Refused U.S. visa eight times, Zoom CEO is now a billionaire

Zoom requires native install and has better resolution.

Zoom is like what WebEx would have been in an alternate universe without Cisco acquiring them.

We're a fully remote team so I haven't used Zoom rooms, that does seem like something of a moat if widely deployed in a company.

Hmm, how does it work?

If you have general-purpose hardware (e.g. a raspberry pi hooked up to a TV camera and microphone) then it seems you shouldn't be locked in...

We had all Cisco/Tandberg rooms for years, then evaluated BlueJeans and HighFive, then trialed Zoom and Zoom won on the merits, even displacing existing deployed rooms with other tech.

So, sure, we’re not about to rip out our Zoom Rooms, but that’s because of the “Zoom” part not the “Room” part of that phrase.

My experience with Meet has been nothing but nightmarish.

It’s not surprising but Meet is Chrome only. Tat was a dealbreaker for me.

I remember reading about this and liked what I saw, so believe me when I say this is coming from a supporter, but...

Why? Why here? Stop that! You could have made your point without the plug and humblebrag.

I'm sure they do, I just don't see what it is yet.

Google meet works for me on Chrome, also, appear.in works great on Firefox.

Works for me on Uber Conference, Gentoo/Xfce

Slack? At least my colleague shares his screen with me weekly and he uses Linux mint

I didn't mean to understate the value of "just" executing better. That's exactly why I think Zoom is interesting. In tech I think people often overestimate the value of a novel idea and underestimate the value of consistently good execution. I don't think Zoom has succeeded through feature innovation but by implementing features better than the competition and making something that "just works". That doesn't mean I think their achievement is somehow less impressive or that they don't have a great product. Quite the opposite in fact.

So he was founding engineer of WebEx, build the team, build the product, but the product was not good enough because "of its older architecture, particularly a lack of usability, reliability, and video quality" !?! Wasn't that his responsibility as VP of WebEx ?

> Eric Yuan was the founding engineer of WebEx

The article and wikipedia don't say he was a founder of Webex; just a early and lead engineer.

I'm interesting in the claim regarding Zoom being head-and-shoulders above Google's product. Hangouts is certainly well past it's EOL but the Google Meet product (focused on the enterprise product) works very well and seamlessly integrates into the gsuite set of applications while also providing a great in-room experience.

I haven't personally used Zoom rooms (have connected to some via a laptop though). I have deployed and used Google Meet's in-room experience for a number of years... I suspect the combination of in-room and mobile workers is the key selling point around these products. Zoom have managed to tap that market very successfully while Google still struggle with selling their solution (despite it being very effective) - they seem to fail at making people aware it even exists.

Anyone deployed both? What has the experience been? Pain points of deploying / operating sizeable fleets of either product?

AirTable.

I wonder how many other products in the enterprise space could be built by startups, by simply doing a much, much better job than incumbents, despite incumbent moats and lock-in. On the other hand, there are also examples of poor products that attempted to "solve" things like word processing better than MS Word or Google Docs and yet are simply much worse products than the incumbents.

I think in the video conferencing space, all existing solutions were simply bad. Video conferencing has been bad everywhere I have worked and we just shrug our shoulders and joke that someone first needs to build strong AI, and only then will video conferencing be solved. Zoom decided to do something about it top-to-bottom, end-to-end. Very inspiring founder and company.

Dark pattern is just a tools, it is especially useful when the product is not that good.

Sometime as a sales or marketing person you are not really in control of the product, in these case these "dark" pattern are useful.

> MBA ideas of an economic moat - lock-in, stickiness, etc - are "dark patterns".

Dramatic statement. I am an SWE and an MBA. There are merits to thinking about every aspect of the business. Tech/Product is just one - an important one in a Saas company, but still just one.

> But there are "light patterns": you can stay ahead in a technological race if you keep running;

This is another way of saying "build it and they will come". You have to combine good business/economic sense with great products.

Apple didn't just get to be Apple by staying ahead in a technological race. Arguably, they are behind a lot of other phone makers in specs. But they have a lot of people thinking about ecosystems, lock-in, marketing and other "MBA" concepts.

This nonsensical hate on MBAs has to got to stop. It's just so shallow.

I agree with the general sentiment of your statement. Isn’t it ironic that the strongest defenders of capitalism are the ones which are trying the hardest (and often succeeding) to monopolize (a niche of) the market?

While I would not argue that there are never arrangements in which centralization and support of monopolies may make some sense (e.g., to speed up coordination or make it easier to enforce regulations), there should probably be more consideration about the societal down sides of “economic moats”.

One interesting example for the economic and societal benefits of this “collaborative” kind of thinking could probabaly be the dutch health care provider buurtzog, which has been scaling like crazy but also seems to have been engaging with a variety of partners to actually help other people understand and replicate what makes buurtzog work. I bet that exchange was fruitful and interesting to both sides (there is always more to learn) but also premised on the idea that the primary goal of any business should be to help solve a problem and not to (primarily) defend its own existance. Encouragingly, both things generally correlate if done in the “right” order but it’s also hard work.

https://www.buurtzorg.com/collaboration/our-partners/

P.S. I know I am somewhat simplyfing here as there are certainly different phases in a businesses lifecycle where different trade-offs may be applicable. I am just commenting on a general mindset which seems to be pretty prevalent.

