Whether the “Best American CEO” can withstand the challenge remains to be answered in time.
Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account “Lishi Business Review” (ID: libusiness), author Zhang Junzhi.
Yuan Zheng did not graduate from a prestigious school, he started his business in the middle of his middle age, In his early years in the United States, because of his poor English, for several years he could only immerse himself in the code and could not communicate well with people. But it is such a person, relying on personal efforts and struggle, has achieved the status of Zoom’s Silicon Valley unicorn. However, the recently popular Yuan Zheng and his company are also experiencing an unprecedented crisis. Whether the “Best American CEO” can withstand the challenge and make a great company remains to be answered.
Inverse in US stocks fuse Attacker
Under the impact of the new coronary pneumonia epidemic, 3 in 2020In May, investors in the US stock market experienced the most thrilling month in history: On March 9, after the second meltdown in the history of US stocks, within three days, three more meltdowns occurred in addition to 22 transactions throughout March. In Japan and China, there were 7 more plunges.
At a time when global capital markets are sorrowful and investors are generally worried that the economy will enter a severe recession, the stock price of Zoom Valley ’s video conferencing platform Zoom is unique. The contrarian surged by nearly 30%. Although this performance is directly related to the current epidemic situation, the company Zoom does not only rely on “day” to eat, but has a very strong market competitiveness.
When Zoom, with only more than 40 employees, was established in 2011, the video conferencing track was already surrounded by strong enemies, such as Microsoft ’s Skype, Google ’s Google Hangouts, Cisco ’s WebEx, and Apple ’s FaceTime. But in the years since, in the competition with these giants, the small company Zoom has developed into the most popular video conferencing platform in the US market.
On April 18, 2019, Zoom successfully landed on the Nasdaq. On the first day of trading, Zoom ’s stock price soared 80%. It reached $ 66 during the day, and finally closed at $ 62, an increase of 72.22%. , The market value of nearly 16 billion US dollars. In the past year, Zoom’s stock price has more than tripled compared to the IPO issue price, and its market value has reached more than $ 35 billion.
As the founder and CEO of Zoom, Yuan Zheng owns 22% of the company ’s shares In the past year, it has become one of the fastest-growing people in the world, and its value on the day of the company’s listing reached more than 3 billion US dollars. The Hurun Research Institute recently released the “Special Report on the Change of Global Entrepreneur’s Wealth Two Months After the Epidemic”, showing that 50-year-old Yuan Zheng’s wealth has reached more than 8 billion US dollars, ranking first in the world in terms of increase.
What ’s more commendable is that Yuan Zheng is also a CEO loved by his employees. In 2018, the US workplace research and survey company Comparably selected 25 companies with the highest employee well-being based on a survey of workplace happiness surveys submitted by 10 million employees from 50,000 companies nationwide. Zoom ranked first. In July of the same year, Glassdoor, a US job search site, ranked the top 100 CEO list in the United States. Yuan Zheng won the championship with a 99% employee praise rate and became the first non-white CEO to top the list.
HoweverWhat many people do not think is that Yuan Zheng is not an American elite in the traditional sense. He did not graduate from a prestigious school. He only started his business in the middle of his middle age. Even when he ran into the United States in his early years, he had to bury his head in code because of poor English. , And can’t communicate well with people. But it is such a person, relying on personal efforts and struggle, has achieved the status of Zoom’s Silicon Valley unicorn.
Zoom
Yuan Zheng was born in Tai’an City, Shandong Province in 1970. Perhaps because his father was a mining engineer, Yuan Zheng applied to the Shandong Mining Institute in Tai’an when he went to university (Predecessor of Shandong University of Science and Technology). After graduating from university, Yuan Zheng went to China University of Mining and Technology for further study and obtained a master’s degree.
During college, because he was in two places with his girlfriend, he could only meet in winter and summer vacations. Yuan Zheng envisioned inventing a device at that time: just click, you can see her girlfriend talking with her, just like the two are in Same in a room. This also became the germ of his later thought of doing Zoom.
In 1994, Yuan Zheng was in Japan and listened to a speech by Bill Gates. Gates mentioned the “information highway” concept, so he was greatly touched. “The Internet has opened a completely different world. You can buy books online and use e-mail.” He firmly believed that the Internet is the future. “At that time, I realized that the Internet represented by Netscape and Yahoo was very powerful and popular in the United States. He is eager to work in Silicon Valley and experience the changes that the Internet has brought to human society.
But going to the United States is not an easy task. Yuan Zheng was refused the first time he applied for a visa. But under the strong appeal of ideals, Yuan Zheng applied for a US visa for eight consecutive times in the next two years. He said he used these failures as a way to hone his patience. In 1997, Yuan Zheng finally won the signing and came to Silicon Valley, his ideal science and technology shrine.
Yuan Zheng ’s English is not good, and he is new at first, so it is not easy to find a technology position. However, there are some Chinese-founded companies in Silicon Valley. Yuan Zheng later moved to WebEx, a video conferencing software company founded by the Chinese Zhu Min and Xu Yuqing, and became one of the company’s earliest dozen programmers.
On WebExIn the first 5 years, Yuan Zheng was digging into the code every day. In his view, there are too many big cows in Silicon Valley and more smart people, so to survive in Silicon Valley, he must work harder than others. “If my competitor says” I work eight hours a day “, then I can work 10 hours. Hard work is in my DNA.”
With this effort, Yuan Zheng’s position in WebEx has been continuously improved, from engineer to engineer manager, to senior engineer manager, director, and senior director, until he became the vice president.
Around 2007, Cisco and Microsoft, which already accounted for most of the market share in gateways and routers, launched fierce competition for enterprise entrance. At this time, WebEx became the acquisition target of Cisco. In 2007, Cisco acquired WebEx at a high price of 3.2 billion US dollars.
As an important member in the development process of WebEx, Yuan Zheng was reused after entering Cisco and was appointed as the vice president of engineering of Cisco. Yuan Zheng lived up to expectations, and in the next four years, under his leadership, WebEx, a Cisco-owned web conferencing provider, grew from the initial 10 engineers to more than 800, and increased revenue from zero growth to more than $ 800 million.
However, with the development of the business, Yuan Zheng gradually found that the application scenario at that time was limited to WebEx of “shared PPT or shared desktop”, which could not meet the needs of customers. Customers need voice conferencing and video conferencing, and need good IP voice quality and video quality. More importantly, in the four years since WebEx was acquired, the external environment has undergone major changes, the computing power of mobile terminal equipment has been greatly improved, 4G networks have begun to popularize, and SAAS has entered a period of rapid development. In the past, complex processes and equipment The video conferencing solutions for the center are gradually falling behind.
Yuan Zheng, who is in the industry, clearly sees the general trend of video conference collaboration and cloudization, but Cisco is not willing to invest more resources in restructuring technology. Although Yuan Zheng tried his best, he did not get strong support. This made him begin to retreat. In 2011, 41-year-old Yuan Zheng rejected Cisco’s retention and founded Zoom Video Communications with dozens of subordinates.
Red Sea Breakout
After Yuan Zheng started his business, he quickly received angel round investment from his former colleagues and supervisors, which also allowed him to put more energy into product development. Among. He also used the recruitment strategy of WebEx and hired a large number of domestic engineers who worked hard and had low costs. After more than a year of development, the first version of Zoom was successfully released in August 2012.
