Eric Yuan is a Chinese internet entrepreneur, founder, business executive, and investor from Xuzhou best known as the founder and CEO of Zoom company.
Early life and education
Eric Yuan was born in Xuzhou, China in 1970. Yuan earned his degree in Bachelor in Engineering from Stanford University and later earned his Master’s Degree from China University of Mining and Technology. In the mid-90s, Yuan immigrated to Silicon Valley at the age of 27 as the internet had not taken off in China. Yuan got denied in his first U.S. visa application and finally obtained his visa on his ninth try.
Eric Yuan is a national born Chinese internet entrepreneur, business executive, founder, and investor from Xuzhou. Yuan is best known as the founder and CEO of Zoom company, a computer software firm.
Career
In 1997, Yuan started his career at WebEx as one of the founding engineers and VP of engineering. He expanded his team from 10 to over 800 engineers worldwide and committed to revenue growth from $0 to more than $800 million.
In 2007, Cisco acquired WebEx and Yuan became Cisco’s Corporate Vice President of engineering, in charge of collaboration software. Yuan often engaged with customers, and with all the interactions with his customers, Yuan discovered that they weren’t happy with the current collaboration solutions, including WebEx. Yuan understood that the solution suffered from some deep flaws due to its older architecture, particularly a lack of reliability, usability, and video quality. Yuan knew that Cisco needed to rebuild WebEx from the ground up, from the back-end architecture to the user interface to the sales model. Yuan explained the issues to Cisco leadership, but they didn’t listen which led him to leave the company in 2001.
Zoom
In 2011, Yuan started a company that delivers remote conferencing services using cloud computing called Zoom Video Communications. Zoom offers communications software that merges video conferencing, online meeting, mobile collaboration, and chat. In January 2013, the service began, and by May 2013, it already claimed one million participants. Zoom built a partnership with B2B collaboration software providers in their first year of its release. Its partnership with RedBooth (known as Teambox at that time) played a role in adding a video component to Redbooth. Zoom designed a program named Works with Zoom, soon after this partnership, which established partnerships with various hardware and software vendors such as Vaddio, Logitech, and InFocus. Zoom managed to have its software integrated into InterviewStream, a company that provides remote video interviewing capacity to employers towards the end of the year. InterviewStream expanded its video interviewing capabilities using Zoom’s video services.
On December 11, 2013, Centrify Corporation declared it would integrate access control, Microsoft Active Directory, and single sign-on (SS0) compatibility with Zoom’s application. Zoom added the capability for the participant on March 17, 2014, to join meetings by dialing into a toll-free public switched telephone network number via its partnership with Voxbone. Later in that year, the publicity of version 3.5 added mobile screen sharing to mobile devices running iOS. In June 2014, the number of participants had increased to 10 million. The number of participants using Zoom Video Communication’s chief product – Zoom Meetings – reached 40 million individuals in February 2015, with 65,000 organizations subscribed. In addition to this, the company exceeded 1 billion total meeting minutes beyond its entire service lifespan. On February 4, 2015, Zoom received $30 million in Series C funding. Among the participants in this funding round include Emergence Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Jerry Yang, Horizons Ventures (Li Ka-Shing), and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. In September of the same year, the company partnered with Salesforce to combine video conferencing into the CRM platform, enabling salespeople to initiate such conferences with their leads without leaving the application. On November 3, soon after this integration happened, David Berman, a former president of RingCentral has been named the president of Zoom Video Communications. The founder and CEO of Veeva Systems, Peter Gassner, joined Zoom’s board of directors on the same day. In February 2016, Zoom had started a new office in Denver, Colorado. Later the same year, the company also added VMware’s CIO, Bask Iyer as a business adviser.
In early 2017, Zoom was estimated at $1 billion. Zoom had formally listed the Unicorn club in January 2017 and brought $100 million in Series D funding from Sequoia Capital at a billion dollar valuation. The announcement was linked with the release of Zoom 4.0. According to Yuan, the company would be investing in portions that need development and banking the investment, rather than preparing a project with these funds, since Zoom has had a cash-flow-positive status in the last quarter. On April 24, 2017, Zoom stated the release of the first scalable telehealth product, permitting doctors to attend their patients through video for consultation. The Zoom for Telehealth, integrates with other healthcare applications within hospital infrastructures and provides a virtual waiting room for patients. It allows for signed business associate agreements to keep HIPAA compliance for adopters. In May 2017, Zoom declared a partnership with Polycom through a new product, the Zoom Connector for Polycom. This new product integrated Zoom’s video meetings into Polycom’s conferencing systems, HD and wireless screen sharing, enabling features such as multiple screens and device meetings, and calendar integration with Outlook, Google Calendar, and iCal.
Marketwired issued a press release in August 2017, acknowledging Zoom’s passing of several milestones in company growth. The highlights covered expanding its year-over-year revenue by 150% and customer base by 100%, hosting over 20 billion annualized meeting minutes (up from 6.9 billion last year), starting offices abroad in Sydney and the U.K., partnering and optimizing integrations with Polycom, Creston, and Cisco, and launching new innovations and enhancements to its platform including Zoom Rooms Scheduling Display and Zoom for Telehealth. In addition, Zoom scored a 4.8/5 on Gartner Peer Insights and ranked 18th on the Forbes Cloud 100 List.
In September 2017, Zoom hosted Zoomtopia 2017, the company’s first year-end user conference. Zoom declared partnerships and a series of new products, including a partnership with Meta to integrate Zoom with Augmented Reality, integration with Workplace by Facebook and Slack, and first steps towards an artificial intelligence speech-to-text converter. In October 2017, the company proclaimed that Jonathan Chadwick had joined Zoom’s Board of Directors as an audit committee chair to supervise financial reporting and disclosure. On November 8, 2017, Zoom proclaimed Kelly Steckelberg, a CFO of Cisco’s WebEx Division and former CEO of Zoosk, had followed Zoom as the new Chief Financial Officer. Zoom filed to go public in March 2019, on the NASDAQ and the company went public on April 18th, with shares up more than 72% with an IPO of $36 a share. The company was valued at just under $16 billion by the end of its IPO. Yuan own 20% of the shares, is tech’s newest billionaire with a stake worth about $2.9 billion.