Roy Pereira, CEO of Zoom.ai tells CBRE Forward about his company mission and values.
Tell us about you and your company, Zoom.ai.
My name is Roy Pereira, I’m the founder and CEO of Zoom.ai. Zoom.ai is an automated assistant company for all employees. We built an automated version of an executive admin but for all employees. Think about offloading all of the dull and repetitive tasks that you have to do as an employee. We’ve automated all of that.
What was the company’s journey like to get to where it is now?
Zoom started out in a coffee shop. I think all startups start in a coffee shop. The idea of Zoom started off with an annoyance of mine, in terms of how inefficient I thought I was and my team was at the previous company that we were at. We wanted to make it better, make our days better so that we had more time to actually do our real jobs and of course being “techies,” the solution was to automate the stuff that we didn’t want to do during the day.
What is it about your company’s culture that drives success?
Zoom’s culture starts with our values, which really starts with our people. I made a decision early that I wanted to focus most of my time on people. I wanted to bring in the people that I wanted to work with, that I thought would make us successful. It led to us building our own value system that we all believed in and now that has shaped our entire culture. One of those values is diversity for example, not just gender but also cultural diversity. This is a big, big message that I always talk about because I find that that is one of our key strengths and one of the reasons we are successful
How do you as a leader ensure that your culture, is a culture, that creates success?
The number one thing that I did to create success in teams, is to hire the best people I can and ensure sure that they have the same value system. That makes it so much easier later on, as the staff members begin to shape the culture. We have a set of values here at Zoom AI, and that shapes our internal culture. Someone asked me “what do I think success is” and my answer was “coming in every day and wanting to commit with a smile”. I want everyone to feel that way.
What’s next for Zoom.ai?
Zoom is growing right now, we’re just moving from 11 people to 21 people. We’ve just raised a new round of financing to allow for that growth. This phase of the company is about revenue growth and to get to our goal of being the first mover, in this new space. We believe we have created a brand new enterprise software segment that nobody else has found yet. So, we want to get there to launch aggressively first and quickly. We’re going to keep automating all those annoying, boring tasks employees have to do during the day until they’re left with work they actually want to do.
