David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Their real line of business is not where they started. True. It was a pivot to peer-to-peer [...]. We can debate whether we can classify that but it’s such a good point. We take this too hard. I think any great investor and partner does, that the most important thing is the DNA of the team you’re backing. If you believe in them, we like to say that the early stage is turbulent. You have to believe in the pilot’s ability to navigate the turbulence. I want to spend a minute before we move into building Zoom. What was it that was making WebEx customers so unhappy? Santi, I’m curious from your perspective, especially your thesis coming into the space. We’ll get into other companies that competed with Zoom over time, but this was not a unique insight to Eric. There was something that had changed. What was it about the collaboration space? I think a big change that a lot of these big incumbents missed was the purchasing process for these products. When WebEx got started, you talked about it earlier, they were selling to IT because they had very high price points. They just needed IT to be okay. They didn’t need IT to be happy. They just wanted IT to be okay with whatever product they were selling. It was more about, “Yeah, we’re complying, we’re secure, we checked all these boxes. If you users hate it, who cares? We’re just going to make sure that we cover your back and that we check all the boxes.”…

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