Eric Yuan
Background
Eric Yuan immigrated to the US from China in 1997 and joined WebEx as a founding engineer, staying on after Cisco acquired WebEx in 2007 to become Cisco's VP of Engineering. Frustrated that Cisco was not investing enough in mobile-first video conferencing, he left in 2011 -- along with about 40 fellow engineers -- to found Zoom, betting that video calling needed to be rebuilt from scratch for a cloud-first, mobile world rather than retrofitted onto legacy enterprise software. He took Zoom public in 2019 and led the company through the pandemic-driven surge in remote-work video demand that made Zoom a household name almost overnight. Before founding Zoom, Yuan had risen from an engineer with limited English skills -- he initially struggled to get an US visa, applying eight times before succeeding in 1997 -- to a senior Cisco executive overseeing hundreds of engineers, a trajectory he has often cited publicly as motivation for Zoom obsessive focus on customer experience and product simplicity. He has remained Zoom CEO continuously since founding it, steering the company through its 2019 IPO, the 2020 pandemic-driven surge that took Zoom from a niche enterprise tool to a verb in everyday use, and the subsequent normalization and pivot toward AI-driven agentic features under the Zoom Communications rebrand. Yuan has said the initial rejection of a Zoom-like product pitch inside Cisco -- where leadership felt WebEx already covered video conferencing -- was the direct catalyst for his departure, and he has repeatedly framed Zoom origin as a story about betting on mobile-native architecture at a time when incumbents were extending desktop-era software rather than rebuilding for phones and tablets.