【6/27/2021】CAPA-NoVA Distinguished Chinese American Project
(Author: 白晶 Jing Bai)
袁征（Eric Yuan）(1970-), is a successful Chinese-American entrepreneur, inventor, and engineer. As the CEO and Founder of Zoom Video Communication, Yuan has been leading Zoom’s video-first unified communications platform to dramatically transform the way friends, families and enterprises communicate worldwide.
Born and raised in China, Yuan earned his Master of Engineering Management in the China University of Mining and Technology and Bachelor of Engineering in Shandong Institute of Business and Technology. He was inspired to move to California’s Silicon Valley to work for an internet startup after listening to Bill Gates’ speech about dot-com, which he did in 1997 after eight failed attempts to obtain a visa.
Yuan founded Zoom in 2011 to deliver happiness and bring teams together in a frictionless video environment. Under his leadership, Zoom became one of the highest-performing tech IPOs of 2019. The pandemic-inspired work from home boom in 2020 hasn’t been all smooth sailing for Zoom. When issues uncovered in early 2020, Yuan apologized and recognized “…we are falling short of the community’s — and our own — privacy and security expectations. For that, I am deeply sorry…” He announced series of measures to help make Zoom more secure and regained trust from customers and regulators. Prior to founding Zoom, Yuan was the corporate vice president of engineering at Cisco and one of the founding engineers and vice president of engineering at Webex.
Yuan is an inventor on 11 issued and 20 pending patents in real-time collaboration. In 2019, he was added to the Bloomberg 50 as a leader who changed the game in global business. Yuan was named the 2020 Time Businessperson of the Year, and was included in the Time 100 Most Influential People of 2020. Ranked on Forbes Billionaire list from 2020, Yuan said he is more excited by the possibility of convincing more people to embrace remote work, “Coronavirus is just a catalyst, the world does not belong to us anymore, it belongs to the younger generation.”
For more information,
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Yuan
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-zoom-billionaire-eric-yuan-career-net-worth-life#reports-have-also-surfaced-that-zoom-didnt-use-end-to-end-encryption-for-its-video-meetings-and-had-leaked-thousands-of-users-email-addresses-to-strangers-10
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