Chinese businessman who developed the video sharing platform TikTok and the news aggregator Toutiao with his company ByteDance. He became the 9th wealthiest person in China with a net worth of $13 billion as of 2019.
The widespread popularity of TikTok has not just created a new generation of social media stars, it's also created a social media billionaire.
Zhang Yiming, the 35-year-old software engineer who founded the app's parent company, now has a net worth of $16.2 billion, Forbes estimates. Despite being the 13th-wealthiest person in China as ranked , Zhang is extremely private and little is known about his personal life.
Zhang was born in 1983 in China's Fujian province, according to the Bloom Billionairesberg Index. Zhang's parents worked as civil servants, reported.
His name is based on a Chinese proverb about "surprising everyone with a first attempt,"
Zhang graduated from Nankai University in 2005, where he started off studying microelectronics before switching his major to software engineering, the
The couple does not have any children,
"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," Zhang told ByteDance employees,
Zhang credits that job for teaching him sales skills that he later used to grow ByteDance.
"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 also worked at Microsoft before founding ByteDance,
The company is now worth $75 billion, according to Pitchbook , making it the most valuable privately held company in the world.
The company owns several social networking apps that operate within China, Business Insider previously reported. The company released a WeChat rival called FlipChat, and a video-messaging app called Duoshan in 2019.
TikTok is now the No. 1 non-gaming iOS app in the U.S, Business Insider reported in September. TikTok is one of the most popular social networks among American teens and has been downloaded more than 1 billion times.
TikTok still goes by the name 'Douyin' in China, Business Insider previously reported.
"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," according to the . "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."
Zhang's leadership style is "soft-spoken yet charismatic, logical yet passionate, young yet wise," according to Time Magazime's Kai -Fu Lee .
Zhang wants the app to continue to grow abroad, saying that he hopes his ByteDance will be "as borderless as Google,"
"We must work harder, we must also be more perfectionist," Zhang said, according to the Post . "Just like there was an international division of labour in the industrial age, in today's information age there's also an international division of labour. Chinese entrepreneurs must also improve their own capabilities as they go global," he said.
TikTok agreed in February to pay a $5.7 million fine to the Federal Trade Commission over allegations the app illegally collected personal information from children under age 13 without parental consent, in violation of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, Business Insider previously reported.
Comments
Post a Comment