Right People, Right Opportunity

in this like Silicon Valley where everyone's starting companies, there's always this expectation that as you grow the company, you're gonna be hiring different executives from other companies who've done this, been there, they have the credibility, and that seems to be the playbook. You start a company in the enterprise sector, you wanna hire people from Salesforce, you wanna hire people from Box, you wanna hire people from ServiceNow, And I came in with that mindset into Zoom. And Eric taught me that there's another way to build great companies. And the way Zoom built an incredible team is by bringing in people who worked incredibly hard and who were passionate like Eric was when he started the company. They were not doing it for the title. For a very long time, we didn't have C-level executives at Zoom. They were all head off even until the company went public. It was like the head of marketing and Janine was running everything. She would have been like a CMO at any other company, but she didn't care about that. She cared about Zoom. And Eric gave the right people the right opportunity and these people delivered incredibly well and they were able to grow with the company. And they are still adding a lot of value. And for me, that was a great lesson, but I struggled initially because I felt that everyone else was hiring the who's who and we were not, but we were hiring the right people.

Can you guys speak a little bit more to that? Because it feels like that is something that's very unique and novel for this, for the journey and success of Zoom is, is that both in funding Eric, it was a people-driven decision. There wasn't, and then also Eric, In the culture that you've built, it's been focused, it sounds like, on the qualities of the individuals more than their resumes or their backgrounds. And so can you speak to how— are there any key tactics that you've done to create this culture where people want to work hard for you? Or how do you identify those people that will be outperformers if you can't look at their resumes and their backgrounds and what they've done in the past?

Yeah, so, Ravi, that's a great question. Thank you for sharing that. That's exactly our practice. The reason why is, you know, for any startup companies, it's a long journey, right? You really cannot think about 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 years you can achieve something. When we started Zoom in 2011, our first sort of milestone in terms of we think it'd be a success is 10 years, right? It's a long journey. During that journey, if you hire someone with a great background, you know, already very successful in other companies, do you think they are going to stay with you for like another 10 years? You know, our tactics is more like we want to, you know, hire those people with a greater potential. They want to learn, but also self-motivated. Ideal scenario will be everyone at Zoom, myself included, We can grow ourselves to the next level. We can become a better version of ourselves along with the company growth. Guess what? Those employees, they tend to be very loyal. That's really important. Otherwise, within a long journey, 4 or 5 years later, some employees, especially successful in other companies, or 4 or 5 years, I still did not see anything, they might quit. You don't want to have those employees. That's why even you set up a stretch goal, promote someone may not be ready, but as long as they want to learn, I think that should be okay. That's our philosophy. But anyway, I'm not saying that is perfect. It's also full of challenges, like suddenly you have a pandemic crisis. Guess what? Our leaders, myself included, all employees, they cannot grow themselves with 30 times more traffic. Then you're probably looking back and say, ah, you should have hired someone who did that before, right? Again, this is also learning curve for us as well.