Santi Subotovsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…I want to get now to the point of, Eric and team get to build Zoom, they’ve got the education beachhead vertical, the companies and the product is starting to spread virally, you started using it as a consumer to start. Walk us through how your relationship grew with Eric and the investment process. In particular, I’m interested in, you mentioned you’ve been looking at the space for three years, [...] lots of competitors out there run by smart people who also get all the problems in the space. What was it about Zoom that you we’re like, “This is the one.” First of all, it started with the product worked. Even before meeting Eric, I knew there was something special in the product. Then when I met Eric for the first time, I realized that it was more than just the product working, it was strong leadership and someone who was committed to doing things right. Not taking shortcuts, not building it on top of open source stuff, just to patch things together, change the UI, and deliver quick value. He was focused on doing the right thing. Then I became obsessed with Eric and the product. I remember stalking him. They had this small office in Santa Clara on [...] road, I think. The elevator never worked and they had boxes piled on and cameras stacked on top of the refrigerator and boxes, and that was the state-of-the-art setting. I would drive down to Santa Clara to meet with Eric and the team on a regular basis, to build a relationship, and try to convince him to partner with us. My goal was to invite him to present to my team and he said, “I don’t have a pitch deck. I’m not raising, so I’m not going to do that.” The hook that we found was, “Look, we are using Skype in the office. I had bought a Skype camera that I would use to talk to entrepreneurs and I hated that, can you come in and talk to us about how Zoom is going to replace that?” He came in and he basically pitched us on Zoom. The pitch was very risky because he didn’t present the metrics, NPS and all that stuff. What he said is, “Everyone in the room, download Zoom now, we’re going to do a live demo.” If you’ve been in this industry, doing a live demo is incredibly risky. We all downloaded the product and we were [...]. Did he leave the office, go somewhere else, and present [...]?…

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