TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

Zoom S-1

219 pointsby wwwdonohueabout 6 years ago

31 comments

GolfyMcGabout 6 years ago
Zoom charged us a fraction of what we paid other more traditional video conferencing companies (GoToMeeting, WebEx) and provided I think a better product in many regards. Not only that, they paid out our previous contract too (worth tens of thousands of dollars). At the time I thought either (a) they&#x27;re losing tons of money to close deals and grow or (b) traditional video conferencing companies are built on infrastructure that was required 10 years ago but with modern advances in web technology they either didn&#x27;t lower their operating costs by upgrading or did and just take more money off the top. Either way, they&#x27;re overcharging. Based on Zoom&#x27;s financials, I think it&#x27;s the latter.<p>If I recall correctly, the founder of Zoom came from Cisco. This all strikes me as someone technical seeing all the waste at their existing job and trying to make change happen. Cisco couldn&#x27;t see the forest for the trees and never took them up on their ideas. The employee believed there was a large enough technology gap so they left and totally undercut them by delivering the same (or better) product for a fraction of the cost.
评论 #19466363 未加载
评论 #19468146 未加载
评论 #19469062 未加载
gz5about 6 years ago
$7M profit is superb, especially in a domain which many folks claimed was saturated and a commodity.<p>Another example that execution is still underrated. Everyone looks for the what do you (startup x) do that is so different and unique from the rest of the world to enable you to win. Feature-focused conversation.<p>Often the real answer is &quot;simply&quot; world class execution at scale, including business model, UX, GTM etc - as it remains the most difficult task.<p>Nice work, Zoom.
评论 #19469488 未加载
vmabout 6 years ago
I&#x27;m surprised by the negative comments on Zoom&#x27;s profitability. The return on sales&#x2F;marketing investment is <i>exceptional</i>. Net income is a poor indicator of high growth SaaS company health.<p>See this deck for a detailed view on SaaS metrics that shows the cashflow benefit of investing in quality growth. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slideshare.net&#x2F;DavidSkok&#x2F;the-saas-business-model-and-metrics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slideshare.net&#x2F;DavidSkok&#x2F;the-saas-business-model...</a>
评论 #19469186 未加载
tiffanyhabout 6 years ago
I’m impressed by their financials.<p>$330m total revenues and $7m profit.<p>Rarely do we hear these days about a tech company IPO who’s profitable.
评论 #19468838 未加载
评论 #19469821 未加载
CedarMillsabout 6 years ago
We&#x27;ve tested so many video conference solutions (Cisco, Starleaf, Skype, Google Hangouts, etc) and landed on Zoom. Nice to see this!
评论 #19466004 未加载
presscastabout 6 years ago
Zoom is objectively a good software solution but being <i>de facto</i> forced to install <i>yet another</i> piece of software just to take business meetings has left a sour taste in my mouth.<p>It&#x27;s objectively impressive that they managed to &quot;force&quot; me to install software. Hats off... but I plan on ditching them as soon as a viable alternative appears.<p>I have no real point here, other than this: I wonder if my sentiment is general, and whether or not this might bite them later down the road? Probably not.
评论 #19466560 未加载
评论 #19466274 未加载
评论 #19467060 未加载
评论 #19466872 未加载
评论 #19466077 未加载
评论 #19466415 未加载
评论 #19466073 未加载
评论 #19468435 未加载
mrnobody_67about 6 years ago
One interesting metric to think about is valuation vs. money raised.<p>Zoom will go public at $3b+ after only raising $145m. That&#x27;s a 20x+<p>Compare to Lyft. $25b valuation after $5b in capital. That&#x27;s 5x.
评论 #19467895 未加载
评论 #19469116 未加载
baxtrabout 6 years ago
We use slack and zoom. And I have to say: Zoom is so, so much better than Slack re quality and stability. And it’s not even a close call. Slack calls are simply poor quality and unstable.
评论 #19469581 未加载
评论 #19468360 未加载
评论 #19468591 未加载
jedbergabout 6 years ago
I&#x27;ve used zoom before but never hosted with it. It&#x27;s always been great. I just looked at their pricing page and was shocked that they give so much on their free tier!<p>It seems like a small company could get away with the free tier for a long time. My only question is, for that 40 minute time out on meetings, does that mean you can just rejoin after 40 minutes, or is that a lifetime limit on the account? Is the only thing stopping you from having a longer meeting really just the hassle of rejoining every 40 minutes?
