CRO Zoom, Ryan Azus: It’s Not Zoom Fatigue, It’s Work Fatigue

Ryan Azus, CRO of Zoom, has been selling all his life, from baseball cards as a kid to ads in the school newspaper to — crucially — books every summer in college. Every year, he and and thousands of other young people would be dispersed around the country to sell books door-to-door as part of an entrepreneurial program called Southwestern Advantage. That experience taught him valuable lessons about his own strengths and weaknesses as a salesperson, the diversity of people’s needs, and the joys of hard-earned time off.

In this episode, Ryan and Joubin talk about the silver lining of growing up with divorced parents; what Ryan learned from his epic first job as a book salesman; how he talked his way into a job at WebEx after being screened by HR; the big thing a lot of people on the outside get wrong about working at a successful fast-growing company; joining Zoom in August 2019, right before COVID changed everything; what it feels like when your job is to keep the world connected; and why success is not created in a “sunny meadow.”

In this episode, we cover:

• The biggest difference between Ryan’s childhood and that of his own kids (04:18)
• Why selling books every summer in college was a lucrative, life-changing adventure (10:45)
• Where his competitiveness comes from, and being a “student of business” (22:01)
• The early days of teleconferencing at WebEx, and how Ryan started working there (27:17)
• Building RingCentral from zero to a billion-dollar run rate, and being a “headquarters person” (33:54)
• “Falling forward” and the myth of instant success in business (39:00)
• Zoom fatigue and virtual backgrounds (44:37)
• Keeping up with the explosive growth in demand for Zoom, and the intense pressure of the job (48:23)
• The most important traits Ryan looks for when hiring (55:05)
• Zoom’s stock price and the “belief barrier” (01:00:05)

Links:

• Connect with Ryan
  • LinkedIn
• Connect with Joubin
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm