About Eric Yuan, Owner and CEO of Zoom Video Communications

Eric Yuan

Introduction

Eric Yuan is a Chinese American businessman, entrepreneur and founder of video conferencing startup Zoom Technologies. He owns 22% of Zoom Company at the IPO. He was also a manger of Web Ex at Cisco. According to Forbes, he has a net worth of around $6 billion as of 2020 and His major source of income is from the company as he has $5.6 billion shares in Zoom.

The career of Eric Yuan and About Zoom

In 2011, he founded Zoom and He was previously a manager of Web Ex at Cisco, which acquired the video conferencing company in 2007 where he worked for four years and left the firm in June 2011. Eric was added to the Business Insider list of the 52 Most Powerful People in Enterprise Tech in 2017. As of 2020, he has $5.6 billion shares in Zoom. Zoom raised a $30 million round from Emergence Capital in 2015 after raising another $6.5 million from Li Ka-Shing's Horizons Ventures.

Zoom Video Communications, Inc works for the provision of the video-first communications platform. It allows people across disparate devices and locations through frictionless video, voice, chat and content sharing, and enables face-to-face video experiences for thousands of people in a single meeting. Its main goal is to focus on customer and employee happiness.  Its headquartered is in San Jose, CA. They had 10 million users by the end of the year 2014 and then in a year, it reached 40 million. Zoom raised $30 million in series C venture capital funding from investors included Yahoo founder Jerry Yang and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiongin the same year. According to Wallmine, In June 2017, for the first time, the company’s private market value was $1 billion and it happened because Sequoia Capital has invested $100 million.

Eric during an interview with Business Matters revealed that the inspiration behind Zoom was to build a video conferencing solution that people love. He said he envisioned Zoom while he was a college student in the late ’80s as it would take over 10-hours (each way) by train to visit his girlfriend. His desire was for an easier way to see her face-to-face without traveling. He immigrated to San Jose, CA in 1997 and became one of the founding engineers at a small start-up, called Web-Ex. where he stayed for 14 years. While there he grew the team he managed from 10 engineers to more than 800 worldwide and contributed to revenue growth from $0 to more than $800M. He said while he spoke with Web-Ex customers he realized that the solution suffered from some deep flaws due to its older architecture, particularly a lack of usability, reliability and video quality. He knew that Cisco needed to rebuild Web-Ex from the ground up – from the back-end architecture to the user interface to the sales model. He told Cisco leadership but they didn’t listen which led him to strike out on his own in 2011. He was soon joined by most of the Web Ex’s most talented and visionary engineers and they spent the next two years building Zoom that ran seamlessly across mobile, desktop devices and conference room systems. Then they built a global team of over 850 passionate people. The following data of Zoom revenue are from Forbes.

  1. Revenue for the quarter ending January 31, 2020, was $0.188B, a 77.93% increase year-over-year.
  2. Revenue for the twelve months ending January 31, 2020, was $0.623B, an 88.39% increase year-over-year.
  3. Annual revenue for 2020 was $0.623B, an 88.39% increase from 2019.
  4. Annual revenue for 2019 was $0.331B, a 118.19% increase from 2018.
  5. Annual revenue for 2018 was $0.151B, an INF% increase from 2017.

According to a business insider, the market share of Zoom had reached double-figure which was $24.2 million because of COVID-19. IDC estimates by 2023, Zoom will have a $43 billion market.

Early Life and Personal life of Eric Yuan

Eric Yuan was born on February 20, 1970, in Shandong, China. From Shandong University of Business and Technology, he had completed his bachelors of engineering and master of engineering management from China University of Mining and Technology. He tried nine times for the US visa over a two year period and finally got in the mid-1990s. He used to travel for 10 hours on the train to meet his girlfriend( now his wife) and they got married when he was 22. They also have three children. But there is no information about the name of his wife and children.

Engagement on the online world 

Eric Yuan is considered one of the most famous business icons in the world. He has 72.1K followers on Twitter.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ericsyuan?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

 

Source of image: https://www1.pictures.zimbio.com/gi/Eric+Yuan+0cHboAuC1IZm.jpg