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Eric Yuan

Founder, President, Chief Executive Officer & Chairman, Zoom

Search every verified Eric Yuan interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In a May 2022 appearance on the Acquired podcast, Eric Yuan discussed his motivations for founding Zoom and the company's approach to capital. Yuan stated that after working on WebEx, he felt he had "let the customer down" and wanted to fix that problem, but said Cisco did not want him to start over, leaving him "no choice" but to leave and build Zoom. He also described the difficulty of raising capital after starting the company. Yuan commented on Zoom's capital efficiency, saying that whether the company took more money or not, "it's all fine" and "would all work out" because what matters is "the great product and the customers."

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“I thought, yeah, maybe we don't need to do it, but also I thought it doesn't matter, right? What matters for Zoom is the great product and the customers. Whether you take some more money, you don't take some more money, right? It's all fine. It would all work out.”

“Literally, I made a huge mistake. We hired more than 6,000 employees within 18 months window. Complete the culture completely broken.”

“I really do not think we need to work over five days, because literally we all will employ so many digital agents, right? And I think we all have more time, you know, for human to human interaction like this.”

“America has a wonderful immigration policy — one of the reasons America is so successful is its inclusive culture; many of the CEOs at large tech companies are immigrants.”

“I made a huge mistake during COVID: to support the traffic and the world we hired over 6,000 employees within two years, and after the crisis we realized it wasn't scalable — we had to go through a very painful 15% reduction.”

“The infrastructure and large language model layer require huge investment—only very big companies can afford the GPUs, data and capital to build those foundations; after that, many application companies can innovate on top.”

Other executives at Zoom

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