10 newyork| february1–14, 2021
intelligencer
The G r oup Por t r a it:Running Zoom on ZoomHow this group of executives
managed a period of explosive growth
while working from their own platform.By James D. Walsh“we were an in-office culture,” says Janine Pelosi,
Zoom’s chief marketing officer, of the pre-pandemicera.
Like many workplaces, Zoom’s went remote last March. But
while employees at other companies may have been focused
on establishing their at-home workflow or salvaging what-
ever office culture they could, Zoom employees were busy
keeping up with the exponential growth resulting from
the office exodus. According to the New York Times, on
March 15, nearly 600,000 people—many of whom hadpre-
sumably spent the past decade using Skype, ooVoo,and
Google Meet—downloaded the app in a 24-hour period. By
April, the number of daily meeting participants reached
300 million, up from 10 million in December 2019. “Wehad
to change job descriptions. Our team wasn’t out there doing
physical events,” says Pelosi, Zooming in from her sun-
soaked home office in San Jose. “They were out there creat-
ing hundreds of how-to YouTube videos for use cases that
were brand new to us.”
Those unplanned use cases represent the digital transpo-
sition of our lives, from maternity wards to funeral homes.
There were dates, tarot-card readings, book clubs, power
hours, and Mary-Kate Olsen’s divorce hearing. Almost over-
night, Zoom, which was founded in 2011, went from a
wonky business-to-business enterprise to a household verb.
There were, of course, stumbling blocks along the way.
“Zoom bombers” popped into meetings, forcing the com-
pany to review its security features; Zoom was caught send-
ing data to Facebook without explicitly telling users; and it
faced backlash after it bowed to pressure from the Chinese
government and suspended three activists planning a com-
memoration of the Tiananmen Square massacre. (Zoom
quickly reinstated their accounts.)
Despite the hiccups, and users increasingly fatigued by the
sight of their own faces, Zoom has garnered plenty of praise
(its founder, Eric Yuan, was named Time’s 2020 Business-
person of the Year) and mountains of money. Zoom’s share
price, which started 2020 below $70, hit $559 in mid-
October with a market cap that, for a fleeting moment,was
slightly higher than ExxonMobil’s. The vaccination rollout
has taken a bite out of that price—it started 2021 at $360—
with investors wondering how many people will attend
Virtual Game Night once they’ve been inoculated.
While many people feel as if the pandemic has cleaved
their lives into two eras, Zoom executives prefer to say it has
simply accelerated the company’s trajectory. “I don’t think
there’s a before and after,” says Pelosi. “Some of those
changes that we’ve all experienced are going to live with us,
and we’re going to evolve the product to whatever the future
looks like.” ■