Who Own Zoom

hamza_naem · March 25, 2022, 11:48am

Who own zoom? Eric Yuan founded Zoom, a video communication technology that went public in April 2019. Zoom use increased significantly during the coronavirus outbreak. He formerly worked at Cisco as a manager of WebEx, which Cisco bought in 2007.

zoom

What is Zoom?

Zoom Video Communications, Inc. is a San Jose, California-based communications technology firm.

It provides videotelephony and online chat services via a cloud-based peer-to-peer software platform that is used for video communications (Meetings), messaging (Chat), voice calls (Phone), virtual meeting rooms for video meetings (Rooms), virtual events (Events), and contact centres (Contact Center), as well as an open platform that enables third-party developers to build custom applications on its unified communications platform (Developer Platform).

Zoom

Who Founded Zoom?

Eric S. Yuan was born on 20 February 1970 in New York City. He is a Chinese-American millionaire businessman, engineer, and the CEO and creator of Zoom Video Communication, which he controls 22% of.

Yuan Yuan’s early years were spent as the son of geological engineers. He was born and reared in the Chinese city of Tai’an, Shandong Province. Yuan gathered construction waste in fourth grade in order to recycle copper for money.

He was motivated to build videotelephony software as a first-year university student in 1987 while taking 10-hour train journeys to see his fiancée and searching for a more convenient method to “visit” her.

He graduated from Shandong University of Science and Technology with a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics and a minor in computer application and a master’s degree in geological engineering from China University of Mining and Technology in Beijing. Yuan graduated in 2006 from Stanford University’s executive programme.

History of Zoom

The Formative Years

Eric Yuan, a former corporate vice president of Cisco Webex, invented Zoom. He left Cisco in April 2011 with 40 engineers to start Saasbee, Inc. The startup struggled to attract investors due to the belief that the videotelephony industry was saturated.

Subrah Iyar, creator of WebEx, former Cisco SVP and General Counsel Dan Scheinman, and venture investors Matt Ocko, TSVC, and Bill Tai invested $3 million in the startup in June 2011.

The corporation changed its name to Zoom in May 2012, in response to Thacher Hurd’s children’s book Zoom City. Zoom debuted a beta version in September 2012 that allowed for the hosting of conferences with up to 15 video attendees. Stanford University became the company’s first client in November 2012.

The service started in January 2013 after a $6 million Series A financing led by Qualcomm Ventures, Yahoo! founder Jerry Yang, WebEx creator Subrah Iyar, and former Cisco Senior Vice President and General Counsel Dan Scheinman.

Growth of Zoom

Zoom partnered with B2B collaboration software vendors such as Redbooth in July 2013 and also launched a programme called Works with Zoom, which partnered with Logitech, Vaddio, and InFocus.

The startup secured $6.5 million in a Series B investment led by Horizon Ventures and current investors in September 2013. It had 3 million users at the time. Daily users grew to more over 200 million in April 2020.

IPO and Onward

The firm went public on April 18, 2019 via an initial public offering. The share price climbed more than 72 percent on the first day of trade after pricing at US$36 per share. Dropbox funded $5 million in Zoom before to its first public offering.

Zoom use rose during the COVID-19 epidemic as distant employment, online education (which was utilised by hundreds of schools), and online social interactions expanded. In a number of nations, the firm provided its services for free to K–12 schools.

By February 2020, Zoom has accumulated 2.22 million users - more than it had in all of 2019. Zoom had 2.13 million downloads in a single day in March 2020. Participants in daily meetings increased from around ten million in December 2019 to more than 300 million in April 2020.

Zoom bought Kites, a language translation firm powered by artificial intelligence, in June 2021 with the goal of eliminating language barriers during video chats. Zoom’s $14.7 billion acquisition bid for contact centre business Five9 was rejected by Five9 shareholders in September 2021.

In Short
Zoom was created by Eric Yuan, a former corporate vice president of Cisco Webex. He left Cisco in April 2011 with a team of 40 engineers to create Saasbee, Inc, which he owns 22% of. After a $6 million Series A round of funding, Zoom was formed in January 2013.

