It’s become a household name in the lockdown for connecting families and friends over video, hosting Cabinet meetings and even online gym classes.
Now, The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a British software executive is among the bosses at American video-conferencing company Zoom who have made a fortune from the lockdown.
Jonathan Chadwick has quietly become one of Britain’s wealthiest software bosses with a £35 million fortune thanks to Zoom’s soaring popularity. When Chadwick joined Zoom in September 2017 he was granted 400,000 shares. These were worth $14.4 million when the company joined the stock market in New York a year ago at $36 a share. He appears to have cashed in some of them over the past 12 months.
Windfall: British Zoom executive Jonathan Chadwick is a graduate of the University of Bath
But since the coronavirus pandemic struck, Zoom’s share price has soared to more than $150 as new users have rushed to download the software on their laptops and smartphones to conduct business meetings from home. The firm, founded in 2011, is now worth £34 billion.
According to stock market filings, Chadwick still owns around 290,000 shares, currently worth around $43. 5million (£35 million) at $150 per share. They would have been worth less than £15 million as recently as December, underlining Zoom’s extraordinary share price surge.
A graduate of the University of Bath, Chadwick was previously the chief financial officer of American software giant VMware, video call company Skype, and cyber security firm McAfee. He chairs Zoom’s audit committee.
The size of Chadwick’s haul is unusual for a non-executive director on the board who is not involved in the day-to-day running of the company. But it is relative small fry compared to the billions accrued by the company’s founder, Eric Yuan.
The Chinese-born American, who runs the company as chief executive, has built up an $8 billion fortune from the surge in demand. Unlike rival video conferencing platforms such as Skype, Yuan’s software more easily allows users to host large group conversations ‘face-to-face’.
The company makes most of its money from charging companies to use the service for staff working from home. Since countries across the world went into lockdown, it has become increasingly popular outside the business world, with friends also using Zoom to have Friday night drinks and celebrate birthdays. One London couple even got married on Zoom. Last December, Zoom hosted ten million meetings a day.
By the end of last month, the figure had shot up to more than 200million. Quirky and a self-professed workaholic (he has been working 18-hour days since the pandemic began), Yuan, who moved to America in his 20s, is known in Silicon Valley for his motto ‘Delivering Happiness’. The slogan is written on the wall of every Zoom office around the globe. His devoted followers dub themselves ‘Zoomies’.
The company has a ‘Chief Happiness Officer’ to ensure the welfare of its 1,700-strong workforce, many of who became instant millionaires when the company was floated on the New York Stock Exchange last year.
Yuan, 50, even jokingly handed out ‘lucky’ $2 bills during Chinese New Year on January 25 and claims his new-found wealth does not mean that much to him.
Yuan won’t travel unless it is absolutely necessary – partly because of climate change – and says he’s just like any other dad who acts ‘like an Uber driver’ to ferry his three children around in the family Tesla. Even on his 50th birthday in February, he eschewed a lavish party in favour of a low-key meal at home with his wife, Sherry, his mother and his three children – two sons and a daughter.
Video stars: Zoom chief executive Eric Yuan with his wife Sherry
His only extravagance is basketball, an interest he shares with his eldest son Roy, an athlete who competes for his university team. Father and son practise in a basketball court built in the one-acre grounds of the family’s five-bedroom, five-bathroom home in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains.
Yuan has signed Zoom to a threeyear partnership with the Golden State Warriors – one of the most successful teams in America’s NBA professional league and local to the Silicon Valley area.
But while Zoom has become one of the biggest tech success stories in recent history, not everyone – as the Americans like to say – is drinking the Kool-Aid. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives in the US, accused the company of being a ‘Chinese entity’, despite its roots in Silicon Valley.
A spokesman for Pelosi later clarified she was referring to the fact that some calls were ‘mistakenly’ routed through servers in China when they shouldn’t have been. Yuan, who lives in a £4 million house in Silicon Valley – modest by tech standards – was also forced to apologise after several online meetings, including some involving NHS workers, were hacked. ‘For that I am deeply sorry,’ he said in a statement.
‘The service has fallen short of the community’s – and our own – privacy and security expectations.’ The hacking into Zoom has even created a new phenomenon called ‘zoom-bombing’ where uninvited guests join video conferences usually to shout abuse or post pornography. Google has banned staff from using the app on company laptops amid concerns over ‘security vulnerabilities’.
The executives and directors are not the only ones to have cashed in from Zoom’s rising popularity.
Early investors include Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing, the owner of a string of major UK companies including mobile network Three, pubs giant Greene King, Northumbrian Water and gas company Wales & West. His early bet on Zoom is now worth more than $ 3billion.
Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo!, was also an early investor in Zoom.
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