Yuan Leaves Cisco Over Lack of Access to Top Executives

Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom, revealed in an interview on the Masters of Scale podcast that he left Cisco because he had limited access to the CEO. Yuan explained that at Cisco, there were too many management layers that prevented his ideas from reaching the top.

He stated that Webex became so user-unfriendly that building something from scratch was the only fix, but even with his idea, it didn't make it past the lower levels of management without the CEO's knowledge. Yuan believes that if the CEO had known about his idea, he might not have left to found Zoom.