Feb 26, 2020
Today's episode originally aired in July 2018. The guest is Eric
Yuan, the founder and CEO of Zoom. Known for its easy-to-use and
reliable video conferencing product, Zoom became a listed company
in April 2019 and soon became one of the largest public SaaS
companies in the world.
The recent outbreak of the
coronavirus has made remote working part of many people's new
realities. It also puts remote working tools like Zoom under a
stress test with the surging needs, which Zoom did incredibly well.
It always works. GGV has been a happy customer of Zoom for a really
long time and we hope this conversation can give you a hint on how
it became successful in the first place.
Zoom is used by a third of Fortune 500 companies and 90% of the top
200 universities in the US. Eric was recently named the Top CEO on
Glassdoor, with an approval rating of 99%, and was the first person
of color to win the award. Eric grew up and went to college in
China, arrived in Silicon Valley in 1997 and joined WebEx when it
was still a small company. In 2007 WebEx was acquired by Cisco and
Eric became Cisco's Corporate VP of engineering in charge of
collaboration software. Eric spent 14 years in total at WebEx and
grew its engineering team from 10 to 800, and increased its revenue
from zero to over $800 million. Eric holds 11 patents, plus 20
pending patents in the pipeline.
In this episode, Eric shared his story of being rejected a US visa
for 8 times while in China, getting its first paid customer,
balancing the needs of SMB and enterprise, and what makes Zoom
different from its competitors.
For the full transcript of the show, go
to nextbn.ggvc.com
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