评论 #19467585 未加载
评论 #19468728 未加载
评论 #19467870 未加载
评论 #19467130 未加载
评论 #19521657 未加载
评论 #19467127 未加载
tamalsaha001about 6 years ago
We have been a very happy user of zoom. Thankfully they have a native client for Ubuntu. I&#x27;m glad to see them go public.
评论 #19468910 未加载
yingw787about 6 years ago
Profitability is underrated. I am jelly for those who have Zoom stock options :)<p>Congratulations to the Zoom team! I use Zoom at work and it&#x27;s a fantastic product (maybe a little rough around the edges for UX IMHO but the video&#x2F;audio is excellent). If it doesn&#x27;t get acquired I would be looking out to acquire some stock :)
gianpajabout 6 years ago
&gt; Since our founding in 2011, we have experienced rapid growth. For example, our headcount has grown to 1,702 full-time employees as of January 31, 2019,<p>WOW. That&#x27;s a lot of people
评论 #19467035 未加载
bevacquaabout 6 years ago
As an avid user of Zoom, this makes perfect sense. We&#x27;ve had meetings with upwards of 600 participants without any issues, it&#x27;s impressive software.
chadmhornerabout 6 years ago
As someone who has never been super-impressed with the Zoom experience, I&#x27;m impressed.<p>Also, what is their moat exactly?
评论 #19466482 未加载
评论 #19466095 未加载
评论 #19466006 未加载
评论 #19466295 未加载
评论 #19466039 未加载
capreseabout 6 years ago
One yield curve inversion and everyone rushes to press submit on their draft S-1
sidcoolabout 6 years ago
I have been using Zoom for the past 2 years after using GoToMeeting, Hangouts video (now google meet), WebEx, Fuze etc. and I must say Zoom is the best of the lot. I don&#x27;t know what they do differently that Google cannot, but the product works amazingly well.
ejzabout 6 years ago
Look at that positive cash flow!<p>Can&#x27;t wait to dig in deeper. But they show that execution and business strategy (like HIPAA compliance) are still important.
cozzydabout 6 years ago
Unlike WebEx and some others, Zoom has a Linux client that&#x27;s not terrible. It&#x27;d be nice if it just worked with webrtc though...
评论 #19468930 未加载
dannykwellsabout 6 years ago
Literally signed up for Robinhood for this. I think Zoom is a potentially transformative&#x2F;disruptive product - at our organization it is essentially enabling us to become more and more remote, with all the benefits that brings, and no downsides. I would honestly use whatever tool they rolled out - email client, chat&#x2F;slack competitor, whatever. Their products just work.
alex_youngabout 6 years ago
Looks like they are running their own data centers and colos?
评论 #19466123 未加载
评论 #19466115 未加载
pkzabout 6 years ago
Zoom is one of the few web meeting solutions that just works - even for people without the client. I was surprised to see that they seem to skipped WebRTC and have a custom implementation instead: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webrtchacks.com&#x2F;zoom-avoids-using-webrtc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;webrtchacks.com&#x2F;zoom-avoids-using-webrtc&#x2F;</a>
zitterbewegungabout 6 years ago
I have used zoom and it is by far the best experience for teleconferencing .
StreamBrightabout 6 years ago
Zoom is the best conferencing solution right now, hands down.
lxeabout 6 years ago
Excited about this. Surprisingly good product overall and what looks like profit!
