Subrah Iyar

Early life

Subrah S. Iyar was born and brought up in Mumbai, in a Tamil family. He was educated in Mumbai and graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology. After graduation in 1982, he moved to the US. He worked with Intel, Apple Inc., Quarterdeck, and Teleos Research prior to founding WebEx.

Founding of WebEx

Iyar became an entrepreneur in 1996, when he founded WebEx in partnership with Min Zhu.

The founding of the company was fueled by an interest in web conferencing. Min Zhu, a Stanford-trained System Engineer had been struggling to develop a web-conferencing tool. Coincidentally, during this time, he befriended Subrah Iyar who was running Quarterdeck's research lab and the two formed a partnership.

Growth of WebEx

WebEx struggled to make a profit in its early days, largely because of low bandwidth. However, with the advancement of technology and the shift to broadband technology, it began to emerge as a potent competitor with clients such as Hoover's Online, Oracle, and Tibco Software. WebEx went on to receive its first funding of $25 million in December 1999.

As a result of the vision conceptualized by Subrah Iyar, 2000 became a honeymoon year for WebEx. The revenues crossed the million mark and Subrah Iyar's own net worth rocketed from a paltry $450,000 in January 2000 to $129 million in November 2000. When enquired about it in an interview at a later stage, Subrah Iyar remarked: "It didn't get too scary, because I knew we had done everything based on fundamentals. You always have a feeling of uncertainty. But it was never a feeling of terror."

In 2003, when Microsoft purchased conferencing company Placeware it was thought to be the end of the road for Subrah Iyar and WebEx. However, WebEx survived and completed a $45 million acquisition of Intranets.com in 2005. In fact, more than 3.5 million people use Cisco’s WebEx products every month. As of 2015, Cisco WebEx continues to own a majority of the web conferencing market share.

On March 15, 2007, Cisco Systems purchased WebEx for $3.2 billion.

Founding of Moxtra

In 2012, Iyar became Co-Founder and CEO of Moxtra, Inc. While working at WebEx, Iyar noted the need for the collaboration for people on the move - it was this need that lead to the inspiration for the Moxtra service (API/SDK/APP). Moxtra is a mobile-first, team collaboration and communication platform that received its first round of funding by Cisco and KDDI from Japan.