Xav Desmet is Head of Digital Natives, Start-ups and Unicorns Asia at Zoom. Before Zoom, he was Strategic Account Director at Microsoft.

👋🏼 How would you explain your job to someone outside tech?

I lead a Team of Zoomies building Zoom's overall partnership with the Digital Natives segment, supporting startups to achieve their growth projections and differentiate their offerings.

How do we do that? By delivering the best-in-class communication tools that best serve their internal collaboration requirements, systems interoperability and can transform their B2C engagements, where we provide the ability to integrate our Meeting & Video SDKs, as a white-labeled service, within their platform.

🧐 What's something about you or your job that would surprise us?

I have a twin brother.

🏆 What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

Les Petits Bilingues — developing a business from scratch to impact French children at scale and reach the 10,000 children coming into our schools was definitely the biggest highlight of my career.

🔍 What's a startup trend or space you're watching this year?‍

A few: sustainable finance, geographic expansion (how to expand quickly) and of course, edtech and healthtech.

• Sustainable finance, as it is important that finance is no longer delivered as it has been for the past 50 years. Web 3.0 will be key to bringing this to reality.
• Geographic expansion as this is how many startups will increase their impact borderlessly.
• Edtech as education has always been close to my heart, an area I want to go back to in the coming years.
• And healthtech because the technologies developed in that space will help millions of people access proper healthcare that they couldn't access in the past.

💼 What advice would you give someone starting out in your industry?

Have a growth mindset. The industry is changing at a pace that we cannot genuinely keep up with — unless we show curiosity, keep learning and stay humble in everything we do.

🗣 What's one thing you can keep talking about for hours?

Diet - didn't expect that, hey? And cinema, of course.

🎥 What's your favorite movie/TV show?

Can't pick just one. So I'll share a few: The Matrix, The Shawshank Redemption, Spirited Away, Django Unchained, Game of Thrones, Trainspotting, Baraka, Samsara, etc.

🍨 What's your go-to ice cream flavor?‍

Chocolate Brownie, vegan, of course.