What Happened Before Zhang Yiming Founded ByteDance/TikTok
Seeds of the ByteDance/TikTok empire
ByteDance: The Chinese company that created TikTok, the world’s largest short-video platform and the world’s 3rd largest social media platform.
As a 10-year-old company, ByteDance has achieved astonishing growth and become the most valuable startup in the world, even ahead of Elon Musk’s Space X! Valuation is once reported to have exceeded 300 billion dollars in 2022.
Let’s see how this legendary Chinese startup makes miracles.
Introduction
The number of combined monthly active users of TikTok and Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) reached 1.6 billion at the beginning of 2022, making it the third largest social platform in the world, only after Facebook and YouTube. One friendly note: the global population is about 8 billion.
TikTok and Douyin, alongside an array of other products, are under the mothership called ByteDance, a legendary Chinese Internet company that was founded by Zhang Yiming in 2012. The young startup has achieved countless milestones. It
● Rises to become the most valuable private company (USD 300 billion valuation according to South China Moring Post) in just a decade;
● Becomes one of those rarefied Chinese companies that have successfully conquered the global market.
Let’s explore the legendary journey of ByteDance and Zhang Yiming by introducing the very origin: the early days of Zhang Yiming before he founded ByteDance.
Childhood and College Years
Zhang Yiming was born in April 1983, in Longyan Fujian, China. Longyan is an interesting city as it is home to two legendary tech founders: Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, and Wang Xing, founder of Meituan, which is the king of food delivery and online-to-offline service providers in China.
Zhang’s father used to work at the scientific committee of the local government and later came to Dongguan to build an electronics products business. Zhang’s mother was a nurse. Zhang’s parents would talk about innovative products and technology with each other. Family times offered Zhang elements of innovation and business as well as a great deal of latitude.
In 2001, Zhang went to Nankai University, one of the most prestigious universities in China. He had four criteria in this consideration:
● Close to the sea so he can enjoy delicious seafood
● Far away from home so he can be free from his parents’ interference
● Renowned university with comprehensive studies, making it easier to find a girlfriend
● A place where he can see snow
Clear and quick. Nankai University is almost the only university that fits all the criteria.
Out of passion for computer programming, he switched from microelectronics to software engineering. Interestingly, teachers from the computer science department had already known him because Zhang was a popular star on the university’s BBS tech forum. Zhang was also good at fixing computers, which was one of the tech guys’ main tricks to meet girls.
Technical expertise brought Zhang fans and so-called “clients”. One Of them became his wife later. Zhang said he met his wife because he was good at fixing computers, but now you’d have to be good at fixing mobile phones instead.
Zhang explains why he married his first girlfriend:
“If there are twenty thousand girls out there who are suitable for me, I just need to find one of them. This is an acceptable strategy close to the optimal. Well, now you know why girls are crazy about programmers.”
At university, Zhang also met a bunch of close friends, who later became his colleagues and business partners. Among them, Liang Rubo was the big one. He was Zhang’s roommate and they studied programming using one computer.
Years later, Liang Rubo became ByteDance’s co-founder. Now he is the CEO of ByteDance.
Amidst Disruptive Times
Zhang graduated from college in 2005.
2005 was a year of significance: China became the second largest Internet market after the United States, Baidu went public on Wall Street, Alibaba closed a USD 1 billion deal with Yahoo, Tencent welcomed the father of WeChat, and the global Internet market was recovering from the crash.
Instead of a decent and stable job, Zhang loves challenges. Not exactly something like making money, but pure and simple discussions about tech, value, and products.
It was a conversation about products and value creation that led to Zhang’s first job upon graduation: a startup of three people. The startup tried to develop enterprise software specialized in IAM collaboration. The product soon turned out to be a failure since China’s enterprise software market in 2005, including collaboration, was far from its tipping point.
In contrast, there was no shortage of paradigm-shifting opportunities and growth miracles back then in the consumer Internet market. The untapped land of the Internet awaits the bold.
Among the bold disruptors, Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook a year before Zhang’s graduation. Unlike Zuckerberg’s sweeping advance, Zhang was off to a rocky start followed by several failed attempts.
Serial Entrepreneur
In February 2006, Zhang joined Kuxun, a travel search website, as the fifth employee and the first engineer. Kuxun is home to a bunch of well-known Chinese Internet entrepreneurs and investors, pretty much like PayPal Mafia whose members have founded companies including Tesla, LinkedIn, Palantir, SpaceX, Affirm, YouTube, etc.
Zhang worked hard at Kuxun and was promoted to technical director a year later with 40 people under management. Writing code was not everything for Zhang as he would discuss user experience with product managers and visit clients with colleagues from the sales team.
There also was an interesting story about Zhang having this idea of information distribution by automatic and intelligent feeding at Kuxun.
Zhang was working on the search engine for Kuxun and found that people need to proactively search for what they want via online search services. This information distribution paradigm would require Zhang to manually monitor the Internet if he would like to buy a second-hand train ticket home. Zhang decided to adopt a different approach by spending one hour writing up a program to automatically search for tickets online for him. He finished coding and went out, only to receive a text message sent by the machine in just 30 minutes, indicating an available ticket.
Such task-driven automation was the early seed for news and video-feeding products of ByteDance.
A startup like Kuxun often runs with organizational issues. Zhang left the company for Microsoft in 2008 to sample how big tech works.
Apparently, a decent tech job with unchallenging daily tasks would not work for him. Zhang soon left Microsoft and joined a social media startup founded by Wang Xing.
The startup was called Fanfou. It was essentially an early Chinese version of Twitter. Built by two legendary Chinese entrepreneurs who later would dominate the Internet space in China, Fanfou grew fast. Unfortunately, the startup failed due to insufficient content moderation.
It was worth mentioning that Zhang bought his first apartment when he was working at Microsoft. It was a big deal to buy a house or an apartment in China, which is a de facto prerequisite for a man when he plans to get married.
One would typically ask around and do a lot of ground research. However, Zhang was different: He went online, collected data from all kinds of housing data from various websites, put the data into a database, and performed data analysis. Then, he identified the ideal housing estate and called an agent to find an apartment there.
The price of the apartment doubled in just one year. Years later, he sold the apartment to provide capital for his startup.
In 2009, Zhang took over Kuxun’s real estate search business and started 99fang. The company was able to acquire 1.5 million users at the early stage of mobile adoption and reached the top spot for real estate apps. By taking the helm this time, Zhang transitioned from programming to leadership.
Founding ByteDance
99fang was not bad, but it was apparently not big enough. Not big enough for Zhang Yiming, considering the rise of the mobile era.
Zhang left 99fang and decided to found his new company. He chose an international brand name: ByteDance. ByteDance is the combination of byte and dance: tech and art.
Success comes with trends beyond individual wills, and empires are built upon foundational elements.
Back in 2012, the number of mobile users exceeded that of PC users. Information explosion was overwhelming people and segmentation of mobile phone usage made things even worse.
Human editors are ineffective, search engines require users to know what they look for, to begin with, subscription services like email newsletters require active management, and social networks offer relatively random information. A new paradigm of information distribution was called for, especially for news and entertainment.
Then let’s look at Zhang. He was young and soft-spoken but had all the right ingredients: programming skills, data mentality, deep understanding of search and information distribution, big tech experience, management experience at startups, mobile know-how, and absolute entrepreneurship.
And he has the answer for how to distribute information for the mobile era: a recommendation engine.
In the same year, Facebook kept dominating and had its IPO. Mark Zuckerberg, and probably everyone else, would have never guessed that Facebook’s online empire would one day be shaken by a startup built then in an apartment.
