What’s it like being the CIO of one of the most iconic pandemic-era tech companies?
o-one knows better than Harry Moseley, the Rathfarnham export who has been Zoom’s chief information officer for the last four years.
As he prepares to step down from the video-conferencing platform whose name has become a verb in the English language, Mr Moseley has some parting thoughts on the health of Zoom and office life after the pandemic.
It’s fair to say that the online service started by Eric Yuan has had a rough six months. It has suffered more than most from the downturn in tech stocks, down 60pc since the start of the year and almost 80pc since its peak in late 2020.
This has to be taken in context, Mr Moseley says.
“Let’s look at a few public data points,” he says. “Compare January 2020 to April 30 of this year, which is nine [reportable] quarters. When the pandemic started back in early 2020, we were at about 2,700 employees. Now we are north of 7,000. Our annual revenue back then was $750,000 (€736,000) compared to over $4bn now. Back then we had around 82,000 clients, whereas now it’s north of 500,000 clients. So this company has grown dramatically.”
In other words, he says, the company is playing at a different level with sounder long-term prospects.
Most analysts have a neutral to bullish view of Zoom. One, Ark Investments’ Cathie Wood, sees a seven-fold increase in share price value and an increase in overall Zoom users from 212 million today to 291 million in the next four years.
The company now appears to be betting heavily on enterprise customers.
Recent acquisitions such as Solvvy, a conversational AI startup and new tools such as Zoom IQ, which provides call analytics to sales departments, are designed to deepen its paid user base among corporate customers.
It is also keen to promote its app marketplace where users can find apps such as Miro (a ‘collaborative whiteboard’), or Welo, which lets people jump from group chat to group chat.
Mr Moseley does not see virtual meetings as an endangered species now that most companies are asking employees to return to the office.
“It think it’s here to stay,” he says of the virtual meeting.
“The pandemic was really just a catalyst for the trajectory that we were already on.”
To questions of ‘you would say that, wouldn’t you?’, Mr Moseley says that some virtual remote features will always trump in-person meetings.
“It’s nice not to travel so frequently for business and it’s nice to be able to connect with people around the world so easily,” he says.
“We’re interested in how to create a virtual experience that’s as good, if not better, than the in-person experience. If you look at things like language translation, we’re doing it. In a physical room, you might have a bunch of people meeting who speak different languages. But with language translation in a virtual environment, they can all actually speak their native language and have others read it in their own language. In some ways, that’s better than an in-person experience.”
While this sounds good, most big companies are pushing to get staff back into offices. In Ireland, tech giants such as Apple and Google say it’s because a key part of their creativity and productivity can only happen through in-person collaboration.
Tesla’s Elon Musk goes even further, recently warning staff that they faced being let go if they did not return to daily physical office attendance.
But Mr Moseley thinks that it’s not a binary choice.
“I think the misinterpretation here is that if you’re working remotely, you’ll be doing it five days a week,” he says. “Many companies are selecting two days or three days a week. When you look back at the last two and a half years, it’s been the biggest experiment in the history of work for hundreds of millions of knowledge workers.
“Organisations are still experimenting with things and it will continue like that for another year or so. Only then will we actually know what will work versus what won’t work. But I just can’t see everyone going back to the office five days a week.”
For Mr Moseley himself, it’s the end of a long corporate run. A long-serving CIO or CTO for banks and consultancies such as UBS, KPMG, Blackstone and Credit Suisse, he was originally set to retire in 2017 when Zoom founder Eric Yuan rang him up with a proposal to work at his video-conferencing startup.
What looked at the time to be a fun job technically steering a mid-tier, steady-growth tech firm through its 2019 IPO turned into the serendipitous move of a lifetime.
But this time, he says, he’s hanging up his full-time career boots for good.
“I want to focus more on my family and my friends,” he says of his immediate plans. “During my career, I have been one of those people sitting in my office at 7am and getting home at nine o’clock at night, with kids asleep when I leave and return. Two of them are getting married this year. I want to spend more time with my wife and be more present. We also want to travel a bit. And then my wife and I want to help others, through a couple of different charities.”
He’s staying on as an advisor to Zoom, though, and will consider other advisory roles too.
“It’s been an amazing journey,” he says. “I didn’t know what sort of a ride I was in for. But now I’d like to start going to bed at night without having to set an alarm.”
