Within months, Yuan realized he wanted to target the video conferencing business again. “Everyone in venture capital thought it was a terrible idea,” says Jim Scheinman of Maven Ventures, who as one of Zoom’s first backers came up with its current name. Mostly because of their faith in Yuan, the investors, including former Webex CEO Subrah Iyar, gave him $3 million for his startup, which was then called Saasbee. “I told her, ‘I know it’s a long journey and very hard, but if I don’t try it, I’ll regret it.’”įirst Yuan asked friends, including fellow investors in a consumer video app called Tango, to write him $250,000 checks so he could pay 30 engineers (some in China) to work on a new idea: create better technology for video communications, then figure out what app to build on top. The biggest hurdle: convincing his wife, who saw him throwing away a lucrative job managing 800 people. Three years after I left, they realized what I said was right.” “Cisco was more focused on social networking, trying to make an enterprise Facebook,” he says. After a year of pestering his bosses to let him rebuild Webex, Yuan gave up and decided to leave Cisco in 2011. “Someday someone is going to build something on the cloud, and it’s going to kill me,” Yuan told Bill Tai, a venture investor who became one of the first backers of Zoom. Zoom executives, investors and family wave to employees who joined the Nasdaq IPO ceremony remotely via Zoom video on its ApIPO. And the service lacked modern features like screen-sharing for mobile.
Too many people on the line would strain the connection, leading to choppy audio and video.
#Parent company of venture communications Pc
Each time users logged on to a Webex conference, the company’s systems would have to identify which version of the product (iPhone, Android, PC or Mac) to run, which slowed things down. The problem, according to Yuan: The service simply wasn’t very good. Not long after, Cisco tapped Yuan to lead Webex's engineering group. Riding the exuberance of the dot-com bubble and with video-conferencing tools taking advantage of faster internet speeds, Webex went public in July of 2000 and was acquired by Cisco for $3.2 billion in 2007.
#Parent company of venture communications code
As a young employee, Yuan would routinely code all night on a Friday, then go play a pickup soccer game on no sleep on Saturday afternoon. In the summer of 1997, Yuan joined two-year-old Webex, based in Milpitas, California. I’ll do all I can until you tell me that I can never come here anymore. For the next year and a half, the now-skeptical immigration services would deny him seven more times. customs asked for an English-language version of his business card, it listed Yuan as a consultant, and he was misunderstood to be a part-time contractor. Already convinced he’d start a company someday, and fascinated by entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, he set his sights on the U.S. Yuan says with typical understatement: “My parents were really upset.”Īt Shandong University of Science & Technology, Yuan studied applied mathematics and computer science and then, at age 22, got married while pursuing his Master’s degree. To his horror, firefighters had to come put out the blaze. When the young hustler discovered the facility needed only the metal, he tried to burn away the extra material in a chicken shack behind his neighbor’s house. The son of mining engineers in China’s eastern Shandong Province, in fourth grade Yuan started collecting construction scraps to recycle their copper for cash.
I’ll run faster than you, and I’ll still catch up.”įor Yuan’s first entrepreneurial act, he burned down his neighbor’s cottage. “You’re only 5 miles ahead of me, that’s okay. “It’s like a marathon,” Yuan says of his ambitions to connect the working world like Facebook did with consumers-which would make Zoom even bigger than Cisco. Ringing the Nasdaq bell checks off one dream for Yuan. And while Zoom has the goodwill of much of the tech community, with partners like Atlassian, LinkedIn and Slack, its inevitable move beyond video means its list of competitors is likely to grow. Cisco, Yuan’s former employer, may privately rue letting him leave, but it’s not shying away from a fight. With hypergrowth comes risk, of course, and Zoom still must prove it can continue to best its competitors: massive companies, like Google and Microsoft, that scared off most venture investors in Zoom’s early days eight years ago.
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