A Five Year Review of my Journey with Zoom

From my Very First Introduction to Zoom: Life is a unique journey with many twists and turns and, most of all, filled with pleasant surprises.? One thing that held great importance to me was going back to college.? This is something I eagerly desired for myself.? Yet, it definitely wasn't an easy decision being a father of four beautiful daughters with much responsibility.? Due to my tenacity and strong desire to pursue an advancement of my education, I followed my dream and accepted the challenges that came with it.? After almost 15 years, in 2016, I enrolled in MS Business Analytics from CSU East Bay and completed it in March 2017.

In the same year, I decided that it was also time for a reboot of my career and decided to look for a challenging role with a startup company, unlike mostly mature companies that I had worked for in the past. I was fortunate to make it to the final rounds of a few companies and almost signed up with one of them. As I was deciding my next assignment, I saw an opportunity open up at Zoom and decided to apply.? Early on, I had used Zoom for a few team collaboration projects and really loved the product in contrast to other video conferencing solutions I had previously used. I was truly impressed with not only the product but also their impressive Glassdoor reviews and their happiness culture. In conjunction with the culture that Zoom as a company represents, the interview process was thorough but quick and I immediately accepted the offer with a sense of excitement.

An Introspective Narrative of My Very First Year at Zoom: I must say that all my years at Zoom have been beneficial to me and I have grown each year with the esteemed company.? I? started as one of the early engineers reporting directly to the Chief Architect and immediately felt welcome. I almost instantly noticed a huge difference in both the culture as well as speed of execution compared to my previous roles. I realized how fast things move at the startups as our engineering teams were releasing new product features at a lightning pace. At first, it was challenging keeping up pace with the scaling demands but I was learning a lot. The amount of knowledge attained will be an asset that I will carry with me always.? In my previous roles, there were some busy days and there were some not very busy days whereas your days at a startup could vary between some busy days and some very very busy days. I spent my first year learning and understanding Zoom's meeting architecture and identifying areas that needed to be strengthened like data encryption, platform security, high availability, business continuity etc.

As crazy as it sounds, I decided to enroll in an MBA from CSU East Bay starting September 2017. I knew it was a lot of commitment working for a startup, balancing a family, and also going to college but I just wanted to keep the momentum going. We find meaning in life through our difficulties and struggles and although I knew that obtaining this degree would not be easy it was definitely worth the sacrifice in order to achieve my goals.? The craziest part was sitting in traffic sometimes for a couple of hours from downtown San Jose to CSUEB campus and there were many days I wasn't able to make it to my classes on time.? Yet, in the end the reward and payoff was insurmountable because I grew and advanced in my field with an increase in the wealth of knowledge that was not easily attained.

First Zoomtopia: When Zoom was looking for volunteers for its first Zoomtopia event in October 2017, I decided to enroll and was given an opportunity to help at the registration desk. To my delight, every customer that came to pick up their badge talked about how great Zoom was. I have never seen such a strong following of any other product. The uses of Zoom were far and wide. I was delighted to see how much difference Zoom is making in areas like Education, Healthcare and many other verticals.?I already knew I was at the right place in my career because of the amount of commendable narratives that the company had brought to my attention.? If I ever had an iota of doubt, it was put to rest after my first Zoomtopia experience, which proved to me inevitably that my personal beliefs about Zoom were not just my own personal opinions, but agreed upon by an ocean of happy employees and customers who sensed the same feeling of satisfaction I did.

FedRAMP (Zoom for Gov) Certification: When you work for a start-up, you may not have fixed job responsibilities as long as you are open to new challenges. My primary responsibility was to bring stability to our data infrastructure and I was able to address the unique challenges that Zoom was facing with scaling its users. However, in my quest to learn more about both the product as well as the technologies used at Zoom, I started exploring other responsibilities outside of my domain. The first break came when our Chief Architect put me in-charge of the FedRAMP project as Zoom wanted to provide its solution to several Gov agencies meeting their enhanced security and encryption standards.

We were able to secure FedRAMP (moderate) within a record time of six months. It was great working with leaders like John Keese, Zak Peirce and Vanessa DiPaulo. It was a lot of hard work with a lot of fond memories that I will treasure in my lifetime.? With our team efforts and successful collaboration, I was excited to see Zoom for Gov take off and since then they have achieved IL4 and are now on their way to DoD certification. Zoom for Gov is now being used at various federal and state agencies. It was a proud moment to see Zoom for Gov being used at the Whitehouse.? Knowing that I had a role in this is something I feel immense joy in, because to feel that my presence and knowledge may have impacted society for the better, gives me a sense of gratitude words cannot convey.

