
The company had been preparing for growth, but nothing like the tidal wave that hit. It closed in late December at $66.64 per share, as investors felt it faced growing uncertainty heading into 2020. The video conferencing company priced its IPO at $36 a share and saw it pop 72% on the first day of trading before eventually reaching $102.30 per share in June. At one point, it was the best-performing tech IPO of 201 9. Time proved him right, and Zoom went public in 2019. I knew the market potential was big because nobody liked the existing products.” However, I spent a lot of time talking to the customers. Nobody thought the world needed another video service. Still, he had a famously hard time raising money for his new startup, with a long list of venture capitalists taking a pass. He knew that despite a large number of video conferencing options, the company wasn’t meeting business customers’ needs.

“The year before I left, every day I did not want to go to the office because I did not see a single happy WebEx customer,” Yuan said. But after several years, he found himself losing motivation because customers seemed increasingly unhappy with the product.


Yuan had been an early WebEx employee and stuck with the company when Cisco acquired it. Register for your free pass today.įounded in 2011, Zoom initially targeted the kind of customers who had been using Cisco’s WebEx. Microsoft’s Skype can also host up 50 people on a conference call for up to 4 hours.Join today’s leading executives at the Low-Code/No-Code Summit virtually on November 9. Facebook’s upcoming video conferencing tool can host up to 50 people without a time limit. One hundred people can be on a Google Meet call, the same number allowed in a Zoom call, but Zoom limits meetings to 40 minutes on its free tier. Google is limiting the time for a meeting to 60 minutes, but that limit won’t be enforced until September. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan admitted that his company has “fallen short” on privacy and security. Unlike Zoom, key features of Google Meet include admitting or denying users into conferences and not allowing anonymous users - both problems that Zoom has attempted to stamp out with software updates. Google emphasized Meet’s security features, writing in a blog post that it’s “designed, built, and operated to be secure at scale.”

Usage has increased 30-fold since January and Google Meet now has more than 100 million daily meeting participants, according to Pichai. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in its earnings call Tuesday that Meet recently “surpassed a significant milestone” and is adding 3 million new users every day.
