How Zoom founder who was denied US Visa 8 times now runs the world with his app amid COVID-19 lockdown

About 30 years ago, Eric Yuan, Chinese billionaire and founder of videoconferencing service Zoom, could have described himself a failure after hitting several stumbling blocks on his way to emigrate to the United States to pursue his dream, but today his innovation is bringing the world closer as COVID-19 is forcing everyone to be socially distant.

Yuan was in his 20s in 1990s when he heard an inspiring speech about the internet from Microsoft's co-founder Bill Gates and he decided he was going to be part of Silicon Valley, the hub of leading global tech innovations based in the United States.

His dream was almost cut short when the U.S. government denied his visa application, he didn't give up, he tried again and was denied for eight times. On his ninth trial, Yuan was finally granted visa after two years of struggling. He stepped his feet in the US in 1997. On his arrival in the U. he landed an engineering job with a videoconferencing software company WebEx. In 2007, WebEx was taken over by Cisco, one of the world's leading tech company with headquarters in the United States.

Eric Yuan started Zoom in 2011 and took over 40 engineers from Cisco with him to his start-up. He got the idea for Zoom while finding solution to the gap in communication between him and his long-distance girlfriend.

Yuan told Forbes in 2017. "I was only able to see her twice a year and it took more than 10 hours to get there by train. I was young then — 18 or 19 years old — and I thought it would be fantastic if in the future there was a device where I could just click a button and see her and talk to her."

Zoom currently stands tall in the market after benefiting in surprising ways primarily due to the coronavirus pandemic.

His video conference services firm Zoom Video Communications Inc. is valued at $38.5bn on the U.S stock market, but it is not just the financial worth of the company that matters at this time when the world is on a lockdown due to the spread of COVID-19, rather it is the value Yuan's innovation is adding to the world.

With people across the world and Nigeria confined to their homes amid the spread of coronavirus which has led to the lockdown of businesses, schools and social activities and forcing people to work from home, the world is turning to video calls to chat with work colleagues and hold meetings, stay in touch with friends and family. There are a number of free services at their disposal, but Zoom is increasingly the one they're choosing.

Prior to this time, Skype and Microsoft Teams were the most popular apps people depend on for meetings, but the tide is changing as Zoom is recording a surge in the number of users because of some pretty simple features including adaptive backgrounds and it is free for anyone to use. As of Thursday April 2, 2020, Zoom has had over 100 million downloads on the Google app store alone.

Government and business organisations are also turning to Zoom to hold meetings with staff who are now working remotely.

In compliance with the directive on social distancing, the Lagos State Government also held its first virtual executive council meeting via Zoom on Monday. A few weeks ago, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also tweeted a picture of himself chairing a Cabinet meeting via the app.

Surprisingly, while many businesses across the world are experiencing loss due to COVID-19, Zoom has been recording boom.

In a blog post published on Wednesday, Yuan said usage of Zoom had exploded by 1900%, with daily free and paying users up from 10 million at the end of December to 200 million in March.

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