Privacy and security issues

Zoom has been chastised for “security flaws and bad design decisions” that have led in increased scrutiny of the company’s software.
Additionally, the company’s privacy and corporate data sharing procedures have been challenged. Security experts and journalists have blasted the corporation for its lack of openness and questionable encryption techniques.
Zoom previously said in its marketing materials that it used “end-to-end encryption,” but subsequently clarified that it meant “from Zoom end point to Zoom end point” (essentially between Zoom servers and Zoom clients), which The Intercept condemned as deceptive and “dishonest.”
In March 2020, New York State Attorney General Letitia James opened an investigation into Zoom’s privacy and security practises; the investigation concluded on May 7, 2020, with Zoom declining to acknowledge wrongdoing but promising to strengthen security procedures.
In the same month, Zoom was sued in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California as part of a class-action complaint.
According to the complaint, Zoom breached its customers’ privacy by sharing personal data with Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn, failed to prevent hackers from interrupting Zoom sessions, and falsely stated that Zoom sessions were encrypted end-to-end. Zoom paid $86 million to resolve this claim.

Censorship

Citizen Lab warned in April 2020 that outsourcing a significant portion of Zoom’s research and development to China might “expose Zoom to Chinese government coercion.” Zoom came under fire in June 2020 for shutting down various accounts of organisations located in the United States and Hong Kong, including Zhou Fengsuo and two other human rights advocates remembering the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations and massacre.

The accounts were eventually reopened, with the firm claiming that it “will have a new approach in place for dealing with such circumstances” in the future.

Zoom said that it is required to “abide by local laws,” including “laws enacted by regimes hostile to free expression.” Zoom later confessed that it had taken down activist accounts at the Chinese government’s request.

A bipartisan group of United States senators responded by requesting clarity from the firm about the event. Zoom said in late August 2020 that it will halt direct sales of its product in mainland China, in part in reaction to critiques of its disabling of the activist’s accounts and comments of worry from the US Justice Department.

Zoom’s Workforce

Zoom has approximately 2,500 workers as of January 2020, including 1,396 in the United States and 1,136 elsewhere. According to reports, a subsidiary in China employs 700 people who work on Zoom software development.

Zoom announced plans to establish additional research and development facilities in Pittsburgh and Phoenix in May 2020, with the goal of hiring up to 500 engineers in each city over the following several years. Zoom announced the establishment of a new technology centre in Bangalore, India, in July 2020.

The facility would house engineering, information technology, and business operations positions. Zoom is expanding its data centre footprint in Singapore in August 2020. Glassdoor’s 2019 “Best Places to Work” study placed the organisation in second place.

Why is Zoom Suddenly so Popular?

zoom popular

In a fast-paced environment where meetings consume the majority of people’s workdays, travel savings and effective meetings are critical factors driving video conferencing usage.
There are several comparisons in business-to-business (B2B) between prominent collaboration applications, all of which are vying for a piece of the video conferencing pie.
To achieve such widespread adoption in a market dominated by Microsoft, Google, GoToMeeting, and Cisco, Zoom needed to (and arguably has) excel at the one factor that sets it apart from competitors: simplicity of use.
And this implies that the meeting experience must be simple to navigate throughout. Eric has already made a point of emphasising this.
That is why, during the epidemic, Zoom became a popular favourite. The ease with which I, you, mom, dad, grandmother, granddad, and even great-grandma and great-granddad could attend, share, and participate in meetings simplified things for me, you, grandma, granddad, and even great-great-grandma and great-granddad.
Zoom’s unexpected popularity for home usage is largely due to its simplicity. Additionally, you might include the brand awareness marketing initiatives that Zoom has been doing for some time.
Long before the epidemic, Zoom was advertised on billboards, in airport lounges, and on train seats. Thus, even if you were using Zoom for the first time in 2020, you were almost certainly familiar with it.

Growth Challenges for Zoom

Security was the primary issue Zoom encountered during the early phases of its unforeseen hypergrowth.
Zoom announced end-to-end encryption for meetings with up to 200 people in October 2020. The feature is available on both free and premium subscriptions.
Encryption from end to end is the most critical component of B2B communications—
Dave Michels, Founder and Lead Analyst of TalkingPointz, a corporate communications research organisation, describes Zoom’s four phases:

Managing client keys: Zoom meetings create and maintain client-specific private key pairs. These will be used by clients to produce and exchange session keys without the requirement for the server to be trusted. Clients, Zoom rooms, and planned meetings will be supported only by key management.

Consider this the degree of security provided by the majority of today’s E2E encrypted systems.

