Zoom Video Communications, Inc.

Eric Yuan grew up in Shandong Province, China. His girlfriend — later his wife — lived in a city ten hours away by train. Yuan later said that riding that train repeatedly as a young man, he would think: "What if I could see her without travelling?" The question stayed with him. It became the founding motivation for Zoom, which Yuan would not create for another 24 years.

Yuan had joined Cisco through its acquisition of WebEx in 2007 and became one of the company's most senior engineers. By 2011, he was frustrated: WebEx customers consistently told him the product was difficult to use and unreliable. Yuan proposed building a new video platform from scratch. Cisco declined. Yuan left Cisco, taking 40 engineers with him, and founded Zoom in 2011. Cisco, his former employer, became one of his main competitors.

Zoom went public in April 2019 at $36 per share, raising $356 million. The company was already profitable at the time of its IPO — an unusual achievement for a high-growth technology company. Revenue was growing 100% year-over-year. Enterprise customers including Uber, Samsung, and Walmart were paying for Zoom as their primary video conferencing platform. The stock doubled on its first day of trading.

When COVID-19 forced global lockdowns in March 2020, Zoom became the de facto communication platform for hundreds of millions of people simultaneously. Daily meeting participants grew from 10 million in December 2019 to 300 million in April 2020. "Zooming" became a verb. Teachers, therapists, families, and governments conducted their entire professional and personal lives on a platform that most had never heard of six months earlier. Zoom's stock rose 500% in 2020. Eric Yuan became a billionaire many times over.

As pandemic restrictions lifted and people returned to offices, Zoom's growth rate collapsed. The company had hired aggressively during the boom — 8,000 employees by 2022 — and laid off 15% of its workforce in February 2023. The stock fell over 85% from its 2020 peak. Zoom remained a large, profitable business, but the extraordinary circumstances that had briefly made it one of the most important companies in the world had passed. Eric Yuan, in an unusual display of corporate accountability, took a 98% pay cut in 2023.