Zhang Yiming

Zhang Yiming is the founder and former chief executive of Beijing ByteDance Technology Co., one of China’s largest internet technology conglomerates. In March of 2021 Yiming transitioned at ByteDance to focus on long-term strategy, corporate culture and social responsibility in his position as chairman of the company’s board of directors and largest individual shareholder with 25%. The apps in ByteDance’s portfolio include Toutiao, a popular content platform in China and TikTok, the video-based social media app that became the most downloaded iOS app worldwide in the first quarter of 2019. Founded in 2012, ByteDance is valued at $75 billion and brings in around 1 billion monthly users globally — it is considered by some as the world’s most valuable start-up. In 2013, Yiming made the 2013 Forbes China 30 Under 30 List and in 2018 he was recognized as a Fortune 40 Under 40 honoree.

Yiming majored in microelectronics and software engineering at Nankai University and began his career working at the travel website Kuxun, later acquired by TripAdvisor. After a short stint at Microsoft, Yiming took to producing his own apps and founded several start-ups, including a real estate search portal. Eventually, Yiming focused his efforts on news aggregation apps in 2012 to compete with Baidu’s offering of news embedded with advertising.

He first launched the content platform Toutiao, an AI-based news recommendation engine that tailors news based on users’ interests without the help of editorial staff. As the app rapidly garnered downloads by the millions, Yiming partnered with Chinese smartphone manufacturers to embed it into new phone models. ByteDance later rolled out its short-video platform Douyin (known as TikTok in the US) in 2016 and acquired the popular US app Musical.ly for $1 billion to merge it with TikTok in 2018, successfully venturing into international markets.