When Zoom hit the public markets Thursday, its IPO pop, a whopping 81 percent, floored everyone, including its own chief executive officer, Eric Yuan. Yuan became a billionaire this week when his video conferencing business went public. He told Bloomberg that he actually wished his stock hadn’t soared quite so high. I’m guessing his modesty and laser focus attracted Wall Street to his stock; well, that, and the fact that his business is actually profitable. He is, this week proved, not your average tech CEO. I chatted with him briefly on listing day. Here’s what he had to say. “I think the future is so bright and the stock price will follow our execution. Our philosophy remains the same even now that we’ve become a public company. The philosophy, first of all, is you have to focus on execution, but how do you do that? For me as a CEO, my number one role is to make sure Zoom customers are happy. Our market is growing and if our customers are happy they are going to pay for our service. I don’t think anything will change after the IPO. We will probably have a much better brand because we are a public company now, it’s a new milestone.” “The dream is coming true,” he added. For the most part, it sounded like Yuan just wants to get back to work. Want more TechCrunch newsletters? Sign up here. Otherwise, on to other news… IPO corner You thought I was done with IPO talk? No, definitely not: Pinterest completed its IPO this week too! Here’s the TLDR: Pinterest popped 25 percent on its debut Thursday and is currently trading up 28 percent. Not bad, Pinterest, not bad. Fastly, a startup I’d admittedly never heard of until this week, filed its S-1 and displayed a nice path to profitability. That means the parade of tech IPOs is far from over. Uber… Surprisingly, no Uber IPO news this week. Sit tight, more is surely coming. $1B for self-driving cars While I’m on the subject of Uber, the company’s autonomous vehicles unit did, in fact, raise $1 billion, a piece of news that had been previously reported but was confirmed this week. With funding from Toyota, Denso and SoftBank’s Vision Fund, Uber will spin-out its self-driving car unit, called Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group. The deal values ATG at $7.25 billion. Robots! The TechCrunch staff traveled to Berkeley this week for a day-long conference on robotics and artificial intelligence. The highlight? Boston Dynamics CEO Marc Raibert debuted the production version of their buzzworthy electric robot. As we noted last year, the company plans to produce around 100 models of the robot in 2019. Raibert said the company is aiming to start production in July or August. There are robots coming off the assembly line now, but they are betas being used for testing, and the company is still doing redesigns. Pricing details will be announced this summer. Digital health investment is down Despite notable rounds for digital health businesses like Ro, known for its direct-to-consumer erectile dysfunction medications, investment in the digital health space is actually down, reports TechCrunch’s Jonathan Shieber. Venture investors, private equity and corporations funneled $2 billion into digital health startups in the first quarter of 2019, down 19 percent from the nearly $2.5 billion invested a year ago. There were also 38 fewer deals done in the first quarter this year than last year, when investors backed 187 early-stage digital health companies, according to data from Mercom Capital Group. Startup capital Byton loses co-founder and former CEO, reported $500M Series C to close this summer Lyric raises $160M from VCs, Airbnb Brex, the credit card for startups, raises $100M debt round Ro, a D2C online pharmacy, reaches $500M valuation Logistics startup Zencargo gets $20M to take on the business of freight forwarding Co-Star raises $5M to bring its astrology app to Android Y Combinator grad Fuzzbuzz lands $2.7M seed round to deliver fuzzing as a service Extra Crunch Hundreds of billions of dollars in venture capital went into tech startups last year, topping off huge growth this decade. VCs are reviewing more pitch decks than ever, as more people build companies and try to get a slice of the funding opportunities. So how do you do that in such a competitive landscape? Storytelling. Read contributor’s Russ Heddleston’s latest for Extra Crunch: Data tells us that investors love a good story. Plus: The different playbook of D2C brands And finally, for the first of a new series on VC-backed exits aptly called The Exit. TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney spoke to Bessemer Venture Partners’ Adam Fisher about Dynamic Yield’s $300M exit to McDonald’s. #Equitypod<doc-sep>Bloomberg (Bloomberg) -- As Covid-19 continues to ravage India, financial professionals across the country are grappling with an increasingly surreal disconnect between the epidemic’s devastation and a record-breaking boom in local markets.The world’s worst