At that time, the track of video conferencing was already quite crowded. Skype, Google Hangouts, WebEx, FaceTime and other giant products not only have a large number of users, but also rely on Microsoft, Giants like Google, Cisco, and Apple. How to break through in giant competition? The way of Zoom is to use the cloud plus the end model for collaboration, which focuses on ease of use and practicality.
When using Zoom, you only need to download the software, log in to your account and click on the link, then you can easily start a multi-person video communication. In addition to easy operation, Zoom has also formed a strong technical team to optimize video functions. “Even if the server and network environment are unstable, users can still start a video call through Zoom.”
Moreover, Zoom attaches great importance to voice callsQuality, “If there is no sound or the sound quality is not good, then no one will use video.” Yuan Zheng said, so we will first ensure the quality of the sound. “Even if the network signal drops by half, Zoom can ensure that the audio stream is normally available.”
However, the cloud model of Zoom also means that companies need to burn a lot of money in the early stage, which is naturally a great challenge for small start-up companies. Fortunately, when Zoom polished the first version, it found customers. In 2012, the School of Continuing Education at Stanford University found Zoom, hoping that Zoom could provide solutions for online teaching platforms. “At that time was a blowout period for various online education projects. Our first few important customers were all from the education field.” Yuan Zheng later recalled.
Zoom successfully entered the video conferencing software market with the education industry as a cut. Later, more than 200 top universities in the United States, 90% became Zoom users.
Because the meeting is attended by multiple people, the Zoom software has a natural virus propagation effect, although Zoom There is no dedicated marketing team, but user growth is still very rapid. In June 2013, the number of Zoom users reached 1.2 million, but by September, personal users exceeded 3 million, and enterprise users exceeded 4,500.
In 2014, after realizing that the demand for real-time communication and collaboration between business people and knowledge workers was stronger and more valuable than individual users, Yuan Zheng began to optimize the iterative function of Zoom for enterprises and quickly It has more than 30,000 enterprise users. At this time, the sales of Cisco and other conference hardware equipment manufacturers have plummeted. They can only start to follow Zoom, but they can’t keep up with the rapid iteration of Zoom.
In August 2014, the new version of Zoom greatly increased the number of participants in the virtual conference room from 25 to 1000; in December 2015, Zoom made a milestone upgrade of the conference function and launched a chat group. In response to the welcome of educational institutions and companies, enterprise users exceeded 200,000.
In July 2016, Zoom added a virtual background to the meeting, allowing users to easily join the meeting whether in the kitchen or coffee shop. This year, Zoom had more than 450,000 enterprise customers, and it was profitable for the first time in the third quarter of the year.
In 2017, Zoom launched version 4.0, which is mainly an open platform for third parties. Through the SDK / API, Zoom is embedded in all Android / IOS apps and can be shared on FacebookLive and YouTube and other social media. At that time, there were more than 700,000 enterprise users on Zoom, and more than 6,900 educational institutions.
In 2018, Zoom launched Zoom Phone, which provides services for enterprise telephone exchanges. In addition, it also improved the third-party open platform App Marketplace, which has carried out more detailed classifications for various interface services, and more in-depth integration with other platforms … With the continuous updating and iteration of products, Zoom’s market share is also growing. More and more companies rely on Zoom for daily meetings.
Sequoia Capital partner Carl Eschenbach said that Zoom is the only startup that can achieve the NPS recommendation rate and loyalty of Apple products, and combines similar Slack services and Facebook ’s network effect capabilities. Prior to this, there was no A company can have all three capabilities at the same time.
On April 18, 2019, after 8 years of hard work, Yuan Zheng led Zoom to land on Nasdaq. On the first day of trading, Zoom ’s stock price soared 80% and its market value reached US $ 16 billion.
Best CEO in the United States
Someone said, “The success or failure of a company is often doomed from the first day of its establishment.” Although such a statement is somewhat absolute, but Not unreasonable. Because the original intention of the founder will determine the direction of the enterprise and will shape the fundamental genes of enterprise development.
In Yuan Zheng ’s view, the key to Zoom ’s success is also related to his original intention. On the first day of Zoom, Yuan Zheng was sitting alone in the office, thinking about the question: “What kind of company do I want to work for?” Finally, he concluded that to make others happy, to be happy for himself . “The purpose of life should be to pursue happiness,And lasting happiness comes from creating happiness for others. “If you make others happy, you will achieve sustainable happiness.” I also apply this theory to self-built companies. “
It is under this kind of ideological guidance that “providing happiness to customers” has become the goal pursued by Zoom. Therefore, compared with competitors, Zoom is simpler, more practical, richer, and better, and the price is cheaper. . As a result, in the siege of large giants including Polycom, Cisco and Microsoft, the small company Zoom has suddenly become the leader of the US cloud video industry.
Internally, “passing happiness” is also a company that Yuan Zheng has always emphasized Culture, he believes that he must work hard to make employees happy, and when employees are happy, they will try to make customers happy. If customers are happy, the company will naturally develop. When hiring new employees, Yuan Zheng ’s requirement is to be able to do five “cares”: care about the community, care about the company, care about customers, care about colleagues, and care about himself. The purpose is also to require employees to pass happiness. “We want to care for each other, focus on providing happiness to each other, and ultimately as a company, we provide happiness to customers.”
Yuan Zheng is very opposed to forcing employees to work overtime to improve production efficiency through 996 Instead, focus on the cultivation and improvement of employees. He believes that any employee is the result of long-term investment, cutting off is equivalent to investment failure. Therefore, in Zoom, Yuan Zheng rarely fired an employee easily. He said: “The company is to find people who are desperate to serve the company. Such mutual assistance can make everyone become such a collective.”
He also used Facebook to reject Yahoo ’s investment. Many executives were dissatisfied with Zuckerberg and quit in an example. For example, he thought it was a good thing for Facebook., Because all those who stay are willing to die.
In addition to creating high-quality teams, Zoom teams tend to enhance each other ’s sense of trust and closeness through the creation of an open, transparent, and shared atmosphere. In Zoom, apart from financing meetings and everyone’s salary, everything else is transparent and open.
Yuan Zheng held a full-person meeting at the company. Employees were free to ask any questions about the company, no matter how sharp. If it feels inconvenient, it can also be submitted anonymously and resolved by the company. Some executives once objected to this, fearing that employees would expose their shortcomings, which would make the company lose face and prevent their superiors from stepping down.
Yuan Zheng said that if he did not support such behavior, he did not put the company ’s interests first. In his view, honest and trustful communication between members can make them have a higher sense of happiness, germinate greater creativity, and can awaken the strongest team strength, and then provide customers with the best services and products .
In 2018, Yuan Zheng was awarded the “Entrepreneur of the Year 2018” by Ernst & Young, a well-known professional services company, and was also named the best CEO of the United States in 2018 by the job search website Glassdoor. Among the companies, the company with the highest employee happiness. The company’s performance, social praise and honor all prove the success of Zoom’s corporate culture to a certain extent.
