Zoom boss Greg Tomb sent packing after 10 months

Video conferencing platform Zoom has fired its president, Greg Tomb 10 months after joining the company.

Mr Tomb’s contract was abruptly terminated “without cause”, according to the company in a regulatory filing.

The former Google executive was appointed as Zoom president in June 2022. A spokesperson for Zoom said the tech firm isn’t looking for a replacement.

Zoom was started in 2011 by Eric Yuan who is the chief executive officer of the company. The platform has rapidly grown, an upturn that accelerated following the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Due to the pandemic-induced lock-downs, Zoom became a preferred means by firms to hold meetings and transact business as employees worked from home. Due to reduction in movement, Zoom also became a favourite channel which business people, families and friends used to connect.

Mr Tomb was expected to tap his experience at Google to sustain and accelerate Zoom’s growth.

While the company reaped big from the pandemic, its fortunes have considerably dwindled and has been unable to replicate its pandemic boom. It has also suffered the same fate of slowing business as other tech companies that have been forced to reduce staff.

In February, Zoom reduced its employees by 15 percent, translating to 1,300 workers. This underlines how much the fortunes of the company have flipped c from the pandemic period when it tripled it’s the number of its staff in tandem with a significant rise in the demand for its services.

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Mr Yuan attributes the reduction in the workforce on their inability to conduct appropriate analysis on the sustainability of the business growth.

“We didn’t take as much time as we should have to thoroughly analyse our teams or assess if we were growing sustainably, toward the highest priorities,” Mr Yuan said.

Zoom now faces rising competition from rivals such as Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Slack. This has forced the app to work towards diversifying its services. Last year, it said it would integrate email and calendar features and a chatbot to help users troubleshoot.

John Kipngetich