How to connect while apart Eric Yuan

we’re now months into this pandemic

what’s been the hardest part for you

of adapting to such an abrupt and rapid

global shift of video conferencing and

remote work

yeah well this happened so quickly

because you know the zoom was built to

serve a lot

enterprise and business customers

you know in terms of capacity

functionality

but over the night you know there are so

many

first-time users or consumers

to start using zoom platform you know

for all kinds of

different use cases so the hardest part

is how we can quickly

transform our business to embrace

first-time users to support all kinds of

new use cases in terms of service

availability

privacy security functionality i think

we’ve got

to quickly adapt to that so that’s the

hardest part

of the past month and presumably as we

were all

um sort of being thrown into work from

home

you guys were at pretty much exactly the

same time maybe a little bit earlier

so how did you and your team have to

change the way

you worked in order to do all the things

you were talking about just now

and still give us all the ability to

work from home as well

well when the pandemic crisis started

and here

the united states in early march you

know we quickly

made a decision to send all employees

back home because employee safety is

always

number one priority also because

we have almost one third of our

u.s based employees already working

remotely

prior to pandemic crisis i think we also

have a tool called

zoom and so i think by and large

we know how to work it together remotely

i think from productivity perspective

there’s no problem the problem is how we

can

and not only do we know we can support

the zoo employees

how we can work it together as a team

everyone working remotely

you know to keep the service up and to

serve for the world

right to make sure other businesses can

counter consume

still can be productive that’s a

challenge but

our team we are working so hard and

i think we adapted to this very very

quickly

do you think that um zoom could become

a company that lives and functions and

works entirely on zoom

i believe so but however also there’s a

challenge

right because if you all of us always

work from a home

for such a long time you might have a

different

problems like a mental health

anxiety depression i think is in the

future is more like a hybrid

for sure we can’t work from a home

without any productivity loss

but we still prefer right you know

sometimes you know maybe this week

next week we all go back to office right

with the traditional working experiences

it’s also very important

i think the future is about a hybrid

so how do you um

talk to me a little bit about sort of

what that hybrid experience then

looks like because as we sort of move

sort of the dial a little bit where sort

of video becomes

much more prominent in our day-to-day

lives what is the experience that we can

expect in the future i don’t think we or

you want zoom in 2030 to look exactly

like it looks now so

what are some of these things we can

expect

i think a hybrid first of all means you

know used to

be employer they are making a decision

right all the employees will go to the

office working together

physically in the office you know hybrid

means you know some delay

they might work from home some employees

they might work in the office

or maybe once a week maybe twice a week

everyone can go back to home to work

however

to support this kind of a hybrid working

environment

for sure you know your technology your

goal to improve

otherwise the tools like zoom i think

can help but that’s not about the

the future the future can let you feel

no matter where you are you still feel

like in the same office

an online conferencing experience

like a zoom can even deliver a much

better

experience than face-to-face meeting

than in the office meeting

like like a remote handshaking if i want

to shake hands with you

you’ll feel my intimacy right and also

real-time

language translation all those cool

features

will be added in the future

collaboration

to further support working anywhere with

any device

so so i can see how uh translation would

work but

how would a virtual handshake work

so you look at the ai technology or ar

technology so i wear uh just a normal

eyeglass something like that

and if i try to shake hand she kind of

is you

you will feel my handshaking and with

some special

devices and i think that will be doable

in the future i’m not saying today

but in 10 or 15 years those technologies

will be ready got it so

one of the things you were saying about

that has been hardest for you in terms

of adapting to

to this sort of very rapid change is

that

so many of your users now are sort of

beyond the original use cases

that you um anticipated

so when we were chatting last week you

were mentioning that

you are now zoom is now used by

thousands of educational

institutions around the world i i’m

we’ve heard a lot

over the decades really about how the

future of education

is going to be remote and online so what

are you seeing

in terms of the future of education that

we’re now in

i think online teaching online learning

are becoming mainstream and prior to

this pandemic crisis

a lot of universities are already

