- As a college student in China three decades ago.
Eric Yuan spent hours traveling to visit
his long distance girlfriend.
It was the only way to see her.
- If I have a device I can one-click,
I can see her, can talk with her.
Wow, that'd be awesome.
- Fast-forward to today.
And Eric's solution, Zoom has dramatically changed
both our personal and professional lives.
- For me, I wanna eat, sleep and Zoom.
- Welcome to "The Inflection Point."
I'm Monica Langley.
Eric, it's so fun to be at Zoom headquarters.
You know this show is called "The Inflection Point."
So my first question has to be
when was that moment in your life when everything changed?
And you can say, "That's when my life changed course."
- My life completely changed when I started Zoom
back in 2011.
- Well, it changed all of our lives actually.
- Yeah, I call Silicon Valley "Startup Valley."
I always wanted to start a business.
Finally, that moment came when I started Zoom.
- What did that mean to you when you started it?
I mean, you wanted to be an entrepreneur
for a really long time.
What did that feel like to you?
- So it means a lot to me.
Cause I was so inspired by Silicon Valley spirit,
entrepreneurial spirit, so many good entrepreneurs.
I feel like finally, I can start achieving something.
Especially I had a dream before to start a business.
Is part of my "American Dream," right?
And you come here with nothing
and you keep working hard and you can start something.
- You wanted to be an entrepreneur since
you were a little boy, actually.
I've read somewhere that when you were in fourth grade
you had this idea to make money off copper?
- Yes.
- And, you did something a little crazy.
What happened that you burned down your neighbor's cottage?
- First of all my neighbor,
they were so upset and they told my parents,
my father also was a little bit upset.
I never realized, I caused the fire.
- Well, how did you start a fire at your neighbor's cottage?
What the heck did you?
- Because I tried to burn the plastic, the stuff, right?
Otherwise you can never sell that, right?
So I had to burn that.
- And that was, you were trying to make money
and be an entrepreneur in fourth grade?
- Yes, exactly.
- All right.
So then you're growing up and at some point
you were getting your degrees in China.
And what made you decide you wanted a visa
to come to America?
- So when I was a young kid,
I was so fascinated by all those great stories
that have happened in Silicon Valley, like HP story
and Apple and all those great entrepreneurs.
And also I was traveling Japan in 1995,
and I was so inspired by the Bill Gates speech
about internet.
He was there to give a speech.
- Interesting.
- At that time I realized, "Wow, internet is the future."
It might change everything.
I should come here take a look
to embrace the first wave of the internet revolution.
That's why I decided to come here.
- But, you had to apply for a visa eight times,
eight times Eric.
Why did you keep that, why did you keep trying?
- So at that time I can tell you I was so sad
the first time I got declined.
Good news, I did not give up.
Looking back, I feel it's more like a practice
of my perseverance.
- Well, it's a good thing that you persevere
and you're here.
But, at some point a lot of people say fourth, fifth time,
well it's not meant to be.
- I told myself unless you told me that
I can never come here, I will always try.
And maybe 20 times, I'm okay.
- Once you finally, finally got your visa.
What was it like to leave your home country?
Take us back to that time for you and your family.
Was it a sad or joyous moment?
- So, first of all I was so excited
because, Silicon Valley is a worldwide innovation center.
On the other hand, I was also so sad
because I cannot see my parents anymore.
They were also so sad.
My mom cried,
I also cried.
My father, he told me that,
"Hey, you're gonna go to Silicon Valley
and make sure you keep working hard, stay humble,
you're gonna have a lot of new friends."
So yeah, on one hand very excited,
but overall I think, it's very emotional.
- But now, when you finally got here, what year was that?
- That's 1997.
- Okay, so 1997 you came, you had degrees from
China universities in applied mathematics
and engineering, right?
- Yeah.
- So, but you didn't speak English.
So your language was code.
How did the ability to code help you get a job here
even though you could not speak English?
- Yeah.
I was sort of the first step,
one of the first 10 engineers when I joined Webex
because I understand the code,
I know how to write a code.
That's why I can survive.
(gasps)
- But you couldn't speak English.
So did you just learn it on the job?
- Just a talk with my colleagues,
sometimes talk with our neighbors
and yeah, that's pretty much.
- So when you arrived here, you were clearly a software wiz.
But you also had a vision, you had a dream.
What was that vision that you had,
your big idea that originated in China?
It kind of began with a love story.
- Yeah.
So when I was a freshman in college
my girlfriend, she's a year older than me,
she's at a different college
and to see her, is really hard.
I only can see her twice a year.
Every time I took a train, there is no direct train,
probably 10 hours.
And one day I remember, it's more like a day dream
I thought about, "My God it's so hard to see her."
Maybe in the future if I have a device, I can one, click,
I can see her, can talk with her.
Wow, that'd be awesome.
It's more like a day dream.
I never thought about that, later on,
the first time when we had the prototype of Zoom,
at that time I can connect the dots.
