The rise of Zoom is legendary!
At a time when U.S. stocks plummeted and financial markets were tested by reshuffles, Zoom bucked the market and its market value exceeded $30 billion.
Even more incredibly, the company's stock price has risen 569% this year, and its market value has reached $129 billion, making it one of the 20 most valuable technology companies in the United States;
Looking back at the first day of listing, Zoom's issue price was only $36, the opening price was $65, and the market value of the day did not exceed $20 billion.
It is worth mentioning that the founder of this company is called Yuan Zheng, who is a native of Shandong, China, but he wanted to develop in the United States after he became an adult, so he applied for American citizenship.
And his application for U.S. status was not very smooth, and he finally applied for U.S. status after 8 failures, and he has stayed in the United States ever since.
Nowadays, he has achieved fame, but unfortunately he has become someone else's child, and his success does not belong to China...
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Video conferencing software developer Zoom is undoubtedly the big winner during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Affected by the epidemic, the demand for video conferencing has increased greatly, and Zoom has become a "popular fried chicken".
In the fiscal second quarter ended July 31, Zoom had revenue of $660 million, up 355% year-over-year, and net profit of $186 million, compared to $5.5 million in the year-ago quarter.
The high growth of performance brings about the carnival of the capital market! Shares of online conferencing software Zoom soared more than 40 percent in one day, closing at $457.69;
Zoom is worth about $119.5 billion (about $816.7 billion) at Wednesday's closing price, and by comparison, the nine-year-old company has surpassed established tech giant IBM (about $114.154 billion) and is twice as large as cloud software developer VMware.
Zoom's performance has soared, its stock price has soared, and investors have also made a lot of money.
Li Ka-shing, Hong Kong's richest man, invested a total of $8.5 million in Zoom in 2013 and 2015, holding an 8.5 percent stake in the company, and is now making a handsome return worth about $11 billion, or a third of his wealth.
Zoom,ta is a video conferencing software.
Due to the special period at the beginning of the year, many companies were forced to resume work normally, so remote work is becoming the first choice for many companies, Zoom took advantage of this fire and became a well-deserved giant enterprise in the United States.
Zoom's soaring stock price also led to the wealth of its Chinese CEO Eric Yuan adding more than $6 billion overnight. Based on a market capitalization of $110 billion, Yuan Zheng's current wealth has exceeded $20 billion (about 136 billion yuan).
Behind Zoom's success is the counterattack story of a Shandong code farmer- Yuan Zheng.
Yuan Zheng is not a graduate of a famous school, 27 years old alone in Silicon Valley, people nearly middle-aged people began to start a business, Yuan Zheng has been quite inspirational along the way.
When he first came to the United States more than 20 years ago, his English was still unfavorable, and for several years he could only bury his head in the code and could not communicate well with people;
But it is such a person, relying on personal efforts and struggles, to achieve the current Unicorn status of Zoom in Silicon Valley.
Talking about his early years in Silicon Valley, he said: "I knew I had no choice but to work hard, and that's exactly what I did, even paranoid. This is my only advantage over other competitors. ”
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Yuan Zheng was born in Tai'an, Shandong Province, when he was a child, he was different from other children, showing a rare old age than his peers, and one of his hobbies was to read and buy books, and he could not extricate himself from the ocean of knowledge all day.
In 1987, Yuan Zheng was admitted to Shandong University of Science and Technology (then Shandong Mining Institute), where he studied applied mathematics and computer science.
After graduating from graduate school, Yuan Zheng was sent to Japan by the company where he worked to study. It was there that an important turning point in Yuan Zheng's life appeared.
Back in 1994, bill Gates gave a speech in Japan that opened a new world for Yuan Zheng in the audience.
After listening to the speech, he immediately realized that the Internet is the future and will be able to bring great changes to people's lives and the whole society.
Although the atmosphere of science and technology in Japan was also very good at that time, it was far from enough compared with Silicon Valley, the world's high-tech gathering place. So he decided to go to the world's center of scientific and technological innovation - Silicon Valley in the United States.
However, instead, Yuan Zheng's H-1B visa (special professional/temporary work visa) to the United States after eight visits was eventually rejected.
Finally, after the ninth visa application was approved, Yuan Zheng finally obtained a visa to the United States in 1997 and went to silicon valley of his dreams, starting a fantastic life!
When he first arrived in the United States, Yuan Zheng, like many people, looked for opportunities while working part-time in restaurants, and he did not speak English very well and found a job as a programmer, whose company was WebEx.
This is a video conferencing software company founded by Chinese Zhu Min and Xu Yuqing, and it has to be said that the work experience of this company has greatly affected Yuan Zheng's life in the future.
From engineer to vice president, Yuan Zheng worked at WebEx for 14 years. In 2007, Cisco acquired WebEx for $3.2 billion.
