hardware to
run this shit on to do your job. I suppose this is better than the atrocious
idea of using WhatsApp as team collaboration tool on your personal phone.

~~~
austhrow743
Everyone I know who has worked remote has had their tools supplied by the
company or has been reimbursed for purchasing them on behalf of the company.

------
sdfsdfsdfsdf3
appear.in, does what it says on the tin, no fucking about. Played about with
zoom but it was a multi-minute ballache of signup steps and a screen sharing
plugin the doesn't work properly on i3wm, I can't even begin to imagine the
others if Zoom was mean't to be straight forward.

------
raylangivens
Alternate opinion, I work at Microsoft as an Engineer. We (obviously) use
Teams for meetings. For one thing, it integrates well with the MS/Office
ecosystem (sharing videos is easier etc). But the video conferencing system is
really poor. Meetings sometime start with one party not able to hear properly,
the other one. Usually, we spend the first 5 minutes saying "Am I audible?",
"Can you hear me?" and their variants with that a feeling of deja-vu hits me.
Usually, there aren't issues once the meeting starts (not with the software
at-least). But the starting a meeting is certainly painful. SfB is a whole
different ball of wax.

I have never used Zoom but I understand why someone would be willing to pay
for a video-conferencing solution that works. Think about your hundreds of
thousands of employees losing 5-10 meetings of all their meetings, everyday.
That is the problem Zoom must be solving.

------
phamilton
Best zoom feature is the magic screen share. Just being in the physical room I
can hit share screen and it will find the right meeting. I think it uses
inaudible sound to identify them right room.

------
agapon
A bit offtopic: what happened to gotomeeting? I recall that 10 years it was a
go-to software for conference calls / distributed meetings / etc. Now it's
mostly zoom.

------
nimbius
Maybe its just the tone of the headline but it seems antiquated. Are we
implying billionaires can only come from america? Or if america blesses their
presence?

------
fooker
I could not participate in an internship at Google a few years ago because my
US Visa was refused, seemingly because the consulate clerk was having a bad
day.

------
philshem
I always though Zoom came standard on Macs, and that is was made by Apple. It
works that well.

Turns out my wife had installed it before she gave me her MacBook.

------
ausjke
what about polycom? the one used to have more markshare before Cisco purchases
its major competitor Tanderberg, it seems zoom does not build its own
hardware, the legacy players like polycom/tanderberg(cisco) still do, maybe
it's the time to use off-the-shelf hardware with zoom software these days.

------
samirillian
Ay we got enough billionaires here already

------
actuator
Zoom's stock jumped around 81% on debut. They seem to have left a lot of money
on the table.

------
yosito
God forbid we let freeloaders like this into our country!

/s

------
presty
it's ironic that 8 is the chinese number for luck

------
victor106
Anyone knows an open source alternative to zoom that is good.

------
bootcat
Respects !

------
NTDF9
That was back when US immigration and state departments were sane.

Imagine applying and going through those hassles today.

------
evgeniysharapov
Being contrarian, I would say, that he should be thankful to US immigration
authorities. If they issues a visa first time he applied he might have become
just an SDE at Amazon.

~~~
whoisjuan
Hmmm, I think you're into something aside from the shitty jab. Tenacity
definitely plays an important role in success. This person had to deal with a
system that judged him unfairly and that probably helped him to built
resilience for other situations where his ventures received the same scrutiny
and rejections.

