Facing intense competition post-COVID, Zoom's strategy is to ensure its platform is open and integrates with competitors like Google and Microsoft. This acknowledges that enterprise customers don't want to be locked into a single vendor's suite, making openness a competitive advantage.
Eric Yuan didn't seek an empty market. He entered the "extremely crowded" video conferencing space after discovering that not a single user of existing tools like Skype or WebEx was truly happy. A market saturated with dissatisfied customers signals a massive opportunity for a better product.
When intrapreneur Eric Yuan saw the need to rebuild Webex, Cisco's internal bureaucracy and layers of management prevented his idea from reaching decision-makers. This forced him to leave and start Zoom, turning a loyal employee into a major competitor.
Despite unprecedented demand, Eric Yuan admits that hiring over 6,000 employees in two years was a mistake that led to an unsustainable cost structure and low productivity. This resulted in painful layoffs, serving as a cautionary tale against reactive, hyper-hiring even during a massive boom.
Zoom survived its 30x overnight growth during COVID because its engineering team had a guiding principle from the start: build the code so it wouldn't need modification for a massive traffic spike. This proactive architectural foresight prevented the system from breaking under hypergrowth.
Zoom built its "deliver happiness" culture with small, thoughtful perks like reimbursing any book an employee buys. While the financial cost is minimal (e.g., ~$1000/year for an avid reader), the perceived value of the company investing in an employee's personal growth is far greater than a cash bonus.
In Zoom's early days, Eric Yuan personally reached out to every user who canceled their low-cost ($9.99/mo) subscription to understand why. This extreme commitment to learning from even the smallest churn events established a deep culture of customer feedback from the very beginning.