Congratulations Eric S. Yuan, Founder & CEO of Zoom
Inclusive Leader Award Winner for Global Impact
Eric S. Yuan founded Zoom in 2011 to deliver happiness and bring people together in a frictionless video environment. Zoom’s communications platform continues to transform the way global organizations connect, communicate, and collaborate. As the company’s chief executive, Eric led Zoom to one of the highest-performing tech IPOs of 2019.
Business Insider named Eric one of the Most Powerful People in Enterprise Tech in 2017. In 2018, Glassdoor recognized him as the top CEO for large U.S. companies. In 2019, he was recognized in the Bloomberg 50 as a leader changing the game in global business. Time Magazine named Eric its 2020 Businessperson of Year as well as one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2020. He was also named Comparably's Best CEO for Diversity in 2021.
Today, we are honored to share his story with you all. The following content was taken from an interview by Kevin Lincoln from Sequoia, which you can find here.
Yuan grew up in the city of Tai’an in Shandong Province, China, where his adolescence was spent being, well, an adolescent. “When I was a kid, I was not always getting A or A+ [grades],” Yuan says. It wasn’t until he started picking up one of the newspapers that his dad would bring home every night that he started to form an idea of what that future might hold. Yuan ended up attending the local university, Shandong University of Science and Technology, where he majored in applied mathematics and minored in computer application.
After graduation, he moved to Beijing to obtain a master’s degree in geology engineering — his parents were geology engineers—from China University of Mining and Technology. His eureka moment came in 1995, when he realized that "the Internet is the future. That’s why I decided, maybe I should go to Silicon Valley, take a look.”
It wasn’t easy. Yuan had to apply for an entrance visa nine times before eventually receiving an H-1B visa, which allows American companies to employ foreign workers. In August of 1997, he finally landed in Silicon Valley, feeling energized by the idea that he could live one of the startup dreams that he’d been following ever since he was a kid—even though he barely spoke any English at the time.
Yuan’s journey began as one of the first 20 employees of WebEx, a startup trying to solve the then-novel problem of how businesses could better communicate over the Internet. Since he was still learning English, he focused on coding, letting his work speak for itself. Which it did: Yuan climbed the ranks to become Vice President of Engineering. Upon seeing various problems with WebEx, Yuan decided to branch off, creating his own company and platform, Zoom.
No experience could have prepared Yuan for what arrived in March of 2020. There were Zoom happy hours, Zoom birthday celebrations, Zoom bachelorette parties, Zoom dates, Zoom concerts, Zoom religious services, Zoom therapy sessions, and a whole new range of experiences centered around living mostly in video-chat windows: gag Zoom backgrounds, funny Zoom names, widely shared Zoom memes. At the same time, Zoom attempted to offer free service to K-12 schools—they ended up supporting more than 125,000 across 25 countries.
“Our company culture is about delivering happiness,” Yuan says. And because of how hard his team worked during COVID to respond to the initial difficulties Zoom faced, “I think the customer really trusts Zoom, they understand Zoom does have a great culture. Our common value is care, meaning we care about the community and customers as well as ourselves. We do all we can to make sure we do not let our beloved users down.”
Over the course of those seven or eight months, Zoom’s view of its role had changed. Instead of mainly focusing on providing a reliable solution for enterprise customers who needed to connect with their customers and partners, Zoom now understood that it was also a yoga studio, a cocktail bar, even a wedding venue—and that this might just be the tip of the iceberg.
Join us at the Inclusive Leader Awards Wednesday June 22nd and the GlobalMindED conference June 23-24. Program and registration details below.