Rong Zhongdao Yuan
Zoom has been developing smoothly since its inception, but has recently experienced an unprecedented crisis. Affected by the epidemic, Zoom users can be said to have surged overnight. According to Yuan Zheng, “As of the end of December 2019, including free and paid users, the largest number of users in the Zoom virtual meeting has reached 10 million in one day. In March this year, we had more than 200 million users one day. Records. “Many schools, companies, and government organizations use Zoom as the most common tool for communication.
However, at the same time that the number of users has exploded, its security issues and personal privacy vulnerabilities have also become prominent. For example, many students encounter interference from unknown persons when using Zoom to teach; a large number of private Zoom videos are uploaded to public web pages, anyone can watch online; some people ’s phone numbers, names, and more personal information are in open cloud storage space It is easy to be searched on … Some insiders pointed out that Zoom does not fully use end-to-end encryption for video and telephone communications. Both the Windows and Mac versions of Zoom software have the risk of exposing user login credentials …
After these problems were exposed, some large companies and institutions began to prohibit the use of Zoom. For example, Musk has banned its SpaceX company and Tesla from using Zoom to hold meetings; NASA banned employees from using Zoom to work; Google also Because of security issues, employees are prohibited from using Zoom on laptops for video conferencing; the New York City Department of Education also requires schools in their jurisdictions to stop using Zoom; the FBI reminds users to pay attention to network security issues when using Zoom, and do not share meetings on social media Link to prevent confidential information from being obtained by hackers.
A series of problems caused Zoom ’s stock price to peak at $ 164.94 / share at the end of March, and then began to plummet … Recently, some investors even filed legal proceedings against Zoom.
In the face of the recent voices of doubt, Yuan Zheng officially apologized on April 1st, promising to suspend the development of all new functions within the next 90 days, use all the resources of engineers to solve existing problems, and the repair process is transparent And a transparency report on user data was issued. “We welcome you to continue to ask questions and provide feedback. Our primary goal has always been to satisfy users and ensure that the security and privacy of our platform is worthy of everyone’s trust.”
On April 9, Yuan Zheng held a live broadcast on YouTube for nearly two hours, and again apologized to the users. In the live broadcast, he said, “We have a lot of work to do to ensure the safety of all user usage scenarios. But we can guarantee that we will take these problems very seriously. We will investigate each problem, If a problem is found, the company will repair it. “
HereIn an interview with CNN, Yuan Zheng said that although the company has recently experienced security problems, its original intention was good. “We are progressing too fast … there are indeed some mistakes. In this regard, we will learn lessons and focus on privacy and security.” Some insiders pointed out that Zoom has the opportunity to become a great video chat software, but its serious Security issues have left Microsoft with an opportunity. Obviously, Zoom still has a long way to go on the road to greatness.
Greatness is often accompanied by tribulation. Looking at the world, almost any great company has experienced tribulations of life and death. From the beginning of its establishment, Zoom, which has always been smooth, has to face more unpredictable challenges and hardships in order to truly become a great company. Difficulties and hardships, Yu Yucheng, we also wish Yuan Zheng, the best American CEO from China, to lead Zoom to continue to ride through the wind and waves and grow into a truly great company.
As the founder and CEO of Zoom, Yuan Zheng owns 22% of the company ’s shares In the past year, it has become one of the fastest-growing people in the world, and its value on the day of the company’s listing reached more than 3 billion US dollars. The Hurun Research Institute recently released the “Special Report on the Change of Global Entrepreneur’s Wealth Two Months After the Epidemic”, showing that 50-year-old Yuan Zheng’s wealth has reached more than 8 billion US dollars, ranking first in the world in terms of increase.
What ’s more commendable is that Yuan Zheng is also a CEO loved by his employees. In 2018, the US workplace research and survey company Comparably selected 25 companies with the highest employee well-being based on a survey of workplace happiness surveys submitted by 10 million employees from 50,000 companies nationwide. Zoom ranked first. In July of the same year, Glassdoor, a US job search site, ranked the top 100 CEO list in the United States. Yuan Zheng won the championship with a 99% employee praise rate and became the first non-white CEO to top the list.
HoweverWhat many people do not think is that Yuan Zheng is not an American elite in the traditional sense. He did not graduate from a prestigious school. He only started his business in the middle of his middle age. Even when he ran into the United States in his early years, he had to bury his head in code because of poor English. , And can’t communicate well with people. But it is such a person, relying on personal efforts and struggle, has achieved the status of Zoom’s Silicon Valley unicorn.
Zoom
Yuan Zheng was born in Tai’an City, Shandong Province in 1970. Perhaps because his father was a mining engineer, Yuan Zheng applied to the Shandong Mining Institute in Tai’an when he went to university (Predecessor of Shandong University of Science and Technology). After graduating from university, Yuan Zheng went to China University of Mining and Technology for further study and obtained a master’s degree.
During college, because he was in two places with his girlfriend, he could only meet in winter and summer vacations. Yuan Zheng envisioned inventing a device at that time: just click, you can see her girlfriend talking with her, just like the two are in Same in a room. This also became the germ of his later thought of doing Zoom.
In 1994, Yuan Zheng was in Japan and listened to a speech by Bill Gates. Gates mentioned the “information highway” concept, so he was greatly touched. “The Internet has opened a completely different world. You can buy books online and use e-mail.” He firmly believed that the Internet is the future. “At that time, I realized that the Internet represented by Netscape and Yahoo was very powerful and popular in the United States. He is eager to work in Silicon Valley and experience the changes that the Internet has brought to human society.
But going to the United States is not an easy task. Yuan Zheng was refused the first time he applied for a visa. But under the strong appeal of ideals, Yuan Zheng applied for a US visa for eight consecutive times in the next two years. He said he used these failures as a way to hone his patience. In 1997, Yuan Zheng finally won the signing and came to Silicon Valley, his ideal science and technology shrine.
Yuan Zheng ’s English is not good, and he is new at first, so it is not easy to find a technology position. However, there are some Chinese-founded companies in Silicon Valley. Yuan Zheng later moved to WebEx, a video conferencing software company founded by the Chinese Zhu Min and Xu Yuqing, and became one of the company’s earliest dozen programmers.
On WebExIn the first 5 years, Yuan Zheng was digging into the code every day. In his view, there are too many big cows in Silicon Valley and more smart people, so to survive in Silicon Valley, he must work harder than others. “If my competitor says” I work eight hours a day “, then I can work 10 hours. Hard work is in my DNA.”
With this effort, Yuan Zheng’s position in WebEx has been continuously improved, from engineer to engineer manager, to senior engineer manager, director, and senior director, until he became the vice president.
Around 2007, Cisco and Microsoft, which already accounted for most of the market share in gateways and routers, launched fierce competition for enterprise entrance. At this time, WebEx became the acquisition target of Cisco. In 2007, Cisco acquired WebEx at a high price of 3.2 billion US dollars.
As an important member in the development process of WebEx, Yuan Zheng was reused after entering Cisco and was appointed as the vice president of engineering of Cisco. Yuan Zheng lived up to expectations, and in the next four years, under his leadership, WebEx, a Cisco-owned web conferencing provider, grew from the initial 10 engineers to more than 800, and increased revenue from zero growth to more than $ 800 million.