coronavirus outbreak has battered India’s economy and lifted its official Covid death toll to more than 318,000 -- a figure that experts say is likely a significant undercount.And yet investors continue to snap up Indian assets, fueling a 65% rally in the Nifty 50 Index over the past 12 months that has outpaced every other major equity benchmark worldwide. The measure’s surge to a record on Thursday has coincided with the fastest rate of Indian initial public offerings since 2017 and an unprecedented flood of foreign-currency bond issuance by local companies.While the combination of pandemic pain and financial-market euphoria is hardly unique to India, nowhere else has the contrast been so extreme.Bulls say the gains are justified by central bank stimulus at home and abroad, along with signs that the current virus wave may be peaking and optimism that India’s long-term economic growth potential will emerge from the crisis intact. Skeptics point to overly rosy earnings estimates and the risk of further outbreaks in a country where vaccination rates remain stubbornly low. India’s central bank weighed in on Thursday, warning in its annual report that the surge in stocks “poses the risk of a bubble.”What’s clear is that financiers on all sides of the debate are stretched thin. Booming markets have left the industry swamped with work at a time when many employees have been sickened by the virus. Some have had to franticly search for medical help after hospitals were overrun and oxygen supplies fell short. Almost everyone has at least one friend or family member who has died.“You feel numb, as if we are in the midst of a war and are losing people one after the other,” said Vikaas Sachdeva, the Mumbai-based chief executive officer of Emkay Investment Managers Ltd., who lost four members of his extended family to the virus.Sachdeva expects Indian markets to be volatile in the near term as investors weigh uncertainties around the vaccination program and the possibility of a third wave. His firm has been buying shares of Indian companies with “high quality” management, betting that the country’s long-term investment case remains intact.India’s $2.9 trillion stock market has been buoyed in part by resilient demand from international investors, who’ve purchased a net $34.9 billion of shares over the past 12 months. While they pared holdings in April and early May, buying by local mutual funds and insurance companies has helped fill the gap. A steady decline in reported Covid cases since mid-May -- along with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to avoid another nationwide lockdown -- have added weight to calls for further market gains.Indian companies have taken advantage of the exuberance in markets to raise about $4 billion via public offerings since the start of the year, on track for the busiest first-half since 2017, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.“The IPO boom is being driven by Indian technology companies coming of age with businesses doing better than expected,” said Sunil Khaitan, India head of global capital markets at Bank of America. “Tech companies are advancing their fundraising plans and financial sponsors also believe this is a good time to bring in public market investors in these companies amidst ample global liquidity.”Khaitan expects India IPO volumes to more than double in 2021 from the previous year.The surge in activity has left some financial firms scrambling to complete deals after employees were sidelined by the virus. The head of equity capital markets at a Mumbai-based investment bank, who asked not be named discussing private matters, said that at one point 25% of his 40-person group was infected.About 200,000 Indian bank employees have been infected and 1,200 have died since the pandemic began, the industry’s largest union estimated this month.Among the biggest risks for India market optimists is another virus wave. Just 3.2% of the population has been fully vaccinated, versus 39.7% in the U.S. and 10.1% in Brazil, according to Bloomberg’s Covid-19 Tracker.The Indian economy’s recovery from last year’s recession is already showing signs of sputtering. The country lost 10 million jobs in May, according to private research firm Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy Pvt. Among the 40 companies in the Nifty 50 index that have posted quarterly results so far, more than half have missed analysts’ estimates. While India’s central bank predicts the economy will grow at a 10.5% pace this fiscal year, other forecasters including S&P Global Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service have recently cut their estimates to below 10%.“If this Covid situation keeps affecting newer areas and new strains keep emerging, then there is a problem for the near term,” said Deepak Jasani, head of retail research at HDFC Securities Ltd.Sachdeva, the Emkay CEO, said Covid will impact him and his colleagues in ways that go far beyond their work in finance. He’s reading “The Difficulty of Being Good” by Gurcharan Das, who writes about his search for a meaningful life.