In a mere four months, Zoom’s daily meeting participants expanded from 10 million at the end of 2019 to 300 million by April 2020. It was becoming an essential social need-and it was happening at light speed. Zoom was already a thriving company that had gone public the previous year-but video conferencing was no longer just a business tool. Yuan saw his company’s mandate change in real time. As COVID spread like invisible wildfire and the world went into lockdown, Zoom founder and CEO Eric S. But that future failed to materialize, in part because the technology to support it-especially video conferencing-wasn’t good enough to make telecommuting a widely-accepted substitute for in-person work, and in part because the world wasn’t ready for it.

As early as the 1970s, forward-looking economists pitched the idea of working from home as a way to save gasoline and reduce stress. For decades, futurists predicted a world defined by “telecommuting,” in which the stuffy old office-and commuting to it-would be a thing of the past.

Zoom video communications eric yuan