World Traveler
Kelly Steckelberg, MPA ’91, has always looked for opportunities to learn something new. Here’s how the CFO managed Zoom’s whirlwind year.
By Todd Savage | Photograph by Dustin Snipes
The world changed earlier for Kelly Steckelberg than it did for most of us. As CFO of Zoom, the Silicon Valley video communications giant, she and other company leaders had been watching the approaching coronavirus storm and anticipating the disturbance it might unleash.
For Zoom, it would be a deluge.
Steckelberg’s last day in the office was March 4, making an earnings call with CEO Eric Yuan, the head of investor relations, and a technical person who came in to assist them. The office had closed to workers the day before, and Zoom’s leaders focused on making sure their employees felt safe and supported. Then they went home.
“We had the luxury that we all lived in the technology,” Steckelberg explains. “We had to adjust to all being remote, but the technology itself obviously was something we were all using every day for every meeting. Really, we were watching very closely what was happening. Even watching, I don’t think we could have predicted how quickly it accelerated. On March 15 everything changed overnight for Zoom.”
That was when many Americans started working from home, and Zoom was on its way to becoming a household name. The company blew up, going from an average 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to 300 million in April 2020.
“Thirty times increase in four months,” Steckelberg says. “We did as much business in six weeks as we had almost done in seven years behind us. It was just incredible. The reaction of the employee base was just as amazing. Everybody rose to the occasion.”
For six weeks, she and the rest of the staff worked every day, including weekends to keep up with customer demand for Zoom. Days blurred as everyone tried “to make sure that all of our customers and prospects that had a need for Zoom had access to it,” she says.
It was an exhausting pace, and Steckelberg still had to juggle her many duties at Zoom. She is responsible for the chief accounting officer function, financial planning and analysis, budgeting and forecasting, procurement, investor relations, tax and treasury, corporate development, and Zoom’s real estate portfolio, including its offices.
Just as dramatic as the growth in their customer base has been the expansion of their head count. Pre-pandemic Zoom had about 2,200 employees; today, that number has more than doubled to 5,000. “The brand awareness for Zoom and the flexibility of hiring has made it really easy,” Steckelberg says. “Of course, it comes with very unique challenges to double your workforce in a complete remote environment, but we’ve done it.”
She has a strong memory of all-hands-on-deck days when they worked hard to keep pace with an accelerating increase in sales. “We were recruiting people from around the company to help and started each day with a review of the queue, which kept growing!” recalls Steckelberg. “But our team stayed with it, doing all we could to get the product to our customers as quickly as possible, and the reward for the long hours was happy customers at the end.”
Locking Down
When Steckelberg was faced with the prospect of lockdown, she knew she didn’t want to spend an uncertain future living and working alone near Zoom headquarters in San Jose, California. She headed to what turned into more than 15 months living with her sister, brother-in-law, their two daughters, and two dogs in Southern California. If Steckelberg was going to be spending the year isolated and working screen-to-screen with her colleagues, she knew she would relish time with her nieces, ages 8 and 10. “I don’t have any children of my own,” she says, “so it’s been a real special experience being there with them.”
We were watching very closely what was happening. Even watching, I don’t think we could have predicted how quickly it accelerated. On March 15 everything changed overnight for Zoom.
She set up a candy jar on her desk in her makeshift office. During our interview, she was dressed comfortably in a Zoom hoodie with a corporate virtual background. At one point her nieces broke through the screen to cozy up to her. “They came to say hi. This happens,” Steckelberg says, with a laugh. “They know where the candy stash is.” During high-profile interviews with CNBC and other media outlets, she locks the door.
While she has been locked down like the rest of us, she has had to put aside her wanderlust. Her tally stands at 60 countries — but over the last year and a half, the farthest she’s gone is to the nearby beach.
Early in her career, a stint as an expat working for PeopleSoft in Amsterdam whet her appetite for exploring new places, because it was easy to visit other countries in Europe.
“That really spurred my love for travel,” she says. “Living in another country and being in Amsterdam, I got the opportunity to experience countries in a different way, which was go sit, have a coffee, and not just run around.”
