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Meanwhile, Yuan himself was even diving into customer service in some cases, by personally responding over email to customers thinking about leaving the product. "We didn't even have a marketing team until 2015," he says. Much of Zoom's early growth was organic its entire marketing strategy at that time relied on "word of mouth" promotion, according to Yuan. ( Zoom still offers its "basic" services for free, but business clients can pay for monthly subscriptions to get more features and allow more participants to use the software.)
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Part of the reason for that rapid adoption: Zoom offered a free product that people could use to stream video calls on their mobile devices or sync with traditional conferencing equipment in an office space. Two years later, that number had quickly grown to roughly 65,000 companies, with over 40 million individual participants using Zoom's videoconferencing software. It quickly became popular with business clients, with over 3,500 businesses using Zoom within five months of its launch.
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After developing a beta version of Yuan's videoconferencing software and testing it with tech company clients around Silicon Valley, Zoom launched its first official product in 2013. (He's now a Zoom board member whose stake in the company was worth nearly $176.5 million after Zoom's IPO, in April).Įventually, Yuan raised $3 million in seed funding from the likes of WebEx founder Subrah Iyar (now a Zoom adviser) and the venture capital firm TSVC. That made it difficult for Yuan to convince venture capital firms to back his new venture, but he was able to win the support of friends and angel investors like Dan Scheinman, a fellow former Cisco executive who believed in Yuan's new project enough to cut him a $250,000 check. When Yuan founded San Jose-based Zoom, the videoconferencing market was fairly crowded, dominated by tech giants like Cisco, Google and Skype (which sold to Microsoft for $8.5 billion in 2011). Meanwhile, Yuan has a 22% stake in his company that's now worth over $9 billion. (Some Wall Street analysts argued last year that Zoom's stock is overvalued compared to the company's revenue.) Thanks to the sudden influx of users amid the coronavirus pandemic, the company's stock has more than doubled since the start of 2020, giving Zoom a market valuation of roughly $42 billion. Zoom launched its initial public offering in April 2019 in what became one of the year's most successful public debuts. In the nine years since Yuan founded Zoom, the company has grown to now employ nearly 2,000 people, while almost doubling its revenue in 2019 to more than $620 million.
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The purpose of life is to pursue happiness, and I was not happy.
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"However, on the flip side, I was not happy. Why would you want to leave?" Yuan tells CNBC Make It.
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"On the one hand that's indeed a big risk, to go from a very well-paid and vice president position. He left Cisco and began developing his own videoconferencing software platform while looking for the funding he'd need to build a product and launch a new company. (Sri Srinivasan, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's team collaboration group, says the company has "redesigned Webex from the ground up" since Yuan's tenure and points out that Webex clients include roughly 95% of the companies in the Fortune 500, and more than 130 million people use Webex every month.)Īs a longtime software engineer with multiple patents related to real-time collaboration technology under his belt, Yuan felt that the evolution of smartphones and tablets created new opportunities for making mobile videoconferencing more accessible than ever.īut by 2011, Yuan realized that, if he wanted to make a product the way he wanted to do it, he'd have to leave the comfort of his high-paying executive job to strike out on his own.
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(In fact, Yuan told CNBC earlier this year that Cisco was still using the same buggy code he wrote for WebEx roughly two decades ago.) Though his first couple of years at Cisco had been "great," he started noticing that, when he'd talk to Cisco Webex's customers about the video-conferencing product he'd helped build, he "did not see a single happy customer." In Yuan's opinion, the product didn't evolve quickly enough, making it a chore for customers to use.
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