From 15-second videos to billions of dollars: Zhang Yiming and TikTok's success story

Zhang Yiming was born on April 1, 1983 in Longyan, Fujian, China. Yiming, who had a keen interest in software and computers in his childhood, enrolled in Nankai University in Tianjin for the microelectronic department in 2001. Later, he switched to software engineering and improved himself in this regard. He graduated from Nankai University in 2005.

First Youth: China

Zhang Yiming was born in China in 1976. This year is very important for the country where he was born. Because it coincides with the death of the legendary president of the People's Republic, Mao Zedong. After Zedong, administrative concerns arose over how the country's economy could rally. The country began to prefer the path of large-scale economic liberalization and the work in the field of technology gained momentum. Zhang's father is also joining this emerging industry. He retired from science-related public service and opened a small electronics factory in the industrial city of Dongguan, near Hong Kong.

An Unconventional College Student

Zhang entered Nankai University in 2001. Although he initially enrolled in the Micro Electronics department, he switched to software engineering a year later. Zhang's student life consisted almost entirely of coding and repairing his friends' computers. One of these side jobs ends unexpectedly, and he marries one of his classmates, who asks him to fix her computer.

Even though he met the love of his life in college, Zhang wasn't much like his other friends. He was not interested in standard student entertainment such as playing cards and drinking. The rather modest young man would often go nowhere without celebrity biographies. He later said of those days: “I've read many biographies of great people. You can learn a lot from them.”

First Official Work Experiences

He started working at Kuxun with his programming diploma and expertise. Later, he worked on the site that served to find plane tickets. The entrepreneur of the future later admitted that he also attaches importance to the quality of the product while coding here. It added a function that automatically notifies users about profitable promotions, instead of waiting for the buyer to think about what they need and find the right offer themselves. The idea took hold, and Zhang realized that customers didn't always know what they actually wanted. This collective consciousness made Zhang think even more.

Zhang Yiming (born April 1, 1983 in Longyan, Fujian) is a Chinese internet entrepreneur. He founded ByteDance in 2012 and developed the news aggregator Toutiao and the video sharing platform TikTok (Douyin), formerly known as Musical.ly. As of October 2022, Zhang's personal wealth was estimated at US$55 billion according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index which makes him the second-richest person in China after Zhong Shanshan. On November 4, 2021, Zhang Yiming stepped down as CEO of ByteDance, completing a leadership handover announced in May 2021.

He worked in Microsoft's China office for a while but left soon after. In 2008, he joined the Fanfou team known as "Chinese Twitter" as a programmer. It was successful for a short time, but in June 2009 something unexpected happened: the Urumqi events. Mass protests by local people in the city of Urumqi caused general unrest as the country's native Uyghur population was killed by the Chinese. The government's prohibitive stance made things even more difficult. Fanfou's popularity has also increased with citizens wanting to have their voices heard. Because many protesters coordinate their actions through this app, the authorities interfered with the company's work and demanded the closure of the project. It was done and the Fanfou story ended. In 2010, the site started working again, but could not achieve the same success.

After a while, a new door suddenly opened before him: The Kuxun company, of which he was a small part, was sold to TripAdvisor and Zhang got a stake. This unexpected sale and an incoming share of stock led him to start his own business: Bytedance.

Use This If You're More Forward Than Google

After blocking Google services and fighting Western IT services in 2010, there was a tech boom in China. There was one thing that the big companies entering this market did not take into account: the upcoming change. The traditional ways of reading news from newspapers and desktops were rapidly coming to an end and they were being replaced by smartphones and smart band technology. Zhang's selectivity was one of the building blocks of his rise in this context. When people opened news sites, it was thought that most of the time people didn't know what they were interested in reading. Therefore, he realized that it would be very functional to entrust the task to artificial intelligence, which, thanks to algorithms, would present to each user only content relevant to their interests.

When 29-year-old Zhang knocked on investors' door with such an idea in 2012, investors weren't sure it would benefit where Tencent or Google hadn't yet.

Founding of ByteDance

In August 2012, ByteDance launched the Toutiao news app, attracting more than 13 million daily users in two years. Zhang Yiming is focused on expanding ByteDance globally, unlike other Chinese tech CEOs who focus on the local growth of their companies.

Zhang Yiming's management style with ByteDance was inspired by the Google company. He took the United States technology companies as an example and held bimonthly town hall meetings. He prevented employees at these meetings from referring to him as "boss" or "CEO," as is customary in Chinese.

Founding of TikTok

In 2016, ByteDance enthusiastically founded the video-sharing application TikTok (Douyin in China), which will be known all over the world. The product was instantly embraced by Generations Y and Z and went straight into world hits. ByteDance bought Musical.ly for $800 million a year later and integrated it into TikTok.

As of late 2018, With more than 1 billion monthly users on its mobile apps, ByteDance is worth US$75 billion, surpassing Uber to become the world's most valuable startup. He is currently the 39th richest person in the world on the Forbes "World's Billionaires List".

TikTok's Worldly Known Story

In fact, Tiktok, which was not known when it first came out, was discovered with a video. The video, on the other hand, was a video made for Adele's song "Someone like you", which was very entertaining and funny, and was made for entertainment purposes only. This video spread so much around the world that everyone finally knew about the Tiktok app.

Copying Charge

After the big rise, tech companies started accusing Bytedance of copying American innovations, including Snapchat. What happened next? Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and even LinkedIn have added the short video feature to their apps.

How's he like?

Of course, Zhang, like many other entrepreneurs, takes his privacy very seriously. So much so that he rarely – and even less often – posts photos of himself on social media. He prefers to stay in the shadows in all his successes and failures. He doesn't appear in public much. Even the name of his wife, whom he met and married while still a university student, is never mentioned in the press. He still hasn't had any real conversations with the American business press.

May 2021

ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming steps down

It has been announced that Zhang Yiming will step down as CEO of the group behind the popular video app TikTok at the end of the year.

Zhang, 38, who founded ByteDance almost a decade ago, led the Beijing-based group that develops popular apps, including TikTok and sister Chinese platform Douyin, amid US-China tensions.

In a statement from ByteDance, it was stated that Liang Rubo, co-founder and human resources manager, will replace Zhang.

TikTok became involved in tensions between the US and China last year, with former president Donald Trump's administration accusing the Chinese video app of threatening national security, trying to ban the app or force it to sell its overseas operations to an American buyer.