Completion of MBA: Among all this craziness, I was (barely) keeping up with my MBA classes and completed my degree in December 2018 and was officially awarded the degree in May of 2019. As I wasn't able to make it to the graduation ceremonies for my previous two degrees, I was happy to attend the commencement this time along with my fellow classmates. Coming from a strong engineering background, it was good to learn the business side of things. But more importantly, I made amazing friends along the way. I still keep in touch with them and get together with them occasionally to discuss my crazy startup ideas and take their advice.

Cloud Infrastructure & Compliance: I started taking a keen interest in our Cloud Infrastructure which I ultimately took over in early 2019. Security of our Cloud infrastructure and cost optimization became my renewed focus which remains to this day. I was able to negotiate our first EDP contract with AWS and secured Enterprise support so our engineering team can have required technical expertise to keep up with the pace of scaling as well as rapid product releases. I was able to work closely with the compliance team to get our SOC2 compliance as well as secure our platform for our enterprise customers. I was also instrumental in securing other compliance frameworks like HIPAA, PCI, SOX and more recently ISO 27001 for Zoom.

Zoom's highly successful IPO: It's a dream for any startup to go IPO and Zoom was one of the most anticipated IPOs of the past decade. We all showed up very early in the morning at our SJ headquarters and it was a proud moment watching our CEO Eric Yuan ring the Nasdaq Opening bell and formally launch the IPO.

My startup experience turned out to be very rewarding.? It transformed me.? On a professional and personal level I was able to accomplish many triumphs in only three years that I was not able to do during any of my previous tenures. Little did I know that all the work that we were doing was unknowingly preparing us for a much bigger challenge ahead of us, the pandemic of 2020.

Pandemic Scaling: No one knew that in March 2020 the world would be struggling with a pandemic that would compromise the quality of our lives.? We also did not? know how important Zoom would become in maintaining the human connections that we were so desperately missing on a face to face level. As we started receiving sporadic reports of school and office closures in early 2020, I suggested preparing to take our real time services, that have always been in our own Data Centers, to the Cloud. I started negotiating capacity with AWS but did not anticipate how quickly and massively things would change.?

In early March, Zoom was one of the first companies announcing to go remote, even before the state and federal agencies were mandating shutdown to contain the spread of the virus. All schools started going remote and our CEO Eric Yuan announced extending free service to all the schools. We had very little notice before the US, EU and APAC regions announced shutdown. My daughters started attending school over Zoom from home and so were millions of other students across the globe.

Our infrastructure grew 30 times within a matter of days. Alex Stamos described this growth as unprecedented in the history of the internet and I suddenly found myself at the helm of this. Sixteen to Eighteen hour (and a few round the clock) days became a routine for weeks. I would lock myself up in the home-office upstairs trying to figure out how I can procure the capacity from our cloud vendors so we can keep our services up and onboard new users the next morning. Routine things like showers and proper meals which we always take for granted, suddenly became a luxury that I had no time for. Yet, being involved in sacrifices like these seemed minor at the task of trying to assist humanity with a crisis that Zoom, in my personal opinion, had a respectable solution for.

When the world's biggest cloud provider tells you that you have used-up all of their available capacity, you know that you have really grown big. To this day, I joke with them (in all seriousness) that I probably hold the world record for highest number of virtual machines in a day. It would not have been possible to go through this massive scaling without the help of Justin Davis and Allen Nearing at AWS. While I was working on procuring and provisioning all this capacity, there were some very dedicated engineers that were working on scaling our web services and applications. Due to our dedicated efforts, Zoom was able to keep our services up without any major disruptions. Zoom was being leveraged for everything including education, remote work, healthcare visits, wedding, social get-togethers, but the hardest part was when we would read how Zoom is being used by the loved ones to say their final goodbyes.

Building of Cloud Ops Team: In April 2020, I was promoted to Engineering Manager of Cloud Operations and was tasked with building a new Cloud Ops team. Working with our talented recruiting team, I was able to quickly put together a team of dedicated Cloud Ops Engineers. The team has grown since and is going strong (needless to say, I am hiring exceptional Cloud Ops Engineers). I was humbled when the following slide was shared during Zoom's Growth Summit of 2020 highlighting the contributions I made to Zoom.

When I reflect about the last five years, despite the difficulties the pandemic has brought to us, I find my life to be filled with well-being, increased growth, and sincere blessings.? I am grateful to those in my family who accompanied me behind the scenes on the journey as well as my friends and colleagues who are at the core and roots of my success.? Looking back, I would not have changed a single thing about my journey, but only feel indebted to the reality that more growth and change lies ahead of me, which are all gifts that I am ready to receive and give with undeniable humility and grace.

What lies ahead: While the pandemic growth has subsided, Zoom continues to grow and innovate at a rapid pace and recent announcements of Contact Center, Zoom Events, Whiteboarding applications are a testament to that. As I look back proudly to the past 5 years at Zoom, I am equally prepared for what lies ahead of us. As our CEO Eric Yuan says, we have to focus on execution as the best is yet to come.