A biography of Eric Yuan, founder of Zoom

Zoom: A Biography of Eric Yuan

The AAPI Biography project was created by Dr. Jiang Pu in summer 2021, which led to the world's first student-made AAPI Bio online library.

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Yuan immediately found work at a young video conferencing software called WebEx, which was located in Silicon Valley, and worked there for 14 years, even when it was acquired by Cisco Systems and the workers grew from 10 to 800 worldwide. He was also promoted soon after to Vice President of Engineering.

He studied both Masters and Bachelor Degrees in his home province of Shandong and married Sherry at age of 22. Yuan immigrated to the U.S. from China in 1997 after his visa applications were denied 8 times, but accepted on the ninth. He settled in Santa Clara with his wife and three  children.

SaaSbee's name was soon changed to Zoom, and in 2012, it was first launched. Shortly after, their product got reviewed by Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal. That was a big moment for the new company, as they could gain more popularity.

In 2019, as the pandemic Covid-19 spread throughout the world, many people were quarantined to prevent the further spread of the disease. Because of that, people were required to work at home. The perfect solution of working at home was Zoom. Now, by the time of 2021, the net worth of Zoom is worth around $100 billion, with Yuan owning 22% of it.

In June of 2011, Yuan wanted to remake WebEx from the ground up, but that wasn't successful due to his bosses not approving that idea, so he left to make his own product. When he left, a few other engineers from Cisco WebEx also decided to join him.

The company was incorporated April 2011 in the State of Delaware and was originally known as SaaSbee. SaaSbee raised a total of $3 million in seed funding from people like former WebEx CEO, Subrah Iyar and Yahoo Co-founder, Jerry Yang.

Disclaimer: Due to the limited knowledge I could gather, this wouldn't be completely accurate.

4 ------------- Early Life 5 ------------- Inspiration 6 ------------- College/Marriage 7 ------------- WebEx 8 ------------- Departure from WebEx 9 ------------- Beginnings of Zoom 10 ----------- Zoom Grows 11 ----------- Zoom Becomes Popular

Eric Yuan was born with his brother to Eric and Linda Yuan in Tai’an, China, on February 20, 1970. During his elementary school years, he recycled copper to earn money.

In 1987, Yuan was inspired to start working on video telephony while he was thinking of a better way to talk to his girlfriend instead of going on 10 hour train rides.

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