A Biography of Eric Yuan, Founder and CEO of Zoom.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, this San Jose based company is rising in household recognition.
With social distancing and isolation taking place all around the world, I decided to do a little research about the tech giant that’s increasingly appearing in both our professional and personal lives. Zoom.
Eric Yuan — the Founder and CEO of Zoom — was born in China (Tai’An City, Shandong Province) and lived in China until he was 27 years old.
His Chinese Name: 袁征 (Yuán zhēng) includes the character 征 (zhēng) which means ‘to go on an expedition / journey’.
And there is no doubt, that the story of Zoom has been a journey for this Founder.
He studied both Masters and Bachelor Degrees in his home province of Shandong and married at a young age of 22.
Yuan immigrated to the U.S. from China in 1997 while he was living and working in Beijing. His visa applications were denied 8 times in a row over a 1.5 year period, but he kept persisting. On his 9th attempt, he was successful.
Moving to Silicon Valley
In 1997, Yuan landed his first job in Silicon Valley as one of the first software engineers at a young company called WebEx.
In 2007, the firm WebEx got acquired by Cisco Systems for USD $3.2 billion in a public takeover. He stuck with the company as it grew from just 10 engineers to 800 worldwide.
In 2006, prior to the acquisition, Eric completed an MBA from Stanford Business School. Yuan went on to become Vice President of Engineering, running engineering in the WebEx business.
Leaving WebEx
Post the acquisition, Yuan wanted to rebuild the WebEx product from the ground up. However, Yuan wasn’t successful in convincing his bosses to let it happen. “So I left Cisco to build that next generation solution of Zoom.” Yuan said later in a Forbes interview.
In June 2011, after being with WebEx for 14 years, Yuan left WebEx to start his own competitor business.
The Early Days
The company was incorporated April 2011 in the State of Delaware and was originally known as SaaSbee. SaaSbee raised a total of $3 million in seed funding from people like former WebEx CEO, Subrah Iyar and Yahoo Co-founder, Jerry.
A search on wayback machine shows the company’s landing page saasbee.com back in 2011 just a few months after the company was incorporated.
The Beginning of Zoom
The startup later changed its name to Zoom Video Communications, Inc in 2012.
In August 2012, Zoom launched their first version of the product.
You can see their landing page from August 2012 below — also visible via Wayback Machine.
Shortly after, their product got reviewed by Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal. A big moment for the new startup.
The result? Walt Mossberg concluded at the end of his article that “Zoom.us is a very good product with lots of practical uses.” Great news for Zoom 👍👍
You can see the full product review from Walt Mossberg below or read the written article here.
More recently, in a wide ranging interview with TechCrunch Journalist, Connie Loizos — Yuan reflected on the early days.
He said that in the early days engineers were the ones responsible for closing deals and that “we did not have a product managers, we did not have QA, we only had engineers. Whenever we received a customer cancellation email, I personally replied back [to them].”
He mentioned in a separate interview that Zoom did not hire Marketing or Sales people until the Company achieved over $1 million in Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). A phenomenal effort. Before that moment, everything was simply left to the engineers to do — including closing sales.
It’s clear from his interviews that Yuan gave priority to hiring engineers and focusing on the Zoom product. Yuan himself, as one of the most experienced video conference software engineers in the world, could see the power in focusing intently on good quality engineering. In many ways, it worked very well for him.
Zoom attracted 45 engineers from Yuan’s former company WebEx to leave their jobs and join his new company — a phenomenal amount of engineers to poach from a former employer.
An Unconventional Founder
In some ways, Yuan is also not your typical Silicon Valley Founder and CEO.
He started the company when he was 41 years old — an age that is definitely higher than the typical age of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial cohort.
Furthermore, Yuan is a solo Founder at Zoom, and many would say that being a solo Founder goes against the conventional wisdom of Silicon Valley.
Yet given this, Yuan has had outstanding success in turning his company into a global tech unicorn.
Fundraising / IPO
Zoom since 2011 has raised huge amounts of venture capital including from some of the most high profile figures in the industry, including Sequoia Capital and Li Ka-Shing’s venture capital fund. Li Ka-Shing is Asia’s richest person.
According to Crunchbase.com, Zoom Video Communications has raised a total of $146 million over 6 separate fundraising rounds.
In 2019, they listed on the NASDAQ and as Forbes highlights in their 2019 article, Zoom is one of the rare tech unicorns that has completed an IPO whilst being profitable.
Zoom Video Communications Inc (NASDAQ: ZM) as of 29th March 2020 has a market cap of USD $42 billion, which puts it higher than Pinterest, Lyft . It also is very close to Uber’s market cap of USD $47 billion.
The company has consistently achieved a market cap of over USD $10 billion since IPO.