However, with the development of the business, Yuan Zheng gradually found that the application scenario at that time was limited to WebEx of “shared PPT or shared desktop”, which could not meet the needs of customers. Customers need voice conferencing and video conferencing, and need good IP voice quality and video quality. More importantly, in the four years since WebEx was acquired, the external environment has undergone major changes, the computing power of mobile terminal equipment has been greatly improved, 4G networks have begun to popularize, and SAAS has entered a period of rapid development. In the past, complex processes and equipment The video conferencing solutions for the center are gradually falling behind.
Yuan Zheng, who is in the industry, clearly sees the general trend of video conference collaboration and cloudization, but Cisco is not willing to invest more resources in restructuring technology. Although Yuan Zheng tried his best, he did not get strong support. This made him begin to retreat. In 2011, 41-year-old Yuan Zheng rejected Cisco’s retention and founded Zoom Video Communications with dozens of subordinates.
Red Sea Breakout
After Yuan Zheng started his business, he quickly received angel round investment from his former colleagues and supervisors, which also allowed him to put more energy into product development. Among. He also used the recruitment strategy of WebEx and hired a large number of domestic engineers who worked hard and had low costs. After more than a year of development, the first version of Zoom was successfully released in August 2012.
At that time, the track of video conferencing was already quite crowded. Skype, Google Hangouts, WebEx, FaceTime and other giant products not only have a large number of users, but also rely on Microsoft, Giants like Google, Cisco, and Apple. How to break through in giant competition? The way of Zoom is to use the cloud plus the end model for collaboration, which focuses on ease of use and practicality.
When using Zoom, you only need to download the software, log in to your account and click on the link, then you can easily start a multi-person video communication. In addition to easy operation, Zoom has also formed a strong technical team to optimize video functions. “Even if the server and network environment are unstable, users can still start a video call through Zoom.”
Moreover, Zoom attaches great importance to voice callsQuality, “If there is no sound or the sound quality is not good, then no one will use video.” Yuan Zheng said, so we will first ensure the quality of the sound. “Even if the network signal drops by half, Zoom can ensure that the audio stream is normally available.”
However, the cloud model of Zoom also means that companies need to burn a lot of money in the early stage, which is naturally a great challenge for small start-up companies. Fortunately, when Zoom polished the first version, it found customers. In 2012, the School of Continuing Education at Stanford University found Zoom, hoping that Zoom could provide solutions for online teaching platforms. “At that time was a blowout period for various online education projects. Our first few important customers were all from the education field.” Yuan Zheng later recalled.
Zoom successfully entered the video conferencing software market with the education industry as a cut. Later, more than 200 top universities in the United States, 90% became Zoom users.
Because the meeting is attended by multiple people, the Zoom software has a natural virus propagation effect, although Zoom There is no dedicated marketing team, but user growth is still very rapid. In June 2013, the number of Zoom users reached 1.2 million, but by September, personal users exceeded 3 million, and enterprise users exceeded 4,500.
In 2014, after realizing that the demand for real-time communication and collaboration between business people and knowledge workers was stronger and more valuable than individual users, Yuan Zheng began to optimize the iterative function of Zoom for enterprises and quickly It has more than 30,000 enterprise users. At this time, the sales of Cisco and other conference hardware equipment manufacturers have plummeted. They can only start to follow Zoom, but they can’t keep up with the rapid iteration of Zoom.
In August 2014, the new version of Zoom greatly increased the number of participants in the virtual conference room from 25 to 1000; in December 2015, Zoom made a milestone upgrade of the conference function and launched a chat group. In response to the welcome of educational institutions and companies, enterprise users exceeded 200,000.
In July 2016, Zoom added a virtual background to the meeting, allowing users to easily join the meeting whether in the kitchen or coffee shop. This year, Zoom had more than 450,000 enterprise customers, and it was profitable for the first time in the third quarter of the year.
In 2017, Zoom launched version 4.0, which is mainly an open platform for third parties. Through the SDK / API, Zoom is embedded in all Android / IOS apps and can be shared on FacebookLive and YouTube and other social media. At that time, there were more than 700,000 enterprise users on Zoom, and more than 6,900 educational institutions.
In 2018, Zoom launched Zoom Phone, which provides services for enterprise telephone exchanges. In addition, it also improved the third-party open platform App Marketplace, which has carried out more detailed classifications for various interface services, and more in-depth integration with other platforms … With the continuous updating and iteration of products, Zoom’s market share is also growing. More and more companies rely on Zoom for daily meetings.
Sequoia Capital partner Carl Eschenbach said that Zoom is the only startup that can achieve the NPS recommendation rate and loyalty of Apple products, and combines similar Slack services and Facebook ’s network effect capabilities. Prior to this, there was no A company can have all three capabilities at the same time.
On April 18, 2019, after 8 years of hard work, Yuan Zheng led Zoom to land on Nasdaq. On the first day of trading, Zoom ’s stock price soared 80% and its market value reached US $ 16 billion.
Best CEO in the United States
Someone said, “The success or failure of a company is often doomed from the first day of its establishment.” Although such a statement is somewhat absolute, but Not unreasonable. Because the original intention of the founder will determine the direction of the enterprise and will shape the fundamental genes of enterprise development.
In Yuan Zheng ’s view, the key to Zoom ’s success is also related to his original intention. On the first day of Zoom, Yuan Zheng was sitting alone in the office, thinking about the question: “What kind of company do I want to work for?” Finally, he concluded that to make others happy, to be happy for himself . “The purpose of life should be to pursue happiness,And lasting happiness comes from creating happiness for others. “If you make others happy, you will achieve sustainable happiness.” I also apply this theory to self-built companies. “
It is under this kind of ideological guidance that “providing happiness to customers” has become the goal pursued by Zoom. Therefore, compared with competitors, Zoom is simpler, more practical, richer, and better, and the price is cheaper. . As a result, in the siege of large giants including Polycom, Cisco and Microsoft, the small company Zoom has suddenly become the leader of the US cloud video industry.
Internally, “passing happiness” is also a company that Yuan Zheng has always emphasized Culture, he believes that he must work hard to make employees happy, and when employees are happy, they will try to make customers happy. If customers are happy, the company will naturally develop. When hiring new employees, Yuan Zheng ’s requirement is to be able to do five “cares”: care about the community, care about the company, care about customers, care about colleagues, and care about himself. The purpose is also to require employees to pass happiness. “We want to care for each other, focus on providing happiness to each other, and ultimately as a company, we provide happiness to customers.”
Yuan Zheng is very opposed to forcing employees to work overtime to improve production efficiency through 996 Instead, focus on the cultivation and improvement of employees. He believes that any employee is the result of long-term investment, cutting off is equivalent to investment failure. Therefore, in Zoom, Yuan Zheng rarely fired an employee easily. He said: “The company is to find people who are desperate to serve the company. Such mutual assistance can make everyone become such a collective.”
He also used Facebook to reject Yahoo ’s investment. Many executives were dissatisfied with Zuckerberg and quit in an example. For example, he thought it was a good thing for Facebook., Because all those who stay are willing to die.
In addition to creating high-quality teams, Zoom teams tend to enhance each other ’s sense of trust and closeness through the creation of an open, transparent, and shared atmosphere. In Zoom, apart from financing meetings and everyone’s salary, everything else is transparent and open.
