Adrian Weckler interviews Zoom’s CIO – via Zoom
HARRY Moseley is cycling through virtual backgrounds in the opening seconds of our Zoom call. What looks like ‘Lost In Translation’’s piano-bar in the Tokyo Park Hyatt Hotel makes way for a tropical island paradise beach.
Sixty-something Moseley, tanned and casually dressed, grabs a bottle of beer from out of shot and grins.
Then it’s back to a more sedate corporate background with the Zoom logo before we start.
Moseley tells me right away that because Zoom is currently in its ‘quiet period’ before quarterly results next week, he can’t update me on the publicly-traded firm’s user numbers.
But from what we know already – a staggering leap from 10 million to 300 million daily users between December and April – it will be a shock if the company hasn’t added another 50 million to 100 million users.
Few would be surprised if it’s even more. Zoom is the single biggest breakthrough service of the 2020 global lockdown, in or out of tech.
Before February, it was a niche business tech tool. Ninety days on, it’s a global household name. Grannies, schoolteachers and friends now use it daily. It has replaced Skype and FaceTime as our default verb for video-conferencing.
And the chief information officer, responsible for making large chunks of it work, is a man from Rathfarnham.
Harry Moseley is unlike a typical CIO. He’s relaxed and easygoing with the emeritus demeanour of a board member rather than the guy logging 14-hour days to make sure everything is ticking.
Part of this is his seniority. A long-serving CIO or CTO for banks and consultancies such as UBS, KPMG, Blackstone and Credit Suisse, he was set to happily retire in 2017 when Zoom founder Eric Yuan rang him up with a new opportunity.
What looked at the time to be a fun job technically steering a mid-tier, steady-growth tech firm through its 2019 IPO has turned into the serendipitous move of a lifetime.
“It’s been a hell of a ride,” Moseley says. “And personally humbling. I joined this small tech startup a little over two years ago. Fast forward to now and we’re at close to 3,000 people in 18 offices around the world, supporting every industry imaginable from schools and business to the British parliament.”
But it hasn’t all been fun. Zoom’s meteoric ascent brought with it security and privacy gaps that the company has had to scramble to fix. ‘Zoombombings’ became a briefly notorious phenomenon, with hackers or pranksters sneaking into private video calls. In Ireland, a Dublin GAA club had to apologise when its children’s virtual training session was hacked with adult content displayed.
Moseley says that it had a big effect internally in the company.
“The headlines have been upsetting. But going from 10 million daily participants to 300 million daily participants is something that most companies would do over the course of two years. We did it over the course of 12 weeks. So we had to play rapid catch up.”
Besides, he says, “those sorts of meeting disruptions can happen on any platform. They’re not only on ours”.
Moseley says that the company is some 60 days into a 90-day security transformation. By the end of it, he pledges, Zoom won’t ever again be known as a security laggard.
“We’re going to set an entirely new standard around security and privacy,” he says. “We’re going to be known as the best platform from that perspective, in addition to being reliable and easy to use.”
Will that persuade the handful of schools, government institutions and corporates that backed away from Zoom because of the bad press? Next week’s user numbers should give a solid clue.
Moseley grew up in Dublin’s Rathfarnham suburb and stayed there all the way through a computer science degree from Trinity College Dublin in 1977. His father made beds for a living, later selling furniture.
Ireland in the 20th century was not always an easy place to grow up Jewish, but Moseley says he had a happy, settled childhood.
“I really enjoyed growing up in Dublin,” he says. “I had a fantastic education between Rathgar National, High School and Trinity. We were kosher at home and used to observe all the Jewish holidays. My father and I would go to synagogue on Saturday morning fairly regularly. We had a great circle of friends and it was a lot of fun.”
His ex-pat status, though, is irreversible.
While he has been back to Dublin a few times, there is no plan to return permanently. Two of his grown-up children
We got 300 million daily participants in 12 weeks, not 2 years
live on opposite coastlines of the US, while a third lives in Switzerland. Ireland is, he says, “lovely” and “a nice place tovisit”.
Looking ahead, Moseley thinks that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is “absolutely” right in planning for up to half of his staff to permanently work remotely, away from physical offices.
But he would say that, wouldn’t he?
“It’s not just because of what we do,” he says. “Companies have now figured out how their employees can work from home. I don’t know how many hundreds of executives I’ve spoken to over the last 10 to 12 weeks who are telling me that.”
But what about culture, serendipity and energy from elevator or water-cooler encounters? Isn’t that a crucial cog in many companies’ productivity and creativity?
“Yes, but you’re going to have social distancing in the office now anyway,” he says.
“The logistics of it mean that up to two-thirds of the office may not be physically present.
“And those that are there will need bigger workspaces, maybe with plexiglass put up between them. The coffee machines and the copiers may be permanently shut down. So the corporate office is going to become a very antiseptic place.”
With a minute or two left on the call, I ask him for a special Zoom feature request: can the company support more proper cameras as instant plug-ins? I’m sick of being a victim of laptops’ woeful 720p webcams.
“I’m talking to the chief product officer in a few hours,” he says.
“I’ll see what we can do.”