Eric Yuan
Co-founder 2011Background
Eric Yuan was born in 1970 in Tai'an, Shandong province, China. He studied applied mathematics at Shandong University of Science and Technology and earned a master's degree in geology from China University of Mining and Technology. After attending a Bill Gates talk in Japan in 1994, Yuan became convinced that the internet would transform global business and communication. He applied eight times for a US visa before being granted entry in 1997, joining the San Jose video conferencing startup WebEx Communications with $200 and minimal English. Yuan rose to become a senior engineering leader at WebEx and remained after Cisco's $3.2 billion acquisition of WebEx in 2007, ultimately serving as Vice President of Engineering for Cisco WebEx before leaving in 2011 to found Zoom.
Role at Zoom Video Communications
Eric Yuan founded Zoom Video Communications in April 2011 after Cisco declined his proposal to rebuild WebEx from the ground up. He took approximately forty engineers with him and incorporated Zoom with a founding conviction that video communications should be simple, reliable, and designed around real users rather than legacy enterprise IT requirements. Yuan led Zoom through its 2019 IPO—one of the few profitable tech IPOs in recent memory—and through the extraordinary pandemic-era growth that made Zoom a household word globally. He remains CEO of Zoom as of July 2025, maintaining an unusual continuity of founder leadership through both the company's hypergrowth and its complex post-pandemic strategic reinvention. Yuan has been recognized by Fortune, Forbes, and Time for his business leadership and is widely regarded as one of the most influential technology executives of his generation. He became a US citizen and has been a vocal advocate for immigration policy reform, speaking publicly about the importance of welcoming high-skilled immigrants to the United States technology sector.