1. Identity

Providers may vouch for their users without having to trust Zoom via single sign-on (SSO). If their contacts are on new devices, other users will get a warning.

2. Transparency trees

A “trust but verify” policy that requires all protocol deviations to be discoverable enables continual third-party auditing.

3. Real-time security

Those who are not utilising SSO may get the same ‘pre-action’ safeguards as those who are.

With Zoom establishing itself as a legitimate rival to industry veterans, resolving any security concerns became a primary goal for Zoom.

According to a National Security Agency assessment, just a small number of collaborative suppliers meet all security requirements.

To Summarize
Zoom refused to admit guilt but pledged to beef up security measures. The simplicity of Zoom is one of the reasons for its unexpected appeal among home users.

Zoom’s Individual and Institutional Shareholders

Individual and Institutional Shareholders of Zoom video communication are as follow:

Top Three Individual Insider Shareholders

1. Santiago Subotovsky

Santiago Subotovsky holds 212,143 Zoom shares, or around 0.07 percent of the company’s total outstanding stock. Subotovsky joined Zoom’s board of directors in 2014 as a member of the executive committee.

He is a general partner at the venture capital company Emergence Capital and the creator of AXG Tecnonexo, a Latin American provider of e-learning. Additionally, he has served on the boards of directors of a number of firms, including Airkit, Civitas Learning, CrunchBase, High Alpha, and Openpath.

2. Ryan Azus

Ryan Azus holds 48,367 Zoom shares, or around 0.02 percent of the company’s outstanding stock. Since April 2019, Azus has served as Zoom’s chief revenue officer. Azus is responsible for the sales, customer success, customer support, solution engineering, and channel teams within the firm in this capacity.

Prior to joining Zoom, Azus served as executive vice president of worldwide sales and services at RingCentral, a provider of cloud-based communications. Additionally, he was a Cisco Webex sales representative.

3. Janine Pelosi

Janine Pelosi holds 31,388 Zoom shares, or around 0.01 percent of the company’s outstanding stock. Pelosi oversees Zoom’s marketing efforts as the company’s chief marketing officer.

Pelosi leads Zoom’s brand, communications, go-to-market strategy, product marketing, lead generation, and customer marketing in this capacity. Pelosi joined Zoom as marketing director in 2015. Pelosi held numerous senior roles at Cisco and Webex prior to joining Zoom.

Top Three Institutional Shareholders

Zoom stock was owned by over 900 13F filers as of the end of Q4 2020, according to Whale Wisdom. Around 27 of them had Zoom as one of their top ten holdings. Around 57.5 percent of outstanding Zoom shares are held by institutional investors.

1. Eric S. Yuan

According to a 13-G form filed on December 31, 2020, Eric S. Yuan holds 43,284,343 Zoom shares, or about 18.5 percent of the company’s total outstanding shares. Yuan created Zoom in 2011 and serves as its founder and chief executive officer (CEO).

Yuan formerly worked at Cisco, where he was responsible for collaborative software development. He also co-founded WebEx, a company that offers conferencing and videoconferencing services, while at Cisco.

He aided in the company’s $800 million revenue growth at WebEx. Yuan’s combined net worth with his family is $14.2 billion, ranking him #140 on Forbes’ list of billionaires.

2. Cathy Wang & Bin Yuan

According to a 13-G form filed on March 3, 2021, Bin Yuan and Cathy Wang have combine voting and dispositive authority over 22,587,156 shares of Class A Common Stock held in trusts for which they act as cotrustees, representing 9.6 percent of the shares of Class A Common Stock.

Additionally, each of them has 1,000 shares in which they have complete control. Yuan is a member of Zoom co-founder Eric Yuan’s direct family.

3. Li Ka-shing

According to a 13-G form filed on December 31, 2019, Li Ka-shing holds 14,558,398 Zoom shares, or around 6.2 percent of the company’s total outstanding shares. Li, who has been dubbed one of Asia’s most powerful businesspeople, now serves as senior adviser to international conglomerate CK Hutchison Holdings and CK Asset Holdings, where he formerly served as chair.

He was an early investment in Zoom, prior to the company’s stock soaring to new heights. His estimated net worth is $32.5 billion, placing him 42nd on Forbes’ list of billionaires.

Yuan’s Career and Personal life

Yuan resided in Beijing after his master’s degree and spent four months in Japan participating in a training programme. He relocated to Silicon Valley in 1997, inspired by Bill Gates’ 1995 speech in Japan. Yuan spoke very little English at the time and asked for a visa to the United States nine times before being given one.