As a result, Yuan Zheng also entered cisco work. Yuan zheng was subsequently promoted to vice president of engineering at Cisco.
Cisco's web conferencing vendor WebEx grew from its initial 10 engineers to more than 800 and increased its revenue growth to more than $800 million.
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For most Chinese engineers in Silicon Valley, reaching such a position is the "peak of life".
But Yuan Zheng was not satisfied with this, and in 2011 he decided to start a business and left with more than 40 engineers to start Zoom.
In the year of entrepreneurship, Yuan Zheng was 41 years old. He is a son, a husband, and a father of three children. Giving up a stable executive position to plunge yourself into the torrent of the unknown, even in Silicon Valley, which encourages innovation, is not an easy choice to make.
It is said that the prototype of Zoom is also related to Yuan Zheng's experience in the 1980s. At that time, he was still in college, and because he was suffering from a long "long-distance relationship" with his girlfriend, he came up with the idea of developing remote video software.
From ordinary code farmers to Silicon Valley upstarts, Yuan Zheng must be diligent and intelligent.
When he worked at WebEx, he was often one of the first people to come to the company and the last to leave, and after founding Zoom, he also maintained a high-intensity work model "hard to engrave in the DNA".
At the beginning of zoom's establishment, the network conferencing software market competition was fierce, and the video conferencing track was already surrounded by strong enemies, before the establishment of giants such as WebEx, followed by Microsoft's Skype, Google's Google Hangouts, Cisco's WebEx, Apple's FaceTime and so on.
However, Yuan Zheng believes that there is still a lack of an application in the market that is practical enough to solve the essential problem of video conferencing. This has also become the direction of Zoom's development.
Zoom finally achieves operational simplicity, users can easily start and share meetings, and participants can enter the meeting by clicking on the link, and these actions can be performed on different terminals.
In the years since, in the competition with these giants, the small company Zoom has unexpectedly developed into the most popular video conferencing platform in the US market.
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In August 2014, Zoom's new version raised the number of virtual meeting participants from 25 to 1,000, allowing the company to reach large organizations, and in July 2016, Zoom's virtual meetings began allowing users to set backgrounds so that people, no matter where they are, can start meetings at any time...
Zoom won the "G2Crowd" Best B2B Software Company in Silicon Valley in 2018; in June 2018, GlassDoor released the first place in the list of the top 100 CEOs of the 2018 Top 100 Companies in the United States, not Zuckerberg, nor Apple CEO Cook, but Yuan Zheng.
With outstanding product performance and the company's proper operation, in April 2019, Zoom landed on the NASDAQ as a Silicon Valley unicorn, and its stock price rose 85% on the day of trading, with a market value of nearly $16 billion. Yuan Zheng, who owns 22 percent of the shares, became a new billionaire.
Yuan Zheng has led Zoom to become a leader in the video conferencing market in just a few years, and today, Zoom is providing video conferencing services to one-third of the World's Top 500 companies.
Affected by the epidemic in March and April this year, the wealth of the world's top ten richest people evaporated by 1.4 trillion yuan. The wealth loss of the world's top 100 entrepreneurs is 2.6 trillion yuan, which is equivalent to more than 400 million yuan per person per day.
In the case of the sharp decline in the wealth of many rich people, Yuan Zheng's wealth broke out against the trend:
In April, Yuan Zheng's wealth reached 56.5 billion yuan, an increase of 77%, ranking first in the world.
Yuan Zheng's company Zoom, during the epidemic, the stock price rose sharply, and the number of daily active users surged from 10 million in December last year to 300 million, an increase of 30 times. Yuan Zheng's net worth in the year of destiny also exceeded 130 billion.
As the saying goes, "people are not many people", although the epidemic has brought unprecedented growth to Yuan Zheng and Zoom, he eventually became someone else's child, and his elbows naturally turned outward!
In May this year, Zoom announced that it would no longer accept individual user registration, and now it has directly stopped its direct sales business in Chinese mainland.
Zoom is reporting that it is reducing its dependence on China, announcing that it will significantly increase its existing staff in India and will also build new data centers at its technology centers in Bangalore and Hyderabad.
It can be said that today's Yuan Zheng and Zoom are gradually drifting away from China...
Resources:
Going to the sea to see "Zoom Yuan Zheng: The Counter-Attack Story of atypical" Code Farmers",
Investment circles "50-year-old Shandong code agricultural wealth myth: market value of 800 billion, VC/PE earned doubled",
Takayama University, "50-year-old counterattack on Yuan Zheng, who is worth 50 billion yuan: if the employee is an old fritter, then his boss is also",
"Zoom market value of $129.1 billion Yuan Zhengzeng visa was rejected 8 times and is now drifting away from China"