Yuan said he would try and get them on a Zoom call to talk through their problems and see how he could fix them. The first version of the product was released in 2013, and there were still so few people outside the engineering group that Yuan took it upon himself to email any user who canceled a subscription. They ended up picking the last one.įor the first two years of Zoom's history, the company was just a small team – mostly engineers from WebEx. Jim not only became an investor and adviser, but helped Yuan come up with four possible names for the company: Zippo, Hangtime, Poppy and Zoom. Yuan says that other investors had committed capital but Scheinman "was the first one to wire transfer the money to the bank." Scheinman also introduced Yuan to his cousin, Jim Scheinman, founding partner of Maven Ventures. "He said, 'For both of our sakes, can I show you the presentation?'" "I said, 'I believe in you and I don't care what's in that presentation, because this is about you,'" Scheinman said, in an interview. But for Scheinman to know for sure that he wasn't backing a closeted lunatic, he made two reference calls on Yuan, including one on his drive to the meeting.īy the time he arrived at Coupa Cafe in Palo Alto, Scheinman says, he had a signed a $250,000 check, and just needed Yuan to tell him what name to put on it because there's wasn't yet a company.Īs of the market close on Thursday, Scheinman's investment has multiplied by over 700-fold to just under $176.5 million, though he's locked up from selling for six months. They'd struck up a friendship while working at Cisco, where Yuan established himself as a strong and reliable operator in addition to his engineering credentials. Scheinman had also left Cisco that month and was well aware of Yuan's background in video and collaboration. In April 2011, Yuan called Scheinman to invite him for tea and a demo of his new idea. He left the company four years after that. He rose to become the company's head of engineering and held that position through Cisco's $3.2 billion acquisition in 2007. Yuan said he opted not to spend the time going through formal English training and, "I just learned it from my teammates."
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"For the first several years, I was just writing code and I was extremely busy," Yuan said in an interview from New York on Thursday at the Nasdaq, where he was celebrating with about 80 employees, customers and investors. He finally made it in 1997, where he got a job building the early WebEx online meeting system.
Yuan had to beat the odds just to get to Silicon Valley, as his visa application was denied eight times. In fact, none of the 50 companies in the Bessemer Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index have Chinese CEOs. There are plenty of Chinese developers with senior engineering roles, but you don't see them starting companies and leading them through IPOs.
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It's been an epic journey for Yuan, 49, from founding a small software start-up in Beijing to the stage of the Nasdaq and CEO of one of the country's 10 most valuable cloud software companies. Yuan, who owns 20% of the shares, is tech's newest billionaire, with a stake worth about $2.9 billion.
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Thousands of businesses use Zoom's software, with many taking advantage of the free product alongside 344 companies that pay over $100,000 a year. Zoom's rich valuation - about 48 times sales - is a reflection of 118% revenue growth in 2018 coupled with an unusual quality for an emerging software company: profit. The stock climbed 72% in its first day of trading to $62, after the company raised $356.8 million in its IPO. His wager is paying off.įollowing Zoom's stock market debut on Thursday, the company is valued at $15.9 billion. So Yuan ignored the skeptics and instead listened to users.
As a software engineer with multiple patents related to real-time collaboration, he also knew that our smartphones and tablets could do so much more with videoconferencing than what was available. Yuan, who emigrated from China to Silicon Valley in 1997 at age 27, says the problem with those products is that nobody enjoys using them, adding that the buggy code he wrote for WebEx two decades ago is still running today.
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