The Birth of Zoom: How a Cisco VP Revolutionized Video Conferencing in 2011

Eric Yuan worked at Cisco. At that time, Cisco was a dominant force in the market for business audio and video communications. The company had its own video conferencing application, WebEx. Eric Yuan was a vice president at Cisco, and he was unhappy with how the WebEx product was evolving. He left the company to build a video conferencing product according to his own vision.

On April 21, 2011, Zoom Video Communications was officially registered. In 2011, the team prepared the first prototype of the video conferencing application, and in 2013, the product was released publicly.

By 2019, the company was already actively competing with major products such as Microsoft’s Skype, Google Hangouts (later Google Meet), and Cisco WebEx.

In 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the shares of Zoom Video Communications rose eight times in value within a few months. This was not a coincidence or fraud. The economics of human communication changed dramatically, and investors correctly concluded that a widely used video conferencing product would become extremely valuable.

Today, Zoom has a market capitalization of around $25 billion.

See also The Birth of Dell: How a College Student Revolutionized PC Sales in 1984.