Zoom
Growth was steady but unremarkable from 2013-2019 ($0 to $622 million revenue).
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.
Key Leaders at Zoom
Eric Yuan
Founder & CEO
yuan's direct involvement in engineering maintained founder effects in that domain, while departments without founder involvement (sales) were overwhelmed by migrant norms, demonstrated patient germination with slow growth before environmental shift
Key Facts
Zoom Appears in 3 Chapters
Zoom recognized COVID-19 as mast year opportunity, compressing years of growth into 90 days by allocating heavily to infrastructure (100K+ customers/day).
Zoom's mast year allocation strategy →Zoom tripled headcount (2,500→7,700) during pandemic - 50-60% annual migration rate meant imported norms from Amazon/Google/Salesforce overwhelmed founder effects.
How rapid growth created gene flow at Zoom →Zoom illustrates 10-year dormancy pattern - founded 2011, steady growth 2013-2019 ($0→$622M), then COVID created light gap enabling explosive growth.
Zoom's 10-year germination →