What COVID-19 Did for Zoom.us & What Zoom.us did for COVID-19 Nicoló Follow Mar 15 · 3 min read

There are few companies out there in the world right now that are benefiting from the Coronavirus quite as much as Zoom; the new kid on the block in the videoconferencing space. Before the crisis, Zoom had slowly been gaining traction in the Silicon Valley startup space thanks to supposedly superior low-latency connection, but they could never have prepared for a traffic-spike quite like this.

With the whole world suddenly moving to remote work, the CEO of Zoom, Eric Yuan, must have been completely shocked when he woke up on the day the news broke. His company had already been spending a lot on marketing over the past couple of months and was perfectly positioned to help the entire world to stop travelling and to start working from home. That being said, I can not even begin to imagine the stress the engineers must have been going through to provision ten times more servers than they expected to use that day in order to meet the new demand.

Zoom has consequently gone on to gain more monthly active users in the first quarter of 2020 than they did in the entirety of 2019. Even after Coronavirus blows over, millions of people will become aware of Zoom and what they do. This brand recognition and the positive association will last a lifetime for Zoom and yield reward many years into the future.

Analysts at Bernstein Research said:

“Zoom has added 3.5x more MAUs YTD [year to date] than the same period of 2019 (2.22 vs. 0.64 million), so even with half the normal paid user conversion rate, this would still yield 74% y/y growth in paid user adds YTD”

Whilst Zoom has benefited massively from the crisis, they have also helped millions by extending their free trials, removing time limits for every user in China and most importantly offering their service for free to schools and educational institutions all over the world. This, all in an attempt to fix the interruption the virus has caused to the educational process for many children worldwide. Thousands of universities across the globe, including Harvard, have also been using Zoom to hold online classes with minimal disruption.

Zoom’s stock is now up almost 100% since the Coronavirus started and this, all while ensuring the world does not fall apart by allowing people to continue working seamlessly from their homes without having to leave and put themselves and other people at risk. Mr Yuan and Zoom have done a stellar job at staying agile and functional throughout the entire ordeal and have turned a horrible crisis into one of the biggest social experiments for the future of remote work.

In Eric Yuan’s own words:

“I think after this crisis is over, people will realize that to work at home probably is not bad.”

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