- Did you finally, when you got Zoom up and running,
Zoom with your wife?
And say, "It's here."
- I hope I did that.
On the day when our product was ready,
but I did not do that only until a later date.
- Oh, you didn't do it right away and say, "it's here."
"It's all because of you, my true love."
- I was too busy at that time.
Always think about how to make the product better.
- Is she like, "You spend way too much time on Zoom?"
- She wants me to keep improving our service.
- She does?
- Yeah, she does.
- Wow.
Do your kids now tell you at dinnertime,
"Dad, there's this thing about Zoom
that you really should do."
- My daughter sometimes.
She does give me feedback like that.
- And do you listen?
Or, have you ever executed any suggestions
from your wife or your kids?
- Absolutely.
Because the first day, my daughter's school,
when they went online to use Zoom for online classes,
she asked a question, how to raise my hand.
- So you did that?
- We are still in the process to keep improving.
- Well now, when you came here you started at Webex.
So, did that give you some way to pursue your vision?
- No, I joined Webex, and at that time there's no video.
And it's more like a web conferencing.
Nobody's thought about video,
because there's no way the camera is on, not like today.
- Okay, gotcha.
So you're there, you are making good money.
You're the lead engineer or something.
And, you're there for 10 years, right?
- That's right.
- And then they're acquired by Cisco,
and you still have your dream of wanting
to do the video conferencing or seeing people by video.
So what did you do?
- So the year before I left,
everyday I tried to talk with our customer,
I mean Webex customer
because I feel like Webex sort of my baby.
And the whole era I can tell you back then,
everyday I was not happy,
because I did not see a single happy customer.
So every morning when I woke up, not like today,
I even do not want to work.
So I struggled for a year,
finally I decided to leave and to build a new solution,
to bring happiness back to Webex customer.
- At this point, you had a wife, you had three children.
What made you, what is in you that made you willing
to walk away from that and take this big of risk
to start completely over?
- You are so right.
That's a very tough decision.
Even my wife, a lot of friends told me that,
"Hey, you already had a very good successful career," right?
Why you wanna start over?
However, I live in Silicon Valley, right?
I really wanted to start something, right?
Because already planted a seed when I was a young kid,
and also if I do not try,
I feel like I was already 41 years old, right?
Probably if I do not try, I never try that.
The most important thing is I always wanted to fast forward,
let's say fast forward to 30 years.
Look back, I regret or not.
I feel like if I do not start something back then,
I'm gonna regret.
So that's reason why I'll do all I can
no matter what kind of a cost, I still need to move forward
to start a company.
- You left Cisco at 41 years old to start Zoom
is that right?
- That's right.
I was very young.
- That's not the youngest of ages for a lot
of these startup guys.
But you had this vision,
did you find, people were like, "what a great idea!"
Did they love your idea?
- I hope that was the case.
I actually, interestingly enough
I shared the idea, I wanna build a new solution
almost every friend of mine,
especially for those of VC friends.
They all told me that, that's crazy, you better give up.
The world does not need to have a new solution like that.
- They did.
And just like the guy who tried eight times to get his visa,
you just decided, I'm gonna persevere?
- So first of all I was little bit disappointed,
because I thought it'll be all my friends that
they're gonna invest in me.
The good news, some other friends and personal friends,
they all supported me.
I cannot raise any-all the funding from all the VCs.
- 10 years later, you were a success.
Zoom is a success, you proved you could do it.
And then you did an IPO,
and it was a huge hit, your IPO.
Tell us about that moment.
- I think, since I lived here in 1997.
I always dreamed about, "Hey, someday
if I can start a company the company can become
a Nasdaq company."
That's a big trade.
I think the day when we went public, the dream came true.
Also we all went into New York to ring the bell.
I feel like, wow, I was so excited.
- Well, the stock market actually validated your vision.
I mean, I think your stock doubled that day, didn't it?
I mean, it was like a major hit on the market, Nasdaq.
You became a billionaire that day.
I mean, it was a dream come true.
- I think it came in my age.
I feel like the money or power,
those kinds of things were not bringing me any happiness.
How to build a best product, to really help
the world and to help people stay connected
that will make me happy.
- So, you felt you had connected the world.
You were getting a lot of success with Zoom.
But then the pandemic happened.
Let's talk about 2020.
What were you thinking in early 2020?
- Wow.
I was gonna say it's over.
I really do not wanna go back year 2020.
That was so challenging.
So on one hand, we were so excited.
Finally, we realized wow, we can really
help the world, right?
Because of the tools Zoom can help people stay connected
when they work remotely or work from home.
On the other hand, I can tell you we were not ready.
The meeting participant thirty times more traffic.
How to support those users is a big challenge.
- Exactly.
And once the pandemic took hold, everything was halted.
Business travel halted, schools closed down,
families couldn't gather,
and so they all turned to Zoom.
Which is what you had to build up to, as you say
for thirty times.
And did you realize that Zoom was becoming like a phenom?
I mean you basically came part of the
cultural zeitgeist, right?