Yuan Zheng held a full-person meeting at the company. Employees were free to ask any questions about the company, no matter how sharp. If it feels inconvenient, it can also be submitted anonymously and resolved by the company. Some executives once objected to this, fearing that employees would expose their shortcomings, which would make the company lose face and prevent their superiors from stepping down.
Yuan Zheng said that if he did not support such behavior, he did not put the company ’s interests first. In his view, honest and trustful communication between members can make them have a higher sense of happiness, germinate greater creativity, and can awaken the strongest team strength, and then provide customers with the best services and products .
In 2018, Yuan Zheng was awarded the “Entrepreneur of the Year 2018” by Ernst & Young, a well-known professional services company, and was also named the best CEO of the United States in 2018 by the job search website Glassdoor. Among the companies, the company with the highest employee happiness. The company’s performance, social praise and honor all prove the success of Zoom’s corporate culture to a certain extent.
Rong Zhongdao Yuan
Zoom has been developing smoothly since its inception, but has recently experienced an unprecedented crisis. Affected by the epidemic, Zoom users can be said to have surged overnight. According to Yuan Zheng, “As of the end of December 2019, including free and paid users, the largest number of users in the Zoom virtual meeting has reached 10 million in one day. In March this year, we had more than 200 million users one day. Records. “Many schools, companies, and government organizations use Zoom as the most common tool for communication.
However, at the same time that the number of users has exploded, its security issues and personal privacy vulnerabilities have also become prominent. For example, many students encounter interference from unknown persons when using Zoom to teach; a large number of private Zoom videos are uploaded to public web pages, anyone can watch online; some people ’s phone numbers, names, and more personal information are in open cloud storage space It is easy to be searched on … Some insiders pointed out that Zoom does not fully use end-to-end encryption for video and telephone communications. Both the Windows and Mac versions of Zoom software have the risk of exposing user login credentials …
After these problems were exposed, some large companies and institutions began to prohibit the use of Zoom. For example, Musk has banned its SpaceX company and Tesla from using Zoom to hold meetings; NASA banned employees from using Zoom to work; Google also Because of security issues, employees are prohibited from using Zoom on laptops for video conferencing; the New York City Department of Education also requires schools in their jurisdictions to stop using Zoom; the FBI reminds users to pay attention to network security issues when using Zoom, and do not share meetings on social media Link to prevent confidential information from being obtained by hackers.
A series of problems caused Zoom ’s stock price to peak at $ 164.94 / share at the end of March, and then began to plummet … Recently, some investors even filed legal proceedings against Zoom.
In the face of the recent voices of doubt, Yuan Zheng officially apologized on April 1st, promising to suspend the development of all new functions within the next 90 days, use all the resources of engineers to solve existing problems, and the repair process is transparent And a transparency report on user data was issued. “We welcome you to continue to ask questions and provide feedback. Our primary goal has always been to satisfy users and ensure that the security and privacy of our platform is worthy of everyone’s trust.”
On April 9, Yuan Zheng held a live broadcast on YouTube for nearly two hours, and again apologized to the users. In the live broadcast, he said, “We have a lot of work to do to ensure the safety of all user usage scenarios. But we can guarantee that we will take these problems very seriously. We will investigate each problem, If a problem is found, the company will repair it. “
HereIn an interview with CNN, Yuan Zheng said that although the company has recently experienced security problems, its original intention was good. “We are progressing too fast … there are indeed some mistakes. In this regard, we will learn lessons and focus on privacy and security.” Some insiders pointed out that Zoom has the opportunity to become a great video chat software, but its serious Security issues have left Microsoft with an opportunity. Obviously, Zoom still has a long way to go on the road to greatness.
Greatness is often accompanied by tribulation. Looking at the world, almost any great company has experienced tribulations of life and death. From the beginning of its establishment, Zoom, which has always been smooth, has to face more unpredictable challenges and hardships in order to truly become a great company. Difficulties and hardships, Yu Yucheng, we also wish Yuan Zheng, the best American CEO from China, to lead Zoom to continue to ride through the wind and waves and grow into a truly great company.
Red Sea Breakout
After Yuan Zheng started his business, he quickly received angel round investment from his former colleagues and supervisors, which also allowed him to put more energy into product development. Among. He also used the recruitment strategy of WebEx and hired a large number of domestic engineers who worked hard and had low costs. After more than a year of development, the first version of Zoom was successfully released in August 2012.
At that time, the track of video conferencing was already quite crowded. Skype, Google Hangouts, WebEx, FaceTime and other giant products not only have a large number of users, but also rely on Microsoft, Giants like Google, Cisco, and Apple. How to break through in giant competition? The way of Zoom is to use the cloud plus the end model for collaboration, which focuses on ease of use and practicality.
When using Zoom, you only need to download the software, log in to your account and click on the link, then you can easily start a multi-person video communication. In addition to easy operation, Zoom has also formed a strong technical team to optimize video functions. “Even if the server and network environment are unstable, users can still start a video call through Zoom.”
Moreover, Zoom attaches great importance to voice callsQuality, “If there is no sound or the sound quality is not good, then no one will use video.” Yuan Zheng said, so we will first ensure the quality of the sound. “Even if the network signal drops by half, Zoom can ensure that the audio stream is normally available.”
However, the cloud model of Zoom also means that companies need to burn a lot of money in the early stage, which is naturally a great challenge for small start-up companies. Fortunately, when Zoom polished the first version, it found customers. In 2012, the School of Continuing Education at Stanford University found Zoom, hoping that Zoom could provide solutions for online teaching platforms. “At that time was a blowout period for various online education projects. Our first few important customers were all from the education field.” Yuan Zheng later recalled.
Zoom successfully entered the video conferencing software market with the education industry as a cut. Later, more than 200 top universities in the United States, 90% became Zoom users.
Because the meeting is attended by multiple people, the Zoom software has a natural virus propagation effect, although Zoom There is no dedicated marketing team, but user growth is still very rapid. In June 2013, the number of Zoom users reached 1.2 million, but by September, personal users exceeded 3 million, and enterprise users exceeded 4,500.
In 2014, after realizing that the demand for real-time communication and collaboration between business people and knowledge workers was stronger and more valuable than individual users, Yuan Zheng began to optimize the iterative function of Zoom for enterprises and quickly It has more than 30,000 enterprise users. At this time, the sales of Cisco and other conference hardware equipment manufacturers have plummeted. They can only start to follow Zoom, but they can’t keep up with the rapid iteration of Zoom.
In August 2014, the new version of Zoom greatly increased the number of participants in the virtual conference room from 25 to 1000; in December 2015, Zoom made a milestone upgrade of the conference function and launched a chat group. In response to the welcome of educational institutions and companies, enterprise users exceeded 200,000.
In July 2016, Zoom added a virtual background to the meeting, allowing users to easily join the meeting whether in the kitchen or coffee shop. This year, Zoom had more than 450,000 enterprise customers, and it was profitable for the first time in the third quarter of the year.
In 2017, Zoom launched version 4.0, which is mainly an open platform for third parties. Through the SDK / API, Zoom is embedded in all Android / IOS apps and can be shared on FacebookLive and YouTube and other social media. At that time, there were more than 700,000 enterprise users on Zoom, and more than 6,900 educational institutions.
