Zhang Yiming

Zhang Yiming at the 1st Digital China Summit.

Zhang is estimated to own 24 percent of ByteDance. Since founding ByteDance in 2012, The 35-year-old has experienced a stellar rise since founding ByteDance in 2012, landing him on the Forbes's Richest Chinese Under 30 list in 2013. According to PitchBook, the Beijing-based company has raised $7.5 billion in total, with investors valuing the company at $75 billion.

Personal and Early Life

Zhang grew up in Longyan, a city in southwestern Fujian Province known for its Hakka culture, which is a Han Chinese subgroup. This obscure city has produced two leading tech entrepreneurs: Zhang and Wang Xing, the founder and CEO of on-demand delivery giant Meituan, respectively.[4] Additionally, His parents both worked for the government.

According to the South China Morning Post, his name is based on a Chinese proverb about "surprising everyone with a first attempt." Zhang studied and graduated from Nankai University in 2005, where he studied microelectronics before changing his major to software engineering, according to the South China Morning Post.

He frequently assisted classmates in repairing their computers, which is how he met his wife, according to Zhang at an alumnus gathering in 2015, The couple currently has no children. Prior to ByteDance, Zhang's background was primarily in start-ups. He worked for Kuxun, an early search engine for tourists, and Fanfou, a social networking platform founded by Wang Xing.

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Early Products

He discovered the Kuxun was to be acquired by Expedia and this presented him with yet another opportunity. He took over the real estate search division of Kuxun's operation and he established his own company, which was his first success that he named 99fang.com. He initially served as the CEO until the company was firmly established, then 2 years later, he turned over the reigns to a professional manager and he quit working for the company to pursue a yet larger endeavor. In 2014, he stated that the work was simple but inefficient.

Around the end of 2011, Zhang, who is obsessed with information circulation, had the idea of creating an app that can distribute information based on personal interests, which later became news aggregator Jinri Toutiao. The same concept of AI-driven personalized content has helped TikTok and Douyin grow into today's empires. His information flow business began in 2012 in a four-bedroom apartment on Zhichun Road in northern Beijing, which he rented for 20,000 yuan per month. There are still dozens of ByteDance offices scattered around the area today.

ByteDance

Furthur Information: ByteDance

By paying grey market vendors to pre-install the company's apps, a common practice at the time, ByteDance was able to not only increase the number of users, but also feed more data into their recommendation algorithm.

They were able to acquire tens of millions of users using this method, but their core user base was mostly people with cheap Android phones, skewing the content the apps recommended. The 9-year-old start-up is now the world's first and only hectocorn, a privately held start-up worth more than $100 billion. It has developed some super apps in both the domestic and international markets, including news aggregator Jinri Toutiao, short video app Douyin, and its international version TikTok, the first Chinese social media app to conquer the Western market.

ByteDance's Logo.

Zhang Yiming had a lucky year in 2012. Noticing the growing popularity of smartphones, particularly among millennials, he founded ByteDance Ltd. with the goal of introducing relevant content to smartphone users. The first app to be released was Neihan Duanzi, which allowed users to share jokes, memes, and humorous videos. Following that, it launched Toutiao, a news application, which quickly surpassed 1 million daily users after only four months.

"I was one of first employees. And I was an ordinary engineer at the beginning, but in the second year, I was in charge of about 40 to 50 people responsible for back-end technology and other tasks related to products"  According to the South China Morning Post, Zhang informed ByteDance employees. Zhang attributes that job to teaching him sales skills, which he later used to help ByteDance grow.

"I remember that at the end of 2007, I went to meet the client with the sales director," Zhang said, according to the Post. "This experience let me know what sales are good sales. When I established Toutiao and recruited staff, these examples helped me a lot." Zhang said.

In 2016, ByteDance introduced Douyin, an app for creating short dance, lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. It was a huge success, with more than 100 million Chinese users signing up within a year. The following year, it launched the same application for the non-Chinese market under a different brand: TikTok. Again, it was met with great enthusiasm, particularly among celebrities. It quickly rose to the top of the free app download charts in Thailand and many other countries. Despite TikTok's enormous success and ByteDance's high valuation, Zhang Yiming remained a very private person, and little is known about his personal life. Despite the fact that there are numerous controversies surrounding the company's operations, including security risks and censorship, he has remained elusive to media interviews.

