Family, Focus, and 350M Users: Inside Zoom with Eric Yuan

28:26Like what? You know, like you say, suddenly, you know, we have, you know, when you add like 500 servers, maybe 5 ,000 servers, what can we do to make sure when you add so many servers over the night, nothing will be broken? That's why. You know, at the same time, remember back then, you know, because, you know, a lot of, you know, sort of looking back at some articles, about Zoom in practice, because we gave the free licenses to a lot of K-12 schools around 25 countries. At that time, we did not realize, even if we build all kinds of security features, normally when you work together with the IT team, they will enable those security features by themselves.

29:11When you give the free licenses to K-12 schools, quite often some K-12 schools, they did not have IT team. And we realized that if they did not turn on the password, no waiting room, guess what? When a kid shared the Zoom link to the social media, other people might easily join or hack into the classroom. When we realized that, okay, what can we do quickly? We become IT team. A lot of things like that. So I need my personal involvement to make sure, drive that, make sure it happens today. Don't wait tomorrow. You know, every day something new like that. You know, that's the reason why I was so, you know, busy at that time, so.

29:54You literally didn't sleep or you like kind of didn't sleep? Sometimes, you know, seriously, sometimes the whole night I did not sleep at all. You were working? Yeah, absolutely. Not only myself, sometimes engineers as well. You're just pulling all-nighters. Yes. Like you're in college. Exactly. I just wish I was younger at that time. I can't have two nights, I did not sleep. But in one night, I did not sleep. The following day, I did feel, oh my God, you feel tired, right? Yeah, you're making a cup of coffee at like four in the morning. Yeah. And was it added pressure because everybody was counting on you?

30:31For a while, for sure. In particular, you look at the K-12 schools and a lot of use cases, right? And you feel like a wedding ceremony. You feel like, wow, you know, dream coming true, right? If you can have a wedding ceremony on Zoom, you know, being the CEO of Zoom, I realized we need to do all we can. Make sure service is always up, always reliable. Make sure those use cases work so well. This is once in your life opportunity. You do not want to stop and say, I'm going to have a wedding ceremony on Zoom. Guess what? If it did not work, that would be a horrible experience. That's the reason why we feel the huge responsibility to contribute to the world, to help the world.

31:15At some point during that time, did you ask yourself, like, I didn't sign up for this. Like, this is, I thought I was supposed to make people work more effectively. I didn't sign up for the weddings and, you know. I never had that question. I always thought about, wow, this is a great opportunity. You know, of course, this is our company, the culture. deliver happiness. You know, company values is care. You know, care about the community, customer, company, teammates, as well as ourselves. If you truly care about the community, care about the society, this is the time. You have to do all you can to help the world.

31:56When the stock went crazy, I mean, it went crazy. Zoom was worth$130 billion. At that time, I was really not happy at all. And you were miserable. Miserable. I know actually someone might cash out, right? So very young, they cash out. You know, nothing wrong about that. But it's not good for some, not good for us either. Because someone made a lot of money in a very short period of time, so quickly, made a lot of money. That's not good. It's really not good. You're saying employees. Yeah, exactly. Why not? Why is it not good? Because they are very young. You know, you got to learn more things.

32:37And suddenly, with a lot of money, they realize, oh, what should I do? They take a break. Essentially, they lost. They completely get lost. It's not good for those very young people. If you make a lot of money within a very short period of time, I do not think that's healthy. It's not sustainable. Because the stock 6x, 7x'd in like a few months. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. More than that. Actually, you know, prior to COVID, probably around$70 or something like that. you know, all the way to 500, more than 500. That's crazy. Did you know that it was not going to last? At that time, I did not think about that.

33:14I think about this price for sure. It's kind of not sustainable. Yeah. Right? What should we do? And so you cannot control the stock price, right? What can you do? What do you do? I'll just tell you, you know, where we're there. I think, hey, guys, we got to look at the future. Look at the future. Yeah. And how sustainable it is. I do not think that's sustainable. We have to innovate. You know, we have to, you know, keep, you know, improving our company culture. And that's pretty much. Otherwise, you know, sooner or later, you're going to hit the wall. And were you selling at that time? For sure, I did sell.

