The crazy ideas...

Salesforce Founder and CEO Marc Benioff interviewed Zoom Founder and CEO Eric Yuan yesterday during this year's Dreamforce conference.

The story he told of how Zoom began should serve as a lesson for us all.

You see, prior to founding Zoom, Eric Yuan was a Vice-President at Cisco. And based on his ongoing conversations with customers during that period, Yuan became convinced that the future of collaboration would not be "social" as most of the people at Cisco believed.

He believed the future of collaboration would be video. And he said as much to his Cisco senior colleagues.

Cisco's response, according to Yuan?

"Nobody listened to me. They said, Eric, you're crazy..."

So he left Cisco and started Zoom.

Cisco has been around since 1984, and today their market capitalization is $240 billion. That's roughly $6.5 billion of value for every year the company has existed. Not bad, right?

Zoom was only started in 2011, but today their market cap is already $87 billion.

That's $8.7 billion per year since the company's founding... and they're just getting started.

Don't be so easy to dismiss your employee's ideas.

The results of doing so could be significant.