In 2018, Zoom launched Zoom Phone, which provides services for enterprise telephone exchanges. In addition, it also improved the third-party open platform App Marketplace, which has carried out more detailed classifications for various interface services, and more in-depth integration with other platforms … With the continuous updating and iteration of products, Zoom’s market share is also growing. More and more companies rely on Zoom for daily meetings.
Sequoia Capital partner Carl Eschenbach said that Zoom is the only startup that can achieve the NPS recommendation rate and loyalty of Apple products, and combines similar Slack services and Facebook ’s network effect capabilities. Prior to this, there was no A company can have all three capabilities at the same time.
On April 18, 2019, after 8 years of hard work, Yuan Zheng led Zoom to land on Nasdaq. On the first day of trading, Zoom ’s stock price soared 80% and its market value reached US $ 16 billion.
Best CEO in the United States
Someone said, “The success or failure of a company is often doomed from the first day of its establishment.” Although such a statement is somewhat absolute, but Not unreasonable. Because the original intention of the founder will determine the direction of the enterprise and will shape the fundamental genes of enterprise development.
In Yuan Zheng ’s view, the key to Zoom ’s success is also related to his original intention. On the first day of Zoom, Yuan Zheng was sitting alone in the office, thinking about the question: “What kind of company do I want to work for?” Finally, he concluded that to make others happy, to be happy for himself . “The purpose of life should be to pursue happiness,And lasting happiness comes from creating happiness for others. “If you make others happy, you will achieve sustainable happiness.” I also apply this theory to self-built companies. “
It is under this kind of ideological guidance that “providing happiness to customers” has become the goal pursued by Zoom. Therefore, compared with competitors, Zoom is simpler, more practical, richer, and better, and the price is cheaper. . As a result, in the siege of large giants including Polycom, Cisco and Microsoft, the small company Zoom has suddenly become the leader of the US cloud video industry.
Internally, “passing happiness” is also a company that Yuan Zheng has always emphasized Culture, he believes that he must work hard to make employees happy, and when employees are happy, they will try to make customers happy. If customers are happy, the company will naturally develop. When hiring new employees, Yuan Zheng ’s requirement is to be able to do five “cares”: care about the community, care about the company, care about customers, care about colleagues, and care about himself. The purpose is also to require employees to pass happiness. “We want to care for each other, focus on providing happiness to each other, and ultimately as a company, we provide happiness to customers.”
Yuan Zheng is very opposed to forcing employees to work overtime to improve production efficiency through 996 Instead, focus on the cultivation and improvement of employees. He believes that any employee is the result of long-term investment, cutting off is equivalent to investment failure. Therefore, in Zoom, Yuan Zheng rarely fired an employee easily. He said: “The company is to find people who are desperate to serve the company. Such mutual assistance can make everyone become such a collective.”
He also used Facebook to reject Yahoo ’s investment. Many executives were dissatisfied with Zuckerberg and quit in an example. For example, he thought it was a good thing for Facebook., Because all those who stay are willing to die.
In addition to creating high-quality teams, Zoom teams tend to enhance each other ’s sense of trust and closeness through the creation of an open, transparent, and shared atmosphere. In Zoom, apart from financing meetings and everyone’s salary, everything else is transparent and open.
Yuan Zheng held a full-person meeting at the company. Employees were free to ask any questions about the company, no matter how sharp. If it feels inconvenient, it can also be submitted anonymously and resolved by the company. Some executives once objected to this, fearing that employees would expose their shortcomings, which would make the company lose face and prevent their superiors from stepping down.
Yuan Zheng said that if he did not support such behavior, he did not put the company ’s interests first. In his view, honest and trustful communication between members can make them have a higher sense of happiness, germinate greater creativity, and can awaken the strongest team strength, and then provide customers with the best services and products .
In 2018, Yuan Zheng was awarded the “Entrepreneur of the Year 2018” by Ernst & Young, a well-known professional services company, and was also named the best CEO of the United States in 2018 by the job search website Glassdoor. Among the companies, the company with the highest employee happiness. The company’s performance, social praise and honor all prove the success of Zoom’s corporate culture to a certain extent.
Rong Zhongdao Yuan
Zoom has been developing smoothly since its inception, but has recently experienced an unprecedented crisis. Affected by the epidemic, Zoom users can be said to have surged overnight. According to Yuan Zheng, “As of the end of December 2019, including free and paid users, the largest number of users in the Zoom virtual meeting has reached 10 million in one day. In March this year, we had more than 200 million users one day. Records. “Many schools, companies, and government organizations use Zoom as the most common tool for communication.
However, at the same time that the number of users has exploded, its security issues and personal privacy vulnerabilities have also become prominent. For example, many students encounter interference from unknown persons when using Zoom to teach; a large number of private Zoom videos are uploaded to public web pages, anyone can watch online; some people ’s phone numbers, names, and more personal information are in open cloud storage space It is easy to be searched on … Some insiders pointed out that Zoom does not fully use end-to-end encryption for video and telephone communications. Both the Windows and Mac versions of Zoom software have the risk of exposing user login credentials …
After these problems were exposed, some large companies and institutions began to prohibit the use of Zoom. For example, Musk has banned its SpaceX company and Tesla from using Zoom to hold meetings; NASA banned employees from using Zoom to work; Google also Because of security issues, employees are prohibited from using Zoom on laptops for video conferencing; the New York City Department of Education also requires schools in their jurisdictions to stop using Zoom; the FBI reminds users to pay attention to network security issues when using Zoom, and do not share meetings on social media Link to prevent confidential information from being obtained by hackers.
A series of problems caused Zoom ’s stock price to peak at $ 164.94 / share at the end of March, and then began to plummet … Recently, some investors even filed legal proceedings against Zoom.
In the face of the recent voices of doubt, Yuan Zheng officially apologized on April 1st, promising to suspend the development of all new functions within the next 90 days, use all the resources of engineers to solve existing problems, and the repair process is transparent And a transparency report on user data was issued. “We welcome you to continue to ask questions and provide feedback. Our primary goal has always been to satisfy users and ensure that the security and privacy of our platform is worthy of everyone’s trust.”
On April 9, Yuan Zheng held a live broadcast on YouTube for nearly two hours, and again apologized to the users. In the live broadcast, he said, “We have a lot of work to do to ensure the safety of all user usage scenarios. But we can guarantee that we will take these problems very seriously. We will investigate each problem, If a problem is found, the company will repair it. “
HereIn an interview with CNN, Yuan Zheng said that although the company has recently experienced security problems, its original intention was good. “We are progressing too fast … there are indeed some mistakes. In this regard, we will learn lessons and focus on privacy and security.” Some insiders pointed out that Zoom has the opportunity to become a great video chat software, but its serious Security issues have left Microsoft with an opportunity. Obviously, Zoom still has a long way to go on the road to greatness.
Greatness is often accompanied by tribulation. Looking at the world, almost any great company has experienced tribulations of life and death. From the beginning of its establishment, Zoom, which has always been smooth, has to face more unpredictable challenges and hardships in order to truly become a great company. Difficulties and hardships, Yu Yucheng, we also wish Yuan Zheng, the best American CEO from China, to lead Zoom to continue to ride through the wind and waves and grow into a truly great company.