33:52Because my sale is kind of even prior to COVID. It's an annual plan. Right. It's already defined. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Already defined. Yeah. Yeah. And it's crazy. to own 20 % of the company at IPO is a lot. It's just, you don't see that very often. Actually, I'm a sole founder, right? So I view my early employees and my under investors, all of my co-founders. When I started the company, the valuation is 15 million. 15? Yeah, 15. And I gave a lot of shares to all those early under investors, a lot. when you started the company was there not people telling you that you should have a co-founder and that the weight of this company is going to be too heavy for just you during the covet times did you wish that maybe you actually had a co-founder i don't know i never thought about that i think you know when i started a company i was already 41 years old i think i can handle the you know the pressure i because the velocity is everything I feel like it's better for me.

35:00For sure, that's a person's cause, right? You have a co-founder, right? But in my case, I feel like I can handle the pressure and also I want to make a faster decision. I never regretted having another co-founder. You spent your entire career doing this type of work. You chose WebEx. So how did you decide on that use case? So, you know, a year before I left Cisco, you know, I spent a lot of time, you know, talking with customers. You know, they all complained about mobile experience. And we wanted to add video, but the video experience was not great. And also the innovation speed is not as good as customer expected.

35:46I realized that, you know, the WebEx, you look at its core, that's a data collaboration architecture. if you really want to build the best video experience, you have to rewrite everything from the ground up. Because at that time, Cisco still can sell a lot of WebEx. You suddenly say, I want to build a new solution from the ground up. Essentially, they do not want to cannibalize the existing business. There's no way for them to say, yeah, let's stop the investing into the current product, build a new one. It's hard. So finally, you know, when customers, they were not happy. And it feels like WebEx is my baby.

36:31You know, when customers, they did not feel happy, you know, when they are using Zoom or WebEx, I was not happy either. So every morning, I did not want to go to office. I struggled for one year. I feel like it's time for me to leave. I got to build a new solution to bring happiness back to those web customers. That's how I started. And when you were starting the company, a 41-year-old is not young to start a company relative to... I wish I was young. Like Brian or some of the other folks. That's the reason why they can't do so many other things as well. Did you feel like maybe the way that you thought about your kids and raising your kids had something to do with the age that you started the company?

37:15Meaning a lot of founders now are starting companies well before kids. They're finding product market fit the first few years. Like, did you feel like maybe this was your way of avoiding the guilt of starting a company late, knowing that you had kids? That's one of the reasons you're so right. Again, every company is different. Every founder is, you know, story is different. In my case, you're so right. That's one of the reasons. I want to make sure the kids grown up a little bit. And of course, my wife was very busy, right? Three kids, you know, I feel like, huh, maybe when they are already in school, maybe, you know, at a middle school, maybe it's time to start.

37:51Also, the timing is perfect. On the one hand, I was not happy. On the other hand, you know, kids in the middle school and at a middle school already, I feel like it's the right time. If I did not start a company at that time, if I start a company today, guess what? My energy level for sure is way down compared to 10 or 20 years ago. Yeah. When you were having unhappy days, a year of unhappy days is a lot of unhappy days. Why did you even stick around for a year? To start Zoom? No, at WebEx before you started Zoom. Yeah. Because I was one of the first several founding engineers. So I did write a lot of code for WebEx as well.

38:33You put a huge amount of work in two WebEx products. It's very emotional. I was thinking about leaving a few times. Every time I told myself, ah, there's so many things not done yet. You know, still some commitment either to WebEx or to customers. I told almost everyone, I told them also, you know, after WebEx got acquired by Cisco, I wanted to grow Webex revenue to a billion dollar revenue. I'm going to leave, try to build something new. I told the team. But, you know, the day when I left, the revenue is still less than$1 billion, around$800 or$150, something like that. I cannot wait. I did think about leaving a few times.

