– Eric Yuan

The Builders

That the founder and CEO of Zoom Video Communications is on this year’s Impact 50 list should surprise no one. Since launching the company in 2011, he’s been outpacing Microsoft’s Skype and Webex, which he also founded and built into a business that Cisco bought for $3.2 billion in 2007.

Not happy with the new management, Yuan left to do his own thing, focuses on customer satisfaction above all. A lag-free, easy-to-set-up experience that comes with fewer limitations on participant numbers and conference duration are just some of the reasons Zoom has emerged as the go-to video conferencing tool for virtually everyone.

Most of this year’s Impact 50 honorees mentioned Zoom as the technology that’s influenced their work the most in these past months. One of them, WME’s Richard Weitz has created the hottest event for music fans right now, called Quarantunes, an invite-only Zoom concert and interview series featuring music’s biggest names, including Billie Eilish, John Legend, Luke Bryan, Beck, and many others.

The show has, so-far, raised more than $6.7 million for COVID-related charities. The software geniuses at Zoom increased the limit for number of participants to up to 1,000 just for Quarantunes.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, from Zoom Yoga and dancing classes, to marriages, to companies’ annual shareholders’ meetings, to, of course, the thousands of artists, who have kept their fans engaged and connected – there’s hardly a use case that hasn’t been tried and tested on Zoom during these past months.

On April 1, when the crisis was in full swing, Business Insider reported that “the 49-year-old billionaire’s net worth jumped 112% to $7.57 billion in the past three months, as the rest of the world braces for an economic crisis caused by the novel coronavirus.” With many professionals in the live trade bracing themselves for a second wave and recurring lockdown scenarios going forward, there’s no reason for Yuan to assume anything else but continued growth.

Previous

Next