I always thought the economic moat was supposed to be some feat of R&D that is hard to replicate.

Like figuring out how to make an AI that functions as a human-quality call center representative. It's not that there's a network effect or something, just that noone else can figure out how to do it without a tremendous investment.

That's more light than dark, right?

Or to paraphrase while the “dark patterns” require moment of inspiration creativeness, being better most of the times rehires diligence and discipline which are much lower hanging fruits.

But it’s also a real danger to just thinking in absolutes like “the best product always wins” are also supremely context dependant. For every example there is always a counter example

By "works better" I mean that it largely implements all the same features of other competing video conferencing products but does them better / more reliably / with better usability. "It just works."

Compared to Slack we have fewer problems with people dropping out of calls or losing audio or video and audio and video quality are generally better. Screen sharing is better quality and less buggy and let's you share individual windows. For calls with people outside the team we have fewer problems connecting than with Skype or Google Hangouts. It handles people calling in by phone or from mobile devices with poor connections more robustly. Overall no real revolutionary features, just consistently good execution.

My company pays for Slack and despite have 1Gbps fiber I constantly have issues hearing via Slack. It was so bad the entire company switched to Zoom just so the remote people could participate properly.

Webex.... I’d rather use Skype. We replaced webex at work with Google Meet. No longer have the issues we had with webex like people not being able to join or not hear audio.

90% of Webex calls I've been on for some reason didn't allow using computer audio. I couldn't even tell if it's disabled or somehow broken. That makes it hard to use good headphones. I usually ended up calling the webex phone number via hangouts, so that I can use a real headset. However, in a way it doesn't really matter because it's hard for other participants to use good audio equipment as well and so everyone else is using some echoey conference room speakerphone or worse put their phones on speakerphone. Zoom treats computer audio like a first class citizen and I've typically found that 80-100% of participants call in via that and end up using a good Sennheiser headset or similar. That makes for a so much better experience.

Everytime I am on some damn webex with people yelling into their conference room speakerphones, I just want to hang up.

In addition to everything already mentioned, Zoom has great screen sharing quality and very, very importantly, is the only solution that supports Linux with a native client, which means proper screen sharing and much more.

Linux desktop adoption may not be great, but many good software engineers use it for work. In our team it's hard to find a windows laptop. Zoom is the only software that works for us.

Déjà vu

Used Appear.in at my current employer for a while. IIRC it was P2P, like Skype used to be, with really easy onboarding though a single URL. (No sign up required.)

But it didn't scale to more that 3 users. That may have changed since.

We used appear.in for a few months, and paid for a premium "room". It was nice to just give someone a URL (no client or extension required). It could be better now, but we had a lot of problems with call quality.

I am a heavy Zoom video conference user but I had no idea about Slack-like chat features. Thank you!

I think most people start with Slack and it becomes ingrained, then they outgrow Hangouts / Meet or try Zoom and realize it's less laggy and a better experience for video overall. I've never heard of their chat app before now.

Slack has the stickiness / lock-in that I think Zoom may lack (at least for the video part). We have years of history in Slack that we wouldn't really want to lose moving to an alternative. We do also make fairly heavy use of integrations. Trialling and switching to an alternative would be a much bigger investment and less incremental than starting to use Zoom for video calls was, even for a relatively small startup like us.

They may also have a bit of a marketing problem. I was vaguely aware they had some chat functionality but didn't realize it was as feature competitive with Slack as it appears on that page.

Thanks for the replies;I guess there aren't any obvious reasons to use both (unless one really likes slack;I'm not sure that I do, although slack is bearable through wee-slack / weechat plugin).

I am a little confused about the pricing model for zoom;it looks like it's roughly one "host" pr team lead + extra money for "rooms"? And/or one host pr team member if you want full flexibility?

Not the OP but it's likely the question he is referring to happened at the consulate not at the port of entry. Buying a ticket without a visa (as I did once) was pretentious and therefore my visa was denied

In some cases interviews are so short that you cannot even show any of these evidence

Heh, I remember crossing into the US by land for a conference.

Their first question was whether I was presenting or attending. I just said "attending", without getting into the specifics of an un-conference.

It's also common in the world of dance workshops, where international teachers tour several countries, teaching every weekend in another town. They usually just claim to be tourists, even though they're clearly travelling for business.

I'm still waiting for the big splash when one or two get investigated. It must happen at some point, their teaching is heavily advertised on workshop web sites. Their presence is the main feature of those workshops, after all.

That's not smart. As a non-citizen you don't have much rights. If you get caught lying, you'll be barred from entering the US and you'll probably need to resolve to court.

How they can find out:

- Booking of where you are staying.

