About Kelly Steckelberg
Kelly Steckelberg, Zoom’s CFO, has discussed the company’s financial performance and strategy in multiple media appearances. In February 2024, she told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that Zoom’s priority is investing for growth, both organically and through potential acquisitions, while also executing a $1.5 billion share repurchase program. She stated that Zoom is expanding its platform with features like workspace reservation to support hybrid work. In November 2023, she said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that Zoom was pleased with its Q3 results, noting that Zoom Phone had crossed the 10% of revenue threshold and that the company uses a “federated approach” to AI, working with multiple models including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. She also highlighted that the company saw stabilization in its online business earlier than expected and reported peak gross margins of 80.5%.
Steckelberg has also addressed the company’s approach to hybrid work and competition. In a December 2023 interview, she said Zoom’s structured hybrid approach, asking employees near an office to come in two days a week, was going well and that 65% of employees remain remote. She has described Microsoft as a partner, stating that Zoom works with customers to integrate its products with Microsoft’s offerings. At Zoomtopia 2023, she said the company would not charge extra for its AI Companion, aiming to make it available to all paying customers. Steckelberg, a UT McCombs alumna, has said that her goal of becoming a public company CFO was realized with Zoom’s IPO, and she has established an endowed scholarship at the business school.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Kelly Steckelberg's recent appearances.
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Transcript (10 segments)
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Craig0:11
Director with the Futurum Group. We are still here live at Zoomtopia 2023. There's a lot of excitement coming just off the main stage seeing the keynotes, and I'm excited to share with you some insights from Kelly Steckelberg, Chief Financial Officer with Zoom. Kelly, how are you doing?
K
Kelly Steckelberg0:24
I'm great, thank you so much for having me today.
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Craig0:26
So we just saw the keynote. There was a lot of energy, a lot of excitement. There's a lot of great things talked about on stage, but I'm curious to get your take on this and how these are going to impact the business going forward.
K
Kelly Steckelberg0:37
Well, one of the first things that was really notable is we talked a lot about AI Companion, right? But interestingly, Eric and team put on the stage information that said Zoom is not charging for this. We want to give this to everyone. Tell me about how that works in terms of making this available to everyone.
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Craig0:50
So we're really excited about Zoom AI Companion and the platform, and so we want all of our paying customers to have access to that. It's going to be such an important component of it, and it's going to have benefit to the financial, which of course I care a lot about. When you think about free-to-paid conversion, we have a large free user base, and this is going to be another way to differentiate the paid version of our product and provide compelling reasons for them to upgrade. And it also becomes another reason why customers love our platform and want to retain and stay with Zoom forever. I've had a chance to be on the beta program for that, and the meeting summary is really good. It works really well. I'm really excited about that.
Now there were a lot of other things that were up there as well too. So with this AI Companion being part of what's available to everyone, what else is part of your growth strategy?
K
Kelly Steckelberg2:10
An important part of our growth strategy is Zoom Phone, our Cloud PBX solution. That product is about four years old now and it's doing really well. Eric mentioned 47 countries now, something like that exactly, and it's over 10% of our revenue, so that's really exciting. And you're going to continue to see growth. We talked about India going into beta, for example, so that's really exciting. And then of course we have Zoom Contact Center, and that is a relatively new product, about a year and a half old, but very exciting. We announced that we have over 500 customers using it today, and that is just going to continue to expand in terms of features and functionality and allow us to start to compete and win some of those really large amazing opportunities.
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Craig3:10
Then built around that we also have workforce management, quality management. There's a lot of great stuff. But you know what really caught my eye, and this is probably not as much in terms of your area, but it was something I was really excited about. I was really excited about Zoom Docs, seeing that product come to bear. Tell me your thoughts on Zoom playing in this document space.
K
Kelly Steckelberg3:30
It's not documents different. No, it's way more than documents, first of all. It will have documents, but it also has capabilities around wikis, around project management. So this is really continuing building out this vision of having Zoom be the platform where you spend your day, making it really easy to collaborate with your colleagues without having to toggle back and forth, and also do it within a meeting without having to even share your screen. So really excited about that future vision of Zoom Docs.
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Craig4:11
You in your growth trajectory going forward, I'm looking forward to see what we can see. Great, thank you for your time and your insights. Thanks everyone. This is Craig with the Futurum Group. Thank you again for tuning in to hear from this. Stay tuned, we'll have some more exciting updates from Zoomtopia 2023.
