
A Profile of Zoom CEO Eric Yuan - dsr12
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2019/04/19/zoom-zoom-zoom-the-exclusive-inside-story-of-the-new-billionaire-behind-techs-hottest-ipo
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wardb
As a remote worker who is on video conferencing calls most of the day, I have
a lot of experience (aka strong feelings) with the tools mentioned in the
article;

\- Zoom is indeed great. Reliable and clean UI. Local recording to MP4 makes
for easy sharing.

\- Webex is a bit less intuitive, but still reliable. Proprietary video
recording protocol makes it video's hard to share.

\- Skype Business should die in a fire. Unreliable and terrible UI. The Mac
version of it is pretty much broken. A lot of folks can't find out how to
screen share.

\- BlueJean. Trying too hard to be fancy with their UI. They are also very
proud with their Dolby Voice, but I find it harder to properly understand
people (My hearing is not that great).

\- Google Hangouts / Meet doesn't work in Safari for no good reason IMHO. High
CPU usage and could use some more features, like a personal room and default
meetings settings (no vid/mute by default on join, default audio devices etc)

~~~
benjaminwootton
Google could clean up in this market. Hangouts is an abomination though, very
unintuitive to use.

~~~
ilikehurdles
Google has lost all goodwill in this space in my opinion. They’ve built,
sunsetted, and rebuilt multiple solutions for video conferencing and at this
point who can trust them with putting out a long-term product?

~~~
izacus
Can you explain which ones? The only product I know of is Hangouts and Google
is right now rolling out updated Hangouts which is a compatible upgrade?

(Having said that, Hangouts is far from perfect.)

~~~
realusername
Hangout, Allo, Duo, Google Voice, Gtalk, Meet, Wave... (list to be completed,
there's probably a dozen more which died I don't remember).

~~~
govg
Of this list, only Hangouts is a video conferencing application, is it not?
Allo's primary goal was chat, Duo's is 1-1 interaction, GTalk is simply the
older version of hangouts, and so on.

~~~
sumedh
Or they could have built a single application which does both
chat/audio/video.

~~~
Spivak
Which was/is Hangouts?

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sumedh
I dont know, its so confusing with so many options from Google.

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hydroflask
Personally, I don't think it can be understated how impactful Zoom's IPO is.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Eric Yuan is the first Asian billionaire created
from running an American tech company. Others have come close (Justin
Kan/Twitch, Tony Hsiehs/Zappos), but Eric is the first.

And I think this really marks the start of an increase in Asian/Indian-
American entrepreneurs making waves in the upcoming decades. For all the talk
about overrepresentation of Asian-Americans in tech, most are limited to
technical/individual contributor/engineering roles. Very little Asian
representation in management/executive roles, but it's quickly rising. Andrew
Chen, Connie Chan @ a16z. Jessica Lee @ Sequoia.

I'm Asian-American, grew up in SV (currently in college). An explanation for
the pattern I described above is that my and most of friend's parents are
immigrants from Asia. Often went to the top universities in their country, and
came to US for graduate school, then work for the big tech companies.

And so for them, they weren't able to take any risk - they were there to
settle down and start a family. But the new generation of Asian-Americans go
to these top colleges, and are able to have the ambition to do
entrepreneurship. I'm extremely excited and optimistic to see more AA
representation in startups and driving real-world impact.

~~~
ralph84
Some others not mentioned yet:

\- Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai of Marvell

\- Koguan Leo and Thai Lee of SHI

\- Jayshree Ullal of Arista

\- David Sun and John Tu of Kingston

\- Min Kao of Garmin

\- Romesh Wadhwani of STG

\- Vinod Khosla of Sun/KPCB/Khosla Ventures

\- Niraj Shah of Wayfair

\- Ram Shriram of Netscape/Amazon/Google

~~~
bluedino
He's not a billionaire but Steve Chen was a co-founder of YouTube.

~~~
jasonshen
Would definitely bet Steve Chen is near billionaire status now if he joined
Google 2006 and stayed for a bunch of years. Google stock and stock market
generally has done very well in that time period (minus 2009-10)

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adventured
The US made Eric attempt to get a visa eight times before he was finally
successful. We should be poaching the world's talent belligerently,
strategically, handing out citizenship and saying thank you for choosing our
country over others. Instead, the clowns in Washington DC make the best and
brightest go through hell just to come here and contribute. Only either a
malevolent or incompetent government would sabotage its own nation in such a
manner.

