LIVE T V Everyone you know uses Zoom. That wasn't the plan Story by Jon Sarlin, CNN Business Video by Jon Sarlin and Janelle Gonzalez, CNN Business Updated 3:54 PM ET, Fri May 22, 2020 The tweet was when Eric Yuan knew something had to change. Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, shared a photo from his first ever virtual cabinet meeting. The cybersecurity red flags jumped out immediately. Some cabinet secretaries' Zoom screen names were visible, you could see which platform the cabinet was running its computers on, and most glaringly, the meeting ID was visible for all to see. The significance of the moment was not lost on the team at Zoom. "That was the big aha moment," Zoom board member Santi Subotovsky told CNN Business. LIVE T V Zoom founder Eric Yuan poses in front of the Nasdaq building after the company's IPO in April 2019. (Kena Betancur/Getty Images) Zoom grew into a vastly profitable business selling software to businesses that could enable a venture capital firm to seamlessly take virtual pitch meetings from around the globe or an executive to deliver an all-hands to a remote workforce. Powering British Cabinet meetings was never on the radar. "Our company that used to be a 100% enterprise-focused, is now powering the world. It's powering governments, education, social activities... And then when the other shoe dropped, it's like we need to get ready for that," Subotovsky said. Zoom was already enmeshed in controversy. Less than two weeks earlier, The New York Times had raised the flag on "Zoombombing," opening the door to a flood of scrutiny, from its feeding data into Facebook to the New York State Attorney General scrutinizing its data practices. But for Eric Yuan, the 50-year-old founder and CEO of Zoom, it was the Johnson tweet that changed everything. This morning I chaired the first ever digital Cabinet. Our message to the public is: stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives. #StayHomeSaveLives pic.twitter.com/pgeRc3FHIp — Boris Johnson #StayAlert (@BorisJohnson) March 31, 2020 "This was our wake-up call," Yuan told CNN Business over a Zoom interview from his San Jose home. Yuan blames himself for not anticipating that users might want to share a screenshot of a meeting. For his business clients, sharing a screenshot of your board meeting would be unthinkable. But business clients weren't his only worry anymore. The world had become his customer. Within a week, Zoom pushed out an update that would hide the meeting ID from view. But for Yuan and his team at Zoom, the damage had only just begun. Yuan built Zoom to please his customers — to use Zoom-speak he wanted to "deliver happiness" — and for years that meant giving his business clients a high-quality video conferencing platform that was easy- to-use. "Frictionless," as the company likes to say. But during a global pandemic that has transformed Zoom into an essential tool for schools, church groups, weddings, and the cabinet of a G7 economy, Yuan is trying to figure out how to make Zoom something it was never meant to be. Now, "Zoom is not only a business communication company, suddenly it's becoming an infrastructure company," Yuan said. Since the pandemic, Yuan has had little time to enjoy his family's multiplying fortune ($8 billion at last count, according to Forbes). He refers to this time as the most stressful weeks of his life, which now LIVE T V consists of three things: Zooming, eating and sleeping, and he's barely been doing much of the last one. "I've had several sleepless nights" Yuan said in front of a virtual background with the words "WE CARE" hovering over a heart-shaped earth. What is the question keeping the CEO of the company — one that is now worth more than General Motors —up at night? Yuan takes a breath. "How did we get here?" Zoom is headquartered in San Jose, California. (Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images) Shandong to Silicon Valley Yuan grew up in the Shandong Province in China in what he describes as a middle-class family. The child of geological engineers, Yuan was an average student who studied computer science, and after a stint working in Japan, decided he wanted to come to the center of technological innovation: Silicon Valley. "I wanted to embrace that first wave of internet revolution," Yuan said. Yuan applied for an H-1B visa to come to America but was rejected. And then rejected again. And again. In what has now become part of his founder's lore, Yuan applied eight times before being accepted into the United States. Yuan entered Silicon Valley in 1997, during the first internet boom. Entranced by fast-growing