A funny tweet caught our attention around the breaking news that Zoom has surpassed 300 million daily meeting participants this month, despite all the negative headlines due to security issues in the past weeks. To put things into perspective, Zoom had "only" 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019. Then the service took off due to COVID-19: the number of daily users grew to 200 million in March and added another 100 million within a month.  

Of course, big techs want a piece of that success. Facebook last week announced its own version of video chat service, Messenger Rooms. It's a little embarrassing that Google has offered Google Meet for years without gaining much momentum. Making products is one thing, attracting users is another.  

Talking about our own experience: as a small investment firm but with members all over the place, New York, Michigan, Beijing, Shenzhen, etc., Esoterica is indeed a remote-working-native company from the very beginning. We started with Microsoft Teams for internal video calls, used WeChat group video chatting occasionally, and we also tried Google hangouts invited by clients, etc. Eventually, we decided to PAY Zoom for a very simple reason: the quality of video meetings is a lot more superior than any other services out there. It just works, IMHO.   

We believe what makes "it works" is the core technological competency of Zoom. Themselves explained it very well here. Simply put, the "video first, cloud first" approach gives the product a very focused goal: optimize the video experience and make it scalable at any cost. Can other guys say the same thing? Or they fall into the category of "retrofitting a video function for a legacy solution?"