India is our second biggest user base, opening new office in Bangalore: Zoom founder Eric Yuan

Zoom CEO and co-founder, Eric Yuan on Friday said India is the second largest market for the company after the US and that it was looking to increase its global presence in the future.

In a candid chat with Rajan Anandan, President, TiE Delhi-NCR and MD, Sequoia Capital during the India Internet Day 2020 in association with Floor by 10Times, Yuan added that the new office in Bangalore will help get more feedback from Indian local users and build a friendlier platform for them.

“India is our second biggest market and I want to thank all of our users in the country. The US is the biggest market for Zoom, followed by India and then Japan,” he said.


He also mentioned that many of Zoom’s employees are of Indian origin including its COO Aparna Bawa, President of Product and Engineering Velchamy Sankarlingam and Corporate Chief Information Officer Sunil Madan. Subhra Iyar, co-founder of WebEx has been his advisor and investor in Zoom.

Yuan said that his favorite usage of Zoom in India is telemedicine and the access to a doctor from any part of the country is very impressive.

“Doctors from one city can serve any number of patients in a timely manner. Another best usage is online class and online teaching from central universities, schools and colleges, people are using zoom to continue studies. Apart from this, there are lots of yoga and fitness classes through Zoom in India and they are super interesting. I would add is the wedding celebrations in India over Zoom which is becoming so popular. So from young kids to grandparents, everyone is using Zoom in India and that is very exciting,” he said.

He also mentioned that in the US, now marriages conducted over Zoom are legal and the feature is known as Zoom marriage.

When asked about what the future of video communications look like when the world will come out of Covid-19, Yuan said even after the coronavirus outbreak will be gone, work from home will become a preferred working style for many.

“I think many businesses will allow their employees to work from home. The main challenge here is how to make sure Zoom will give a better and safer experience to users than compared to that in an office environment. Today, people are also suffering through anxiety, depression from too many meetings, so how to make you sure to mitigate those problems giving a virtual face-to-face experience. We believe, at Zoom, we should be able to deliver a better service. However, we are not there yet,” he said.

Yuan said that in the future, sometime in 2040, technologies like Artificial Intelligence, can have some real problems in translation. “However, through video communications, I want the other person to feel the intimacy, to shake hands and feel the presence and these features will be there in the future. In one click, the coffee you have with you, I can smell it from here. I truly believe that’s how we are going to live in the future,” he said.

He added that when that happens, people can work from anywhere and people will feel like they are in the same conference room.

Talking about the future of Zoom Communications, Yuan said that they want to become more and more global. “Prior to the financial crisis caused by the coronavirus, most of the revenue came from North America- US and Canada, a little bit of Europe. More international expansion is another opportunity we are working on. Apart from this, we want to introduce more services. Two years ago we introduced a cloud-based PBX system, now we are going to introduce more services either for enterprise customers or some new use cases,” he said.