Innovating from within

Cisco acquired Webex in 2007 for whopping $3.2B and along with the products they got the mind of Eric Yuan as well. Eric is founding engineer of WebEx and grew it from 0 to wherever it was when Cisco acquired it. A question comes to mind -

Why Cisco could not build Zoom ?

Eric Said

"I got to this point in life by never giving up on my inspiration — which has always been to build a video communications solution that people will love. This has been a long-time passion of mine. I was born in mainland China. I first envisioned Zoom while I was a college student in China in the late ‘80s, and would take over 10-hour (each way) train rides to visit my girlfriend (now my wife). My desire for an easier way to see her face-to-face without the arduous travel became the impetus for my long path from student to entrepreneur. In 1997 I immigrated to San Jose, CA and secured a position as one of the founding engineers at a small start-up called Webex. I stayed with Webex for the next 14 years, and proudly grew the team I managed from 10 engineers to more than 800 worldwide, and contributed to revenue growth from $0 to more than $800M. In speaking with Webex customers, I realized that the solution suffered from some deep flaws due to its older architecture, particularly a lack of usability, reliability, and video quality. Simply put, it was hard to use and it didn’t work. I knew that Cisco needed to rebuild Webex from the ground up – from the back-end architecture to the user interface to the sales model. I told Cisco leadership, but they didn’t listen. I struck out on my own in 2011, and, fortunately, dozens of Webex’s most talented and visionary engineers soon joined me. Together we spent the next two years building Zoom 1.0, a unified video and web conferencing software that ran seamlessly across mobile, desktop devices, and conference room systems. Since then we’ve developed the product into the best video communications software in the world and built a global team of over 1,100 passionate people."

Sometimes, it's needed to be done ground-up, fresh, new ideas augured with prior learnings and experiences.

As a leader, listening is most effective skill. Learn to find intrinsic motivations of people and channel them.