As we pass the one-year mark of working in fully remote or hybrid environments, many organizations have realized that the workplace will likely never look the same again. Fueled by lockdowns and social distancing, a new way of communicating and collaborating with colleagues, clients, and stakeholders emerged. For the latest episode of If I Knew Then: Leadership Lessons series – in partnership with Entrepreneur – Comparably Co-founder/CEO Jason Nazar sat down with the leader of the most popular platform that helped bring families, classrooms, and businesses together during the pandemic. This company grew so fast in the past year that it became its own verb. Case in point: they went from having 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to more than 300 million by April 2020.
Founder/CEO Eric S. Yuan of Zoom (NASDAQ: ZM) shared the most valuable lessons he learned throughout his career, by pulling back the curtain on his time as an executive at Cisco and Webex to the launch and hyper-growth of Zoom, the No. 1 video communications platform that has dramatically transformed how global enterprises and consumers communicate. Yuan founded Zoom in 2011 with a mission to deliver happiness and bring teams together in a frictionless video environment. The platform provides video meetings, phone, webinars, and chat across desktops, phones, mobile devices, and conference room systems. Under his leadership, Zoom was one of the highest-performing tech IPOs of 2019. As one of the most in-demand video software tools of our era, it continues to be one of the highest-performing tech stocks to date.
Before becoming an entrepreneur at the age of 41, Yuan held executive leadership positions at reputable technology companies. He was one of the founding engineers and VP of engineering at WebEx before Cisco Systems acquired the platform in 2007 – where he became corporate Vice President of engineering. Between 1997 and 2011, Yuan grew his team from 10 engineers to more than 800 worldwide and contributed to revenue growth from $0 to over $800M.
Headquartered in San Jose, Calif. with more than 4,400 employees globally, Yuan has achieved an envious company culture that can be funneled down to two words: delivering happiness. And it is clear that he’s a man who puts action behind his words.
For the past two consecutive years, Yuan was named the No. 1 “Best CEO” of a large company with Zoom named as a company with the “Happiest Employees”, according to ratings on Comparably. He was also named one of the Most Powerful People in Enterprise Tech by Business Insider and EY Entrepreneur of the Year in Northern California (software category), and added to the Bloomberg 50 as a leader who changed the game in global business. He is also a named inventor on 11 issued and 20 pending patents in real-time collaboration.
Allowing education to resume free of charge, weddings to be witnessed, and holidays to be celebrated together when we have been physically apart for the past year, Eric Yuan is helping people stay connected while reminding us that it is never too late to pursue your dreams. Find out the moment Yuan’s career trajectory changed forever, the five things he did to evolve as a leader, and other insightful leadership lessons from this hour-long conversation with Time’s 2020 Businessperson of the Year:
1) Do not wait around for anyone to say yes, just go for it. While he could have stayed comfortable in his executive role at an established technology company like Cisco, why did Yuan leave? He woke up every day and didn’t want to go to work. The customers he served were not happy and he realized that he was not happy, either. When he started his own company at the age of 41-years-old, he didn’t think anyone around him would have said, Yes, go for it! So he had to motivate himself every morning by asking, What is my dream? If I don’t do it now, things won’t change in 10 years. I can’t wait anymore.
2) Lean on your friends to support your dreams. Zoom may not have come to fruition today without the help of some friends willing to take a risk and financially back Yuan: “I had friends who really wanted to support me. So I sent my friends an email that promised I would work as hard as I could to give them a 10x return. And that I did have money in the bank in case the company did not do well, so I could repay them.” After raising $3 million in capital from his friends and family, he eventually received funding from venture capitalists, made good on his word, and the rest is history.
3) Your journey to success as a CEO is a practice in Little did Yuan know that a months-long trip to Japan from his native China would transform his life forever. It was during this time that he attended a keynote speech given by Bill Gates in 1995 about the future of the internet. “I realized the internet was going to change everything and that I had better embrace it as early as possible. I told my wife that I should figure out a way to get to the U.S. and join the first wave of the internet revolution.” Although that was his plan, he got declined eight times. “I did not give up,” Yuan recalls. “After nine times trying to attain my visa, I got it. Looking back, it is more of a practice of my perseverance.”
