“Zoom’s stock is up more than 20% in the last month, a major outlier as the stock market as a whole is plummeting.” – Vox
Zoom is a video-conferencing tool – just like Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, Bluejeans and hundreds of others.
The company launched in 2011 when Cisco Webex’s VP of Engineering thought – the market is saturated with collaboration tools but customers aren’t happy.
When he couldn’t convince Cisco to change their strategy, Eric Yuan left his lucrative job and jumped on building another video conferencing company.
In 2013, 3 million people joined a Zoom meeting.
In 2014, 30 million joined.
In 2015, it grew to 100 million.
After a successful IPO last year, the company is today valued at more than $30 B.
So what’s different about Zoom?
When a user logged on to a Webex meeting, the software had to figure out which version (Mac or PC) of the product to run. This slowed things down.
Zoom built a lightweight web client which didn’t need different versions for Mac or PC. They leveraged the cloud to become platform agnostic (run equally across all platforms).
The software could also operate at 40% data loss, so it would still run on a slow internet connection.
This made Zoom different.
Prashant Bagga 