39:20But you told yourself a billion and you couldn't even wait till then. Yeah. And how long did you wait until you started Zoom? probably one and a half years or two years that long yeah what did you do during that time i struggled because i want to fix the problem make it better and i want to build something totally different i want to focus on to build a consumer product very different you know the market and on the one hand you know i i thought about hey i need to build something new on the other hand i need to make sure because i was the vice president of engineering right and i need to make sure web is product better and better.

39:59Still a lot of responsibility, you know, and I struggled for almost two years. You weren't working? I was, I was working. Okay. Working so hard at that time also. Okay, but when you quit Cisco, how long before you started Zoom? One weekend. I left Friday, I started Monday morning. No way. Yeah, that's exactly. Friday I left, Friday I searched, I forgot, you know, But Monday morning, I started working for my new company. You incorporated everything Monday. At that time in the process, incorporating the company and try to call a friend to buy a user's furniture and write down a company culture and value as well to start, just myself.

40:47So one of the first things that you did was writing down the culture and the values. That's the second thing, I'm sorry. The first thing I remember called a friend. I needed some used furniture. After that, I think I started writing company, my goal and the culture and the value, so on and so forth. And then were you writing the first lines of code? No, I didn't. And if I did that, who is going to be a product manager, UI designer, anything else? When I started, all others are engineers. I'm responsible for everything else. and for pay the bill for the utility bill, phone bill, I did it by myself.

41:31I paid insurance for all the employees as well. And any sales, you know, I handled. So except for writing code. Was it, I mean, was it pretty awkward between you and Cisco at that point? It was not awkward because, you know, after the left, for sure, a lot of people wanted to join. It turned out that I cannot afford hiring so many people. Maybe a little bit over 20 to start with, they joined me. And that's pretty much because this is Lincoln Valley. We want to build the next generation. So we ride everything from the ground up. This is very clean. So it's the next generation technology. Yeah, that makes sense.

42:13How long before you had 20 people in the company? For a few weeks. Within a few weeks, you had 20 people working? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think less than two months. Yeah. Yeah. Did you know before you even started building it that you could actually build this technology, that the time was right? I know for sure I can build a better technology. That's part for sure. Because I was a VP engineer. I was very hands-on. Yeah. Even today, I still understand the code. So yeah, I know I can build a better technology. That's part for sure. What didn't you know? I did not know. is how to build a product. You can make a consumer happy and also make an enterprise happy.

42:56Because I struggled. Should I start from consumer SMB? Should I start selling to the enterprise? I did struggle a little bit about that. But later on, I realized let's focus on the enterprise customers and we should not focus on the consumers. Why? What tipped you off towards one direction or another? Because, you know, the consumer, if you build a consumer product and what is the enterprise product, the go-to market is very different. The way to monetize is very different. The consumers, you cannot charge them, you know, a lot, right? So enterprise is different. You know, feature request also is different.

43:32You know, let's say take some financial institutions. You know, compliance is very important. You need to make sure you have very secure, you know, architecture. Make sure you, with all those features, you even do not want to look at your solution. But consumers, you need to make sure the usability and a lot of cool features, right? You should make sure start from that first. It's very different, the feature sets. But was there demand from enterprises early that signaled that you should go there? Or was it just, it's going to be too difficult and overwhelming to do the consumer stuff? I think to start with both very difficult, right?

44:14You know, consumer enterprise, you know, we focus on those kind of medium-sized companies, like 100 to 500, you know, like some startup companies. They really wanted to deploy a frictionless, you know, the video conferencing experience. You know, like I remember our product was not ready at that time. You know, Stanford continuing studies group, they tried to kind of test a solution, can help their online, you know, the teaching, online learning. They tested almost every other product. None of them worked so well. And finally, they found Zoom. Wow, the video experience, amazing. Even before our product was ready, they wanted to buy.