I mean, I remember watching Saturday Night Live on Zoom.
NBA teams were practicing over Zoom.
People were getting married over Zoom.
Were you gratified and proud?
How did you feel when Zoom became part
of the whole experience?
Pandemic was horrible,
but Zoom was one bright spot.
- Yeah.
First of all, we all felt very proud.
This is a great privilege to solve for so many users.
You mentioned Saturday Night, that's one of
my favorite shows.
Tom Hanks was there, with Zoom.
And also the Zoom marriage, was legal in New York.
We feel like, wow we can really,
really help the people stay connected.
- As you mentioned though,
there were growing pains at Zoom, at your company.
And that must have been hard to suddenly have the Zoom
bombing become an issue.
How did you react to that, Eric?
Because this is your baby.
This is your brainchild.
- First of all, if I can take step back
and share with you how it started.
Zoom was built to serve for enterprise customers
and from a privacy security perspective
we do have so many features,
but the way it works is normally we work with the
galleries enterprise IT team.
They will decide what kind of features they enable
or disable.
However last year there's so many first time consumers,
including K-12 schools
I think sometimes they're so excited to just share
the gallery view with the meeting ID, no password,
they shared it to the social media.
- So that became a big weakness.
- For sure is also our problem.
I think, we should take step back to really look
at a consumer use case.
We should enable those features by default.
With the meeting password, with waiting room,
we learned a big lesson
not only from enterprise perspective,
but also in the user perspective.
- You have taken serious steps to resolve this now, right?
I mean, you came out and you had, "Ask Eric anything."
- And first of all, we got to tell the audience,
tell our customers sorry.
For me as a CEO, I know actually as the bigger problem,
and also we wanted to keep everything open and transparent.
Tell our users what kinds of actions we're gonna take
to completely address this problem.
We had so many, and security background engineers,
we have a security council,
and also hired so many professionals from
a security background
and we triple down on that.
And essentially wanna make sure that enterprise security
is part of our common DNA.
- People though continued to stay on Zoom,
practically around the clock.
I mean, I live on Zoom.
I felt like I've lived on Zoom.
I continue to live on Zoom.
But, a lot of people then started to talk about
"Zoom fatigue."
And you know, Zoom is a verb.
We all like, "Let's get on Zoom."
"We wanna do Zoom."
It's a verb.
That's great.
But then when they start making "Zoom fatigue," a noun.
Because everybody's like, "Oh, I'm exhausted."
Even you came out and said you were getting tired
of Zoom a little bit yourself.
- When we were all stuck at home, for me I wanna eat,
sleep and Zoom.
- Exactly.
- Nowhere to go.
Also on a peak day I had a total of 19 Zoom meetings.
For sure I also have a little bit of fatigue.
But we all understand why is that.
- So do you feel at, even as the founder of Zoom
that being on Zoom all the time
it's not a healthy way to live and work?
- The problem is, you have too many back to back meetings.
You never take a break.
And is in the mental health, anxiety,
depression could have caused a problem.
- And for you that day you had 19 Zoom meetings
in a single day.
Did you find, "I'm about to lose my mind."
- At that time I can tell you, and I was so tired.
And I just realized, man that the meeting
fatigue is something real.
You have to be proactive to take a break.
- What do you do when you're proactive and take a break?
- Oh, I just walk around in my backyard with my kids,
with my mom or maybe read a book.
- Yeah.
- Give that the future is about a hybrid,
I think that problem will be gone.
- Really, because now we're vaccinated
and the future of work, you think it's gonna be
a hybrid workspace.
- Yeah.
- And the future of Zoom will stay apart of hybrid.
Hybrid by definition means we're gonna be out some,
but we're also gonna be at home some.
So people will still be Zooming,
just not all the damn time, right?
- Very true.
- Okay.
So, we're sitting here in Zoom.
We have the delivering happiness.
There's little happiness sayings all over the office
around here.
You talked about starting Zoom because
you weren't happy and your customers weren't happy.
What does happiness mean to you, Eric?
- So back to the time when I was a kid,
I do not understand the purpose of life.
I try to get an answer to that,
and only later I realized the purpose of life
is to pursue happiness.
And a sustainable happiness comes from making others happy.
Deliver happiness is our company culture.
Meaning for me as a CEO of the company
my number one priority is to make sure our employee happy.
If our employee happy, I will be happy.
And also together if we can make our customer happy,
also we are happy.
And also that happiness is very sustainable.
- You were named the 2020 Business Person of the Year
by "Time Magazine."
You have gotten a lot of great accolades and cool things
that people would say you have arrived Eric.
You should be super happy.
- All of those happiness are short-term
and not sustainable.
Only the sustainable happiness is
making others happy.
Those happiness are very sustainable.
- So do you feel happier?
- I do.
- Because?
- Because I make our users happy.
I make our employees happy.
I make my family happy.
- Well, you made me happy by letting me come interview you.
So thank you so much for letting me join you today.
- My pleasure, thank you so much.