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Zoom is a conference platform business people use to do business. It’s just like Skype, or Lifesize, or Google Hangouts, UberConference, or Bluejeans, but different!
Zoom is a conference platform business people use to do business. It’s just like Skype, or Lifesize, or Google Hangouts, UberConference, or Bluejeans, but different!
Over the past eight years, some very rich people (businesspeople!) gave Zoom over 160 million dollars, which is more money than everyone reading this article will probably make in a year, combined. All of those rich people, and the company’s founder, Eric Yuan, are very happy now.
That’s because Zoom became a public company yesterday–meaning regular people, but mostly other rich people, can buy a tiny piece of that company and maybe get richer later but most just pay money now to the people who bet on Zoom way back when. Each of those slices was supposed to be worth $36, but some important folks realized that actually, they were worth closer to $65, which is a lot more (81 percent more to be exact, which is good, as numbers go.)
This is fundamentally different from Lyft, another company that a lot of very rich people gave an amount of money to that is comparatively small to them but unfathomable to you or me ($4.9 billion). Each of those little slices of Lyft were rumored to be worth about $62, but at the last minute it was decided that, no, $87 was probably closer and Lyft has been sort of quietly regretting that ever since because now the number they invented to say what pieces of Lyft are worth is even lower than the first number they thought was fair and reasonable.
Part of that is because different businesspeople, some of whom have not paid money for slices of either company, have paid money to Zoom for its software. In fact, so many businesspeople have done exactly that that Zoom’s gross profits hit 270 million dollars just last year, which you might remember is more than the amount the very rich businesspeople bet on them in total.
Last year Lyft lost 248 million dollars.
Rich people are continuing to bet on some ideas, and using their understanding of economics, a lot of them have decided the company that makes money instead of loses money is a better place for their money.
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