44:59That's how we started. And the second one, also the university as well. So we started a model from a high end, one by one, one by one. And that's how we grew our business at that time. I guess, is it weird that the stock price is basically the same as what it was before COVID? And your, I don't know, your users are probably way up. The company's in a lot better position than it was before COVID. but the stock price is the same? So if you remember, April when the company went in public, right? I think the first of the day stock closed like 66, something like that. I was on the, I think maybe CNBC interview.

45:50At that time, I told everyone the stock price was overpriced. You went on CNBC. Yeah, overvalued. Because at that time, because again, I really do not want to focus on stock price. Sure. You know, sometimes undervalued, overvalued, what can you do? Just to focus on your product, your business, your culture, your customers. You know, stock price, you know, will be taken care of by itself. If you focus on stock price, you know, it's really hard. So that's not my focus at all. So it went out. So you don't even think about that now? I did not think about it for a long time, even from the very beginning.

46:27But it is weird, isn't it? that the business is in such better shape and the stock is the same as what it was before COVID. Yeah. At that time, our growth rate was much higher. You know, during COVID, the 300 % year-over-year growth by now are very profitable. Right. And, you know, for sure, more customers' revenue much higher. But you've got to figure out a new way to grow your company. Yeah. Before we figure out a new way to further grow the company back to higher growth, for sure, the investors, they want to wait and see. That's very fair. When you think about new growth levers for this business moving forward.

47:03Are we going to get into some sci-fi stuff here? How far away are we from the Star Wars holograms? If what you did to Cisco was a step function change, what's the step function change from here? You are so right. Literally this morning, I was chatting with engineers You know, what's the next innovation, a lot of other things like immersive experience for sure, you know, can change the way for us to communicate, right? That's, but it will take some time. You gotta be patient, right? You know, take like a 3D immersive video conferencing experience, you know, it's not ready yet, but we need to make sure get ourselves, you know, technology wise ready.

47:50But even if it's, you know, you cannot reach the mainstream, But you look at AI, the AR immersive experience, that's the future, in particular AI. We are transforming our business from a video collaboration company to be an AI-first system of actions. Like every video conferencing, every phone call, and it can become, to leverage the AI technology, guess what? After the meeting, we can create a task. We can assign action item to you. We can follow, right? And it's become a system of actions. It's going to be more and more powerful. You know, what's crazy is that I had a guest on the show at some point.

48:35His name was Roni Abovitz. Do you know who that is? Do you know who Roni is? He started Magic Leap. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Magic Leap was doing this hologram stuff like 15 years ago. Yeah, yeah. At that time, I was so excited because I really needed to, you know, make sure to count on other startup companies. to come up with some breakthrough hardware technology and then our software can integrate with them. But take some time for any hardware to become a mainstream device and to create an immersive experience. Well, it's fun to think about the future as it relates to Zoom because, you know, if you look at the OpenAI acquisition that of Johnny Ives firm, right?

49:23Johnny Ives was basically, he innovated the form factor of the iPhone and the MacBook. And obviously Zoom is the benefactor of that. But if you hear and listen to their interviews now, I don't think any of those, the form factors that they're thinking about for how to deliver AI to consumers is not going to be on a laptop. And it doesn't even seem like it would be like a wearable. I don't know. But it's just really interesting to see, like, boy, like, are people even going to want to communicate through computers in the same way? Yes and no. Because you look at AI, for sure, if I'm an iPhone, it's good enough, right?

50:11I can talk with the chat LGBT, you know, and talk with the other AI agent. But however, there's some other experience. You know, take the immersive video conferencing experience, for example, in the future. I think desktop experience probably is much better, much bigger screen, right? And of course, you know, you think about, imagine the world where in the future, you and I are sitting anywhere in the world. When I have a video conferencing, you feel like we're sitting together, can you shake your hands, you feel my hand shaking, hand shaking. I give a hug, you feel my intimacy, right? I think those experiences will not only happen on mobile, but also on desktop, laptop, the big, you know, video conferencing room screen as well, right?

