Zoom S-1 Teardown

Over the past month since I joined Metasys, we have been evaluating our end-to-end tech stack. Though we are ingrained in the Microsoft ecosystem (and are happy customers), we haven’t been as pleased with Skype for Business. Video conferencing software is key for our business — we have 75+ employees in different cities across the US and India. Skype for Business, especially when communicating internationally, lags.

From the ground up, as we polled members of our organization for their favorite video conferencing platforms, Zoom became a more and more common response. I had used Zoom sparingly over the years and always had a good experience, but hadn’t used it extensively enough to have an informed opinion. After using it extensively over the past few weeks, and evaluating it deeply against its competitors, it’s become patently obvious how much better a product it is — both for its user experience and because of its integration agility (e.g. it’s integration with HubSpot has incredible utility for us). We’re starting to use Zoom at scale for our company and it’s going to be materially impactful for us.

So it was only timely that as we were evaluating Zoom, the company filed its S-1 and went public. Last year, I did an S-1 teardown of Dropbox and many folks enjoyed reading it. I decided to do a similar excise for Zoom, since while I was extremely pleased with the product, I knew how competitive a market it was — everyone from bigtech (Google, Facebook, Microsoft Cisco) to point solutions (GoToMeeting, BlueJeans) are trying to solve video conferencing; I…