Zoom CEO Eric Yuan providing K-12 Schools his Video conferencing tools for free

On Thursday, CEO Eric Yuan was taking the time to remotely sign up schools to free accounts of his video conferencing software. First was a prestigious school in Silicon Valley, then two schools in the Austin, Texas area. 

“They told me they’d connect with my team, and I said, ‘no, I’ll do that for you,’” said Yuan, reached by Zoom at the San Jose, California-area home that is now his office for the foreseeable future. “I did it manually myself.”

Yuan having already removed the time limit from video chats using Zoom’s free service for affected regions in China and elsewhere, he took another measure to help mitigate the impact of the coronavirus: he decided to remove the limit for any K-12 schools affected in Japan, Italy and the United States. 

Students or teachers who fill out an online form using their school email addresses and are then verified by Zoom will have any accounts associated with that school’s domain also gain unlimited temporary meeting minutes, according to a site set up for the process overnight.

The free basic accounts are also available by request in Austria, Denmark, France, Ireland, Poland, Romania and South Korea, a spokesperson for Zoom said. “Given that many K-12 schools are starting closing, we decided to offer Zoom access to all K-12 schools in the country starting tomorrow,” Yuan wrote in an email overnight.

Zoom is far from the only tool standing to benefit from this trend. Analysts point to others like file-sharing service Dropbox, e-signatures business DocuSign and emergency communications business Everbridge as obvious fellow cloud companies that will likely see a boost in usage as the world moves even more online.

At Zoom, Yuan does allow himself to be excited about one vanity metric: his app store rank, which he says tells him that people are finding his product useful. Mid-conversation on Thursday, he holds up his iPhone to the camera. Then (and again on Friday), Zoom ranked No. 3 among all free apps in Apple’s App Store. “This is the first time you have a business app there,” Yuan says. “People are getting it.”