Warby Parker

Zoom

Warby Parker

Vertically integrated DTC eyewear — Warby Parker designs frames in-house, contracts manufacturing directly (cutting out the brand licensing middlemen), and sells directly to consumers through its website and owned retail stores. The $95 price point (later raised to $95-$195) eliminates the traditional retail markup chain.

Home Try-On program lets customers pick five frames to try for free before buying. Revenue comes from prescription glasses, sunglasses, contact lenses, and eye exams (offered in stores).

The company expanded from pure e-commerce into physical retail with 200+ stores, making it an omnichannel brand rather than purely online.

Zoom

Zoom uses a freemium model. Free accounts get unlimited one-on-one meetings and 40-minute group meetings.

Paid plans start at $13.33/month per user for Pro (meetings up to 30 hours), $18.33/month for Business, and custom pricing for Enterprise. Zoom also charges for add-ons — Zoom Phone (cloud phone system), Zoom Rooms (conference room hardware), and Zoom Contact Center.

The free tier is the hook. The 40-minute limit on group calls creates just enough friction to push power users to pay.

And once one person in a company pays, the whole team follows because nobody wants to be the one whose meetings keep getting cut off.

Warby Parker

Neil Blumenthal lost a pair of glasses backpacking and couldn't believe replacing them cost $700. He mentioned this at Wharton Business School, where classmates Dave Gilboa, Andrew Hunt, and Jeffrey Raider were having the same reaction.

They dug into the economics and discovered that Luxottica — an Italian conglomerate most people have never heard of — owned Ray-Ban, Oakley, LensCrafters, Sunglass Hut, Pearle Vision, and the licensing rights for Chanel, Prada, and Versace. One company controlled the supply chain from design to retail and priced accordingly.

The four students launched Warby Parker in February 2010 with a simple website selling prescription glasses for $95 — about a quarter of what Luxottica charged. GQ called them "the Netflix of eyewear" before they'd shipped their 100th pair.

They hit their first-year sales target in three weeks and had a 20,000-person waitlist within 48 hours of launch.

Zoom

Eric Yuan grew up in Tai'an, a mining city in Shandong province, China. In the mid-1990s he was in his twenties and inspired by the internet boom happening in America.

He applied for a US visa. He was rejected.

He applied again. Rejected again.

Eight times in total over about two years before he was finally approved in 1997. He moved to Silicon Valley with barely any English and joined WebEx as one of its first engineers.

Yuan spent 14 years at WebEx, eventually becoming VP of Engineering. Cisco acquired WebEx in 2007 for $3.2 billion.

Yuan watched Cisco slowly bloat the product with enterprise features while the core video quality deteriorated. He kept telling Cisco leadership they needed to rebuild the product from scratch.

They kept saying no.

In 2011, Yuan quit and took 40 WebEx engineers with him. He founded Zoom Video Communications with a simple thesis: video meetings should just work.

No downloads. No lag.

No "can you hear me?" No IT department required. He built the product that Cisco refused to build.

Warby Parker

The DTC playbook: build a beautiful brand, price dramatically below incumbents, and tell a compelling story about why the old way was a rip-off. The Home Try-On program was brilliant viral marketing — people posted photos of themselves in five different frames on social media asking friends to vote.

"Buy a Pair, Give a Pair" philanthropy (one pair donated for every pair sold) gave the brand a social mission that resonated with millennials. Physical retail expansion gave customers who wanted to try before they buy a real store experience.

Celebrity endorsements and fashion magazine coverage positioned Warby Parker as a lifestyle brand, not just a discount option. Steady geographic expansion of stores into new markets, each store becoming a customer acquisition channel.

Zoom

Zoom grew on one thing: it worked. In a world where every video call started with five minutes of technical issues, Zoom calls just connected.

That reliability was the entire marketing strategy for the first five years.

The freemium model did the rest. Teachers, coaches, therapists, book clubs, and small teams all started on the free tier.