50:50I think that, I think, you know, every device will support that. I do not think in the future, everyone just to count on one device, you know, different use case, you know, different devices, all of them, I think it would be very important. Are you, are you happy you're not an entrepreneur in China and that you're an entrepreneur here? I think when I started in 1997, for sure, you know, like at that time, you know, internet is already booming, why everyone uses Yahoo, Netscape. At that time, that's 1997, very few people heard about internet. That's one of the reasons, you know, remember actually why I came here, because I live in Yokohama, Japan, and Bill Gates, he was there to give a keynote speech.

51:32I was so fascinated about his speech. And the first time I played Netscape in Browser, you know, there's a Netscape, you know, Mark is a company. The first time I played a Netscape Navigator, I said, wow, that's amazing. I think this browser is going to change everything in how to ride a wave of that innovation. That's the reason why I decided to move to Silicon Valley. That's 1997. Wow. When you were growing up, what was childhood like for you? What was, what was, what were, was it, did you have sisters, brothers? Yeah. Were your parents involved in your life in the way that you're involved in your kids' life?

52:16So both of my parents, they were geology engineers. And they gave me a lot of flexibility. You know, I was not like, you know, always tried to pursue grade A students. I did spend a lot of time to hang out, you know, with my friends. I probably, I spent way too much time on playing mahjong or poker. So from junior high school, high school in college. Only until after I graduated from college, I realized, gee, all other classmates are so smart. They leave their focus on the study. I spend all the time wasting my time on so many other things. I feel like that's not smart. Afterwards, I feel like I understand what should I do in the future.

53:04And everyday think about what I can do to become a better person for myself, become a better warrior for myself. And I have a dream to really embrace technology. Someday I'm going to start a company. At that time, I feel like I truly understood the future. As you think about the next five to 10 years of this company, do you feel like I've had a lot of conversations with incumbent companies, okay? with the generational SaaS companies that we've known for the last 15 years. And I put you like squarely in that category.

53:47You know that like there's a lot of people waking up every day salivating about the idea of doing exactly what you did, rebuilding the architecture from someone's going to say Zoom can't do what they're saying they need to do. They need to rebuild their entire architecture from the ground up. AI native. Do you think about that? Yeah, I do. That's the reason why I like sports. You know, business is ultimate sports, right? Meaning you are facing competitors every day, everywhere, right? I'm pretty sure the way for us to think about the competition is we have to keep innovating. We have to think about it.

54:33We are still a startup. If you lose that, the mindset, we are going to lose very quickly. Because our competitors are huge ones and the smaller startups, you know, a lot of competitions. If we really focus on the customer experience, you know, don't always think about protect, you know, our existing business. Think about what we can do differently to keep delivering happiness to customers, keep working hard. We are still a startup. We are okay. As long as we do not lose the velocity, I think we can survive. Do you consider yourself a demanding CEO? I ask because, like I said earlier, your approval ratings, the love that your employees feel for you is higher than I've ever seen.

55:19I demand a lot. Again, I keep everything open transparent to the entire company, to the entire employee base. I demand myself a lot too. They can demand a lot to me as well. I do not call that demanding. I call that as kind of urgency to get this thing done. Right? And velocity is number one thing for us to compete against other bigger competitors. You lose the speed, you lose everything.

55:49Why not finish this task today? Why you want to wait next week or next month? You don't like that. You'll challenge your team like that. I challenge my team. I challenge myself. They also contended me as well. That's our common culture. Do you think your velocity is high today? Like if you were giving a sober assessment. Not as high as I expect. And how many people are in the company? We have around 7 ,500. Like, isn't that the problem? Meaning, can you ever be extremely high velocity when you have that many people? You're so right, it's very hard. But if you do not push, the problem is getting worse.

