The Queen does it. Boris does it. Even educated celebrities do it. Let’s Zoom it, let’s fall in love...
Okay, the lyrics are tweaked but 200 million users a day in lockdown around the world really have fallen for the video conferencing app.
Zoom allows friends and families to have group chats, schools to run classes, fitness nuts to join live sessions and many of us to work from home – all online.
Pub quizzes have attracted literally hundreds of thousands of participants.
And Her Majesty, self-isolating at Windsor, marked her 94th birthday last Tuesday with her family on Zoom. A royal see-all of approval, you could call it.
That’s the good news for Chinese founder Eric Yuan – who used love as his inspiration for Zoom way back in the late 1980s. Long before smartphones and easy-to-use video calls, he dreamed of a way he really could see his girlfriend, who lived 10 hours away.
The bad news is that hackers love Zoom too. In the past week technicians have been upgrading the app to stop pranksters – some naked – who have “Zoom-bombed” private sessions, yelling obscenities and even screening porn.
Some NHS meetings were targeted. And security issues prompted space agency NASA to halt its use of Zoom.
The app was designed for business and makes its money by selling corporate licences at £15.99 per month per host.
Now, in the age of coronavirus, it has gone from an office tool to a virtual gathering place in an era of social distancing.
And it has made 50-year-old Yuan the 293rd richest man in the world. He owns 20 per cent and his worth has risen more than $4billion since the Covid-19 crisis, to an estimated $7.9billion.
Shareholders say Zoom would be worth more if it wasn’t for the hackers – and one is even suing the company for allegedly playing down privacy flaws.
The fuss didn’t stop the likes of the Rolling Stones using it for the uplifting One World: Together At Home concert.
Rocker Jon Bon Jovi, reality star Kim Kardashian and actor Matthew McConaughey all surprised tutors in the US when they dropped in on lectures.
And self-isolating PM Boris Johnson tuned in via Zoom to chair top-level meetings before the virus laid him so low.
Zoom’s success can be traced back to 1987, when lovesick Yuan was 18 and studying maths and computer science at Shandong University. Desperate to see girlfriend Sherry, who lived hundreds of miles away, his creative mind wandered.
He says: “While enduring a 10-hour train ride from college to visit my girlfriend, I’d be so exhausted I would fall asleep standing and be kept upright by passengers packed around me. I detested those rides and would imagine other ways I could visit her without travelling.”
So Zoom “began as a recurring daydream”, a way to see and talk with Sherry without the torturous train trip.
Maybe not quite a Mills & Boon love story. More Mills & Zoom.
The son of mining engineers, Yuan graduated with a master’s degree. After years of hated train rides, he was 22 when he wed Sherry. But his journey to create Zoom would take longer – helped by a nudge from Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Yuan was working in Japan in 1994 when he heard a speech by Gates – now 64 and worth $98billion – praising the potential of the embryonic internet. It was enough to convince Yuan his own future lay in California’s Silicon Valley. He applied for a work visa nine times before getting to the US.
Yuan says: “I was prepared to apply 30 times. When I came to America I didn’t speak English, but I could write software. There are more smart people than me in Silicon Valley, but I know I can achieve a little more.
“If my competitors say: ‘I work eight hours a day,’ then I can work 10. If you don’t need sleep, I don’t. Hard work is in my DNA.”
Yuan joined California-based video-conferencing group Webex in 1997, routinely staying up all night coding on Fridays, then heading off to play a soccer match the next day. When Webex was bought by Cisco for $3.2billion in 2007 Yuan was named head of engineering.
In 2012 he left his $400,000 job to create Zoom. “It was time to make the video communications solution I imagined during my train trips a reality,” he says.
Yuan persuaded friends to invest $3million in his start-up. But, as Jim Scheinman, one of Zoom’s earliest backers, admits: “Everyone in venture capital thought it was a terrible idea.”
Based in Santa Clara, California, Yuan had a run-down office with a faulty lift and the all-important video camera parked atop a cheap fridge.
When Zoom launched in 2013 he promised Sherry the app would mean he could spend more time at home.
He took just eight business trips in the five years before Zoom went public last year. And he never misses his three kids’ sports matches.
Yuan says: “I do not want to miss any important moments. I love time with my kids. They play basketball, dance or play computer games. After I spend enough time with the kids, I feel I am fully recharged.”
Yuan drives a Tesla and lives in a $5million hilltop castle – with basketball court for son Rory – in Saratoga.
His motto is “delivering happiness”, but that has been challenging as Zoom soared from 10 million to 200 million daily users in the last month – attracting hackers along the way.
“The journey is so painful,” admits Yuan. He promises to “learn the hard lessons, become better and stronger.”
He dreams of Zoom eventually linking with artificial intelligence, providing “a virtual hug that you can feel... or when you drink tea or coffee, with one click you digitise a smell.”
Yuan believes the pandemic may permanently change the way businesses approach working from home.
He adds: “I hope this crisis can be over very, very soon. But one thing I know for sure is that companies will learn this is the way to work. Maybe let every employee work from home, maybe once a week.”
While global stock prices plummet, Zoom’s has been soaring.
But Yuan insists: “If I was 25 maybe I would be very excited. Those things don’t have any impact on me. Money is not going to bring me happiness.”
But it does mean that lovestruck teen can go by private jet instead of crowded train. And he got his girl.
