Few organizations have had as meteoric a rise in 2020 as Zoom, the videoconference company that became a fixture in how people stay connected while living and working during a global pandemic.
Originally designed as an enterprise tool, Zoom this year became a go-to platform not just for business meetings, but also for classroom instruction, happy hours, birthdays, workout sessions and weddings.
For Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan, this skyrocketing demand has meant logging longer hours to meet consumer needs, he said in an interview with Business Insider's co-editor in chief Alyson Shontell at the Web Summit Conference. He also has more meetings - up to 19 in one day - but said he makes an effort to find the bright side of having a more demanding schedule.
"I do enjoy that because I have more responsibility, because we are helping people stay connected during the pandemic crisis," he said.
And despite the longer hours, he still keeps a few daily rituals: "When I wake up, I always think about, 'Hey, what can I do differently today?'" Yuan said.
Then, "in the evening I also have 15 minutes - I call that 'thinking meditation,' I carve out 15 minutes in my calendar - when I think about, 'If I could start over today, what I would do differently?'"
With that said, bringing in new hires and maintaining company culture during a time of massive growth is something that keeps him up at night. Zoom began the year with around 2,400 employees and scaled up to roughly 3,400 today, Business Insider reports.
"We're learning quickly," Yuan said of working to address these issues. "That's why we've had to change our internal practices and processes to embrace those new use cases and new consumers."
According to its latest earnings report, Zoom's total revenue for the third quarter was $777.2 million, up 367% year-over-year, and puts Yuan's stake in the company at $17.9 billion, Forbes calculates.
Despite the massive success he's seen this year, Yuan contends that his general outlook on leadership remains the same: "For me, as the CEO at Zoom, my No. 1 priority is to think about how to make sure every employee is happy. Together we make our customers happy. Every day I think about that. I think nothing has changed."
Source_ businessinsider.com
