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. (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. I even did not want to go to the office to work," Yuan tells CNBC Make It. "Every day, when I woke up, I was not very happy. Yuan became the tech giant's vice president of engineering, earning compensation in the "very high six-figures." But he was unhappy. WebEx sold to Cisco for $3.2 billion a decade later (the platform is now known as Cisco Webex). He didn't speak English, but he knew how to write computer code, and he landed an engineering job with the videoconferencing software company WebEx. visa on his ninth try - before finally coming to the U.S. Yuan spent over two years struggling with visa issues - he was rejected eight times in total, finally receiving a U.S. Yuan dreamed of leaving China to go to Silicon Valley, ever since he was a young man and heard Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates give a speech on the promise of the internet. Eric Yuan is Zoom's 50-year-old founder and CEO.
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