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Eric Yuan

Abstract

Eric Yuan (born 1970) was refused a United States visa eight times before he got one in 1997, joined WebEx as one of its first twenty engineers, and rose to run engineering after Cisco bought the company in 2007. In 2011 he asked Cisco to let him build a video-conferencing product that worked well on a phone; Cisco said no, so he left with about forty engineers and built Zoom. It launched in January 2013 into a market that already had Skype, WebEx, GoToMeeting and Google, and won by being the one that connected on the first click. Then the pandemic arrived: daily meeting participants went from 10 million in December 2019 to 300 million in April 2020, the company’s name became a verb, its encryption claims were exposed as overstated, and Skype, the incumbent, disappeared. Zoom remains the companion piece to Skype’s story: the product that did what Skype’s owners had stopped doing.

Eric Yuan
Eric Yuan in 2025. Image: TechCrunch, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Nine Applications

Yuan Zheng was born in Tai’an, in Shandong province, on February 20, 1970, to two geological engineers. He took a degree in applied mathematics at Shandong University of Science and Technology and a master’s in geological engineering at the China University of Mining and Technology in Beijing. In 1995 he heard Bill Gates speak in Japan about the Internet and decided to go to Silicon Valley; the US consulate turned down his visa application eight times over two years before granting the ninth, in 1997. He has said that the ten-hour train rides he took to visit his girlfriend as a student were the origin of his interest in video calls.

WebEx

He joined WebEx in 1997 as one of its first twenty employees and wrote much of the meeting software that made it the standard for web conferencing in the 2000s. Cisco bought WebEx in 2007 for $3.2 billion and made Yuan corporate vice president of engineering; the WebEx engineering team he had grown from ten people numbered more than 800. By 2010 he was unhappy: customers were unhappy, the product had accumulated the layers of a decade, and the smartphone had arrived with a camera on its front. He proposed a new product built for mobile video and was refused. He resigned in 2011, and about forty WebEx engineers went with him.

Zoom

The company was incorporated in April 2011 as Saasbee, renamed Zoom in May 2012, and funded by Yuan’s own money and investors who knew him from WebEx after venture firms passed. Stanford was the first customer in November 2012 and the product launched publicly in January 2013. Its design rule was that a meeting should start with one click and keep working on a bad connection; the software adapted video quality continuously to bandwidth, ran the same on every platform, and let anyone join from a link without an account. The free tier allowed 40-minute meetings for up to 100 people, which made every free user a salesperson. The company went public on April 18, 2019, at $36 a share, closed the first day up 72 percent, valuing the company at about $16 billion; it was profitable, which was unusual for a software IPO that year.

2020

When offices, schools and courts closed in March 2020, Zoom was what they used. Daily meeting participants rose from 10 million in December 2019 to 200 million in March 2020 and 300 million in April; the app was the fifth most downloaded in the world that year; the share price rose from $68 in January to $559 in October, and the company’s market value passed that of the seven largest airlines combined. “Zoom” became the word for a video call, as “Skype” had been. The larger shift is in The Remote Work Revolution.

The scrutiny came with the growth. Uninvited people joined public meetings and broadcast obscenities, a practice named Zoombombing, and the company added waiting rooms and default passwords. Researchers at the University of Toronto found in April 2020 that some calls had been routed through servers in China, and that Zoom’s advertised “end-to-end encryption” was in fact encryption to Zoom’s servers; the company apologised, froze feature development for ninety days to work on security, and shipped real end-to-end encryption in October 2020. The Federal Trade Commission settled a complaint over the encryption claims in November 2020, and a class action over data shared with Facebook and others through the iOS app was settled for $85 million in 2021.

Skype, meanwhile, with the recognised name and twenty years of users, gained a fraction of what Zoom gained and was retired by Microsoft in 2025; why is examined in Dead End: Skype. Yuan’s own explanation was the one he had given Cisco in 2011: the product had to work first and be featured second.

After the Peak

Growth stopped when offices reopened. Revenue rose from $623 million in the fiscal year before the pandemic to $2.65 billion the year after and $4.1 billion the year after that, and then flattened; the stock fell back below its IPO-year level. In February 2023 Zoom laid off about 1,300 people, 15 percent of its staff, and Yuan cut his own salary by 98 percent for the year. The company added a phone system, a chat product and, from 2023, an AI assistant, and in November 2024 dropped “Video” from its name. Fiscal 2025 revenue was $4.67 billion with about 7,400 employees.

Yuan became a US citizen in 2007. He was Time’s businessperson of the year in 2020, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2025, and in 2021 transferred about 40 percent of his Zoom shares, worth some $6 billion, to trusts, saying it was for estate planning and philanthropy. He lives in Santa Clara and has said he takes about two business trips a year, on the grounds that he built the alternative.

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