56:31Even if you push, that's not going to mean everything will move very fast, you know, in a sustainable way. That's not the case. But you still need to push. But 7 ,500 is like a battleship, right? It's big. And, you know, all these people have Zoom stock, right? They've all made a lot of money at this company. They all have, you know, resistance to change. Because they have more to lose than they used to. They have big, nice jobs. They have big teams. Why would they change, right? There's no incentive. No, that's an incentive. Because we happen to have our all-hands meeting this morning. I always share with our employees, the way I look at the business, I want to make sure the employee look at it the same way.

57:20Because I want to make sure all of us, when we retire down the road, look back, we feel like we feel proud of working at Zoom. We all became a better version of ourselves. They all become better, you know, the engineers or better salespeople because it's not only benefit Zoom, also we benefit them, benefit their families as well. They all want to become better. If all of our employees become better version of themselves, guess what? The company become better. right? That's the reason why the incentive for, you know, from an employee perspective, if they keep working hard, they keep improving, they become better.

58:04Business will benefit, family benefit, themselves also benefit. That's a win-win-win. I always share with the team about that philosophy. And if you think your velocity is not as fast as you would like it to be now, What can you do? I think only one thing I can do, which is double down on company culture. Make sure everyone really understands that. What's the company culture? You've got to deliver happiness to the customer. When the customer asks anything to you today, you should figure out a way how to respond today. How to fix that problem today rather than tomorrow, next month. If everyone thinks about everything from others' perspective, in particular from a customer's perspective, they are going to have a sense of urgency.

58:52Even if there are new processes, they are going to figure out a way to deliver something to delight customers. But isn't this why going to my earlier question of you being the founder CEO that might feel stuck, you can't just bring in a CEO who says, my only solution is to double down on culture. It's your culture. The culture is one thing. It's a foundation, right? is a foundation to help you achieve something faster. You have a solid culture. But culture, without a great culture, you really cannot achieve a lot of things. You know, meaning, let's say, if you have a task, you know, customer waiting for next month, if you don't have a great culture, you know, you probably will say, ah, let's wait.

59:37I have so many other, you know, team. I count on other team. I need to make the customer tell me to do this, to tell me to do that. I cannot deliver in the next six months. You're going to lose very quickly. Yeah. I just think about this idea of, like, no one else could reinforce the culture of Zoom like you can. Don't you think? For sure, you know, founder, especially founder of SEO, will play a much bigger role. But you also need to hire a greater team around you. You know, talent is very important. I need to make sure, you know, all those senior leaders around me, they are all great, right?

1:00:15and the leaders and the front-end managers. If you have a greater team, everything will be easier. That's the reason why you have a greater culture, greater team, and you can push the business forward faster. And otherwise, you are going to lose very, very quickly. As a lifelong engineer and then engineering leader, what did you struggle with or get most surprised by becoming the CEO? I think in my case, even if I was an engineer and I was a VP engineer, along the way, I, you know, when I was a kid, I, you know, I wanted to make money. I wanted to sell something. Essentially, if I start over, I want to be a salesperson, a current executive to sell our product.

1:01:00You know, to build a product is one thing. To sell the product to the customer, make sure the customer and the selling value, they feel very happy to buy a product. I think that's even harder, I think. But I enjoy that. And for me, actually, naturally, even if I'm an engineer, I wrote a lot of code. Naturally, I think I learned a lot about go-to-market, marketing and sales. The day when I started a company, I feel like I'm not an engineer. I already understood how marketing works, or how the sales work, right? Especially, I always care about customer. I look at everything from a customer perspective.

1:01:43By doing that, I can learn from others. Then you can learn a lot of other things, even finance, you can learn, so. Where do you think organizations go wrong? Like this idea of looking through the lens of a customer sounds good, right? Amazon is famous for being customer obsessed. But where do you think in practice things go sideways? Like where's the trade-off? That's a great question. So every company is different. If you focus on building a product for consumer or for developers or for enterprises, if you build a product for consumers, sometimes it might have a big gap. Maybe you talk to a few customers.

