Time - USA (2020-12-21)

ERIC YUAN

The CEO of Zoom

brought an isolated world

a little closer together

By Andrew R. Chow

When Milo Mccabe’s daughter Was born, he could see she

had 10 fingers, 10 toes and dark swirls of hair; he could hear her

piercing cry. But he couldn’t make out the color of her eyes and,

heartbreakingly, he couldn’t hold her. He was watching over Zoom.

McCabe had never considered not being in the delivery room.

But in early April, he fell ill with COVID-19 and was rushed to

a hospital in Southern California. When his wife Roxanne went

into labor more than a week later at the same hospital, he was still

there—but could barely get out of bed.

A video call was the next best thing: they wanted to see each

other’s faces, record the proceedings and stay on for hours for free

without technical glitches. So they chose Zoom—a platform that

they, like most of the world, had barely used previously but that

now seemed to be everywhere.

“I remember going through contractions and hearing his voice

saying, ‘You’re doing good, babe,’ every few minutes,” Roxanne says.

“I would turn to look at the video on my left, as if he was going to go

somewhere—but he wasn’t going anywhere.” They were together

for almost 11 hours before Emberly Anne emerged into the world.

“It wasn’t how I anticipated your coming-out party, kid,” McCabe

says eight months later, looking down at the daughter in his arms.

If the idea of a Zoom birth was shocking to the McCabes, it

would have been no less surprising to Eric Yuan. The 50-year-old

founder and CEO of Zoom had worked for a decade to build a no-

frills, highly functional conferencing platform for businesses. Now

OF THE YEAR

Businessperson

PHOTOGRAPH BY FARAH AL QASIMI FOR TIME