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Eric Yuan was born in Shandong in 1970. In 1987, he entered Shandong University of Science & Technology. After getting married, he began studying for a master's degree in engineering from China University of Mining and Technology.
In 1990, Yuan planned to emigrate to the United States, but his visa was rejected. He tried other seven times. His application was not accepted until 1997 when he was 27 years old. In that year, he began working at WebEx, where he quickly rose as vice president of the company. In 2007, Cisco Systems acquired WebEx, making Yuan part of Cisco's engineering department.
In 2011, Eric Yuan left his job at Cisco to start his own company: Zoom. At that time, few considered that his idea could be successful since there was stiff competition in the videoconferencing market. However, Yuan believed that the rivals had not fully exploited the potential of video conferencing.
Yuan invited a former Cisco collaborator as an investor, who fully trusted him, becoming the first to make a bank transfer to his account. For the first two years, the company was a small team made up primarily of WebEx alumni. In 2013 they released the first version of the product. So few were the initial users, that Yuan personally contacted all those who canceled a subscription by email to discuss the problems they had with the platform and find ways to solve them.
Zoom began to go viral thanks to a freemium strategy, where it offered a product that anyone could use from their smartphone and with a suite of tools to synchronize mobile video with other more traditional conference systems.
Zoom managed to become a profitable company in a few years. Upon its release, Zoom was valued at nearly $ 16 billion, and Yuan, which owned 20% of the company's shares, became a millionaire.
In 2018, Eric Yuan was named the top big company best CEO by the Glassdoor jobs website, who noted that the executive had 99% approval among his employees. Yuan reimburses its employees for the price of any book purchased by them or their family, including children's books.
Yuan notes that he works much less than most CEOs, preferring to hold meetings with clients and recruit using Zoom so that he can show the producer and receive feedback.
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