 "Zhang Yiming becomes China's richest person. Who is ByteDance co-founder?")
Zhang Yiming is now China’s richest person.
The co-founder of ByteDance, which owns social media firm TikTok, is now worth $65.5 billion, according t_o Forbes._
That makes him the 23rd richest person in the world.
But who is Zhang? What do we know about him?
Let’s take a closer look:
Early years
Zhang was born in 1983 in China’s Fujian district.
His parents were civil servants.
His name is based on a Chinese proverb about “surprising everyone with a first attempt,” according to the South China Morning Post.
He graduated from Nankai University in 2005 with an engineering degree.
He initially studied microelectronics before changing to software engineering.
Immediately after college, he worked at Kuxun – a digital travel booking startup.
Zhang said he was an engineer to begin with.
However, by his second year at Kuxun, he was handling 40 to 50 people, as per SCMP.
Zhang says that job helped develop sales skills that he later employed with ByteDance including learning “what sales are good sales.”
“At that time, I was responsible for the technology, but when the product had problems, and I would actively participate in the discussion of [the] product plan,” Zhang said, according to the newspaper. “A lot of people say this is not what I should be doing. But I want to say: your sense of responsibility and your desire to do things well, will drive you to do more things and to gain experience.”
He was also briefly employed at Microsoft.
As per The Washington Post, Zhang left Microsoft because he was ‘bored.’
Co-founding ByteDance
As per News18, Zhang, 41, co-founded ByteDance in 2012.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsAs per NDTV Profit, ByteDance began in Zhang’s four bedroom apartment in Beijing.
As per The Washington Post, Zhang, at the time 29, was an entrepreneur.
He was examining eyeing employing use big data and machine learning to analyse and curate content according to user preferences.
In 2013, he made Forbes’ 30 Under 30 List in China.
As per Moneycontrol, Zhang in 2015 stated that he had the idea for ByteDance after seeing fewer people reading newspapers on the subway.
He said it was then that he understood that phones would become the way to share information and that personalisation would be key.
In 2017, Zhang said he hoped ByteDance would become a global company – like Google.
“If when Chinese companies go overseas, they can overcome cultural problems, will the overseas market be huge? I am both optimistic and pessimistic about this,” The Washington Post quoted him as saying.
As per Business Insider, Zhang was looking to create an AI-power news platform.
“We push information, not by queries, by news recommendations,” he told Bloomberg in 2017.
“The most important thing is that we are not a news business,” he added. “We are more like a search business or a social media platform. We are doing very innovative work. We are not a copycat of a U.S. company, both in product and technology.”
Zhang launched TikTok in 2016. At the time, the app’s name was Douyin.
Zhang mandated that senior members of the team make TikTok videos.
“For a very long time, I was merely watching TikTok videos without making any of them myself, because it’s a product mainly for young people,” Zhang said, as per SCMP. “But later on we made it compulsory for all management team members to make their own TikTok videos, and they must win a certain number of ’likes’. Otherwise, they have to do push-ups. It was a big step for me.”
Time Magazine described his leadership style as “soft-spoken yet charismatic, logical yet passionate, young yet wise.”
Zhang stepped down as CEO of ByteDance in 2021.
As per Forbes, this came after pressure from the Chinese government.
However, Zhang retains an estimated 41 per cent stake in the company.
As per Moneycontrol, though he is not running the day-to-day operations in the company, he has retained a critical role in ByteDance’s AI strategy.
As per The Paper, Zhang is laser focussed on Artificial general intelligence (AGI).
He also heads up ByteDance’s AI hiring team.
He recently lured a top AI engineer from a rival firm away for a pay packet of $1.4 million.
Not much is known about Zhang’s personal life.
According to Moneycontrol, he prefers to keep to himself.
“The truth is, I lack some of the skills that make an ideal manager. I’m more interested in analysing organizational and market principles, and leveraging these theories to further reduce management work, rather than actually managing people,” Zhang wrote to his employees in 2021 before stepping down as CEO. “Similarly, I’m not very social, preferring solitary activities like being online, reading, listening to music, and contemplating what may be possible.”
As per NDTV Profit, he is interested in gaming, news, e-commerce and education.
Though he retains his Chinese citizenship, Zhang lives in Singapore.
With inputs from agencies
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