“The pandemic has brought about a change in many of us and we are more aware of things that matter most in life,” Sachdeva said. “We would though have to see if this is indeed a permanent change when life comes back normal.”(Updates death toll in second paragraph)More stories like this are available on bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2021 Bloomberg L.P.<doc-sep>The CEO of video-conferencing company Zoom is the newest member of an elite class of tech billionaires that include names like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos. CEO Eric Yuan was made a billionaire Thursday on Zoom's first day of trading on the public market. The company priced its IPO at $36 a share, but Zoom's stock surged as the day went on. By the time the stock market closed, Zoom's shares had jumped 72%, giving the company a valuation of $15.9 billion. Yuan, Zoom's founder and CEO, owns 20.5% of his company's stock. At the price Zoom closed at Thursday, Yuan is now worth more than $3 billion. Read more: Video-conferencing company Zoom soared 81% in its first day of public trading — now its CEO and CFO are focusing on these 3 goals Before he founded Zoom in 2011, Yuan was the vice president of engineering at Cisco. He first came to the US fom China in 1997 after unsuccessfully applying for a visa eight times, Yuan said in an interview with Thrive Global. On his ninth try, Yuan was accepted, and he came to the US without speaking any English, CNBC reports. By 2017, Zoom had 450,000 businesses as customers, and was valued at $1 billion. Zoom raised $517.5 million from investors before its Thursday IPO, and entered the public market as a rare profitable tech company. Despite the achievement of Thursday's IPO, Yuan says its time for Zoom to focus and get back to work. "I'm going to fly back to California," Yuan told Business Insider in a recent interview. "We have to double down on our execution and do what we were doing before. We've got to keep doing that to make sure we keep our customers happy."<doc-sep>NEW A vastly improved search engine helps you find the latest on companies, business leaders, and news more easily.<doc-sep>
Eric Yuan helped shatter one of the weirdest corporate taboos on Thursday, becoming one of the first Chinese CEO of a major U.S. publicly-listed corporation. (Indian CEOs, by contrast, including Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Pepsi's Indra Nooyi, and Citi's Vikram Pandit, have been highly visible for years.) The backdrop: Yuan's triumph came in the highly competitive world of videoconferencing. It's a world he knew very well when he founded Zoom in 2011: He had been the head of engineering at one of Zoom's competitors, WebEx, which was sold to Cisco for $3.2 billion in 2007. Zoom was an improbable startup. As CNBC's Ari Levy writes in an excellent profile, "not even Eric Yuan’s closest friends, oldest advisers and earliest investors thought Zoom needed to exist." It was also fighting giants: Not only Cisco but also Microsoft and Google. As CNBC's Ari Levy writes in an excellent profile, "not even Eric Yuan’s closest friends, oldest advisers and earliest investors thought Zoom needed to exist." It was also fighting giants: Not only Cisco but also Microsoft and Google. Yuan's Zoom is also a great place to work. It's the top-rated company on Glassdoor, with a 96% "recommend to a friend" rating. (One corporate perk: Zoom will reimburse you for any book you buy for yourself or your family members.) In contrast to Alibaba, with its notorious "996" culture of working 12-hour days 6 days a week, Yuan encourages employees to spend a lot of time with their families — and does the same himself. Zoom raised $751 million in its IPO on Thursday, none of which might ever be needed. The company is profitable, and, partly for that reason, now trades at a valuation of $16 billion. (“The price is too high,’’ Yuan told Bloomberg.) Zoom's profits are still small — the company's p/e ratio is north of 2,000 — but profitability means long-term sustainability. Loss-making companies like Uber and Lyft, by contrast, will ultimately fail if they can't persuade investors to keep funding their losses while they attempt to find that elusive path to profitability. The big picture: Zoom, like Slack, is part of a new breed of enterprise software companies. The financial decision to start paying for the product is still made in the executive ranks, but it's invariably driven by bottom-up adoption of the free version by rank-and-file employees. If a sales team can say that half of a company is using the product already, just because they love it, it's a lot easier to close the deal. Editor's note: This piece was corrected to show Eric Yuan is one of the first Chinese CEOs of a major U.S. publicly-listed corporation (not the first).