Because the meeting is attended by multiple people, the Zoom software has a natural virus propagation effect, although Zoom There is no dedicated marketing team, but user growth is still very rapid. In June 2013, the number of Zoom users reached 1.2 million, but by September, personal users exceeded 3 million, and enterprise users exceeded 4,500.
In 2014, after realizing that the demand for real-time communication and collaboration between business people and knowledge workers was stronger and more valuable than individual users, Yuan Zheng began to optimize the iterative function of Zoom for enterprises and quickly It has more than 30,000 enterprise users. At this time, the sales of Cisco and other conference hardware equipment manufacturers have plummeted. They can only start to follow Zoom, but they can’t keep up with the rapid iteration of Zoom.
In August 2014, the new version of Zoom greatly increased the number of participants in the virtual conference room from 25 to 1000; in December 2015, Zoom made a milestone upgrade of the conference function and launched a chat group. In response to the welcome of educational institutions and companies, enterprise users exceeded 200,000.
In July 2016, Zoom added a virtual background to the meeting, allowing users to easily join the meeting whether in the kitchen or coffee shop. This year, Zoom had more than 450,000 enterprise customers, and it was profitable for the first time in the third quarter of the year.
In 2017, Zoom launched version 4.0, which is mainly an open platform for third parties. Through the SDK / API, Zoom is embedded in all Android / IOS apps and can be shared on FacebookLive and YouTube and other social media. At that time, there were more than 700,000 enterprise users on Zoom, and more than 6,900 educational institutions.
In 2018, Zoom launched Zoom Phone, which provides services for enterprise telephone exchanges. In addition, it also improved the third-party open platform App Marketplace, which has carried out more detailed classifications for various interface services, and more in-depth integration with other platforms … With the continuous updating and iteration of products, Zoom’s market share is also growing. More and more companies rely on Zoom for daily meetings.
Sequoia Capital partner Carl Eschenbach said that Zoom is the only startup that can achieve the NPS recommendation rate and loyalty of Apple products, and combines similar Slack services and Facebook ’s network effect capabilities. Prior to this, there was no A company can have all three capabilities at the same time.
On April 18, 2019, after 8 years of hard work, Yuan Zheng led Zoom to land on Nasdaq. On the first day of trading, Zoom ’s stock price soared 80% and its market value reached US $ 16 billion.
Best CEO in the United States
Someone said, “The success or failure of a company is often doomed from the first day of its establishment.” Although such a statement is somewhat absolute, but Not unreasonable. Because the original intention of the founder will determine the direction of the enterprise and will shape the fundamental genes of enterprise development.
In Yuan Zheng ’s view, the key to Zoom ’s success is also related to his original intention. On the first day of Zoom, Yuan Zheng was sitting alone in the office, thinking about the question: “What kind of company do I want to work for?” Finally, he concluded that to make others happy, to be happy for himself . “The purpose of life should be to pursue happiness,And lasting happiness comes from creating happiness for others. “If you make others happy, you will achieve sustainable happiness.” I also apply this theory to self-built companies. “
It is under this kind of ideological guidance that “providing happiness to customers” has become the goal pursued by Zoom. Therefore, compared with competitors, Zoom is simpler, more practical, richer, and better, and the price is cheaper. . As a result, in the siege of large giants including Polycom, Cisco and Microsoft, the small company Zoom has suddenly become the leader of the US cloud video industry.
Internally, “passing happiness” is also a company that Yuan Zheng has always emphasized Culture, he believes that he must work hard to make employees happy, and when employees are happy, they will try to make customers happy. If customers are happy, the company will naturally develop. When hiring new employees, Yuan Zheng ’s requirement is to be able to do five “cares”: care about the community, care about the company, care about customers, care about colleagues, and care about himself. The purpose is also to require employees to pass happiness. “We want to care for each other, focus on providing happiness to each other, and ultimately as a company, we provide happiness to customers.”
Yuan Zheng is very opposed to forcing employees to work overtime to improve production efficiency through 996 Instead, focus on the cultivation and improvement of employees. He believes that any employee is the result of long-term investment, cutting off is equivalent to investment failure. Therefore, in Zoom, Yuan Zheng rarely fired an employee easily. He said: “The company is to find people who are desperate to serve the company. Such mutual assistance can make everyone become such a collective.”
He also used Facebook to reject Yahoo ’s investment. Many executives were dissatisfied with Zuckerberg and quit in an example. For example, he thought it was a good thing for Facebook., Because all those who stay are willing to die.
In addition to creating high-quality teams, Zoom teams tend to enhance each other ’s sense of trust and closeness through the creation of an open, transparent, and shared atmosphere. In Zoom, apart from financing meetings and everyone’s salary, everything else is transparent and open.
Yuan Zheng held a full-person meeting at the company. Employees were free to ask any questions about the company, no matter how sharp. If it feels inconvenient, it can also be submitted anonymously and resolved by the company. Some executives once objected to this, fearing that employees would expose their shortcomings, which would make the company lose face and prevent their superiors from stepping down.
Yuan Zheng said that if he did not support such behavior, he did not put the company ’s interests first. In his view, honest and trustful communication between members can make them have a higher sense of happiness, germinate greater creativity, and can awaken the strongest team strength, and then provide customers with the best services and products .
In 2018, Yuan Zheng was awarded the “Entrepreneur of the Year 2018” by Ernst & Young, a well-known professional services company, and was also named the best CEO of the United States in 2018 by the job search website Glassdoor. Among the companies, the company with the highest employee happiness. The company’s performance, social praise and honor all prove the success of Zoom’s corporate culture to a certain extent.
Rong Zhongdao Yuan
Zoom has been developing smoothly since its inception, but has recently experienced an unprecedented crisis. Affected by the epidemic, Zoom users can be said to have surged overnight. According to Yuan Zheng, “As of the end of December 2019, including free and paid users, the largest number of users in the Zoom virtual meeting has reached 10 million in one day. In March this year, we had more than 200 million users one day. Records. “Many schools, companies, and government organizations use Zoom as the most common tool for communication.
However, at the same time that the number of users has exploded, its security issues and personal privacy vulnerabilities have also become prominent. For example, many students encounter interference from unknown persons when using Zoom to teach; a large number of private Zoom videos are uploaded to public web pages, anyone can watch online; some people ’s phone numbers, names, and more personal information are in open cloud storage space It is easy to be searched on … Some insiders pointed out that Zoom does not fully use end-to-end encryption for video and telephone communications. Both the Windows and Mac versions of Zoom software have the risk of exposing user login credentials …
After these problems were exposed, some large companies and institutions began to prohibit the use of Zoom. For example, Musk has banned its SpaceX company and Tesla from using Zoom to hold meetings; NASA banned employees from using Zoom to work; Google also Because of security issues, employees are prohibited from using Zoom on laptops for video conferencing; the New York City Department of Education also requires schools in their jurisdictions to stop using Zoom; the FBI reminds users to pay attention to network security issues when using Zoom, and do not share meetings on social media Link to prevent confidential information from being obtained by hackers.
A series of problems caused Zoom ’s stock price to peak at $ 164.94 / share at the end of March, and then began to plummet … Recently, some investors even filed legal proceedings against Zoom.
