Eric Yuan

Eric Yuan is the founder and CEO of Zoom Video Communications, the video conferencing platform that became one of the most essential tools of the 21st century. His relentless focus on building the most reliable, user-friendly video communication product in the world positioned Zoom to become the go-to platform when the world suddenly needed remote communication at unprecedented scale. Yuan's personal philosophy that happiness and ease of use should be at the center of every product decision created a company culture and a product that hundreds of millions of people came to depend on.

Yuan's path to founding Zoom began with a dream. Growing up in China, he was inspired by a Bill Gates speech about the internet and applied for a U.S. visa eight times before finally being accepted on the ninth try. After arriving in Silicon Valley, he joined WebEx and spent 14 years building video conferencing technology, rising to Vice President of Engineering. When his proposals to rebuild the product from scratch for the mobile era were not adopted, he left to found Zoom in 2011 with a small team of loyal engineers who shared his vision for a truly delightful communication experience.

Zoom's growth from a startup to a company processing hundreds of millions of daily meeting participants is one of the most dramatic success stories in technology history. During 2020, Zoom's revenue grew from approximately $600 million to $2.6 billion as the platform became essential infrastructure for business, education, healthcare, and personal connection worldwide. Yuan's technical excellence, customer obsession, and genuine warmth as a leader have made him one of the most admired technology CEOs of his generation, and Zoom's continuing evolution demonstrates his commitment to innovation and growth.

Eric Yuan was born in 1970 in Tai'an, Shandong Province, China. As a university student in the early 1990s, he became fascinated by the potential of the internet after hearing a speech by Bill Gates. He was particularly inspired by the idea that technology could connect people across distances, eliminating the need for the long train rides he took to visit his then-girlfriend (now wife). After earning his master's degree in engineering, Yuan decided to move to the United States to pursue opportunities in the nascent internet industry. His visa application was denied eight times over nearly two years before finally being approved on the ninth attempt in 1997. He joined WebEx, a video conferencing startup, as one of its founding engineers. When Cisco acquired WebEx for $3.2 billion in 2007, Yuan became Cisco's VP of engineering, overseeing the WebEx platform. But growing frustrated by Cisco's inability to innovate on the product, he left in 2011 to found Zoom with the mission of building the video communications platform he always wished WebEx could have been.