When Eric Yuan first envisioned Zoom, he was trying to solve a simple problem: he wanted to meet his girlfriend without being forced to take a 10 hour train ride. In the 90’s there was simply no solution to this problem. After hearing a speech by Bill Gates, Yuan was inspired by the future of the internet and decided to embark on his journey of becoming the billionaire he is today. After multiple visa rejections Yuan finally arrived at Silicon Valley in 1997 where he worked for WebEx. By 2007 he became Cisco’s Corporate Vice President of engineering and had a huge 6 figure salary. However he was unhappy and frustrated by hearing the constant complaints the customers had against Cisco and their outdated platform, resulting in him quitting his job in 2011, and pursuing his passion.
Zoom was built on years of hard work. Eric Yuan says that during the early stages of launching zoom he individually replied to each customer problem and addressed each customer who cancelled the zoom service. This dedication and hard work continued as he built his company. It paid off. In 9 years by 2019 the company was already worth 620 million with one of the most successful public debuts. Zoom is an application that is used worldwide today that allows up to 100 participants to video call simultaneously. Furthermore if the enterprise plus pack is bought for 20$ a month it allows up to 1000 participants in the same video call. This is one reason why school and many companies switched to zoom during the world wide pandemic.
is when Zoom really began showing its presence in the video conferencing market. Millions of people around the world began looking for a solution to conduct classes or meetings. With its large participants limit, zoom was able to seize the opportunity and boost itself to become one of the leading firms in the industry. Zoom went from a 620 million dollar company to a 42 billion dollar company. Eric Yuan's stake in the company (22%) is now worth over 9 billion dollars.
Although Zoom has been successful so far, many challenges still lie ahead. Recently zoom has been accused of many security issues including sending participants data to Facebook, and being easy to hack into. This has caused many concerns and has forced countries like Singapore to ban the use of Zoom in schools after hackers post inappropriate pictures in meetings. Eric Yuan has publicly apologised for security issues and has promised to fix any holes in their security. Although Zoom suddenly became a billion dollar company, their journey to dominate the industry is far from over.