The new year has already been good to videoconferencing startup Zoom, a fast-growing competitor to Cisco’s ubiquitous WebEx.
Just last week, the San Jose-based company raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation in a round led by legendary investment firm Sequoia Capital, making it Silicon Valley’s newest “unicorn.”
At the same time, Zoom disclosed it had 450,000 customers, including Uber and SolarCity, and that it finished 2016 with two cash flow positive quarters, back to back.
Days later, a report from fellow enterprise unicorn Okta indicated that in 2016, Zoom was the fastest-growing app among its subscribers — a distinction previously held by $3.8 Silicon Valley golden child Slack.
In other words, if you haven’t heard of Zoom yet, you probably will soon. Business Insider sat down with Zoom CEO Eric S. Yuan (via a Zoom videoconference, naturally) to talk about where his startup came from, and where it’s going next.
Zooming out of nowhere
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, Yuan says, he was getting frustrated in the job: Cisco was focused heavily on selling expensive, complex teleconferencing hardware, and acting too slowly to reconfigure the underlying systems behind its meeting software to meet the new demands created by the rise of smartphones and tablets in the workplace.
“That’s what the customer needs, it’s what the industry needs,” Yuan says.
And so, sensing opportunity, Yuan took some WebEx engineers with him and formed Zoom. Yuan’s thought…