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< All founders' list

Zhang Yiming

Quit Job to Start
Does Code
Year of founding:
Current age:
Net worth:

1. Background

Education: Zhang Yiming majored in microelectronics and later changed to software engineering

College: Nankai University, Tianjin

Previous Career:

- 2006: Zhang Yiming became the fifth employee and the first engineer at the travel website, Kuxun, and was promoted to technical director a year later

- 2008: Yiming left Kuxun to work for Microsoft, but left Microsoft to join the startup, Fanfou, which eventually failed.

- 2009: When Kuxun was about to be acquired by Expedia, Yiming took over Kuxun's real estate search business and started

- 2011: Yiming hired a professional manager to take over as CEO of

2. Origin Story

The Background

Zhang Yiming's entrepreneurial spirit was evident from the choice of companies he worked for post his graduation in 2005 - they were all startups. Yiming started in 2009, and later (in 2011) hired a CEO to run things at - he wanted to focus on building another venture, ByteDance. He found ByteDance in 2012.

The Spark

In 2011, Zhang Yiming observed that many users were migrating from computers to smartphones. During the time, Snapchat had started gaining popularity among the teenage crowd across many countries. Yiming wanted to create platforms whose results were powered by artificial intelligence, separate from the Chinese Search Engine, Baidu. The first product in line with this vision was a news platform called Toutiao. Looking at the popularity of apps like Snapchat, Zhang Yiming started to develop an app where users could create short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. To engage the young audience, he integrated AI to recommend similar content to the users based on their preferences and searches.

The Launch

The app was developed in 200 days. Named as Douyin, the app was first launched in China in September 2016. Within a year, it had 100 million users, with more than one billion videos viewed every day. Seeing a great response for Douyin, the process to build the app for the global market began.

Going Global

In 2017, TikTok was born. It was launched in the international markets - majorly Asia and the U.S. Interestingly, TikTok is not available in China and its data is stored outside of China.

The Success

Within 2 months of TikTok's launch, ByteDance spent $1 billion to purchase, a startup based in Shanghai. This was done to leverage the digital platform's young user base. On August 2018, TikTok merged with to create a larger video community, with existing accounts and data consolidated into one app, keeping the title, TikTok.

3. Other interesting points

- Douyin, the Chinese version of the TikTok app was developed in 200 days.

- By September 2018, TikTok had surpassed Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and SnapChat in monthly installs, with more than one billion downloads.

- In the year 2018, Zhang Yiming made over $ 12 billion, taking his net worth to over $ 16 billion.

4. Quote

Stay hungry, stay young. What is “Stay hungry, stay young”? “Stay hungry” refers to curiosity and the thirst for knowledge and ambition. But why “stay young”? I think young people have a lot of advantages: they don’t have rules and regulations; they don’t have too much ego to maintain; and they often break the rules; they work hard; and they don’t compromise; and they are not sophisticated. Ten years on, some young people still have these wonderful qualities. I think that’s “staying young.” - Zhang Yiming

5. Company growth & sources (links)

Personal Story

How did they grow the company?