ZOOMED TO BILLIONS

Eric Yuan is a Chinese American that migrated to the US at the age of 27 in 1997. He could barely speak English. He was born in 1970 in Tai’an, Shandong Province of China. As at 4th grade, he collected construction scraps to recycle copper for money. He had his first degree in Applied Mathematics and his Masters in Engineering. He spent 4 years working in Japan until Bill Gates went there to speak in 1994. He decided to move to California with the little English he could speak but was denied visa 8 times before the future billionaire was allowed on the 9th application to fulfil his dream in 1997.

He was good at writing codes so he spent several years in the US writing codes. He first worked for Webex – a videoconferencing starts up until it was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007 when he became Vice President Engineering. He was about 17 years old when the idea that eventually became ZOOM came to him. He was inspired to develop videotelephony software on a 10-hour train journey to see his fiancée. He could only see her twice in a year and he wanted an easier way to “visit” her. Ideas rule the world. In 2011 while working with Cisco, he pitched a new smartphone friendly video conferencing system to Cisco Management but he was shut down.

Cisco was hoping to compete with the Facebook social networking and his idea was out of place. They found out they made a huge mistake 3 years later. Eric Yuan left Cisco to start ZOOM Video Communications in 2011. He laboured and received many rejections as he could not get any funding for the platform as they kept on telling him that ‘the market is too crowded’. Even his wife initially questioned why he left his comfortable role in Cisco where he was already a top shot but he told her “I KNOW IT IS A LONG JOURNEY AND VERY HARD, BUT IF I DON’T TRY IT, I WILL REGRET IT’. He changed his screen saver to “It can’t be done” in order to get provoked as he kept working. Zoom kicked off in a crowded market but it cut a brand and a style for itself.

As at 2017, Eric Yuan was everything in ZOOM. He was even in the Customer Service sending emails and receiving phone calls whilst also personally chasing after those who cancelled their subscriptions. He is so popular with his own staff as they all gave him 99% approval rating with the outside one percent being his own self rating. He reached the billion mark in April 2019 and still remained unknown among the Forbes top richest people. He was not even near the top 500 richest as at December 2019. Since the pandemic began, he has gatecrashed into the Forbes’ 500 richest humans landing at number 192. He currently worths $10-11 billion dollars. These billions were made on the back of lockdown with many organizations and companies signing up lucrative subscriptions amongst which include Samsung, Uber, Walmart, Capital One, etc.