Were I briefly king, one of the first things I'd do is task the Federal
Reserve to create a large 'steal the talent fund' (by another name) and set
out on draining the world of as much talent as possible. I'd use clever
funding programs to make it easier for the best to move to and transition to
the US. A tiny bit of inflation in exchange for a massive long-term return.
The rest of the world would in part pay - via the international holdings of
dollars - for my program to steal their own best and brightest.

Every graduate of a major US university gets automatic citizenship. The best
scientists, engineers, doctors, and so on, I'd want all of them. I'd do almost
anything it takes to get them to my shores. Half of everything America is in
its wealth or accomplishments, spanning two centuries now, is owed to brave
immigrants that chose to abandon a life elsewhere and seek opportunity here at
great risk. It's hard to comprehend the enormity of the mistake that is the US
immigration system. We don't even take a neutral approach, we take a make-it-
difficult approach.

~~~
sonnyblarney
" We should be poaching the world's talent belligerently" \- this is hard to
identify. Sometimes not, but most often, yes.

"Every graduate of a major US university gets automatic citizenship." This
basically means Universities are in the business of selling cheap citizenship.
So, no.

Most importantly: " I'd do is task the Federal Reserve to create a large
'steal the talent fund'"

Wow. I hope you don't mean that! There are 1000 initiatives the gov. wants to
be involved , we just don't print money willy nilly!

~~~
sonnyblarney
I should add: yes, 'getting talent' is a good initiative, of course! And it
should be facilitated by the government mostly in terms of 'smart immigration
reform' \- I don't think there needs to be a 'fund'. Private enterprise can
definitely 'fund' that by hiring people.

I think if the H1 programme we re-thought so that it was not abused - and
there were some kind of 'path to citizenship' in some cases that would be
ideal. So long as it's managed properly.

I think the key here is 'intelligent policy' that works well with private
enterprise, not a big spend.

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gcb0
> Each time users logged on to a Webex conference, the company’s systems would
> have to identify which version of the product (iPhone, Android, PC or Mac)
> to run, which slowed things down.

are all executives really that clueless about tech or do they say those dumb
things to target investors that they know are clueless about the tech?

~~~
kgc
There was probably some error in communication on this. Or they really are
talking about shaving milliseconds.

~~~
zackbloom
Identifying the device is probably on the order of nano to microseconds.

~~~
jamisteven
In present day yes, but 5-10 years ago when you went to download the client
their web interface didnt know what OS you were running, it would prompt and
ask you to download either the .dmg or .exe

~~~
mangamadaiyan
Anecdote: Sometime last week, I was given a Skype for Business link to login
from my Linux laptop. Since regular Skype works fine on my Linux laptop, I
thought this would be ok. Wonder of wonders, it wanted me to download and
install an MSI :)

~~~
teddyh
Please note: “Skype for Business“ is _an entirely different program_ from
Skype. They are completely unrelated.

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hrdwdmrbl
I still don't understand how 1\. Companies are paying so much for their
software. How much do they charge for licensing to make so much money? 2\.
They intend to defend their position from competitors 3\. How they will ever
grow to justify a PE ratio of 2,123.29!!!

I actually use their software and love it, but do they really have a secret
sauce that won't be copied soon?

~~~
jeena
The secret sauce for Zoom seems to reliability. For some reason it just always
works, independent of how many people join the call (we have calls with more
than 100 people calling in independently), which OS you use (most of us use
Linux, but also Android, Windows, macOS and iOS). It just always works, in the
last two years I had zero problems with it, no idea how they do it.

~~~
pg_bot
Last I checked Zoom avoids using WebRTC in favor of using media over
websockets. This should obviate a lot of the reliability problems with
enterprise networks that you would normally need to solve with STUN/TURN/ICE.

I think the other thing they do is decrease the image quality when multiple
people are simultaneously connected. This is a nice hack since you don't
really notice the difference, and users blame bad images on the network not
the product.

The biggest challenge to their business IMO is if/when WebRTC becomes stable
between all browsers. There are still many kinks that need to be worked out.
Everything falls apart in the P2P version when you have more than like 5
people connected as the amount of information that needs to be transferred
across the network scales exponentially.[0] So you need to add a gateway and
connect everyone over a single pipe.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law)

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adnanazadsg
I'm surprised at how big Zoom became. Video conferencing is a competitive
market and other players in the space were spending a lot on sales to get all
the big clients.

Microsoft, for example, has a lot of deep integrations of Skype for Business
with the Office suite and I'd imagine they'd make it compelling for their
enterprise customers (who I'd imagine is the main user of video conferencing)
to use it.

How did they win the market in the face of competition from all these large
players?

