Explore Zoom's leadership team, from founder Eric Yuan's philosophy of delivering happiness to the executives driving AI innovation and workplace transformation.
Written by Laura Bouttell • Sun 4th January 2026
When Eric Yuan founded Zoom in 2011, he possessed something that many corporate executives lack: the stubborn conviction that unhappy customers signal a broken product, not unrealistic expectations. This philosophy, born from years of watching WebEx stagnate under Cisco's stewardship, would become the cornerstone of one of technology's most remarkable success stories.
Zoom leadership has transformed the company from a straightforward video conferencing tool into what Yuan now describes as "the AI-first work platform for human connection." Understanding the individuals steering this transformation—and the principles guiding their decisions—offers valuable lessons for leaders navigating technological disruption across any industry.
Eric S. Yuan's journey to becoming one of technology's most influential leaders began with a 10-hour train ride. As a first-year university student in China during 1987, the young engineering student endured lengthy journeys to visit his girlfriend, dreaming of a world where technology might eliminate such distances.
That vision took him to Silicon Valley in 1997—after being rejected for a US visa eight times—where he joined WebEx as one of its first twenty employees. Over the following decade, Yuan rose to Vice President of Engineering, helping grow the company to over 750 engineers and approximately $1 billion in annual revenue before Cisco acquired it for $3.2 billion.
Despite achieving considerable success at Cisco, Yuan found himself increasingly troubled by a fundamental problem: customer dissatisfaction. "I did not see a single happy customer," he later recalled of his conversations with WebEx users. The product, in his view, had stopped evolving meaningfully.
When Yuan proposed a smartphone-friendly video conferencing system to Cisco management in 2011, his idea was rejected. That refusal became the catalyst for one of technology's most consequential departures. Yuan left Cisco, and forty of his eight hundred engineers followed him immediately—a remarkable vote of confidence in his leadership.
The decision required abandoning a comfortable six-figure salary and starting again from scratch. Yet for Yuan, the calculus was simple: "Every day, when I woke up, I was not very happy. I even did not want to go to the office to work."
Zoom's company culture can be distilled into two words: "Deliver happiness." This deceptively simple phrase encapsulates Yuan's approach to building organisations, prioritising employee satisfaction as the foundation for customer satisfaction.
This philosophy challenges conventional management thinking. Rather than focusing primarily on metrics, targets, or shareholder returns, Yuan asks himself a different question: "What kind of company do I want to work for the next twenty years?"
Several characteristics distinguish Zoom's approach from typical corporate leadership:
This approach resonates with what management scholars term transformational leadership—characterised by inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualised consideration for team members.
Zoom's leadership structure reflects the company's flat organisational philosophy. Unlike many technology companies of similar size, the Management Team consists almost entirely of C-level executives, with fewer vice presidents and senior vice presidents than might be expected.
| Executive | Role | Background |
|---|---|---|
| Eric Yuan | Founder, CEO & Chairman | Former VP of Engineering at Cisco WebEx; founding engineer at WebEx |
| Michelle Chang | Chief Financial Officer | 25+ years at Microsoft, including CFO of Commercial Sales & Partner Organisation |
| Aparna Bawa | Chief Operating Officer | Former Chief Legal Officer at Zoom; previous roles at Palo Alto Networks and Nimble Storage |
| Velchamy Sankarlingam | President, Product & Engineering | Former SVP at VMware; VP of Engineering at Cisco |
| Xuedong Huang | Chief Technology Officer | 30-year Microsoft veteran; former Azure AI CTO |
| Abhisht Arora | Chief Strategy Officer | 20+ years at Microsoft, including VP of Product at Microsoft Teams |
| Gary Sorrentino | Global Chief Information Officer | Former Managing Director at J.P. Morgan; 40 years in IT leadership |
The appointment of Xuedong Huang as Chief Technology Officer in 2023 signalled Zoom's serious commitment to artificial intelligence. Known as "Mr. Speech" during his three decades at Microsoft, Huang helped achieve multiple industry-first human parity milestones in speech transcription, machine translation, and computer vision.
Huang holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and previously directed the Sphinx-II speech system research at Carnegie Mellon University. His credentials include recognition as an IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow, alongside the IEEE Amar Bose Industrial Leader Award.
Zoom's trajectory through the pandemic years resembles something of a corporate odyssey—meteoric rise followed by the challenge of sustaining relevance in a changed world.
During the early months of 2020, Zoom experienced a 1,900% increase in daily active users. Revenue surged from $623 million to $2.65 billion in a single year, representing growth of over 300%. At its peak, the company achieved a market valuation of $139 billion.