After she moved back to the States, she started taking her three eldest nieces from another sister on an annual trip to a new country. About 10 years ago, the excursions expanded to include Steckelberg’s mother and a sister. The first “big family adventure,” she says, was to Africa where they all volunteered at a children’s home and went on a safari.
Since then, they’ve gone to the Galapagos, Fiji, and Bora Bora for her 50th birthday. COVID-19 ended that. Next year, she hopes to resume the annual trip, perhaps with a trip to Brazil.
On the Move
Steckelberg is used to moving around. Her family moved often during her childhood, finally settling in Harper, Texas, a small Hill Country town where she had 15 students in her graduating class. She had just two electives in her high school: shop or home economics. She chose the latter. “I had four years of home economics and I was also, by the way, the president of Future Homemakers of America, which is really funny if you know me because I’ve obviously gone on a different trajectory in life.”
Arriving at the Forty Acres, she quickly switched majors from fashion merchandising to accounting at McCombs. (Her father was a CPA.) She took advantage of the five-year MPA program as a student in the program’s early days. “It seemed like a great opportunity to get my master’s done all at one time,” she says. The comprehensive curriculum also prepared her for the CPA exam and gave her a leg up on the competition, she says.
More than that, she says many of the analytical skills she learned have stayed with her.
“The brand awareness for Zoom and the flexibility of hiring has made it really easy,” Steckelberg explains. “Of course, it comes with very unique challenges to double your workforce in a complete remote environment, but we’ve done it.
“It’s a lot more about how you think through problems, how you problem solve, and how do you help make decisions. I think McCombs helped me do well.”
At each stage in her career, she has looked for opportunities that would broaden her skill set. Her first job was with KPMG in public accounting, where she gained exposure to different industries traveling around with Bay Area clients. She started in audit and then did tax work to learn something new. She went on to work in tax forms at PeopleSoft for a year, and then the company offered her a chance to move to Amsterdam.
“I was like, ‘OK, here we go. An opportunity to learn something new.’ I agreed to move to the Amsterdam sight unseen.”
At the same time, she set a goal to become a public company CFO. “That started to help me target the types of roles I was going for,” she says. She landed at WebEx as the corporate controller, and although she thought one day she might have a shot at becoming CFO, the company was acquired by Cisco. New doors, however, opened.
“I had never worked for a company of that size,” she says. “That’s why I got to learn about hardware. I learned about consumers. I continued looking for new things I hadn’t done yet.”
From there she became CFO of the dating site Zoosk, her first experience working in a private company, a start-up, and a consumer web company. She moved into the COO role and learned the operation side of the business. A long sought-after goal of any CFO — taking a company public — ended with disappointment when Zoosk wasn’t able to adjust its business model quickly enough and called off its IPO. When the founders exited the company, the board asked Steckelberg to take over as CEO. “It was one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever done, but it was amazing and rewarding in the end. When you start to see your strategy come together, it’s really rewarding.”
After Zoosk, she expected to take a break, but within two days of updating her LinkedIn profile, she heard from a former colleague who would change her life. A colleague at WebEx, Eric Yuan, now the founder and CEO of Zoom, sent her a message. “I think he wrote something like, ‘It would be a dream if we could work together again.’”
At the time, Zoom was not the noun, verb, and adjective — as in “Zoom fatigue” — that it is today. Nor was Steckelberg very familiar with the company. “I had not paid attention to it,” she says. When she did, she was impressed.
Joining Zoom
Steckelberg was drawn by the opportunity to work with Yuan again and the chance to achieve her ambition of helping take the company public. When Zoom went public in 2019, it was a career highlight, she says. Of course, no one knew Zoom would command the world stage by spring 2020.
Yuan today is pleased he brought her on board. “Kelly is a brilliant leader and some-one who makes Zoom a better place. She has an adept ability to make tough decisions and lead by example. We are so lucky to have her on our leadership team.”
Her earlier CEO experience came into play, especially in a growing company.