ByteDance raised $100 million in its Series C round the following year from venture capital firm Sequoia Capital China. Zhang's company was valued at $500 million in the deal, but that was just the beginning. Three years later, in 2017, its flagship app Toutiao — a popular news aggregation service among younger users — had become China's most downloaded news app on the iOS App Store. Two funding rounds led by Sequoia Capital China in April and December 2017 increased ByteDance's valuation to a whopping $20 billion. Zhang, who has a net worth of $4 billion, debuted on the Forbes World's Billionaires list in March 2018.

The New York Times reported last week that the US government had opened a national security investigation into ByteDance for its purchase of Musical.ly, a Santa Monica-based app that was rolled into TikTok. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley has scheduled a hearing for Tuesday, November 5, to investigate potential national security threats posed by Chinese tech firms in the United States, and has invited representatives from ByteDance to attend.

ByteDance and TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but a company spokesman told the South China Morning Post that the company was unable to provide a witness for the hearing on short notice. “We remain committed to working productively with Congress as it looks at how to secure the data of American users, protect their privacy, promote free expression, ensure competition and choice among internet platforms, and preserve U.S. national security interests,” the spokesperson said.

Leaving the Company

On April 27, 2020, Zhang announced that he will leave the company at the end of the year to "focus on long-term strategy."[6] Zhang's decision, however, is similar to that of some of his peers. Colin Huang Zheng, the 41-year-old founder of Pinduoduo (PDD), announced in March that he would step down as chairman to pursue other goals, including his childhood ambition of becoming a scientist or researcher. In less than a decade, he had transformed the company from nothing to a platform capable of competing with Alibaba.

Trivia

• Zhang Yiming founded his own business startup when he left the employ of Microsoft. He is not the kind of person that lets the grass grow under his feet, or takes a break when he's pursuing personal or professional goals. The business that he established was called Fanfou, and after trying to make it a success for about a year, the business failed, as many new startups do within their first year of operation. he was establishing himself as an entrepreneur.
• Unlike his first successful venture, Zhang Yiming has retained a firm position in the executive leadership of ByteDance. He previously handed over control of 99fang.com to a professional manager in order to launch ByteDance. Zhang has been ByteDance's CEO for the entire company's seven-year existence. He is also the chairman of the board of directors of the Beijing ByteDance company.
  • According to Forbes, he is a self-made billionaire and his primary source of wealth is designated as in the software business, because of the two programs that rocketed ByteDance to dizzying heights of success and wealth. He doesn't have a fancy education but he did make advance preparation by achieving his bachelor's degree prior to striking out in the business world. This opened enough doors for him to get a start and show the world how talented and savvy he is in the business world.
• Although Zhang Yiming has the skills to work as a team player and understands how to run a business and make it successful, he has found it difficult to work for others. Because of his interpretation of best practices, his vision has not always been consistent with that of others, as was the case with Microsoft.
  • While some may consider this arrogant, Zhang Yiming has demonstrated that it is not arrogance, but rather his strong business acumen and intuition. The fact that he went out and started his own business and turned it into the largest of its kind in the world with a valuation of $75 billion lends credence to this assertion.
• Zhang occasionally gives speeches to ByteDance employees in which he tells them about his first job. This motivates them to perform to the best of their abilities. He has a strong work ethic, which he attributes to his rapid success. He went above and beyond his responsibilities, and it paid off in the form of rapid advancement in his career. He applies the same philosophy to the businesses he owns.
• Zhang's success is linked to the fact that he is open-minded and has been exposed to a wide range of people and experiences. All of these things assist him in learning and expanding his thought patterns.
  • He admitted that they were fairly limited during his years as an engineer, but they have expanded, and when the time comes for him to create a product that will be marketed to the public, he has a much better idea of what consumers want due to his experience with a broader cross-section of people.
• Zhang approaches his business with realism and practicality. There was a time when he did not use the software he had created. He was just scrolling through TikTok videos. Then it occurred to him that he should be participating in this as well, in order to gain a better understanding of his customers' experiences. Zhang also required all members of his staff to create their own TikTok videos and to receive a certain number of likes from the community. He made it mandatory for all of his employees, and if they didn't get the required number of likes, they had to do push-ups.
• He founded his first company, 99fang.com, in 2009, just four years after graduating from college.

External links

• ByteDance