The post-pandemic landscape presented different challenges. As return-to-office initiatives gained momentum and competitors intensified their offerings, Zoom's growth slowed considerably. Revenue in fiscal year 2024 reached $4.53 billion—still substantial, but representing only 3% growth from the previous year. Market capitalisation fell to approximately $18 billion by 2024.
Rather than merely defending its video conferencing position, Zoom's leadership chose transformation. The company now describes itself not as a meetings company but as a comprehensive collaboration platform. Products have expanded to include Zoom Phone, Zoom Contact Center, and Zoom Workplace—all unified under an artificial intelligence strategy.
At the heart of Zoom's reinvention lies its AI Companion, which has evolved through multiple iterations since its introduction. The strategy reflects CEO Yuan's vision of creating a digital assistant capable of handling scheduling, travel planning, and project execution on behalf of users.
The current AI Companion features several sophisticated capabilities:
Monthly active users of AI Companion have grown 40% quarter over quarter, with 64% of top-tier enterprise customers enabling the technology.
Zoom's leadership has identified agentic AI—systems capable of taking initiative rather than merely responding to requests—as the next frontier. AI Companion 3.0, launched with agentic capabilities, operates on four core principles: reasoning, memory, task action, and orchestration.
Practical applications include analysing calendars to resolve conflicts, proactively surfacing meeting agendas and action items, and converting meeting discussions into project trackers or Jira tickets without manual intervention.
The company's technical approach employs a federated model, combining Zoom's internally developed 2-billion parameter Small Language Model with larger industry models. This architecture balances performance, quality, and cost-effectiveness.
Yuan's leadership journey offers several insights applicable beyond the technology sector:
Prioritise genuine customer problems: Yuan's founding insight—that existing video conferencing tools created more frustration than value—came from direct customer conversations, not market research reports.
Invest in people for the long term: The "slow firing" philosophy, whilst unconventional, builds the psychological safety necessary for innovation and risk-taking.
Lead through sacrifice: Cutting one's own salary by 98% during difficult times sends a message no internal memorandum can match.
Embrace transformation over preservation: Rather than defending video conferencing market share, Zoom's leadership chose fundamental reinvention as an AI-first platform.
Hire for learning capacity: Yuan's preference for self-motivated learners over experienced executives who might impose previous playbooks reflects a growth mindset philosophy, as Carol Dweck might recognise.
Eric S. Yuan serves as Zoom's Chief Executive Officer, a position he has held since founding the company in 2011. Yuan, a Chinese-American billionaire businessman and engineer, previously worked as Vice President of Engineering at Cisco WebEx before leaving to create Zoom. He was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2025, representing the highest distinction accorded to an engineer.
Zoom's company culture centres on two words: "Deliver happiness." CEO Eric Yuan prioritises employee satisfaction above all else, believing that happy employees naturally create happy customers. The company emphasises transparency, sharing negative reviews with all staff members, and maintains a slow approach to terminating employees, viewing employment relationships as family commitments rather than purely transactional arrangements.
Zoom has evolved from a video conferencing provider to an AI-first work platform. Following explosive pandemic growth—with revenue increasing from $623 million to $2.65 billion in a single year—the company expanded its product portfolio to include Zoom Phone, Zoom Contact Center, and Zoom Workplace. The strategic focus has shifted toward artificial intelligence, with AI Companion becoming central to the company's value proposition for enterprise customers.
Zoom AI Companion is an artificial intelligence assistant integrated across the Zoom Workplace platform. The technology provides meeting summaries, action item tracking, and content synthesis from multiple sources including email platforms. The latest version, AI Companion 3.0, features agentic capabilities allowing it to take proactive initiative on behalf of users, such as resolving calendar conflicts and generating project documentation from meeting discussions.
Eric Yuan employs a transformational leadership style characterised by servant leadership principles. His approach emphasises inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualised consideration for team members. Yuan demonstrated this philosophy by reducing his own salary by 98% during company workforce reductions, whilst his executive team accepted 20% salary cuts. He leads through example and maintains radical transparency with employees about company challenges.
Zoom's executive team includes Michelle Chang as Chief Financial Officer (formerly at Microsoft), Aparna Bawa as Chief Operating Officer, Velchamy Sankarlingam as President of Product and Engineering, Xuedong Huang as Chief Technology Officer (30-year Microsoft AI veteran), Abhisht Arora as Chief Strategy Officer, and Gary Sorrentino as Global Chief Information Officer. The company maintains a flat organisational structure with predominantly C-level executive positions.
Zoom employs a federated approach to artificial intelligence, combining its internally developed 2-billion parameter Small Language Model with larger industry-leading language models. This architecture allows the company to balance performance, quality, and cost-effectiveness. The company built its smaller model entirely from scratch rather than distilling from larger models, and integrates AI capabilities across more than 2,500 partner applications through its open ecosystem.