Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, the secrets to his success

For those of you who were off the planet for the last week, the big news is Zoom.us had their IPO last week.

Valued at an extraordinary $16Bn on the day of IPO, Zoom has gone from great small company to great big company in less than a week. I’m not exactly surprised they have done well on their IPO, even Gary Vaynerchuk was impressed with their S1. The CEO of Box stated that Zoom could have a second revenue stream selling coffee table books of their S1.

There has been a lot written about Zoom and its founder Eric Yuan over the last few years, and a great deal more about to be written about him. I think we can all expect to see a bunch of books about this man and his company over the next year or two.

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A few years ago Eric was kind enough to grant me an interview for my Excession Events Podcast. I had just left the video conferencing industry. Frankly, my heart was broken.

I’d believed in it since I saw my first Xerox Liveboard and PictureTel Concorde in a showroom on St Kilda Road in Melbourne in 1992. This was a technology that could change the world, enable me to have a good relationship with my Dad back in the UK, and perhaps help save the planet. As a mild understatement I believe in it.

The problem was it hadn’t worked out that way. After over 20 years I was still talking to the very largest organizations about putting the technology into a few dedicated rooms. Only a tiny percentage of these rooms had video collaboration tools.

The quality had improved, and I’m proud of what I did in helping bring the world’s first High Definition Video Conferencing solution to the market in 2005. At the time I thought that this shift to High Definition would be the big change, the catalyst to kick this market into gear. It wasn’t.

I gave up on the video collaboration space, it seemed destined to be the technology of the future, and always would be. I went off, wrote my book, and thought I’d spend my time talking about innovation.

I was wrong. Interestingly enough it was that Podcast series that helped me understand that actually the seeds of a new video collaboration space were taking root and that a new set of success criteria would help this industry finally fulfill its potential. I was drawn back into the video collaboration world as a result.

A few things stuck with me in my interview with Eric. He never once talked about technology. All he cared about was making his clients happy. He knew from his previous experiences that selling a client a solution was only a tiny part of the story. Making them want to use it, and then helping them virally get that message to people who mattered to them was far more important.

Eric understands and lives Metcalfe's law better than anyone else in this industry. That was the Excession Event in this industry.

Eric also understands that the only people who you should really listen to is your clients. I know Eric spends an incredible amount of time simply understanding client pain points and fixing them.

Of course, every CEO will tell you they listen to customers, but most get too caught up in talking to their own people, their channel, and traveling around the world talking, not listening. All of those things take an enormous amount of time.

In my interview with Eric, we talked about how little he traveled. This Forbes article states that Eric traveled eight times in five years, and one of those was to NYC for the NASDAQ IPO. I know plenty of people who would consider eight trips a light month. Eric believed in his own solution so much he would always say. Let’s meet on Zoom.

Many people like to read books about highly successful people, and I’m sure many are going to be written about Eric Yuan in the coming few years. As someone who knows Eric a little, and who has had a front-row seat as his company has transformed an industry I believe I’m in a good position to suggest four factors in his success.

• Solve a client problem. I was wrong when I thought this industry would never take off. We were not successful before because we were trying to solve the wrong problem. It didn’t resonate with clients.
• Listen to your clients. At the end of the day, everything else is secondary. A happy client will use your technology more and spread the word for you. Making some money now, and then replacing the barely used technology with another, newer, shinier version, doesn’t work. Why the industry tried that failing strategy for so long, is simply a failure of imagination.
• Be productive. We may all think we’re busy, jetting off to some meeting or conference. We need to change the way we think. Traveling should be considered as wasteful, not as a badge of honor. We all have a habit of considering the cost of resources, but not enough about our own time. We must change and embrace the idea that time is our most vital resource.
• Be humble. Eric doesn’t stand on ceremony. At the annual Zoomtopia event, Eric is often seen pouring coffee. It’s part of his CEO as servant mentality. Plenty of CEO’s and senior execs like to pretend they are one of the people, but to be authentic you have to do this sort of thing all the time, Eric is famous for it, almost to the point of parody. I can’t remember any other CEO doing this sort of thing, for longer than the camera was rolling.

I’m sure Eric is back home, working out how to solve another clients problem as I write this. He has built something extraordinary, and I’m sure his only just started. I’ve never had the slightest impression he cares less about the money. I’m certain this IPO has made him an extraordinary amount of money. I can’t imagine him changing at all. I honestly think he simply wanted to give people a better set of tools. That might sound simplistic, naive even, but I can not see any other motivation.

I wish him the best of luck and he has my thanks for restoring my faith in an industry I love and showing us all how we might build a better world for our children, by thinking and acting differently.

About the Author

Simon Dudley is a chump. A man who believes in paying taxes, waiting his turn, the rule of law, being a decent human being. He writes a lot about technology, society, education, business, Excession Events and science. He is also the Head of Sales Enablement & Analyst Relations at Logitech Video Collaboration.