In the late ’80s, Yuan was a freshman studying applied mathematics and computer science at the Shandong University of Science and Technology, in China’s Shandong Province. 2011-2013: From Shandong Province to Silicon ValleyĮric Yuan had been thinking about video-conferencing technology for more than 20 years before he quit his job at Cisco to start his own company.

However, before Yuan could realize his vision, he needed funding––and he got it from a former colleague at Cisco, who believed in that vision. Yuan was convinced there had to be a better way for people to collaborate via online video. How even well-intentioned design decisions can have unintended consequences.How Zoom was able to succeed despite its late entry into an already crowded market.How a long-distance relationship inspired Yuan to create a better web-conferencing product.Here are a few of the things we’ll be looking at in this article: Not only that, but the company also achieved profitability very quickly, thanks to Yuan’s lean, focused approach to product development and his customer centricity. In just four years, Zoom’s video-conferencing product went from scrappy upstart to being used by tens of millions of people around the world. Undeterred, Yuan did what any confident entrepreneur would do, he promptly resigned to start his own company. Despite the fact that WebEx had been a costly acquisition, and the product was an important part of Cisco’s business. In 2011, Cisco’s then-VP of engineering, Eric Yuan, tried to persuade his fellow executives that they urgently needed to improve WebEx, Cisco’s web-conferencing product.Īt that time, Cisco’s strategy for web conferencing didn’t involve improving existing products.

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