Zoom

Eric Yuan founded Zoom in 2011 after leaving Cisco WebEx, detecting signals others missed: terrible video quality, desktop-first products in a mobile-rising world, underutilized bandwidth, clunky user experience. Growth was steady but unremarkable from 2013-2019 ($0 to $622 million revenue). Then COVID-19 created a massive light gap. Daily participants jumped from 10 million in December 2019 to 300 million in April 2020.

Zoom recognized and executed COVID-19 as a mast year opportunity - compressing years of growth into 90 days. Work-from-home adoption happened overnight. The company allocated heavily to infrastructure scaling, adding 100,000+ new customers per day. This was textbook mast year execution: recognizing the rare opportunity, allocating aggressively during the window, then pivoting to profitability focus in 2021-2022 recovery.

But hypergrowth created extreme gene flow: Zoom tripled headcount from 2,500 employees in January 2020 to 7,700 by Q4 2021. Migration rate of 50-60% annually meant half to two-thirds of the organization was new each year. When migrants outnumber existing employees 2:1, their norms dominate. Sales imported practices from Salesforce/Oracle/SAP while engineering retained founder effects through Eric Yuan's direct involvement. Zoom illustrates both the 10-year dormancy pattern and how rapid scaling creates culture challenges.