Thursday, May 1, 2025
Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Eric Yuan’s Capitalization on Covid: Creator of Zoom
Jennifer Doudna and Emmenuelle Charpentier received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020 virtually. They missed out on the annual Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ ceremony at Stockholm Concert Hall in Sweden. There, the king of Sweden would have given them their awards personally along with a handshake. But COVID-19 necessitated the switch to an online webconferencer.
The webconferencer of the pandemic was Zoom. Eric Yuan founded the company in 2011 after he was rejected when pitching it to his former employer, WebEx. He left his role with 40 coworkers to pursue the idea he’d had since his 20s when he was dating his eventual wife who lived 10 hours away, wishing for a way to see her face instantly. Zoom had some big moves early on, including Stanford University as its first official customer and securing partnerships with Slack, Salesforce, and Meta technologies by 2017. But it saw exponential growth during COVID-19, being the 5th most downloaded app in 2020. This landed Yuan in a place of extreme potential. His leadership is what led to Zoom’s success and connected millions of people during lockdowns. He was Time Magazine’s business person of the year.
Eric Yuan on Zoom
As Zoom became more popular, it faced security and privacy criticism, including selling data to companies like Meta. This led to millions in settling fees. Yuan had to effectively manage the situation while creatively navigating the press. He released an official blog post reporting on Zoom’s work to resolve issues and the 100+ changes they made to improve security, including hiring third parties to test their software for privacy leaks. This gained him much trust and acclaim from critics.
When employees started returning to the office, founder and exec Eric Yuan had to get creative. First, they had to stay afloat. They had to let go of 15% of their workforce in 2023, about 1,300 employees. In 2024, it rebranded from “Zoom Video” to “Zoom Communications Inc.,” to shift emphasis from video conferencing to all-around communication and an “AI-first work platform.” Yuan continues to look for new ways to adjust to the current climate and keep his company thriving.
Monday, April 7, 2025
Paleo Art & The Roots of Human Creativity
Chapter 10 of Agustin Fuentes' The Creative Spark recounts the author's experience in a cave in Portugal, seeing cave paintings illuminated by a dim light, where he realizes in viewing the cave paintings, he's probably standing right where the artist who made them hundreds of years ago would have. As an anthropology major, I love early art like this. Humans have been "behaviorally modern" since about 100,000 years ago, meaning around that time we began to act and think the same way we do now. Right around then is when art began, with ochre paintings on cave walls and carved figurines. This is something I really love about people, is that basically as long as we've been people, we've been making art. Early humans I think are rarely given enough credit-- many people still have the view of ancient man as being a lumbering, primitive caveman, when in reality, ancient people were just like us. They drew pictures and spent time with their families and survived in an altogether pretty hostile world.
Cave paintings like those at Lascax and Altamira are proof of just how like us early humans were, with detailed drawings done from observation and scenes of people and animals. Just like now, people wanted to document their world, to illustrate their lives and stories. I especially love drawings done of horses, as ancient horses really do have that coloration of burnt red on top, white belly, and a black mane, as can be seen in Prezwalski's horse, the most ancient lineage of horses still extant today. I would love to have the experience Fuentes' had, of standing in a dimly lit cave and imagining what it would have been like to be the artist who painted these scenes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)