Zoom

Eric Yuan left Cisco's WebEx team because they wouldn't fix the product, then built Zoom and destroyed them. Pre-pandemic: 10 million daily meeting participants. April 2020: 300 million. Zoom's market cap hit $159 billion — briefly worth more than ExxonMobil. The product won because it "just worked" when every other video call required IT support. The 40-minute free tier limit was a genius monetization move: long enough to be useful, short enough to make companies pay. "You're on mute" became the defining phrase of an era. Yuan went from immigrant engineer to $4 billion net worth.