4) Patience is key when you start your own company. Yuan says that the most surprising thing he learned about starting his own company was actually something he never expected. He assumed that he’d be able to quickly acquire more resources and hire his dream team within one year. He quickly realized that he needed to have more patience by taking things step by step and embracing the process.
5) Build something better than other solutions out there. “If you always look at the competitor’s product, you will not dare start something on your own,” advises Yuan. “Lead with the focus on the customer.” Zoom was able to beat established incumbents that dominated the video chat platform by setting itself apart as user-friendly with no heavy download times that often plague other competitors.
6) The best marketing is to leverage your users. Zoom’s very first marketing effort was the old-fashioned way; posting information on the Stanford campus bulletin board. Eventually, the team grew savvier and learned along the way that word-of-mouth and leveraging your users remain the best marketing strategy. They created market demand by first making the users happy and, in turn, those customers shared their satisfaction by using Zoom with their network. And the positive experiences continued to echo naturally from there.
7) If you make customers happy, the money will come. During the company’s origins, Yuan thought, We are not successful financially yet, but if we make customers happy the money will come. Now he receives an exorbitant amount of emails daily from customers who share their positive experiences and how Zoom has changed their lives. And the company continues to have one of the most successful stocks in technology.
8) Your business principles are more important than just managing a team. With hyper-growth and thousands of global employees, Yuan’s management philosophy has evolved from overseeing engineering talent to leading a massive company like Zoom. “As a founder and CEO, you have to manage every part of the business and be very hands-on,” says Yuan. “Ask yourself what kind of company do I want to work for? The culture? The value? Write down answers to these business principles because they are more important than just managing a team.”
9) Lead by example when creating a company culture. In the early days, Yuan told himself that he had to write down the definition of Zoom’s culture, one that everyone can remember. “It should be catchy, not too many things, maybe 2-3 words,” Yaun shares. “As a CEO, you need to think about your employees. Zoom’s culture is: deliver happiness. If they are happy, the customer is happy. It’s a simple formula and we lead by example.”
10) Your hiring philosophy should be the same across the board, from executives on down. Yuan says he looks for self-learners and self-motivators when hiring anyone. He emphasizes that possessing these characteristics is a must-have for working at Zoom no matter the role. “We hire people with potential,” shares Yuan. “They may not have the background today, but they can grow themselves along with the company as it grows. I ask these two questions: ‘What books are you reading? Who are your mentors?’ By listening to the answers and other stories they share, you can discover how they would handle a professional crisis or how they learn from their own mistakes.”
11) You should always be evolving as a leader. Five tips that helped Yuan evolve:
- Figure out what your dream is.
- Think about how to become a better version of yourself.
- Have mentors.
- Read a lot of business books. (One of Yuan’s favorites: Only The Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove).
- Think about the importance of life. (“Every time I thought about the importance of life, I had no answer,” shares Yuan. “The purpose is the pursuit of happiness. Sustainable Happiness comes from making others happy. That completely changed my life and journey.”)
12) Create a customer care culture for success. Yuan is known for his obsession with the customer experience and is big on soliciting feedback from them. Every interaction with a customer creates a customer care culture. There are mechanisms for soliciting feedback that you can’t always get from your support team, so he suggests asking how can you attain this crucial feedback surrounding your product directly from them.
13) Always do what is right. During the pandemic, Zoom showed the global community that they cared. That doing what is right will always transcend business. They provided K-12 schools free video conferencing to help children and teachers continue to meet their educational needs. On the holidays, they did away with the 40-minute time limit on free accounts so that families unable to see one another in-person due to quarantine or travel restrictions could still be together virtually to celebrate with their grandparents, parents, and children.
To learn more about this inspirational leader’s journey, watch the full webinar here. For more extraordinary talks with other CEOs from high-profile brands like Nextdoor, WarbyParker, Dallas Mavericks, GoDaddy and DocuSign, check out our series page.