Play all audios:
_Clockwise from top left:_ ERIC S. YUAN, founder/CEO; JANINE PELOSI, CMO; BRENDAN ITTELSON, CTO; KELLY STECKLBERG, CFO; VELCHAMY SANKARLINGAM, President of Engineering and Product; and
APARNA BAWA, COO. Photo: Devin Yalkin We were an in-office culture,” says Janine Pelosi, Zoom’s chief marketing officer, of the pre-pandemic era. 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 whatever 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 had presumably 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. “We had 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 creating
hundreds of how-to YouTube videos for use cases that were brand new to us.” Those unplanned use cases represent the digital transposition 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 overnight, 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 company to review its security
features; Zoom was caught sending 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 commemoration 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 Businessperson 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.” _*This article appears in the February 1, 2021, issue of _New York_ Magazine.
__SUBSCRIBE NOW!_