Zoom

Eric Ewan left Cisco's WebEx division because video calls still dropped and froze in 2011. He built Zoom with a single obsession. The call should work every time. The product launched in 2013 with 40-minute free group calls. The time limit was the paywall. 40 minutes in, the call ends. Pay $13 monthly and it never ends. The free tier hooked individuals and small teams. The cutoff was annoying enough to make businesses pay. By 2019, Zoom had 10 million daily participants. Revenue was 330 million. Then the pandemic arrived. Daily participants went from 10 million to 300 million in three months. Revenue quadrupled to 2.