Company
ActiveZoom
San Jose · Since 2011
Still independent. Demand collapsed back from the 2020 peak, and the product remained the default room for a great deal of remote work.
Eric Yuan founded Zoom in 2011 after leaving a video unit at Cisco. The product was a meeting that started when a person clicked a link, without a hardware kit and without an instruction from the IT department. Reliability was the feature.
In 2020 the meeting moved into the spare room, and Zoom became the room. Schools, courts, and companies that had never bought video software were on it within weeks. The company hired as fast as it could and then, when the rooms reopened, laid many of those people off.
A tool that relocated the job
Zoom's own staff are engineers, salespeople, and the support workers who reset a webinar. The larger effect was on everyone else's staff. A receptionist, a teacher, and a middle manager spent the day in a window. New tasks appeared: the person who admits participants from a waiting room, the technician who makes a hearing work, the manager who decides which meeting could have been a message. Those jobs were not at Zoom. Zoom was the condition for them.
After the peak
The company is still independent. Demand fell from the lockdown high and settled above the old normal, because a share of knowledge work did not move back. Zoom is a smaller story than the platforms around it, which is why it belongs here. Not every firm that changes a working day becomes the most valuable company in the world. Some of them just become the room.
The work it organized
- Video engineer
- Customer support
- Sales engineer
- Meeting host
On the timeline
Related
- MicrosoftActive