1:02:31all of them might tell you something may not be right. Right? You know, take an iPhone, for example. Remember, at that time, everyone talked about, oh, we need a keyboard. All those consumers were not right. Apple was right. You do not need a keyboard. But if you build a product for enterprise customers, most of the time, those enterprise customers, they are right. Because the reason why they share with their pinpoint is their daily pinpoint. You got to truly listen to those customers well. You cannot say, ah, you are not right. I built something differently. Then you're going to make a mistake.

1:03:13So the first thing you look at your customer base, the consumers or developers or enterprise customers, then you should have a different philosophy. Let's assume it's enterprise. What do you think the trade-offs are that people get wrong? So sometimes, because you really care about customers, internet customers, many internet customers will tell you, I want you to build this feature. I want you to build that feature. What if you have 10 internet customers? They tell you build 10 different features. You'll be stuck. However, the right thing to do is don't listen to their problems. Don't listen to their solution.

1:03:51Because you've got to understand, when they share the problem with you, you try to understand what's the root cause. Quite often, human nature, they tell you what to do, give you a solution. You should take a step back. Don't focus on solution, focus on problem. And 10 enterprise customers give you 10 different solutions. Guess what? If you take a step back, analyze, realize, it's one problem, one root cause, just one solution. Focus on the problem, do not focus on solution when you work together with enterprise customers. Have you seen, are there other companies that you admire that have a customer obsession that you think is the right way of doing it?

1:04:31A lot, you know, here in Silicon Valley. You look at the service now, you know, being on our board is great. You know, Salesforce, you know, so many. Workday as well. A lot of great enterprise companies, you know, they really listen to a customer, understand the customer pinpoint. They build innovative solutions. a lot. By the way, I was talking to Carl about you recently, Eschenbach. Oh, he's an amazing, amazing leader. He loves you. He says, tell Eric he can call me whenever he wants. And I was thinking in the back of my mind, I suspect Eric knows that he could probably pick up the phone and call you whenever.

1:05:10He is my brother and anything I do for him. That's amazing. He's great. He was with you yesterday? Was he there yesterday? Yeah, yeah. With you yesterday. He was on my board for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he's... I truly enjoyed working together. He's a gem. He's doing a good job at Workday. Yeah, that's the reason why you feel very lucky living in Silicon Valley. There's so many world-class leaders, you know, here. So you really can learn a lot from them. And what's crazy is, like, the people that you have just mentioned, like the three companies that you just mentioned that you admire, Bill McDermott at ServiceNow, Carl Eschenbach, Benioff.

1:05:48Yeah. They're all still going. They still work very, very hard. They have no reason to. Yeah, another example, Oracle as well. Larry. Larry, you know, I admire him a lot. He's still working so hard. He's still very hands-on. And he's an amazing leader. He's great. They're still going. Absolutely. They have no reason to go. And they're leading by example. That, like, great operators operate for a long time. They all set up a great example for the young startup founders. That's the reason why Silicon Valley is so successful. Remember, this is a key reason. Do you feel that responsibility still right now?

1:06:30Like as you think about, should I retire or should I not? Is setting that example? Sometimes when I think about retirement, for sure, from time to time, I did. But look at what others, what other founders did. You feel like others are still working so hard. So you better follow other leaders. But what would you do if you were retired? Wouldn't you miss being at Zoom? I think if I have time, I'd like to give back. Maybe talk with some young entrepreneurs. Maybe teach something in the classroom. I really want to give back because I learned a lot along the way. A lot of people helped me. I want to give back as well.

1:07:14Yeah, that makes sense. I really appreciate you doing this. My pleasure because, you know, I really enjoy your podcast. I'm a huge fan. And yeah, so why not? I really appreciate you doing this. It is not surprising to me in the slightest that you are beloved by so many people in the valley. Thank you. I feel very fortunate I live in the Salinga Valley. It is a best innovative culture. So many great world-class leaders. And every day, I just enjoy that. And doesn't it kind of feel like we're, it's like a rebirth recently. With AI? Yeah. You are so right, huh? Like, it's vibrant. Like, whenever people, I have maybe like career calls where people ask me about, you know, the up-and-coming salesperson or whatever.

