(Walk did not invest in Zoom, but he is a longtime user.) “Zoom had an intersection of stable, high-quality performance plus ease-of-use, and the network effect started snowballing from there.”Īsk other avid users, and they bring up that same theme: While there were plenty of other options out there, Zoom just provided a better one. “Previous to Zoom, I felt like the debate around videoconference apps was ‘Which do you feel is least terrible? Let’s use that one,’” says Hunter Walk, another Silicon Valley–based seed-stage investor. I reached out to a few power users to find out.

To be sure, Microsoft’s Skype, Cisco’s Webex, and Apple’s FaceTime were already in existence in 2011, to name just a few. Scheinman says it was easy for people to dismiss the company when it launched nearly 10 years ago, because videoconferencing was already considered to be a crowded market. Since then, the company’s shares have soared about 200%, giving it a market cap of more than $31 billion. “Then it went public, and it was like, ‘Oh, my God, look at Zoom.’”īy going public, he means Zoom’s hot initial public offering in April. “For years, I told everyone they were undercovering Zoom,” says Dan Scheinman, an angel investor who gave Zoom founder Yuan his first check, a $250,000 seed investment, in 2011. Zoom won’t disclose usage numbers beyond its last reported quarter, but CEO Eric Yuan said on March 4 that the company has seen a “large increase in the number of free users, meeting minutes, and new video cases.” Then again, Zoom has actually been zooming for quite some time. Not surprisingly, the virus outbreak has supercharged demand for the tech company’s video-chat service. And for many, that includes using Zoom for the first time.

Indeed, the coronavirus pandemic is forcing us to adopt all sorts of new ways of interacting, learning, and working.

What was zoom stock in march 2020