You can be grinding for years then Boom! your idea becomes the biggest thing on the planet . This is true of Eric Yuan born February 20, 1970 in Taian, China. Eric earned his bachelor’s degree in applied Mathematics with a minor in computer application from Shandong University of Science and Technology and a Master’s degree in geology and technology from China University of Mining and Technology in Beijing.

In 2011, Eric Yuan decided to kick-start his new venture Zoom. Over 40 engineers from Cisco followed him to his start-up that finally took shape in 2012 and Zoom was launched as a video conferencing app. A few years later, the company had 1,700 employees and its revenue doubled in 2018.

When Yuan had launched Zoom, it faced a tough competition at the market with Skype, Google and Cisco already ruling it. However, two years later, Zoom had over 40 million individual participants that used Zoom’s videoconferencing software. Initially, Zoom offered a free product to people so that they could use the app to stream video calls on their mobile devices or any other devices such as a laptop or their desktops. Interestingly, Zoom still has that offer that provides basic services for free but business clients can pay more for more features.

Till 2015, Zoom didn’t have a dedicated marketing team and they totally relied on the word of mouth promotion for a very long time. To be a more customer-friendly organization, Yuan himself was deeply involved in the whole customer service process and responded personally over email to customers who were not happy with the product and planning to cancel it.

Zoom recently became the most sought after app after the world was hit by coronavirus pandemic. The company behind the app has seen its share price surge and the result is that the wealth of Yuan has also gone up. He was already a billionaire with a net worth of about 6,7 billion USD (2022) according to Forbes.

As the world sat under lockdown during the peak of Covid-19, the working professionals across the globe resorted to Zoom to meet their professional commitments. Despite facing stiff competition from Google, Apple, and Microsoft, Zoom witnessed a rapid ascent in the videoconferencing market. And this because Zoom offers a host of new features and lets a person add over 100 participants to his video call. Apart from that, it also allows the participants to share their presentations during a live video conference. With many other such features, Zoom currently stands tall in the market after benefiting in surprising ways primarily due to the coronavirus pandemic.