1:08:08First question I ask them, where do you live? oh Boston Austin I'm like what like move to the Bay Area then let's have this call again move to the Bay Area then let's talk again I wish I would be 21 years old and just graduated from college I would immediately start an AI company you would? yeah just to ride the wave like you did of the internet wave yeah yeah this time I'm president and I think we more any other previous paradigm shift like mobile error, PC error, or internet error. This AI error, oh my God. What gives you that confidence? You look at what's happening over the past two years.

1:08:55You look at all the AI technology. Is it the rate of change of the technology or is it the technology itself? Two things, the potential of this technology and also the innovation speed. You look at all those models, look at what they can do two years ago and look at it today. Like, by the way, yesterday, on our earning call, for the first time in history,

1:09:20Zoom, AI-generated avatar participated in the earning call. It's my avatar. Joined our earning call yesterday. I never thought about that many years ago. Remember, for every property company, every quality earning call, either you record a script or you read a script. I do not like that experience. Finally, I can enjoy earning call now. I do not need to record anything. I give my AI avatar to my marketing team. I just recorded a 30-second video. I call that my AI avatar to our marketing team. They use that AI avatar with a script. It could be 10 minutes. One click, regenerate it. a video. They can play back in the earning call.

1:10:14It's an amazing experience. Did you use Synthesia for that? No, our own. Oh, okay. Yeah, we have a service called Zoom Clips to support. And were you on the call? Yes. No, for the first 10 minutes, I was on the call, but we played my AI avatar for the earning script. Yeah. Two or three years ago, I never thought about that. Today, it's becoming reality. And you mentioned you're unbelievably excited, but you also get scared sometimes. For sure. What do you get scared about? Because you think about so many things. Let's say when AI becomes so powerful, do I still have a job? Even as CEO, do I still have a job, right?

1:11:02Imagine all those digital assistants, even in the future digital twin, they become smarter and smarter, even smarter than human being. What kind of society will be at that time? Right? And that's one thing. Another thing, given the so powerful technology, you know, what if, what if the bad people, they levered this technology? At that time, it'd be very easier to disrupt society. I created so many bad things as well because this technology is so powerful and so easy to get, to access. That's the reason why you feel like there's so many good things and there's so many potential negative things as well.

1:11:50No one has a great answer because this is a brand new technology in human history. The first time. But don't we feel that way about every brand new technology as a society? No, AI is different. Whenever you build any new technology, guess what? They're built by human beings. You know, just to make our lives better to assist what we're doing. We never build something that is smarter than us. This is the first time in human history. Smarter as defined by? But essentially, we are human beings, but we are creating digital human beings. Yeah, but in some ways, they're dumber. And in some ways, they're much smarter.

1:12:35Eventually, on many ways, they're smarter. They can learn quickly. They sure can. Yes, that's the reason why they become smarter and smarter.

1:12:49And the models really haven't even started training themselves yet. They just started. We're still training the models. Yeah. So that's the reason why, you know, just over the past two years, you look at innovation speed. That's unbelievable. It's crazy. Yeah. It's crazy. Also exciting. Yeah. Well, thank you. Are you hiring? Yeah, we are. We are hiring a lot of AI engineers in Seattle and here as well. Those are the two hubs. Yeah, yeah. I ask every guest this. When you hear the word grit, what do you think of? I think about, you have a dream. Keep working hard. You know, pursue your dream. Don't stop.

1:13:40You're everything and more that I was hoping you would be. And I just really appreciate you coming here. I appreciate the example that you set. and you kind of break a mental model for me, which is that my worldview is that most CEOs and founders that I know that have built the type of company that you have built, I would never work for. I would never work for them. They're just something about it and you break that mold for me. So thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank you. So I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. That's it for now. If you liked the episode, please leave us a review or go back into the archives where we've done more than 200 episodes with some fantastic folks.

1:14:35This podcast is a Kleiner Perkins production, and I'm Juven. Thanks for listening.