deploying zoom and for online teaching

online learning

during this pandemic crisis a lot of

k-12 schools

you know around the world like you know

we we offer the free service to more

than ten thousand

k-12 schools they also can leverage zoom

platform

for online teaching i truly believe in

the future

also this is more like a hybrid as well

you know students

they want to go to campus basically they

can

or if they want to stay at a home they

also can use the tools like a zoo

for online teaching for online learning

this is the future

i think in team of 20 years it’s very

likely

most of the learning are going to be

done

online so physically the campus probably

will be

small portion of the online learning

experience

instead um so one question for you now

and then we’ll go to community questions

but

silicon valley in the tech industry is

not really known for being

ahead of the curve when it comes to

ethical

considerations and thinking about the

ethical implications of their products

um what are the ethical challenges that

you’ve faced

um of growth at this kind of speed like

are you able to be deliberate about that

when things are changing so quickly

yes so first of all silicon valley is

not a only

for the worldwide innovation center but

also from ethical perspective

also got to set up a great example for

all

others to follow i think first of all

you know we got to take step back

always listen to listen what’s happening

what’s happening in the community in the

society

and don’t be eager right to make a

decision

really sit down listen to end user to

the community to society

to understand what and then take a step

back

and try to think about what we can do

to further leverage the technology to

embrace the potential changes i think if

we can follow this

formula i think the selling tamale still

can deliver a much better job

than anywhere else than any other places

in terms of

embracing new changes increasing ethical

challenges i think that’s a path

but when things have been changing this

quickly

are you able to do that

yeah i think so because you look at the

culture here of

silicon valley you know as so many great

entrepreneurs

is this the open and exchange of ideas

everyone trying to help to help to make

the world a better place

we all share the same vision what we can

to leverage technology to make the world

a better place

that’s the culture of silicon valley

that’s why i have high confidence yes

we can adapt to anything quickly

great um so let’s take a couple of

questions from the community

how did zoom beat out the googles apples

facebooks of the world did you see this

crisis coming in a way that they did not

well i don’t think we are beating out

our competitors so on day one

you know when i started the zoom a lot

of people already told me that there’s

so many solutions orders there

how can you compete against those

competitors are very very big

so we do we never wanted to focus on

competitors

we spend all the time talking with our

users

customers we try to be the first

vendor to really understand customer

side

problems and we got to take a step back

understand why and then we want to be

the first vendor

to come up with a solution to serve

the customers in terms of ease of use

in terms of functionality the quality we

do not look at the competitors

so but we are working harder right to

really you know

figure out a way to serve our customers

better than any others

got it next question please

what are some of the innovative ways in

which people have been adapting to your

platform to stay connected

when we build a platform the the main

use case is about the business

collaboration of business communication

like i talked with our

employees or employee talking with

customers or partners

i think during this panel crisis a lot

the consumer-driven use cases like the

yoga class

online wedding ceremony or zoomed

marriage

is legal in new york right how those

users

leverage zoom platform how people truly

stay connected

i think this is something very creative

we never thought about that before like

a wedding ceremony

maybe you’ll be able to conduct one

yourself soon you can be the officiant

um let’s go to another question please

concerns have been raised about privacy

and security on zoom

and zoom has responded but how have you

been

approaching privacy as zoom continues to

grow

yeah that’s a great question so as i

mentioned earlier

when we built a business and services

when we started

all the user cases are around serving

enterprise and the business customers so

in terms of

security we already had a built-in

security features to serve enterprise

customers

a lot of security features normally the

way it works

works is that we’re working together

with you know enterprise

itt enable or disable

secure features and also with the

onboarding process

before any employees start using zoom

in terms of serving first time users we

should have done a better job because we

cannot assume those consumers like to

take a k212 schools

they may not have itt we need to

simplify

a package that enable those security

features

for them by default so from that

perspective we got to change

over the past 90 days we made it a

bigger change right

always look at how to serve those

