There were already plenty of established video conferencing vendors in 2020, including giant companies like Cisco, Microsoft, and Google. Zoom was the first com

There were already plenty of established video conferencing vendors in 2020, including giant companies like Cisco, Microsoft, and Google. Zoom was the first company to make a video conferencing product that was cheap, easy to set up (for free!), and that mostly “just worked”. So when Covid hit and everybody suddenly needed to do video conferencing on their own, with no IT department forcing the choice on them, they were perfectly positioned. The sad message to founders is not that “early” doesn’t win — Zoom was in no way “early” — it’s that “better” doesn’t win. And/or that consumer success and enterprise success have very different leverage points.