Most of us want to hear success stories from business leaders. It serves as our inspiration to move forward throughout the adversities and the hurdles of doing business.
I always believe that if you fall seven times, you get up eight. So take two steps backward, then take three steps forward; that’s how we will progress in what we do.
It’s similar to the case of Eric Yuan, the founder of the communication platform Zoom. A graduate of Shandong University of Science and Technology with Bachelor’s and master’s degrees in applied mathematics and computer science.
In the ’90s, he planned to pursue a career in the U.S. but was denied a visa eight times. Two years later, on his 9th try, he finally got the U.S. visa he dreamed of. He became the vice president of engineering while working for WebEx.
It was all a dream for Mr. Yuan. A solution to connect people and families from long-distance relationships. He established the communication platform Zoom in 2012 in San Jose, California.
After one year of operation, Zoom accumulated a one million user base. The program “Works with Zoom” made the essential platform collaborations with companies like Logitech, Vaddio, and InFocus.
By 2014, Zoom had already achieved ten million users. It jumped to 40 million the following year, with 65,000 enterprises using the app. In addition, zoom had reached a milestone in hosting 1 billion meeting minutes by that year.
Zoom then launched Telehealth in 2017. This platform is a scalable telehealth tool that allows doctors to consult with their patients remotely via video conferencing and chats.
It also collaborated with Polycom’s conferencing systems that allow features like multiple screens and device meetings with calendar integration.
Now, Zoom is utilized by over 750,000 businesses to communicate and collaborate with their distributed teams. It provides access to video and audio conferencing, collaborative workspaces, chats, and other features to 300 million daily meeting participants. It’s compatible with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari browsers.
Zoom’s success occurred before the pandemic. So they’ve expected that the platform will become a big hit as people were sent to work from home or work remotely.
Zoom users were given complimentary 40-minute sessions for groups of up to 100 individuals. It also works on a slow, congested internet connection. Hence, it became one of the most downloadable apps in the market. It’s downloaded 3.5 million times in a single day during its peak.
In many countries, Zoom provides its services to schools for free. It also launched a paid education subscription that allows unlimited meetings with up to 300 individuals. Not only that, but these meetings come with recording, transcription, and a slew of other administrative features.
Its IPO opened at $36.00 per share in April 2019, but in March 2020, Zoom’s share price increased to US$160.98 per share. Zoom is currently valued at $49.86 billion today.
At its height, Zoom founder Eric Yuan added $20 Million to his net worth in just one day. He has an estimated net worth of $5.6 billion today.
Mr. Eric Yuan proves resilience and determination to achieve the goal. As they always say, if the plan doesn’t work, change the plan but not the goal.
Olivia Yu has decades of experience in the Human Resources industry. She’s the Regional Director for Asia Pacific of a famous international HR company. Olivia’s international experience inspires her to write articles about human resources and global staffing.
