Cloud Giants: Meeting Eric Yuan, CEO and Founder of Zoom

Global venture group

04/02/2021

On Cloud Giants, a podcast brought to you by Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), Byron Deeter of BVP interviews entrepreneurs, founders and great leaders who have built world-changing cloud companies.

In this episode, Byron talks to Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom Video Communications, about the origin story of Zoom, Eric’s background and how Eric is looking at the current situation of the global pandemic.

Listeners will hear about:

How the idea of Zoom was inspired by Eric’s experience at Webex, a first-generation product sold to Cisco. Eric noted that he was embarrassed to contact Webex customers on the different problems and issues that they were reporting, as Cisco had an aversion to making these changes.

How Eric’s experience immigrating to Silicon Valley provided a good training in perseverance. He also mentioned inspiration from hearing Bill Gates speak as Internet access was proliferating during the 1990s.

His advice to founders to hold to their convictions as success will not come overnight. There will always be doubt and voices or reasons against them.

Eric’s focus on the users of Zoom, the deep sense of loyalty in his community of users from the early days and how much the strategy of the company was geared toward this.

The growth Zoom experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic in the first four months of 2020, when “daily meeting participants” grew by a factor of 30 to a figure of more than 300 million by April. Of course, Zoom’s share price also appreciated substantially through the year.

Listen to the full recording:

We hope that you enjoy Eric’s deep sense of humility even amidst the incredible success of Zoom in a fairly short time. In the face of mounting competition, it is clear that he continues his plan to keep the user first in his thinking and Zoom’s strategy, and to not try and predict the efforts of the competition.

At WisdomTree, we offer an investment strategy that favors pure-play cloud companies. To find out more about our unique cloud computing investment strategy in collaboration with Bessemer Venture Partners, visit our Cloud Computing Strategy page.

Important Risks Related to this Article

The WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund (WCLD), through a collaboration with Nasdaq, leverages the expertise of Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), a leading venture capital investor in cloud-based businesses with more than a decade of investment success in the cloud computing industry. BVP is not affiliated with WisdomTree Asset Management.

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