CEO of Zoom, video conferencing platform, Eric Yuan has been named Businessperson of the Year by TIME for the growth of Zoom in pandemic. He began at WebEx as a coder and soon became integral to the creation of his video-conferencing platform.
Zoom’s software was released in 2013, promoting a free basic service for different-size organisations along with many paid levels. Although many other startups relied heavily on free goods to cause widespread saturation, Zoom targeted modest school and company networks that would pay year after year for subscriptions.
The company went public in 2019, to great fanfare, after nearly a decade of steady growth. Zoom was both debt-free and profitable, unlike other tech IPOs racking up massive losses (like Uber, Lyft and Slack). And Zoom was also one of the top employee-rated companies to work for according to Glassdoor and Comparably surveys, thanks in part to Yuan’s frequently repeated emphasis on “delivering happiness.”
Zoom's founder and CEO @ericsyuan is TIME's 2020 Businessperson of the Year #TIMEPOY https://t.co/SrvyYDaasL pic.twitter.com/rGsYBJ6Te8
— TIME (@TIME) December 11, 2020
Growth Of Zoom
When pandemic hit the world at the start of 2020 and people were forced to stay at home and work from home, Zoom started growing with leaps and bounds.
Like the other hundreds of video conferencing sites, Zoom allows individuals to communicate virtually face to face. Zoom is now in the business of connecting everybody, originally intended for businesses and universities, at a time when separation is so necessary.
Zoom became the most downloaded Android App in India from March 25 to April 10, according to download estimates from app analytics firm Sensor Tower, surpassing the popular TikTok social media app.
Another study by the data analytics company App Annie announced that Zoom was downloaded 14x more than the weekly average during Q4 of 2019 in the U.S. during the week of March 15-21.
In March, Zoom’s use shot up from a previous maximum estimate of 10 million to 200 million regular meeting participants. This number increased to 300 million the following month. Zoom is used by 58 percent of Fortune 500 businesses.
Origin Of Zoom
Yuan remembers in an interview with Forbes how those 40 Cisco engineers believed in his goal and left to create Zoom with him.
Within a few months of its launch, Zoom crossed a million users, 10 million in one year and 40 million by February 2015.
$100 million was invested in Zoom by Sequoia Capital in January 2017. The company is now worth $1 billion, putting it in the vaunted unicorn band.
In April 2019, after two years, Zoom went public at $36 per share, which priced the business at $9.2 billion, around nine times its previous valuation.
On its very first trading day, shares rose 72 percent and almost 84 percent from the initial price in just over a week, which made Zoom the best-performing IPO of a U.S.-based company in 2019. Zoom finished 2019 profitably going.
Zoom stocks traded at a volume 36 times higher than what the company had expected for 2021 in late March this year. In the last three months, Yuan’s net worth of 49 years soared 112 percent to $7 billion, and he is now ranked number 231 on Bloomberg’s Billionaire list.
A lot of ups and downs such as security issues, anti-china sentiment and different privacy problems came on the way but Zoom kept growing and as we talk about it, Zoom has market cap $113.8 billion. Certainly, Eric Yuan deserves the credit for this growth.