- Going through your phone/laptop.

- Paper/Flyers for your company or the event.

- A big event is happening and you are kinda fitting the bill for it.

See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19697430

Don't be discouraged. Re-apply. The process depends on the interview guy. He'll get to decide your fate. His decision will depend on whether he likes you or not. Probably based on appearance.

Sorry that my home country is doing this kind of thing too. I'm familiar with the US Visa system because i've gone through the process a few times. But it makes me sad that Australia is playing silly games too.

Or maybe they already had plenty of info about you that you didn't know about?

Yes, it sometimes depends on the agent that's interviewing you. I've heard so many stories of this kind. Try again but try not to get interviewed by the the same person.

Visas are issued by the Department of State, not USCIS. USCIS can adjust the status of foreigners already within the US but that's not the same thing.

Are you using chrome and also have either uBO-Extra or Nano Defender installed? If not it's most likely the ads are being served by Instart Logic. [1] [2]

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBO-Extra/wiki/Sites-on-which-uBO...

[2] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/227

Yes, probably, however, an O Visa requires the recipient to be working in the USA upon receipt, it's not meant for tourism for business or pleasure (including tech conferences).

The trend is more important. US has only 32% of the world's unicorns. Even if you remove all the Chinese companies, US is 58% of the total, far less than the number a few years back. India and Southeast Asia are especially doing well if you put the size of their economies into consideration. In five years, these unicorns could grow into nowadays Amazon and Facebook, and the same holds true for the shift in the job market.

At the very least immigrants would need to fill out a ton of paperwork and endure multiple bureaucratic round trips, assuming the destination country even has the capacity to deal with all applications.

Then the message behind a detailed screening is: "We consider you as an extreme risk, which is only worth taking if we can exploit you enough."

You can't bring your spouse or family, at least not without significant hurdles, and if that process is too easy, screening for the original criteria is undermined.

Considering restrictive immigration policies against your people, you won't be able to find a supportive immigrant community and are totally dependent on fitting in with the locals, and the locals letting you fit in. Just ask Westerners in Japan.

For any kind of screening to work, you also need a ruthless border control and immigration enforcement, including mass deportations if neccessary. An effective enforcement has to - at the least - "inconvenience" anybody looking remotely like an immigrant, before being shown any paperwork.

Many of these factors don't play out in many countries, but mostly with the result that the screening doesn't really work that well. The US and Canada have rather big populations of undocumented immigrants, despite having detailed and sophisticated "screening" processes.

[0], [1],[2], etc. could be reasonably see as part of the Australian government's relative unfriendliness to tech companies and privacy laws at least compared to other countries. Whether the australian government is in fact friendly or not is immaterial if capital investment and companies do not want to put a large amount of money/effort into the Australian tech scene.

[0]: https://kvoa.com/news/national-news/2019/04/14/foreign-gover...

[1]: https://hothardware.com/news/australia-controversial-encrypt...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/technology/australia-cell...

I know of someone who went on to interview at Google a total of sixteen times.

Australia has an order of magnitude fewer people, has a different regulatory environment (e.g. their counter-terrorism bill that lets them coerce engineers into cooperation, and in the wake of the NZ shooting they're proposing to imprison website operates that don't take down content quickly enough - and apparently 90 minutes isn't quick enough) and is located in completely different region of the world. There are plenty of reasons why one would want to move to the US but not Australia.

He was probably going for an investors visa which is a permanent immigrant visa not a short term visa. Gotta get the paperwork right. And for such visas there is a lot of paperwork.

Australia has little tech industry to speak of and software engineers aren't terribly respected or well-compensated. The US is a much better bet for technologists.

He could have just bought entry on H-5 with a $500K investment in "Harlem".

Eh, some people will be tempted, knowing that their children will get a decent education that doesn't cost the world, healthcare, gun violence, etc. But you're right, we'll likely never convince the people who have never experienced another culture and who value money over everything. Edit: Even if we did pay more, the language barrier is still pretty high.

Meh. GDPR involves not being a dick with other people’s data, and don’t Americans have to deal with inter-state tax as well?

In the UK I can setup a new legal company in an hour online, and have access to top notch banking from across Europe almost immediately.

You mean, like, a profitable business model?

If you’re a “serious company” then surely you can pay for a great service like this.

Yes the free tier is 40 min for meetings with more than 2 people.

I switched to the first paid tier and am a happy customer. The best quality of service and software in the space I’ve seen so far.

Good - they should make money. If you enjoy the service, you should be paying for it right?

I second this. My Linux laptop drops to seconds-per-frame when I share my screen on zoom. It's gotten to the point where I have other co-workers pull up my presentations on their Macs.

Ha - I had the same thought recently... We agreed about a year ago to all just use Zoom in our mostly remote organization to get off of the ~5 other free solutions we were using. I saw the latest invoice and it stopped my breath a bit, "We're spending how much on Zoom now?" But every one of our vendors uses it, all of our contractors do, it's just everywhere. (Granted this is all in SV so whatever that's worth)