Riding the Wave at Zoom: Priscilla McCarthy Barolo '03

Love it or hate it, Zoom has become a part of daily life for many of us. Whether hopping on for business meetings, joining friends for a virtual happy hour, or catching up face-to-face with loved ones, we’ve turned to the video communications platform to stay connected while maintaining safe distance throughout the pandemic.

All of that screen-sharing and virtual glass-clinking has kept Priscilla McCarthy Barolo ’03 pretty busy. As Zoom’s head of communications, she has helped the company ride a tsunami of new users who have made the product a household name. Before the pandemic, she says, “a lot of what we were doing in marketing was around brand awareness. And then suddenly you’re a verb and you don’t need brand awareness anymore.”

Priscilla started at Zoom in 2013, just two years after it was founded. She was finishing her MBA at Santa Clara University when she responded to a job posting on LinkedIn. After a 20-minute interview, she was hired. Priscilla explains: “They had a couple of sales guys and engineers, and that was it. So they needed someone to do trade show tabletops and website copy and a blog ... basic stuff that even I, with no technical marketing experience, could pretty much figure out.”

Her background in nonprofits helped. Before entering the MBA program, and after earning a BA in sociology from Bowdoin College, she worked for four years at two Boston-area nonprofits, one in workforce development and another in education. Among other duties, she helped with marketing, grant writing, and event planning—all experiences that would benefit her at Zoom.

Every single team, every single process—everything we did had to be pivoted toward dealing with this massive demand.

Priscilla also credits the writing skills she gained at Santa Catalina. Communications is all about writing, she says: “It’s writing emails and chats, it’s writing press releases, statements, blogs, and so forth. And to have those really solid writing skills early on that I could just build on is unusual. I mean, that was why I was hired at Zoom, because a lot of people just don’t have those skills.”

Of course, as the company grew, she grew as well, noting, “There’s kind of no way around having to learn on the job. You just have to ask a lot of questions, find mentors, and then just execute.” Priscilla found a mentor in Chief Marketing Officer Janine Pelosi, who was hired a couple of years after her and “whose presence in my life has been completely transformative.” The two women worked together, with Priscilla having a front-row seat to the building of a marketing team from scratch. Now, after starting out as a one-woman shop, working on a personal laptop in a two-room office, Priscilla can focus on the bigger picture while overseeing a 30-person team of communications professionals. Here, too, she draws on her time at Santa Catalina, where serving in student government, including as student body president, taught her important lessons about leadership. As she explains, building consensus is a big part of her job. “I need to be able to influence and work with people all across my organization,” she says.

And it’s a big organization. With over 5,000 employees, Zoom is far from the startup it was when Priscilla was hired. “It's the biggest company I’ve ever worked for, and a lot of the things that have happened at Zoom are things that would happen maybe once in a person’s career,” she says, referring to events such as an IPO, an acquisition, and tremendous growth in the company over the past year.

Priscilla McCarthy Barolo ’03 has been part of many major milestones for Zoom, including a stock market launch. Here, Priscilla celebrates thelaunch with Zoom CEO and founder Eric Yuan in Times Square.

Courtesy of Priscilla McCarthy Barolo

Priscilla was on maternity leave with her second child from December 2019 through March 2020, just as the pandemic was ramping up. She recalls: “I was kind of watching it from the outside. Suddenly everyone I know is talking about Zoom and asking me how to use it.” From the time she went on leave to the time she returned to work in April, the company reported a 30- fold increase in daily meeting participants, from 10 million participants to over 300 million. More than the challenge of sheer numbers was the type of user engaged with the product. Large businesses, tech companies, and higher education institutions already used Zoom, but suddenly demand was up from smaller businesses, K-12 schools (including Santa Catalina), and individual consumers. With brand awareness pretty much taken care of, half of the communications strategy went toward informing the public what was happening within Zoom—such as how it was addressing security and privacy concerns— and half went toward educating users how best to use the platform. Then there were the press inquiries. Priscilla says that when she returned in April, she was fielding more than a hundred requests a day. “It was big. Every single team, every single process—everything we did had to be pivoted toward dealing with this massive demand.”

But that’s exactly what she loves about her job: No two days are the same. Plus, she has a place at the table. “The fun thing about communications is you’re in the mix,” she says. “When there are decisions being made at the company, policies being made, when you get to be head of communications you’re in the room. You’re not just being told, ‘Hey, we’re rolling this out, go do it.’ So I think I've now gotten to that point in my career, and that’s a really fun place to be intellectually.”

Though the demand on the company presented many challenges, Priscilla knows they were good problems to have, and she’s grateful to play a role in a company that became so much a part of people’s lives. “It was extremely rewarding to feel like people were using your product in a time of great need, and it’s something that people really leaned on.”