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The epidemics caused by the Coronavirus are having such a devastating effect on the economy as on human lives. As in any great crisis, there are millions of losers. However, there is also a minority that benefits . In the case of the Covid-19, one of those who has struck the bell is the founder of Zoom, Eric Yuan .

Zoom is the revelation app for the past few months. Its simple operation, the possibility of accessing its services without being a registered user and its free nature for most of its functions have made it the revelation application of this pandemic. Its market value skyrocketed and this move has catapulted its founder to 293 of the world's richest men on the Forbes list .

With a life on the horse between China and the United States, Eric Yuan has constructed a story around his person that combines the narrative hackney of the "self-made entrepreneur" -which is presumed by the great managers of Silicon Valley- with the apology of work taken to the extreme of which Chinese magnates boast.

A very common practice of which some show the visible faces of the large corporations of the Asian giant with Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba (the company that owns Aliexpress) as a paradigmatic case. A business policy that has sparked public protests from employees of China's top technology companies, who are protesting being forced to work 12-13 hours a day and six days a week despite the fact that their country's law prohibits it. However, the founder of Zoom is not far behind and boasts of being a very busy man who works 18 hours a day .

As with the vast majority of billionaires far from the pages of the paper, we only know about them what they say about themselves and what the tax laws of each country allow us to find out about their companies. A situation that is aggravated in the case of Yuan, having remained out of the main media outlets until the outbreak of the pandemic.

The son of two mining engineers, Eric Yuan was born in Shandong province and, like his parents, pursued higher education in engineering and mathematics. A student stage in which Yuan himself tells that he had the idea to create Zoom . Studies separated him from his girlfriend (who would later become his wife) and he could only see her twice a year on a 10-hour train ride. A circumstance that led him to think of a project capable of uniting with image and voice people who are thousands of miles away .

The idea was parked for many years. After graduating, he moved to Japan where he worked for years in the computer industry. From the Japanese archipelago, he tried to get a visa to travel to the United States and pursue the American dream. Something that cost him nine tries .

At the age of 27 he finally obtained permission to emigrate to California and with a macaronic English he began working as a programmer in the emerging technology sector.

He was first employed by WebEx and later at Cisco, which absorbed the former, and in which he came to occupy a managerial position .

20 years after conceiving his idea and married to his longtime girlfriend, Eric attempted to undertake the Zoom project within Cisco . However, the board rejected his project and decided to undertake the adventure alone.

The Zoom startups in 2011 were not easy. The project did not convince investors, and Eric Yuan was forced to borrow money from family and friends .

Zoom was conceived for communication within companies and not as a mass communication channel. A design that has caused that in the last two months it has been on the verge of dying of success due to the worrying security flaws discovered on the platform. A few failures on which the company tries to get chest ensuring that they are fixed .

Although the Zoom boot was not very buoyant, it was very meritorious . Most startups in the tech sector (even those that make big rounds of funding) fail or get sucked in by a bigger fish.

Zoom's leap to the big leagues can be placed just a year ago . In April 2019 the company debuted on Wall Street. A debut in which he achieved good numbers with stable but timid growth.

Zoom's exceptional nature came hand in hand with the Coronavirus pandemic. The great success recently experienced by the company cannot be explained without the context of a global health crisis .

Over the past three months Eric Yuan has earned nearly $ 4 billion, increasing his net worth by 112%, which currently stands at $ 7.57 billion. In the span of a year, each share of the company has gone from $ 68.72 to a maximum of $ 169.09 million.

However, doubts about the long-term success of the application remain open. Its security problems caused it to be banned in business areas and public administrations that handle sensitive information.

In addition, competition giants such as Google, Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram have improved and incorporated advanced functions of massive video calls to their applications, thus neutralizing the great appeal of Zoom .

Some changes that detract from the Zoom service compared to the competition. And they reduce the differential value of the Yuan service to little more than the possibility of participating in massive video calls without having to register and put fun funds on live videos.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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