10 years ago @EricSYuan was just an employee at Cisco Systems.

Today he’s worth $25 billion making him one of the 25 wealthiest people in America.

Here’s how he did it

Born in China, Eric had his visa application denied 8 times before finally moving to California in 1997.

At the time he barely spoke English but was a superior engineer and began working for WebEx, one of the early pioneers in video conferencing.

Eric worked his way up the ranks at WebEx until the company was acquired by Cisco in 2007.

Eric became VP of Engineering at Cisco however he was unable to generate any support for his new video conferencing concept that would be more user friendly and better on mobile devices.

Eric finally left Cisco in 2011 and decided to start Zoom. Unfortunately he had a hard time getting investors excited about the idea because the market already seemed crowded with many options such as WebEx, GoToMeeting, Skype, etc.

Unable to raise money from investors Eric had to borrow money from friends and family to launch the company.

In the early days Eric was very involved in the business from hiring to engineering to customer service.

Eric was eventually able to raise money from a great group of investors topped off by a $100 million VC round in January 2017 that valued the company at $1 billion.

Around the same time that Eric was out raising capital I sent him an email to be a guest on my podcast and he was kind enough to reply.

I’ve saved it all these years because I knew $ZM was going to be huge one day.

You can tell @ericsyuan had tremendous passion for his company.

In April of 2019 @zoom_us finally IPO’d on the @Nasdaq.

$ZM priced the IPO shares at $36 which closed the first day of trading up 72%. Not only was $ZM growing very fast but they were already profitable which was extremely rare for a young hyper-growth software company.

Since the IPO, shares of $ZM have been on a tear, helped by the current Covid health pandemic which meant hundreds of millions of people, students, employees, etc were all locked down at home. $ZM has become an integral part of our daily lives. It’s basically a verb now.

Due to the social and professional importance of being able to have face-to-face meetings and their best in class product $ZM just reported the most insane quarter I’ve ever seen from a public company.

Last night $ZM reported that revenues in the last quarter were up 355%

Due to those blowout numbers $ZM is trading 34% higher today which brings the market cap up to $125 billion.

$ZM is now up 562% year to date.

Since @ericsyuan owns approx 20% of the outstanding shares it means he is worth around $25 billion however he’s one of the most humble Founder/CEO’s in the country so I doubt that net worth means anything to him. He’s focused on building the biggest and best company possible.

Kudos to @ericsyuan and his team at @zoom_us for helping us get through this pandemic with a little less stress. I miss being in an office and I miss traveling for work but $ZM has been a lifesaver.

In fact I had a Zoom meeting this morning with a business partner in Singapore.

I have no idea where $ZM’s stock goes from here but this story about @ericsyuan and his entrepreneurial journey is what the American Dream is all about.

I love that a kid from China can come to the US and build a $125 billion company