Zoom's stock soared in the video-conferencing company's public trading debut, making CEO Eric Yuan a billionaire (ZOOM)

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

• Zoom, a video-conferencing company, went public Thursday and began trading on the Nasdaq.
• Shares jumped 72% on its opening day, putting the company's valuation at nearly $16 billion.
• Zoom CEO Eric Yuan owns 20.5% of the company's stock, which makes Yuan one of the newest tech billionaires.

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."

NOW WATCH: Nintendo Switch is the fastest-selling console of the current generation — here's why Nintendo is dominating video games

See Also:

• Pinterest's IPO team wants to convince investors that it has more in common with Google than Snap
• The average Pinterest employee has $700,000 in equity according to a report which warns of disruption if the IPO is volatile
• Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and all 27 other banks working on Uber's mega-IPO

SEE ALSO: Pinterest was one of the most-downloaded apps in the U.S. in the months leading up to its IPO