Company News Thought Leadership

Happiness and Trust: Our Foundation and Our Future

Updated on June 25, 2020

Published on April 18, 2019

In this blog

Eric S. Yuan

CEO

Eric founded Zoom in 2011 to deliver happiness and bring people together in a frictionless video environment. Zoom’s communications platform continues to transform the way global organizations connect, communicate, and collaborate. As the company’s chief executive, Eric led Zoom to one of the highest-performing tech IPOs of 2019.

Business Insider named Eric one of the Most Powerful People in Enterprise Tech in 2017. In 2018, Glassdoor recognized him as the top CEO for large U.S. companies. In 2019, he was recognized in the Bloomberg 50 as a leader changing the game in global business. Time Magazine named Eric its 2020 Businessperson of Year as well as one of the 100 Most Influential People of 2020. He was also named Comparably's Best CEO for Diversity in 2021.

Prior to founding Zoom, Eric was corporate vice president of engineering at Cisco, where he was responsible for Cisco's collaboration software development. Eric was also one of the founding engineers and vice president of engineering at Webex.

Eric is a named inventor on 11 issued and 20 pending patents in real-time collaboration.

Today, standing side by side with our colleagues, investors, and customers, we participated in the ceremony at Nasdaq to celebrate the opening trade of Zoom shares on the public market. This is one of those surreal moments in life, a watershed when years of effort culminate in a public, symbolic act. But what, exactly, does it symbolize? First, it symbolizes happiness. My journey with Zoom began with a desire for the independence to build something that would make users happy, a true video-first unified communications platform. This IPO is us shouting out loud to the world that we are here to stay, to build, to care, and to deliver happiness. Second, it symbolizes trust. Zoom was built over 7+ years by 1,700+ dedicated and passionate employees in close cooperation with our investors, partners, and customers. I think of Zoom’s early employees, and how we sat on the floor, assembling our Ikea desks when we got our first office. I think of their families, who have supported them in this long journey. I am glad they can share this day with their loved ones. I hope that my father, too, is watching us from heaven. I think of our early customers - the California State University System, Uber, BAYADA Home Health Care - who gave us feedback and ideas to help us build our platform. I think of our first investors, Dan Scheinman and Jerry Yang, who didn’t even need to see my pitch deck. They trusted me enough to fund us sight unseen. All these people took a leap of faith and trusted their future, time, ideas, and funding to us. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. Finally, it symbolizes a milestone. An IPO is like a high school graduation. It’s a big deal at the time, but there is a lot of work to do after the party is over. You have college and adulthood right in front of you. Plus, no one wants to be the person who peaked in high school! Today is a milestone for Zoom, but I see ahead the many milestones we have to look forward to as a company. I expect some of them to be even more exciting than today. So where do we go from here? It is simple. We keep building trust and never forget those who helped us along the way. We take this as a milestone, nothing more or less, and focus on the future. And most importantly, we get back to work and back to delivering happiness.