Eric Yuan served as the VP of Engineering at WebEx from 1997, staying in the role for years after Cisco’s $3.2 billion acquisition of the company in 2007.
By 2011, he was getting frustrated in the job: with Cisco not being customer focussed - or offering a great solution to the mass market
“So, together with some WebEx engineers he formed Zoom - with a single-minded focus on creating a brilliant customer experience .
Yuan said at the time that
“We don’t spend a lot of money to sell the product,”
A bit of fairy dust
In Jan 2017, Zoom raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation in a round led by Sequoia Capital
The plan for this new $100 million was to scale by spending on marketing and global growth - and that it did!!!
The home run
In 2019 it raised $350m in an IPO at $36 per share at a 10.5b valuation
Today it’s at a share price of $250 valuing Zoom at circa $70B
So VC Investors scored a 70X return from the Zoom deal .
A $10k investment world have generated $750k
Where to from here?
Zoom has taken a leaf out of Sequoia Capital’s book and has created a $100 million Zoom Apps Fund, with plans to invest anywhere from $250,000 to $2.5 million in companies across the video spectrum.
Zoom CTO Brendan Ittelson says "At the end of the day, we're looking at folks that are working with our ecosystem, be that Zoom Apps, integrations, hardware." They are focused on early-stage investments in companies that are starting to get traction.
Zoom hopes to help spark more development in the space, to make Zoom Apps into a platform as big and powerful as Zoom imagines it could be.
Amazon committed $200 million to its own Alexa Fund, and Google has invested $100 million in lots of Google Assistant-related startups.
A cuppla hundred mill goes a long way toward starting a developer ecosystem of a platform!
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