MEET THE US$16.2 BILLION MAN BEHIND TIKTOK

Meet the US$16.2 billion man behind TikTok
While TikTok has become the definitive social media platform for gen Z, exploding in popularity in recent months, Founder Zhang Yiming prefers to stay out of the limelight.

Zhang Yiming Bytedance founder
With millions of people around the world stuck in isolation over the past few months, many of us have had to find new ways to occupy our time, with the condition that it can be done from home. Some turned to making their own sourdough starters or soda bread, while online platforms offering official qualifications reported a surge in enrolments. Others decided to dive right into the popular ByteDance developed app TikTok.

The video editing and sharing app has been used to document the age of COVID-19 on a personal level, with some lamenting the loss of social lives, others satirising the ubiquity of video conferencing, and a number providing valuable health and safety advice. The app itself has even worked to promote official advice from the World Health Organization and local health authorities.

In the first three months of 2020 alone, TikTok brought in more than 315 million new users, setting a record for the most downloads any app has ever had in a single quarter. At time of publishing, the #quarantine hashtag on TikTok has racked up 59.8 billion views. But as much as COVID-19 may have driven thousands online in the search for distractions, TikTok’s popularity is hardly a nascent trend. The app quietly began life as Douyin (as it’s known in China) in 2016, but its sudden and meteoric rise in popularity saw it merge with US app Musical.ly in 2018, and it achieved huge success with millennials and gen Z.

But what of the man behind it? Often described in the media as ‘private’ and ‘secretive’, Zhang Yiming, the Founder and CEO of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, prefers to keep a low profile, despite the massive success of his ventures.

@sneakersthecorgi
remember when we used to work in those office tings ##lifeathome ##wfh ##workfromhome ##fridaythe13th ##dogsatwork ##distorted ##petsoftiktok ##corgi

♬ distorted – lannieve

Like compatriot and fellow entrepreneur Jack Ma, Zhang had an inauspicious start to his career. At university, he switched from microelectronics to software engineering, and upon graduation in 2006, he joined travel website Kuxun as its fifth employee and first engineer. A year later, he was promoted to Technical Director, and in 2008, he left Kuxun for Microsoft. The restrictive corporate environment was evidently not for him, however, and he soon joined a startup called Fanfou. This was ultimately unsuccessful, yet it heralded the career path Zhang would soon take.

With his erstwhile employer Kuxun in the process of being acquired in 2009, Zhang saw his chance. He purchased Kuxun’s real estate search business and transformed it into 99fang.com. It was his first foray into entrepreneurship, but the creation of ByteDance three years later would dwarf that initial attempt, earning him a spot on the China 30 Under 30 list by Forbes in 2013.

“We must work harder, we must also be more perfectionist.” – Zhang Yiming

The inspiration for Toutiao (ByteDance’s first major venture, a news aggregator) is an example of the saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention”. Zhang saw a need for something among Chinese mobile users – information. Users found it hard to find relevant information from existing internet companies, due to Chinese censorship laws and lack of distinction between ads and genuine search results.

But Toutiao went up against big players like Baidu by providing users with information that mattered to them through the use of algorithms. Despite the retrospectively obvious potential of the idea, it didn’t find backing immediately. Sequoia Capital initially passed on the concept, as did other investors, until Susquehanna International Group eventually backed the plan.

Two years after its launch, the app had more than 13 million daily users, and Zhang’s concept was vindicated by Sequoia Capital’s about-face; the investing firm put forward US$100 million in 2014 in support of ByteDance.

In 2018, the company secured a funding round of US$3 billion. And in the first quarter of this year, Reuters reported ByteDance’s revenue to be US$5.6 billion, representing year-on-year growth of 130%.

@enpyar
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