~~~
amrrs
I think it's very similar to how Trello made an impact in their segment. After
a point, simplicity is what literally what people want. You can check the
customer acquisition page of WebEx and Zoom and you'd know the difference of
how easy it's for someone to get started with Zoom and set up a webinar or
video conference.

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dba7dba
> I'm surprised at how big Zoom became. Video conferencing is a competitive
> market and other players in the space were spending a lot on sales to get
> all the big clients.

Focus on sales is what doomed other video conferencing. Sales in such context
usually means they focused on convuncing some exec to buy the product, who
inevitably used it personally not that much.

Zoom seems to have focused on tech and end user experience.

~~~
z2
Totally agree on experience--hardware competitors were $3000+ systems with
terrible interfaces resembling DVRs from the late 90's. It seemed for
corporate conferencing, the competition was sort of diffuse, with many being
rigid and expensive hardware sets from Cisco, Polycom, and not just
Skype/Bluejeans/Google Hangouts.

Zoom had great value, they took advantage of existing tech so that companies
could set up reliable conferencing gear for a fraction of the cost, using a
cheap PC, an iPad for the remote, a Bluetooth speaker, and a generic webcam.

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sonnyblarney
It's shocking how FAANGS have not utterly dominated what should be a utility
market by now. Shame on them - not for 'not doing a good job' but for arguably
getting in everyone else's way with crap. I'm thinking of you Skype. It really
goes to show how inefficient things can be when there is not product focus,
and tons of money coming in from some other division.

~~~
r00fus
Part of what makes FAANG so profitable is ignoring the supposedly not-
profitable segments.

Combine this with the dominance of Cisco and Microsoft and you have big giants
who don't see enough money to complete with other giants.

So the insurgent player is the only one who breaks through.

btw, doesn't Amazon have a similar software (Chime?). So they are competing
but only really recently.

~~~
sonnyblarney
I think there is definitely enough money to interest MS and Cisco, as we see
with MS's move to compete with Slack.

MS, more than any company is very well positioned for this - they have the
relationships and sales force.

Cisco has that, but in kind of another way.

Google has the tech, but they need 'Enterprise Oriented Product Management' \-
which they don't quite have, and a kind of Enterprise Sales, which they don't
quite have.

Their Cloud offer has suffered due to this, granted, that's a much bigger nut
to crack, with other kinds of overlapping issues.

I think if Bezos, or another CEO decided it should be a focus, it would be.

I don't think Salesforce is hot on this area yet, but it wouldn't surprise me
if eventually they did, as Benioff seems to be keen to extend horizontally,
and they are good at integrating stuff.

Good on Zoom though, I hope VC's take note and back quality efforts in
classical markets.

~~~
r00fus
No I'm saying FAANG (ie, not Microsoft or Cisco) don't want to jump in to
compete with MS/Cisco who already have strong offerings.

Amazon have an offering, but it's relatively recent (last year?).

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andrei_says_
Zoom is a great example of how it is possible to enter a saturated space with
big players and carve a growing slice of the user base by providing better UX
and technical execution.

Inspiring.

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ulfw
Is there any competitive comparison on what underlying technology and
codec/compression the various video conferencing players use? Does one have
better quality/datarate than others?

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iKevinShah
I do not have the metrics / data required but in my very limited experience, I
can confirm zoom does the video conferencing / remote troubleshooting better
than webex. That, while Webex is also good at what it does, zoom feels
slightly better.

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sjg007
The only issue I have ever had with Zoom is that sometimes dial-in audio users
have terrible audio quality and drop outs. I was never able to get their
support to resolve it.

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s_tech
Zoom is a useful tool, competition is always healthy!

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pojntfx
Recently switched from Zoom to Jitsi. FLOSS and much, much simpler.

~~~
skinnymuch
Jitsi is buggy. CPU usage is unnecessarily large. I dislike everything about
Jitsi.

