The Zoom IPO (with Santi Subotovsky)

**Santi Subotovsky** (0:00)
And how do you get people to be their true selves rather than...

**Ben Gilbert** (0:06)
Whiskey.

**Santi Subotovsky** (0:07)
Where's the whiskey? That should be part of your, like, mobile thing. One of the, like, airplane... In case of urgency, you break the glass. Tequila shot or something.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:33)
Welcome to Season 4, episode 8 of Acquired, the podcast about technology, acquisitions, and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:40)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:41)
And we are your hosts. To introduce our episode today, I want to play you a little clip from Emily Chang on Bloomberg TV. This is from the day of the Zoom IPO, where she interviewed Eric Yuan, the founder and CEO of Zoom. As you can tell from this clip, Eric is incredibly grounded, humble, and quite a different type of Silicon Valley CEO, as we will see when we get into this episode.

**Emily Chang** (1:06)
And that's very exciting, but it's also a lot of pressure. We've seen some of the recent IPOs, like Lyft, have a lot of volatility. Do you feel that pressure?

**Eric Yuan** (1:15)
I do, I do, because the price is too high, so.

**Emily Chang** (1:21)
So you think the price is too high?

**Eric Yuan** (1:24)
Yeah, I think so.
But anyway, yesterday we finalized the price of $36. Today, wow, there's a big pop. So, and it is out of our control. We just go back to work. So.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:39)
This IPO pop last month put Zoom's market cap at $16 billion. Today, just under two months after he said that, it has risen another 60% to $26 billion. So what's going on here? What is Zoom and what makes it so special? Today, on Acquired, we dive in with one of the best people on the planet to help us tell this story, Santi Subotovsky. All right, David. So who is Santi?

**David Rosenthal** (2:07)
We're super lucky to have Santi here today. Santi is a partner of Jake Sabre, who was on the LP show a few months ago and is here at Emergence Capital. Santi has been on the board of Zoom since he led Emergence investment in the company in 2014 And Santi is also from Argentina and like Zoom CEO Eric Yuan is an immigrant to the US, which we are going to talk about a lot more on this episode. Before joining Emergence, Santi, you founded and ran an online learning platform in Argentina and you also did your MBA at HBS. And I think the class you were in had some pretty good entrepreneurs in it, right?

**Santi Subotovsky** (2:44)
We had some great people, yeah. And I actually saw them last week. We were all celebrating our 10th year reunion. Oh, wow.

**David Rosenthal** (2:52)
That's awesome. Is it Rent the Runway came out of your class?

**Santi Subotovsky** (2:57)
CloudFlare.

**David Rosenthal** (2:58)
CloudFlare, yep.

**Santi Subotovsky** (2:59)
A few other great companies.

**David Rosenthal** (3:00)
ThreadUp.

**Santi Subotovsky** (3:00)
So we had a bunch of great companies.

**David Rosenthal** (3:02)
Yeah. That was a great year.

**Santi Subotovsky** (3:04)
I mean, to be honest, it was a horrible year to be looking for a job. It was 2009 So that's why the opportunity cost of starting a business was much lower.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:13)
Yeah. It's kind of funny. It's like your life cost of capital was very low.

**Santi Subotovsky** (3:18)
Exactly.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:21)
Well, Santi, thanks for having us in your office today here at beautiful Emergence Capital. We're super excited to dive in.

**Santi Subotovsky** (3:27)
Thank you for having me.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:28)
Well, if you like the show and you want to go deeper on company building topics with David and I, you can become an acquired limited partner and get access to our second LP only bonus show. On our last episode, we gave an update on a lot of our thinking from the Uber and Lyft episodes, regulation and autonomous vehicles. We also answered a bunch of LP question and answers. If you want to join, you can become an acquired limited partner by clicking the link in the show notes or going to glow.fm slash acquired. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (4:02)
So Crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners and literally Crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because Crusoe's cloud is purpose-built for AI and run on wasted, stranded, or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.