When they hit the 40-minute limit, enough of them converted to paid. And every free meeting was essentially a demo — everyone in the meeting saw how good Zoom was.

Yuan obsessed over simplicity. While competitors like WebEx and GoToMeeting required downloads, plugins, and IT involvement, Zoom worked in the browser with one click.

The learning curve was essentially zero. Your grandmother could figure it out.

That turned out to be extremely important when a pandemic suddenly required your grandmother to figure it out.

Then COVID happened. In March 2020, the world shut down.

Every meeting — work, school, family, doctor, church, happy hour — moved to video. Zoom was already the easiest option.

Daily participants exploded from 10 million to 300 million in four months. The stock went from $70 to $588.

Warby Parker

Luxottica (now EssilorLuxottica after merging with the world's largest lens maker) remains a $90 billion behemoth with resources Warby Parker can't match. Post-IPO stock performance has been disappointing — shares fell over 70% from their 2021 highs as the DTC bubble deflated.

Physical retail expansion is capital-intensive and each store needs to reach profitability. Competition from dozens of DTC eyewear brands (Zenni, EyeBuyDirect, Pair Eyewear) that copied the model and often undercut Warby Parker on price.

Prescription eyewear requires optometrist involvement, which adds complexity and regulatory overhead compared to selling non-prescription consumer products. And the fundamental challenge of glasses: people only buy them every 1-3 years, making customer lifetime value dependent on retention across very long purchase cycles.

Zoom

The post-pandemic hangover has been severe. Zoom's stock peaked at $588 in October 2020 and crashed to under $70 by 2022 — an 88% drop.

The company went from the most exciting tech stock on the planet to a cautionary tale about pandemic valuations. Revenue growth slowed from 300%+ to single digits as people returned to offices and competitors caught up.

Security and "Zoombombing" were early crises. In early 2020, as millions of new users flooded in, trolls discovered they could join open Zoom meetings and share offensive content.

Schools, churches, and AA meetings were disrupted. It turned out Zoom's encryption wasn't truly end-to-end as advertised.

Yuan had to halt all feature development for 90 days and focus exclusively on security fixes. It was a near-death reputational crisis.

Competition from Microsoft Teams and Google Meet intensified. Both companies bundled video calling for free into products that hundreds of millions of people already used.

Microsoft Teams integrated directly into Office 365. Google Meet was built into Gmail.

Zoom had to compete against free products from two of the richest companies on Earth.

Warby Parker

Prescription eyeglasses starting at $95 including basic lenses — the product that broke the Luxottica pricing model. Home Try-On — pick five frames online, receive them in a box, try them at home for free, return what you don't want.

Progressive lenses and blue-light-filtering options for higher-end needs. Prescription and non-prescription sunglasses.

Scout contact lenses — Warby Parker's daily disposable contact lens brand. In-store eye exams with licensed optometrists.

Virtual Try-On using iPhone face-scanning technology to see frames on your face through the app.

Zoom

Zoom Meetings is the core — video calls that actually work. Zoom Webinars handles large-scale events with up to 50,000 attendees.

Zoom Phone is a full cloud-based phone system replacing traditional office phones. Zoom Rooms turns physical conference rooms into one-click video meeting spaces.

Zoom Contact Center competes with established call center software. Zoom Team Chat is their Slack/Teams competitor.

Zoom Whiteboard is a collaborative digital canvas. Zoom Revenue Accelerator uses AI to analyze sales calls.

And Zoom AI Companion summarizes meetings and drafts messages.

Warby Parker

Pre-IPO investors included General Catalyst, Tiger Global Management, T. Rowe Price, Durable Capital Partners, and D1 Capital Partners.

The company went public on the NYSE in September 2021 via direct listing.

Zoom

Sequoia Capital, Emergence Capital, Horizons Ventures (Li Ka-shing), Qualcomm Ventures