Santi Subotovsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Once Eric landed on Zoom and got going, after leaving and raising [...] from all the folks that he had worked with in the past, this episode is full of incredible stats about Eric. Forty engineers of the 800 that he had worked with at Cisco come over and joined him to build this new technology from the ground-up that’s going to pursue customer happiness. Maybe that’s says a little bit about Cisco during that era, not to bash on them too much, but it says a lot about Eric. Forty engineers right off the bat. They just cranked for basically two years building this product. Finally, at the end of 2012, they get their first paid customer which is actually the Stanford Continuing Education Department. This was super cool. Also, right before then, they got a review from Walt Mossberg in AllThingsD, before they had a single paid customer. What a great write up. Walt is just glowing, we’re willing to [...] in the show notes in his typical Walt way, just glowing about how great the product is and how well it works. It’s funny, he talks about it as a consumer application even though at that point they were a business application, but that’s how good it was. Stanford is the first customer. I think that actually ends up becoming a great beachhead customer for them. This was the time of the rise of MOOCs and Coursera had just launched, there’s Udacity and 2U—2tor became 2U. All these universities around the country were thinking about like, “What is our online education strategy and component?” Zoom becomes the way that they deliver that. Education is still a huge vertical for Zoom, something like 90% plus of universities use it. It is a huge vertical, I think it makes perfect sense for these disruptive technologies. If you think even about Apple, the way they did it, they went into the education vertical because that’s where you capture the next generation. The older generation is probably okay with what they have, things are not going to change, but the younger generations are expecting a different type of experience. Then those younger generations get into the workforce and they demand the same type of experiences. This was not only a great decision by Eric to focus on education early on, but I feel that they also created a lot of value because if you’re trying to communicate to someone and deliver a message and people are remote, they can’t show up to class and you have a seamless way to communicate, that’s going to have a huge impact. I believe that if we could measure the impact on happiness within students and graduation rates of those people using Zoom, we should probably see an increase there. I was thinking about it as education was a great beachhead customer because they are ready to adopt, but that’s such a good point too. Again, what a perfect strategy to go in, these kids are all going to join the workforce. They’re going to show up and they’re going to be like, “Eww, I’m using a Polycom?”…

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