How Zoom became the defining app of the coronavirus
era
“The firm was founded nine years ago by
Chinese-American businessman Eric Yuan, 50, formerly vice-president of
engineering at US technology giant Cisco Systems. ...
But this growth has now been far exceeded: Covid-19
meant Zoom’s daily active user base grew by 67 per cent in the first three
months of this year, and the company now has a market value of $42bn. In recent
weeks, its app has been downloaded more than 50 million times from the Google
store alone.
Yuan, who was born in Tai’an, eastern China, in 1950,
moved to the US in the mid-1990s. His net worth is now rising faster than that
of any other person in North America. By the close of trading in New York on 28
March, Yuan’s personal fortune was valued at $7.86bn, a rise of $4.29bn (121
per cent) since the same time last year, according to The Bloomberg Billionaire
Index”.
As the videoconferencing platform’s popularity has
surged, Zoom has scrambled to address a series of data privacy and security
problems.