Eric Yuan: Until a few weeks ago, very few people had heard this name. Maybe, some have not listened even now.
However, because of him you may have had conversations with different people during the lockdown. For the first time, Eric Yuan, the founder, and chief executive officer of the video conferencing company Zoom, has been included in the list of billionaires of the American magazine Forbes.
According to Forbes, Yuan’s wealth in China’s Shandong province is estimated at 7.8 billion.
Eric Yuan is a Chinese American businessman who was born in 1970.
He studied engineering in China and worked in Japan for four years. Then he wanted to go to America.
In the 1990s, Eric Yuan wanted to join a technology company in California. However, his visa application was rejected eight times before he was allowed to live and work in the United States. He arrived in Silicon Valley in 1997 at the age of 27. That’s where his journey as a programmer at technology company WebEx began.
Decades later, WebX was bought by another large company, Cisco Systems. There, Eric Yuan became the head of the engineering department.
In 2011, he gave Cisco officials the idea to create a video conferencing app. Which can be accessed not only from desktop and tablet, but also from mobile phone.
“When I first imagined Zoom, I was a student at a university in China,” Eric said in an interview with Medium. I had to travel ten hours by train to meet my girlfriend. She is my wife now. ‘
However, raising money for the project was not easy. After leaving Cisco, he started looking for investors. Many responded that there was no place for new players in the business.
According to the Financial Times, Eric Yuan asked his friends and family for money. ‘Timing is important if you are starting a business. The expansion of smartphones and cloud storage companies has created favorable conditions for projects like Zoom, ”he told the Financial Times.
According to him, his wife was not confident in that work either. However, quoting his wife, Eric said that he understood that it was a long and difficult journey and that he would regret it for not trying at that time.
Even before it was listed on the US Stock Exchange in April last year, Zoom’s turnover had not increased much. After being listed on the stock exchange, Zoom became one of the best-performing companies in the cloud software group. When the group was in crisis in September, Zum was in good shape. By December, the situation was normal.
Then things took an unexpected turn. Outbreaks of corona virus (Covid-19) have been reported worldwide. Global financial markets were sinking, with shares of Zoom rising 14 percent. In December, 10 million users came to Zum daily. By March, that number had risen to 200 million. It has increased to Rs 300 million in April.
The market estimates that the value of Eric Yuan has risen by 4 billion in the last three months. Because most of the countries in the world are in lockdown and people needed a platform to communicate with each other.
Of course, platforms such as Microsoft Skype and Google Hangouts were also on the market for business meetings or conversations. But, in spite of all this, Zoom remained the speaker.
How did Erik Yuan make this possible?
According to technology experts, the main reason behind the success of the video conferencing company Zoom is its ease of use. It does not require user registration. Up to 100 people can join up to 40 minutes in one call conference and it’s free. However, questions are being raised about zoom data security and privacy.