Yuan joined WebEx, an online conferencing startup, as one of the company’s initial twenty recruits upon his arrival in the United States. In 2007, Cisco Systems purchased the firm, and he was promoted to vice president of engineering.

Yuan presented Cisco management with a new smartphone-friendly video conferencing solution in 2011. Yuan quit Cisco when the plan was denied to found Zoom Video Communications.

Name	Eric S. Yuan
Born	20 February 1970 (age 52) Tai’an, Shandong, China
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	Shandong University of Science and Technology (BS) China University of Mining and Technology
Occupation	Businessman
Title	Founder and CEO, Zoom Video Communications
Spouse(s)	Sherry (Married since 1991 or 1992)
Children	3
Personal life At the age of 22, while enrolled as a master’s student at China University of Mining and Technology in Beijing, Yuan married his fiancée Sherry. They are the parents of three children. Yuan now resides in Santa Clara, California, with his family. Yuan became a naturalised US citizen in 2007.

Yuan picked the middle name “S.” in honour of Subrah Iyar, WebEx’s cofounder.

Summary
Prior to joining Zoom, Janine Pelosi had a number of prominent positions at Cisco and Webex. Within the company, Ryan Azus is in charge of the sales, customer success, customer support, solution engineering, and channel teams.

Frequently Asked Questions

People usually ask many questions about Who own zoom. A few of them are dicscussed below:

1. Is Zoom owned by China?

Zoom Communications, Inc. is not a Chinese firm but an American one created by Chinese-American millionaire Eric Yuan. It is located in San Jose, California, and Yuan, who also serves as Zoom’s CEO, is a naturalized citizen of the United States.

2. Does Microsoft own Zoom?

While Skype predates Zoom and is owned by Microsoft, Zoom has surpassed Skype in terms of market share. People no longer often say, ‘I’ll Skype you,’ as they do, ‘I’ll Zoom you.’

3. How do Zoom make money?

Zoom generates revenue from membership fees, hardware sales, and advertising, as well as through venture capital investments in other firms. Its business model is freemium. Zoom was founded in 2011 by a former Cisco executive and quickly became a hit owing to the excellence of its product.

4. Is Zoom US owned?

Eric Yuan, a Chinese-American business magnate, established Zoom. He is also the CEO of Zoom Video Communications and controls 22% of the firm. It is a California-based American corporation with its headquarters in Los Angeles. Additionally, it is a Delaware corporation.

5. How did Zoom win?

The free version’s 45-minute maximum meeting length and participant limit rapidly become a limitation, allowing Zoom to convert a large number of free users to paid customers. This contrasted sharply with Evernote, another freemium firm that gave out much too much in its free edition.

6. Why is Zoom preferred over Skype?

Zoom’s business features vastly outweigh those of Skype, making it the clear victor in the Zoom vs. Skype comparison. Zoom meetings may accommodate up to 1,000 attendees, but Skype meetings are limited to 100.

7. Does Zoom consume more data than Google Meet?

Mobile users will likely require somewhat less data than desktop users, since Zoom’s bandwidth will be optimised according on your connection. Google Meet is a popular video conferencing service among schools and universities.

8. Why am I so tired after Zoom meetings?

When we work remotely, there is a strong desire to multitask (something you would never do in a face-to-face meeting), which is very taxing. Additionally, it requires a greater emotional investment to look attentive and engaged for hours on end - even if you are not the organiser.

9. What is a waiting room in Zoom?

The Waiting Room feature enables the presenter to have complete control over when a member attends the meeting. As the meeting host, you have the option of admitting participants individually or holding all attendees in the Waiting Room and admitting them all at the same time.

10. How long is too long on Zoom?

However, both to provide appropriate time for attention and to account for the reality of how much effective work can be achieved in a day, we advocate spending no more than two to three hours each day in virtual (video) meetings, with at least a 15 minute break between each meeting.

Conclusion
Prior to the Zoom company’s stock flying to new heights, Li Ka-shing was an early investor in Zoom. He is presently a senior consultant to CK Hutchison Holdings and CK Asset Holdings, the international conglomerates where he formerly served as chair. His estimated net worth is $32.5 billion, ranking him 42nd among the world’s billionaires according to Forbes.