Book Eric Yuan

Eric Yuan is the founder and chief executive of Zoom Communications, the video platform that became a daily habit for workers, schools and families around the world. Trained as an engineer, he left China for Silicon Valley in 1997, drawn by the tech boom after hearing Bill Gates speak, and persisted through nine visa applications to make the move. He joined the web conferencing startup WebEx as one of its first 20 employees and stayed on after Cisco Systems acquired the company in 2007, rising to vice president of engineering. In 2011, when Cisco passed on his idea for a mobile-friendly video conferencing product, Yuan walked away and built Zoom himself. The company went public in 2019 and then became essential infrastructure as work and learning shifted online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yuan has since pushed the product toward AI-powered features, including the idea of digital stand-ins that attend meetings on an user's behalf. He was named Time's Businessperson of the Year for 2020 and placed on the Time 100 list of the most influential people that year, and he speaks with authority on entrepreneurship, product vision, remote work and resilience.