How Zoom is moving fast to avoid becoming a victim of its own success

At no time did Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom, imagine when he left his job as VP of Engineering at Webex that Microsoft’s neglect of Skype and the consequences of a global pandemic would cause his company to skyrocket on the stock market a year after it went public, while the number of active users would soar from 10 million to more than 200 million in three months. Furthermore, driven by the need to make a rapid transition to online learning, more than 90,000 schools and educational institutions in some 20 countries have chosen Zoom, with all that this entails in terms of volume and attendance.

Zoom, from its origin, was designed for use in corporate environments, in organizations with a good level of technological support. At no time did the company think that it would find itself in a scenario where half the world, overnight, would be using its product to work from home, study or talk to family and friends.

Why have so many people chosen Zoom? The reasons are clear: it’s easy to install and use, has a freemium model, image and sound are great, and it even offers fun features like changing the background.

Such rapid take up was obviously going to bring unforeseen challenges. First there were reports that the iOS application of Zoom was leaking data to Facebook, which the company immediately solved with an update. Then, it mistook several thousand users as belonging to the same company, exposing their personal data. Next, video conferences that the company claimed were end-to-end encrypted were not fully encrypted or with keys originated in China, and what’s more, that people were zoombombing: hacking into them and broadcasting pornography and other unwanted messages, which threatened to spread rapidly, a problem that was easily solved by proper administration in the case of public events, and by password-protected private meetings. At one point, some even claimed that Zoom was a disaster in the making or even that it was malware, something that could tarnish the fantastic progression the company was experiencing.

The company’s response? Impeccable: it addressed these issues quickly and transparently by getting its engineers to focus on security and to expand its vision to become an application not only for videoconferencing, but for all teleworking needs.

Dealing with rapid growth has never been easy, and always poses significant challenges as new users begin to use the product for all kinds of applications, creating challenges that could not be anticipated when the platform was conceived. However, companies need to be seen in the context of their founders: Eric Yuan, the son of two mining engineers in China’s Shandong province, is such a persistent person that he was not discouraged when he had to apply nine times for the visa that allowed him to migrate to the United States. Redesigning parts of his app won’t be a problem.

That said, Security problems should never be minimized. But for now, Zoom has shown that it has what it takes to do well in this environment going forward: a willingness to tackle problems quickly, decisively and, above all, with complete transparency. On that basis, I have very little doubt about his ability to consolidate his enviable position when this pandemic passes.

(En espa?ol, aquí)

?