Eric Yuan was not happy at Cisco Systems even though he was making a salary in the high six figures, working as vice president of engineering on the videoconferencing software Cisco WebEx.
“I even did not want to go to the office to work,” Yuan told CNBC Make It in 2019.
Yuan was unhappy with the culture at Cisco, where new ideas were often shut down and change was slow. When he suggested building a new, mobile-friendly video platform from scratch, the idea was rejected by Cisco’s leadership. Frustrated by the resistance to innovation, Yuan left the company in 2011 and founded Zoom, whose value increased astronomically during the Covid pandemic years as it became the go-to app for remote work.