companies like Netscape and Yahoo, who were revolutionizing the world's communications, Yuan wanted to get in on the ground floor of a bustling startup. He found it at WebEx, a young company — he was among the first 20 hires — whose goal was to leverage rapidly increasing bandwidth capabilities into online meetings where you could share your desktop screen easily and cheaply. Yuan, who was 27 years old at the time of his arrival, fit into the global workforce of WebEx — a significant number of Chinese immigrants were recruited alongside Yuan — but found himself stymied by his inability to speak English. While he could understand the conversations around him, he says he couldn't participate. "I couldn't join a marketing team or a sales team," said Yuan. "I had to go back to writing code." Yuan's former colleagues associate Yuan's limited English (he still has a thick Chinese accent) with him being repeatedly overlooked. "I saw a tremendous amount of unconscious bias against Eric because he didn't look the part, he didn't sound the part," says David Knight, a former VP of Product Management at WebEx. "We put so much LIVE T V stock in how people communicate. We ascribe their eloquence to be their intelligence." While Yuan couldn't control how others understood his English, he focused on what he could control: his work. "I knew two things from my father: keep working hard, stay humble, and someday you'll be OK," Yuan said. Eric Yuan speaks before the Nasdaq opening bell ceremony on April 18, 2019 in New York City. The company's IPO priced at $36 per share, at an estimated value of $9.2 billion. (Kena Betancur/Getty Images) The WebEx years WebEx was founded by two immigrants: Subrah Iyar came from India and ran marketing and sales, while Min Zhu, a Stanford-educated immigrant from China, was in charge of technical development. Both became mentors for Yuan. WebEx's early days were similar to many startups in the Valley: a flat, diuse hierarchy that rewarded long hours from a loyal sta intent on changing the world. "We were very scrappy," said Ed Wong, a friend of Yuan who worked as a product manager with him at WebEx. Unlike other product-focused companies, WebEx sold itself as a cheap cloud-based "SaaS" (software as a service) that only required you to download its product: no expensive hardware purchases necessary. "Your economics had to be dierent," explained Subrah Iyar to CNN Business. "The price point for SaaS meant that you didn't get too much money upfront, you got it on a monthly basis." That SaaS model put tremendous pressure on the employees of WebEx to continually service and respond to their customer's demands. Companies were taking risks moving meetings and events online and any disruption in that service was seen by the WebEx team as an existential threat. "Nobody thinks of web conferencing as mission critical. But when a meeting goes south and you've got eight or ten executives on the call, it's a big deal," said Knight. "If WebEx was down for five minutes, I would spend the next month traveling and meeting customers, explaining to them why it happened and why it wouldn't happen again," said Velchamy Sankarlingam who worked alongside Yuan as an engineer at WebEx. "If your service goes down, you're going to get churn. People are going to switch away." Yuan proved his worth to Iyar and Zhu, rising to lead the engineering team as the company's fortunes grew. First there was the RuPaul Superbowl ad in 2000, then a successful IPO later that year. WebEx even received an unlikely boost after 9/11. Amid global panic, companies who didn't want their employees LIVE T V flying unnecessarily instead turned to a service that could enable cheap and easy virtual meetings. And because WebEx was built on the cloud, Yuan and his engineering team's software could scale and meet the increasing demand. After first fielding an oer from IBM, Iyar and the WebEx board decided to sell their company in 2007 to Cisco for $3.2 billion. Yuan, who was so attached to WebEx that he referred to it as "his baby," now found himself an employee of the one of the largest technology companies in the world. The WebEx team celebrates their IPO in 2000. WebEx cofounder Subrah Iyar, in a greige shirt, is flanked by Eric Yuan in a black polo shirt and hat. Yuan was an engineer for the company at the time. (Photo courtesy of Subrah Iyar) From fast-growing startup to a 'rounding error' Thanks to the Cisco acquisition, Yuan became a rich man. But while some WebEx employees took their earnings and split — wary of making the transition from fast-growing startup to cog in a Fortune 500 corporation — Yuan stuck around.