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A few weeks ago people may not have known Eric Yuan, they may not even recognize him yet, but the world has continued to keep in touch thanks to him, a fact that has brought him great monetary benefits during the coronavirus pandemic.
Yuan is the founder of the company in charge of the Zoom video conferencing application, And thanks to the earnings he has received in recent weeks due to high demand, for the first time he entered the Forbes magazine list of billionaires, with an estimated fortune of $ 7.8 billion.
However, Yuan had to go a long way to get to where he is today, he was born in the province of Shangong, in China, studied engineering and when he finished he went to work for 4 years in Japan, finally decided to take the big leap and travel to the United States to join the wave of innovation that occurred in the 90’s.
The North American country denied him the visa up to 8 times until he was finally granted it, so in 1997 and at the age of 27 he arrived to start a life in Silicon Valley.
Despite knowing little English, he found a job as a programmer at WebEx, a company that was acquired after 10 years by Cisco Systems, where Yuan became the vice president of engineering.
In 2011 Yuan presented the idea of an application to make video conferences to Cisco executives, however this was rejected, before this Yuan made the decision to resign and found his own business: Zoom.
He had a hard time finding investors to support his idea so he had to borrow from friends and family to get started.
According to an interview, the idea of the application originated when he was still in China and had to take a three of 10 hours to go see his girlfriend, who is his current wife, “he hated those trips and used to imagine other ways of visiting my girlfriend without having to travel… those dreams eventually became Zoom’s foundation. ”
The company maintained a medium profile until the end of last year when the coronavirus outbreak began, as financial markets fell, Zoom’s share rose nearly 140% so far in 2020.
According to company figures, in December they had 10 million users a day, in March they already had 200 million and in April they registered 300 million a day.
In a few months the Yuan’s fortune would have increased more than 4,000 million dollars, all thanks to quarantine measures and the high demand for remote communication, even some governments in the world have used the application to organize meetings.
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