Zhang Yiming is a Chinese entrepreneur born in April 1983. He founded ByteDance in 2012, which was valued at nearly $1 billion in 2019 and had over 1 billion monthly active users at that time. He also developed the news app Toutiao and the video-sharing platform TikTok.

Zhang Yiming majored in microelectronics and later switched to software engineering at Nankai University, a public research university located in Tianjin, China. The university is classified as a first-tier institution by the Chinese Ministry of Education. It was founded in 1919. His net worth is $16.2 billion.

In 2006, Zhang Yiming became the fifth employee and first engineer at Kuxun. He was promoted to technical director a year later. He left Kuxun in 2008 to work for Microsoft, but quickly left to join the failed startup Fanfou.

Zhang Yiming's entrepreneurial spirit was evident in his choice of companies after graduating in 2005, most of which were startups. In 2009, he took over the real estate search business from Kuxun and launched 99fang.com. He appointed a CEO for the site in 2011 to focus on founding ByteDance.

In 2011, Zhang Yiming noticed that many users were abandoning computers for smartphones. Around that time, Snapchat was gaining popularity among teenagers in many countries.

Zhang Yiming wanted to create AI-powered platforms independent of Chinese search engine Baidu. The first product aligning with this vision was a news platform called Toutiao.

Given the popularity of apps like Snapchat, Zhang began developing an app that allowed users to create short videos for lip-syncing, comedy, and talent, aiming to engage young audiences. He integrated AI to recommend similar content based on users' preferences and searches. The app was developed in 200 days and launched as Douyin in China in September 2016. Within a year, it had 100 million users and over 1 billion video views daily. This success drove Zhang Yiming to work on launching the app globally.

In 2017, TikTok was launched in international markets, primarily in Asia and the United States. Interestingly, TikTok's data is stored outside China.

Within two months of TikTok's launch, ByteDance spent $1 billion to acquire Musical.ly, a Shanghai-based startup, to leverage its young user base. In August 2018, TikTok merged with Musical.ly to create a larger video community, consolidating accounts and data into a single app named TikTok.

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June 2, 2020 Last updated: June 2, 2020

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