Zoom, Leadership, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Video-conferencing company Zoom has succeeded in building a great product, but also a strong philosophy centered on delivering happiness

An economic moat refers to a company’s ability to sustain competitive advantages over rivals to preserve long-term profitability and market share. It turns out that Zoom, whose mission is to make communication frictionless, effectively exemplifies this notion. A cloud-native platform and modern leader in video-conferencing software, Zoom is defined by its scalability, ability to work across different devices, and easy integrations with physical locations and applications. In their S-1 filing (p. 75), they underline the importance of building greater empathy and trust by delivering a solution that just works.

Zoom (ZM) opened at $65 per share at its Nasdaq debut on April 18th — 80.6% above its initial public offering price — placing it as the best performing IPO of the year to raise at least $300 million, with a market capitalization of $20.68 billion and exceeding both Lyft and Pinterest (two other companies to recently go public); from Bloomberg: