Zoom’s Eric Yuan: A CEO’s First Job Is to Make Employees Happy

I began introducing Zoom and Eric Yuan around 2016. Taiwanese entrepreneurs were even Zoom’s most important angel investors; without Taiwan, Zoom as we know it might not exist. Yet Taiwanese people still let liking or disliking a country and its people influence many judgments. Try to remove your filters when looking at the world. Yuan was born in Shandong, China, and attended university there, not a top-tier school such as Tsinghua, Peking, or Jiaotong. A software engineer with limited English, he had eight visa applications rejected. Going from that Chinese background to a CEO loved by employees was not easy. Yuan believes a CEO’s first job is to make employees happy. ---- Why start a business? Because I was unhappy. I began realizing our customers were dissatisfied. They wanted a mobile-first, video-centered solution. I wanted to rebuild WebEx from scratch around that, but Cisco was not ready. After trying unsuccessfully for a year, I decided to leave and start a company. The goal was simple: offer a new solution that made customers happy again and made me happy to get up each day. Engineers need happiness, too. Having led a very large team at Cisco, I knew happy engineers produced much better code. Life is so short. What is its purpose? For a long time I had no answer, but eventually realized it was the pursuit of happiness. What happiness lasts? Making others happy. Whether helping your community, society, friends, or family, thinking of others and contributing makes you even happier than they are. When founding the company, I made this a priority. My first job as CEO has nothing to do with customers, products, or services, but with whether employees are happy. If I make employees happy, we can work together to make customers happy, generate business, and keep the company alive. My father told me two things: #DoYourBestEveryDay and #StayHumbleEveryDay. I always remember them; they became my personal values. When Zoom began, most employees were engineers. #I wanted simple, memorable company values, #so there was just one word: “#care”—care for our company, team, customers, and community every day.