Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award

Stanford Graduate School of Business is proud to announce that Zoom Video Communications, Inc. has been named the 2020–21 ENCORE Award recipient.

Eric S. Yuan, founder and CEO, received the award on behalf of Zoom and participated in a fireside chat on March 21, 2022.

2020–2021 ENCORE Award Recipient

Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Zoom Video Communications, Inc.

Eric S. Yuan founded Zoom Video Communications, Inc. in 2011 to deliver happiness and bring teams together in a video environment. Zoom’s video-first unified communications platform continues to dramatically transform the way leading global enterprises communicate. Under Eric’s leadership, Zoom was one of the highest-performing tech IPOs of 2019. Before founding Zoom, Eric was corporate vice president of engineering at Cisco, where he was responsible for collaboration software development. Eric was also one of the founding engineers and vice president of engineering at Webex. Between 1997 and 2011, he grew his team from 10 engineers to more than 800 worldwide and contributed to revenue growth to more than $800M.

Eric has been named one of the Most Powerful People in Enterprise Tech by Business Insider. In 2019, he was added to the Bloomberg 50 as a leader who changed the game in global business. In 2020, he was named TIME Businessperson of the Year. Eric is a named inventor on 11 issued and 20 pending patents in real-time collaboration.

About ENCORE Award

The Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award was created in the late 1970s by the Bay Area Chapter of the GSB Alumni Association when they saw an opportunity to recognize the entrepreneurial spirit of the companies springing up in the Silicon Valley. The first honor was given to the CEO of ROLM Corporation in 1977. Zoom Video Communications, Inc. will be the 42nd recipient.

Although the award was originally designed to honor an individual, it soon became apparent that a company’s success was based on the contributions of many people. Accordingly, the award was changed to the Entrepreneurial Company of the Year in 1982. Additionally, the scope of the award has been widened to recognize best-in-class entrepreneurs from throughout the world and is no longer limited to Silicon Valley.

ENCORE Award Selection Committee

We thank the selection committee for their participation in the award process.

  • Geoff Yang, MBA ’85, Redpoint Ventures – Chair
  • Peter Fenton, AB ’94, MBA ’00, Benchmark
  • J. Stuart Francis, MBA ’77, Evercore
  • Charles A. Holloway, Stanford GSB Faculty, Emeritus
  • Jeffrey Dalton Jordan, MBA ’87, Andreessen Horowitz
  • Mary Meeker, BOND Capital
  • Joe Lacob, MBA ’83, Golden State Warriors
  • Frank Quattrone, MBA ’81, Qatalyst Partners
  • Ilya Strebulaev, Professor of Finance, The David S. Lobel Professor of Private Equity
  • David L. Sze, MBA ’93, Greylock Partners
  • Peter Wendell, Sierra Ventures and GSB Lecturer in Strategic Management

ENCORE Award Recipients

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