Pandemic Makes CEO Zoom Enter the List of Richest People in the World

KOMPAS.com – The Covid-19 pandemic makes a CEO Zoom, Eric Yuan, the more fortunate. The popularity of the Zoom platform for video conferencing during the pandemic made the contents of Yuan’s wallet even thicker.

Magazine Forbes, for the first time, including the name of Eric Yuan in the list of the 400 richest people in the world with a total wealth of 11 billion US dollars or around Rp. 164 trillion.

The 50-year-old man is an engineering graduate from the Shandong Institute of Business and Technology in Yantai, China.

The founder of Zoom was inspired by Bill Gates at an event in Japan in 1994.
Three years later, Yuan was determined to move to Silicon Valley with an English that was not very fluent.

He also left for Uncle Sam’s country after registering visas nine times. In the US, he worked at WebEx and was one of the first 20 hired employees at WebEx startup web conference it.

Also read: Zoom’s Revenue Skyrocketed, Translating Rp. 9 Trillion

WebEx was later acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007 and Yuan served as vice president engineering. In 2011, he came up with the idea to create a video conference platform for smartphone.

But Cisco rejected the idea and chose to leave and then set up his own company called Zoom Video Communication.

Several years later, to be precise in 2019, Zoom conducted an IPO and is now the most downloaded video conference application per August 2020 according to the Sensor Tower research institute.

Because it is so widely used by the world’s population, Zoom’s stock has skyrocketed by nearly 300 percent since it took the floor on the stock exchange.

Summarized KompasTekno from Forbes, Friday (11/09/2020), Eric Yuan became one of 18 new names on the list of the 400 richest people.

Also read: The story of Eric Yuan who founded Zoom after his idea was opposed by Cisco

Apart from Yuan, there are a number of other names that also have a background from the technology industry.

Like Trevor Milton, the founder of the electric vehicle maker Nikola Corp. Ken Xie, an entrepreneur in cybersecurity.

Then there is the name Jim McKelvey, who has partnered with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. As well as William Stone an entrepreneur in financial software.

Also read: Here’s how to change the background in the Zoom application during a video conference

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