first-time users better

in terms of privacy as zoom continues to

grow

we need to change our company open

because not only

not only do we serve for enterprise and

business customers anymore

how to make sure when it when it comes

to a balance

between the privacy security and

functionality innovation

privacy security always very very

important

always number one priority i think

if we can change our company culture

to embrace that i think we will be okay

so i know company culture is actually

very important to you you’ve talked

about it

quite a bit how how do you make that

change and is it harder to change when

everyone is remote

i think first of all you’re so right

company culture

is indeed the number one important thing

right

as we evolve our company called our

comedy culture used to be delivering

happiness

meaning we do all we can to develop

happiness

to our customers we work remotely as

long as you have very well defined

as long as an employee they wanted to be

part of this journey

they want to embrace the new changes

i think it’s done no matter where you

work in the office or working remotely

for you to evolve your company culture i

think the key

is by do you have a culture where

you you all your employees they want to

embrace

the changes they want to evolve your

existing culture

so a little earlier we just you were

talking about how

rapidly sort of the the number of uh

users

increased during this pandemic um and

all the work you and your team have had

to done to kind of keep up with

that and to improve the product as

you sort of found these you know

weaknesses in it in some way

how has how have you been hiring during

this

like have you been hiring engineers have

i know you’ve made some a couple of big

hires but how do you hire

right now to keep up with the speed at

which you’re having to deliver

yes good question so yeah even prior to

pandemic crisis

we have so many open racks meaning we’re

still

aggressively hiring and during this

dynamic crisis

you know based on demand based on the

the need and also for our service

we are hiring very aggressively you know

for

engineers for security researchers and

also suicide you know not only here all

over the

uh all around the globe and the ticket

united states for example we just

decided to open up two offices

for rnd offices like phoenix

and pittsburgh right and how can we

quickly hire

as many engineers as possible because

used to be we wanted to hire engineers

here in silicon valley

for now giving everyone the work

remotely

give us more flexibility we can hire our

employees i think

in any other cities i think give us more

opportunity

i think that’s why look at our pace of

hiring i think

our team did a good job we hired a lot

of people

over the past several months i’m happy

to hear that you’re still

actually taking office space

because as as good as zoom and some of

these other products are i’m not really

looking forward to

to a world where we only interact

through our screens

so you were

you’re a naturalized american citizen i

believe um

but you were also denied a visa i think

about eight or nine

times so i’m just curious given the

uh recent immigration announcements and

restrictions

from the current administration if you

have any comments or thoughts on that

yes yes i i moved to silicon valley in

and yes since then i happily lived here

in silicon valley but you look at the

second silicon valley

the one of the key reasons why

silicon valley is a worldwide innovation

center

is about its culture where no matter

where you are coming from

and the culture here is true is to

embrace

diversity and no matter where you are

coming from

they all respect each other respect each

other and still can get

the job done right i think this is a

great culture here you know you look at

all the startup companies a lot of

startup companies

founders they were not a bunker they

or to other cities i think this uh

immigration

policy i think we got to keep that

in other words i think in 10 or 20 years

suppose you have a great company

the engineers or co-founders you know

they might be immigrants

now if you do not keep that a policy i

think that’s not

healthy that will break the potential

sustainable greater culture for silicon

valley or high-tech

economy um if you were your you know

20 22 year old self now would you choose

to come here and start your company here

i still think so because uh silicon

valley

is still the worldwide innovation center

you look at the great

leaders entrepreneurs vcs

engineers access you know to those

you know the greater companies greater

technology

is still i think the best place if you

want to focus on high-tech innovation

okay you’re very positive that’s great

so well i’ll ask one more question and

then go to

another community question um so you’re

you’re the chinese-born leader

of one of the hottest u.s tech startups

right now

um how are you handling sort of the

increasing

tension and friction between the us and

china

and do you think your background allows

you

to navigate it better than someone who

hasn’t had a lot of experience in china

i think i i do not think that my

background

can help actually my background

sometimes in some cases

maybe even even is causing a little bit