“Life is all about the pursuit of happiness. The greatest, most sustainable happiness comes from making others happy. Delivering happiness is what we do at Zoom,” notes Zoom founder and CEO Eric S. Yuan in the company’s S-1 filing.
Similar to other companies that have recently announced IPOs, Zoom focuses on its mission, which is to keep both customers and employees happy; in its S-1 filing, the word “happiness” occurs 34 times, “happy” occurs 17 times, and “unhappy” only twice.
In his letter, Yuan notes that, while he was the engineering lead at video-conferencing company Cisco Webex, customers would tell him about how “unhappy” they were with the technology, making Yuan feel “unhappy” too. That made him realize that he wanted to provide something better, something that would deliver “happiness.” Thus Zoom was born, a cloud-native, video-first communications platform that is both user-friendly and scalable. Today Zoom has over 1,300 employees, and its product is used across various industries from universities to hospitals to private employers like Uber, Wells Fargo, and VMWare.
Indeed, Yuan and the company have a lot to be happy about. Debuting on the public markets today, Zoom soared over 72% out of the gate. Shares opened at $62 a piece, giving the company a valuation of at least $15 billion. Yesterday afternoon, Zoom announced its shares at $36 a piece, above its previously announced expected range of $28 to $32 per share. That makes Yuan, who owns over 20% of the company, a newly minted billionaire.
The company generated $330 million in revenue and a profit of $7.6 million by the end of January 2019, according to the S-1 filing, making it one of the few profitable tech companies going public this year.