In the face of the recent voices of doubt, Yuan Zheng officially apologized on April 1st, promising to suspend the development of all new functions within the next 90 days, use all the resources of engineers to solve existing problems, and the repair process is transparent And a transparency report on user data was issued. “We welcome you to continue to ask questions and provide feedback. Our primary goal has always been to satisfy users and ensure that the security and privacy of our platform is worthy of everyone’s trust.”
On April 9, Yuan Zheng held a live broadcast on YouTube for nearly two hours, and again apologized to the users. In the live broadcast, he said, “We have a lot of work to do to ensure the safety of all user usage scenarios. But we can guarantee that we will take these problems very seriously. We will investigate each problem, If a problem is found, the company will repair it. “
HereIn an interview with CNN, Yuan Zheng said that although the company has recently experienced security problems, its original intention was good. “We are progressing too fast … there are indeed some mistakes. In this regard, we will learn lessons and focus on privacy and security.” Some insiders pointed out that Zoom has the opportunity to become a great video chat software, but its serious Security issues have left Microsoft with an opportunity. Obviously, Zoom still has a long way to go on the road to greatness.
Greatness is often accompanied by tribulation. Looking at the world, almost any great company has experienced tribulations of life and death. From the beginning of its establishment, Zoom, which has always been smooth, has to face more unpredictable challenges and hardships in order to truly become a great company. Difficulties and hardships, Yu Yucheng, we also wish Yuan Zheng, the best American CEO from China, to lead Zoom to continue to ride through the wind and waves and grow into a truly great company.
It is under this kind of ideological guidance that “providing happiness to customers” has become the goal pursued by Zoom. Therefore, compared with competitors, Zoom is simpler, more practical, richer, and better, and the price is cheaper. . As a result, in the siege of large giants including Polycom, Cisco and Microsoft, the small company Zoom has suddenly become the leader of the US cloud video industry.
Internally, “passing happiness” is also a company that Yuan Zheng has always emphasized Culture, he believes that he must work hard to make employees happy, and when employees are happy, they will try to make customers happy. If customers are happy, the company will naturally develop. When hiring new employees, Yuan Zheng ’s requirement is to be able to do five “cares”: care about the community, care about the company, care about customers, care about colleagues, and care about himself. The purpose is also to require employees to pass happiness. “We want to care for each other, focus on providing happiness to each other, and ultimately as a company, we provide happiness to customers.”
Yuan Zheng is very opposed to forcing employees to work overtime to improve production efficiency through 996 Instead, focus on the cultivation and improvement of employees. He believes that any employee is the result of long-term investment, cutting off is equivalent to investment failure. Therefore, in Zoom, Yuan Zheng rarely fired an employee easily. He said: “The company is to find people who are desperate to serve the company. Such mutual assistance can make everyone become such a collective.”
He also used Facebook to reject Yahoo ’s investment. Many executives were dissatisfied with Zuckerberg and quit in an example. For example, he thought it was a good thing for Facebook., Because all those who stay are willing to die.
In addition to creating high-quality teams, Zoom teams tend to enhance each other ’s sense of trust and closeness through the creation of an open, transparent, and shared atmosphere. In Zoom, apart from financing meetings and everyone’s salary, everything else is transparent and open.
Yuan Zheng held a full-person meeting at the company. Employees were free to ask any questions about the company, no matter how sharp. If it feels inconvenient, it can also be submitted anonymously and resolved by the company. Some executives once objected to this, fearing that employees would expose their shortcomings, which would make the company lose face and prevent their superiors from stepping down.
Yuan Zheng said that if he did not support such behavior, he did not put the company ’s interests first. In his view, honest and trustful communication between members can make them have a higher sense of happiness, germinate greater creativity, and can awaken the strongest team strength, and then provide customers with the best services and products .
In 2018, Yuan Zheng was awarded the “Entrepreneur of the Year 2018” by Ernst & Young, a well-known professional services company, and was also named the best CEO of the United States in 2018 by the job search website Glassdoor. Among the companies, the company with the highest employee happiness. The company’s performance, social praise and honor all prove the success of Zoom’s corporate culture to a certain extent.
Rong Zhongdao Yuan
Zoom has been developing smoothly since its inception, but has recently experienced an unprecedented crisis. Affected by the epidemic, Zoom users can be said to have surged overnight. According to Yuan Zheng, “As of the end of December 2019, including free and paid users, the largest number of users in the Zoom virtual meeting has reached 10 million in one day. In March this year, we had more than 200 million users one day. Records. “Many schools, companies, and government organizations use Zoom as the most common tool for communication.
However, at the same time that the number of users has exploded, its security issues and personal privacy vulnerabilities have also become prominent. For example, many students encounter interference from unknown persons when using Zoom to teach; a large number of private Zoom videos are uploaded to public web pages, anyone can watch online; some people ’s phone numbers, names, and more personal information are in open cloud storage space It is easy to be searched on … Some insiders pointed out that Zoom does not fully use end-to-end encryption for video and telephone communications. Both the Windows and Mac versions of Zoom software have the risk of exposing user login credentials …
After these problems were exposed, some large companies and institutions began to prohibit the use of Zoom. For example, Musk has banned its SpaceX company and Tesla from using Zoom to hold meetings; NASA banned employees from using Zoom to work; Google also Because of security issues, employees are prohibited from using Zoom on laptops for video conferencing; the New York City Department of Education also requires schools in their jurisdictions to stop using Zoom; the FBI reminds users to pay attention to network security issues when using Zoom, and do not share meetings on social media Link to prevent confidential information from being obtained by hackers.
A series of problems caused Zoom ’s stock price to peak at $ 164.94 / share at the end of March, and then began to plummet … Recently, some investors even filed legal proceedings against Zoom.
In the face of the recent voices of doubt, Yuan Zheng officially apologized on April 1st, promising to suspend the development of all new functions within the next 90 days, use all the resources of engineers to solve existing problems, and the repair process is transparent And a transparency report on user data was issued. “We welcome you to continue to ask questions and provide feedback. Our primary goal has always been to satisfy users and ensure that the security and privacy of our platform is worthy of everyone’s trust.”
On April 9, Yuan Zheng held a live broadcast on YouTube for nearly two hours, and again apologized to the users. In the live broadcast, he said, “We have a lot of work to do to ensure the safety of all user usage scenarios. But we can guarantee that we will take these problems very seriously. We will investigate each problem, If a problem is found, the company will repair it. “
HereIn an interview with CNN, Yuan Zheng said that although the company has recently experienced security problems, its original intention was good. “We are progressing too fast … there are indeed some mistakes. In this regard, we will learn lessons and focus on privacy and security.” Some insiders pointed out that Zoom has the opportunity to become a great video chat software, but its serious Security issues have left Microsoft with an opportunity. Obviously, Zoom still has a long way to go on the road to greatness.
Greatness is often accompanied by tribulation. Looking at the world, almost any great company has experienced tribulations of life and death. From the beginning of its establishment, Zoom, which has always been smooth, has to face more unpredictable challenges and hardships in order to truly become a great company. Difficulties and hardships, Yu Yucheng, we also wish Yuan Zheng, the best American CEO from China, to lead Zoom to continue to ride through the wind and waves and grow into a truly great company.