As a former CEO, “I had to learn exactly how products, engineering, marketing and sales — and your go-to market strategy — how that all comes together to drive a business and what the levers of that are,” Steckelberg says. “It’s helped me as I came back into a CFO role again to understand how to think about prioritization when things like, we’re setting budgets so that I know, ‘OK, if we’re going to invest here, this is likely what the outcome is going to be,’ and really having seen it and lived it in a very different way than just being more on the sidelines.
“I can be much more active and I can ask different questions because I’ve really seen it and lived it. I think it’s made me a much better CFO.”
Steckelberg is generous with her time. She has mentored young women and recently “came back” to McCombs for a conversation — on Zoom, of course — in the VIP Speaker Series, hosted by the Undergraduate Business Council at UT Austin. A student asked how she handled failure, and she answered in her open, down-to-earth style.
“One of my friends told me, ‘I’ve never interviewed for a job that I didn’t get. And I was like, ‘What?! Then you are definitely not putting yourself out there enough, because I can tell you I’ve interviewed for a lot of jobs that I haven’t gotten.’ And yet look where I am. I’m sitting in what I think is the best job in the world.”
Over the past year, she says, the company has stayed focused on two goals: making sure their platform was stable and available to their customers, and supporting a boom in employees. At the same time, they have strived to make decisions that would be sustainable after the pandemic has calmed. They had to continue adding sales reps to serve their customers and engineers to keep developing their platform. It was a difficult balance to strike.
“We didn’t want to get ahead of ourselves from a hiring perspective,” she says. “How do you prioritize and think about our employees who need some support and help? Our customers need support. In that situation, for example, we turned to third-party partners to help us so that we can get an immediate influx of talent to support us but providing us the ability for long-term flexibility to scale that back down if we need to. That was the challenge.” She had to make sure the company wasn’t overcommitted, or, as she says, “out over our skis.”
Late last year, Steckelberg was named CFO of the Year by the finance news site CFO Dive. The magazine cited her earlier CEO experience, saying that knowing the “strategic side of running a company made her the ideal partner to manage Zoom’s explosive pandemic-led growth.” In the story, analyst Ryan Koontz, who follows Zoom as managing director of Rosenblatt Securities, said, “Kelly and her team have done a tremendous job. She’s an integral part of the machine there.”
Of course, none of that could prepare her for the pandemic’s impact on Zoom. Now as cases of COVID-19 recede, at least in the U.S., and workers begin coming back to the office, how will that impact the company’s fortunes?
Steckelberg says she doesn’t expect us to stop Zooming. “Zoom has become embedded in all aspects of our lives. It’s in our work life. It’s in our children’s learning. It’s in our social life now,” she says. “As we move toward the time where we can all move around the world again more safely, we’re going to want to leverage Zoom for the aspects that make our lives the most convenient.
“The future of work is not ever going to look the way it did before.”
Zoom is positioning itself for the post-pandemic world by building out some features that the company hopes will continue showing its value. One of them is the Smart Gallery, an innovation meant to improve the experience for a mixed environment where some employees are in a conference room and others are remote. Another new development: Zoom Apps — in-meeting applications by third-party developers to improve the meeting experience, such as integration with a service like Dropbox.
“Over time, what you’re going to see is Zoom continues to evolve to be a platform where you spend your workday,” she says. “It’s not just where you come together to meet, but it’s also where you do your work and especially continue to collaborate with colleagues or with friends and family.”
After a year like no other, Steckelberg hasn’t visited Brazil yet, but her role at Zoom has taken her to places few people have been. She is proud of what the company has accomplished and says, “I can’t imagine not having been here with the amazing team and gone through this. It’s a lifelong experience that I’ll never forget.”
Career at a Glance
Hometown
Kerrville, Texas
Education
McCombs School of Business BBA/MPA ’91
First Job
Tax Manager, KPMG, 1991–95
Career Moves
European Finance Director, PeopleSoft, 1995–2000
Various roles, including CFO of WebEx Division, Cisco, 2006–11
CFO, COO, and CEO, Zoosk, 2011–17
CFO, Zoom, 2017-present
Other Roles
Board Member, Qualtrics, Audit Committee Chair
Board Member, Episcopal Community Services of San Francisco
This article appeared in the summer 2021 issue of McCombs magazine. Click on the link to see the full issue.
