Company culture is my number one priority. It's more important than the team, the product, the business model, or the investors. All of those things can be fixed and made better over time. But culture has to be established on Day 1.
Eric Yuan
Our philosophy at Zoom is to create a company that promotes self-motivation. I have told our managers not to spend too much time motivating employees. You have to create an environment where employees can motivate themselves. That is really important because self-motivation is more sustainable.
We really don't look at our competitors. The market is big. If you focus too much on competitors, you can lose focus on the customer. If we make our customers happier, we are going to win.
Empathy, humanity and support for each other is more important than revenue, than growth.
My philosophy is, if I can provide a solution that the end user truly enjoys, then I think I have a chance.
Coronavirus has completely changed how people think about where or how you should work.
If you see your company culture as a family, you don't want to fire someone just because their short-term performance is not good. If you do, even the people on your team who are excellent performers will look at what's going on and say, 'Someday you might fire me too.' You'll lose everyone's trust.
My biggest worry is that sometimes you know the problem, but you don't do anything about it until it gets too big to be fixed.
No matter how busy you are you've got to spend time with your family. I do not want to miss any important moments.
We don't spend a lot of money to sell the product.
Money is not going to bring me happiness.
You can work hard and be smart, but you need to think about when you're going to be part of a startup and build it. You only have so much energy, whether you want to admit it or not.
The beautiful part of the cloud is, you know, it's unlimited capacity, in theory.
Similar to many multinational technology companies, Zoom has operations and employees in China. And like many multinational technology companies, our offices in China are operated by subsidiaries of the U.S. parent company. Our engineers are employed through these subsidiaries. We don't hide this.
Enterprise customers have been working together with us for a long time, they trust us, and we just keep everything open and transparent.
When competitors try to innovate, I think it puts more pressure on us. The only thing is, we've got to work harder. They work two hours, we work three hours... Ultimately this is good for the end user.
I tell myself, every morning when I wake up, two things. Don't let the world down. Don't let our users down.
We help ensure that Zoom is made up of caring people starting with the hiring process. At that point, we evaluate candidates on whether we believe they can embrace the value of Care and deliver happiness for others.
Zoom does not focus on revenue goals, but rather we have confidence that focusing on the happiness of existing customers and our employees will organically increase growth.
We want to hire people who are self-learners.
I never thought that overnight the whole world would be using Zoom. Unfortunately, we did not prepare well, mentally and strategy-wise.
We expect our employees to care about the community, the company, their teammates, customers, and themselves.
I'm an engineer.
Social networking like Facebook or Twitter is very popular, but one thing I have found is that the more social networking tools you are using, the more alone you feel.
I really want to build something to make the world a better place.
Hijacking other's meetings or classrooms - this is online crime.
My journey with Zoom began with a desire for the independence to build something that would make users happy, a true video-first unified communications platform.
Some students just don't like online class.
The harshest criticism may be the best words you ever hear.
We want to make sure every user is happy.
Distributed workforces are most likely to succeed if their culture is one that values and prioritizes face-to-face communications.
When it comes to working from home, when it comes to video conferencing, it's got to work. Anytime you want to meet someone, the quality has got to be good, very reliable. Otherwise, you've scheduled a very important meeting with a customer - oh my God, if the audio is choppy, the video doesn't work, you're not going to try it anymore.
I don't want to be only the most scalable platform, I want to be the most secure. To do that, it's not only Zoom's work, we need lot of people's help.
If the world misunderstands us, then I don't blame others, it's our problem.
I hope that with video conferencing like Zoom everyone can spend time with family.
My older brother went into another city for college, and I felt like I wanted to stay in my home town to be close to my parents. Looking back, that was the best decision. My father passed away in 2010 and I got to enjoy those four years with him.
Once you have a culture problem, it's very hard to fix.
Every day I'd talk to my customers at Webex and they'd tell me how unhappy they were with our service. This was a terrible way to spend my days, it weighed heavily on my heart. I wanted to spend my days delivering happiness, and I knew I had to take charge of my own destiny to do that.
I think many businesses will allow their employees to work from home. The main challenge here is how to make sure Zoom will give a better and safer experience to users than compared to that in an office environment.
I feel like Zoom is not a part of Zoom anymore. Zoom belongs to the world now.
I want to make sure I do the right thing for society.
My barometer for choosing a board member is this: regardless of the business, can I make a lifelong friend?
I told our employees several times, 'Let's focus on the end user, let's focus on committing to society, and focus on the crisis and doing the right thing, show our corporate social responsibility.' Don't focus on marketing and sales. That's horrible culture.
Security and safety are very important for us.
Being a solo founder allows you to move quickly - when you're going up against massive, entrenched competitors, you need to maximize speed and agility. Having just one person at the top allows for faster decision making.
I experienced the year 2000 dot com crash and the 2008 financial crisis, and it almost wiped out the company.
In 2007 WebEx was acquired by Cisco and I became Cisco's Corporate VP of engineering, in charge of collaboration software.
I really didn't understand why hackers would want to hack into a classroom. Are they going to learn algebra? Maybe calculus?
When you hire someone, you are investing in them.
The reason why Silicon Valley is a worldwide innovation center is because it is a open culture that embraces diversity. You see people from all over the world. When you have many people from different backgrounds gathered together, that is where innovation comes from.