buboardabout 6 years ago
i hope they grow to eat skype. will be justice for what MS did to skype
splonkabout 6 years ago
I can&#x27;t speak much towards Zoom&#x27;s quality at videoconferencing relative to their competitors (I think it&#x27;s bad, but I&#x27;ve never had any VC solution that I thought was good), but as a chat client, using it with the combination of Linux and Android is utter garbage, and I say that after seeing significant improvement in the Linux client in the past ~6 months or so. Something about how those two clients try to sync with each other is broken, to the point where it&#x27;s not reliable at all as a chat client, and I have to tell people to just text me if there&#x27;s anything urgent. Other people in my company who are on iOS&#x2F;Mac say it&#x27;s fine, though.<p>- Get a chat directly to you? It might show up on your phone. Or maybe not. There are plenty of times where I show up to work in the morning and notice that somebody&#x27;s tried to get a hold of me the night before.<p>- Actually answer a message on your phone? Usually the chat history will show up on the Linux client. Eventually. Probably. (This is a wild improvement from last year where it was guaranteed to never show up at all, and there appeared to be no way to refresh chat history. I spent way too much time copy and pasting text from chats on my phone to some place where I could use it on desktop). Possibly worse, sometimes the chat history is just missing some lines with no indication of where.<p>- Even now, sometimes chat history just completely disappears on the desktop client. Restarting generally fixes this. It seems like whatever triggers the load for older chat when you scroll up in history sometimes just breaks entirely.<p>- Speaking of scrolling, have fun with that. It&#x27;s always a fun surprise to see where the cursor ends up. I think maybe it&#x27;s trying to target the last read message but it fails pretty badly, possibly from loading images and rerendering? All I know is that I scroll up a couple pages, wait a little while for all the text to stop jumping around, and then try to figure out where I am and scroll back to where I&#x27;d originally targeted.<p>- Answer a message on the desktop client and continue a conversation in chat on the desktop? Have fun having your phone buzz with notifications for maybe half the responses you receive.<p>- Have someone @me in a chat somewhere? I&#x27;ll probably get that notification. Somebody does @all in another chat? Well, that takes priority, so I&#x27;ll just kill the @all notification and never notice the one targeted for me. Admittedly this is partially a culture problem with people abusing @all in our chats.<p>- There a bunch of other functional things that are&#x2F;were left out of the Linux client that I can at least understand as being lower priority (gif support, code formatting), but still make it clear that the Linux client is a second class citizen at best.<p>The whole experience has been bad enough that I get actively annoyed at seeing giant Zoom ads plastered all over 101, on buses, at T5 at JFK, etc. and think about what those cost compared to allocating some engineering time to fixing really basic bugs. Maybe it&#x27;s a cheaper solution than the other options, I don&#x27;t really know. But if the decision was up to me, Zoom would be basically last on my list if any significant portion of the company was using Linux.
评论 #19467932 未加载
alexcnwyabout 6 years ago
blows my mind that video conferencing software with such low switching costs can be worth so much.
评论 #19466087 未加载
评论 #19466093 未加载
评论 #19466448 未加载
hexoabout 6 years ago
I know Zoom, they are making guitar effects!
评论 #19471644 未加载
temp129838about 6 years ago
One of the first mainstream, non-gaming applications for VR has got to be meetings.
评论 #19466622 未加载
chris32heabout 6 years ago
Zoom&#x27;s questionable
throwawayseaabout 6 years ago
They have 1702 employees and $7.6m profit (net income) on $331m revenues for 2019. Their financial statement shows that of their $263m in 2019 operating expense, $186m is in sales and marketing. $33m in R&amp;D. And nearly $2m of that $7.5m in net income comes from interest income and other income.<p>The gross margin figures (82% for 2019) are defined as &quot;revenue - cost of revenue&quot;. And cost of revenue is:<p>&gt; Cost of revenue primarily consists of costs related to hosting our video-first communications platform and providing general operating support services to our customers. These costs are comprised of co-located data center costs, third-party cloud hosting costs, integrated third-party public switched telephone network (PSTN) services, personnel-related expenses, amortization of capitalized software development costs and allocated overhead costs. Indirect overhead associated with corporate facilities and related depreciation is allocated to cost of revenue and operating expenses based on applicable headcount.<p>While I do like that they are profitable and have a plan for profit, unlike the other glitzier tech IPOs, it does seem like the return on capital is low. They have received $146m in funding to date (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;organization&#x2F;zoom-video-communications" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;organization&#x2F;zoom-video-communica...</a>) after all, and in the end, $7.6m&#x2F;year is not much to show for it. This is really a bet that in the long term, the costs in sales, marketing, R&amp;D, and General Administration can be cut severely so that the revenue can be realized as mostly profit. Hard to know if that day will actually come.
评论 #19467349 未加载
评论 #19467351 未加载
评论 #19467390 未加载