Yiming Zhang

Zhang Yiming is a quiet software engineer who has almost never given a big public speech. He built ByteDance on one idea — that a computer could learn what each person wanted to see better than any editor or friend — and that idea became Douyin in China and TikTok in the rest of the world.

Fujian

He was born on 1 April 1983 in Longyan, in the south-eastern Chinese province of Fujian. His parents were civil servants. As a boy he read widely and was fascinated by technology.

He went to Nankai University in Tianjin, where he started in microelectronics and switched to software engineering, graduating in 2005. He met his wife there.

Startups

After graduating he joined Kuxun, a travel-search startup, as one of its early engineers, and rose quickly to lead its technical team. He worked briefly for Microsoft in China in 2008, and found the large company too slow and bureaucratic. In 2009 he started a property-search website called 99fang.

Around 2011 he noticed something on the subway: people were moving from newspapers to smartphones, and struggling to find what they wanted on small screens. Search, he reasoned, required people to know what they were looking for. On a phone, it would be better if the information found the person.

The Algorithm

In March 2012 he founded ByteDance in a flat in Beijing. Many Chinese investors turned him down; they did not believe an app could succeed without human editors. He raised money from a smaller number of backers, including the investment firm SIG.

ByteDance’s first big success, launched in August 2012, was Toutiao (“Headlines”), a news app with no editors of its own. It gathered articles from across the internet and used machine learning to work out, from what each reader clicked, read and scrolled past, what they wanted to see next. The more people used it, the better it got. Toutiao gained hundreds of millions of users.

The approach also brought trouble. Chinese regulators repeatedly criticised ByteDance for vulgar and low-quality content, and in 2018 ordered it to shut down one of its apps, a joke-sharing platform. Zhang issued a public apology, saying the company had not properly understood its social responsibility, and hired thousands of content moderators.

Douyin and TikTok

In September 2016 ByteDance launched Douyin, an app for short videos set to music, using the same kind of recommendation engine. Instead of showing people videos from friends, it showed them a stream of videos from anyone, chosen for them. It became one of the most used apps in China.

For the rest of the world, ByteDance launched a similar app called TikTok. In November 2017 it bought Musical.ly, a lip-syncing app popular with American teenagers, for about $1 billion, and in August 2018 merged it into TikTok. With heavy spending on advertising, TikTok became one of the most downloaded apps in the world, with more than a billion users. ByteDance also built the video editor CapCut and the workplace app Lark.

The Battle Over TikTok

TikTok’s Chinese ownership made it a political target in the United States, where officials worried that the Chinese government could obtain American users’ data or influence what they saw. ByteDance denied that this happened. In 2020 President Trump tried to force a sale; the attempt stalled in the courts.

In 2024 Congress passed a law requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US business or see the app banned, and in January 2025 the Supreme Court upheld it. After repeated delays, a deal was completed in January 2026: TikTok’s US operations passed to a new joint venture led by Oracle, Silver Lake and the Abu Dhabi investor MGX, each with a 15 per cent stake. ByteDance kept 19.9 per cent.

Stepping Back

In May 2021, at thirty-eight, Zhang announced that he would step down as chief executive of ByteDance. In a letter to employees he wrote that he lacked some of the skills that make a good manager, and that he preferred analysing organisational and market principles to managing people. His college roommate and co-founder, Liang Rubo, took over. Zhang moved his base largely to Singapore and focused on long-term strategy.

The move came as Chinese regulators were tightening control over large technology companies, which many observers saw as part of the reason.

The AI Push

With the rise of generative AI, Zhang became closely involved again. ByteDance built its own large models under a research team called Seed, and launched Doubao, a chatbot that became one of the most used AI assistants in China. In 2026 he was reported to have moved his main office back to Beijing and to be personally leading parts of ByteDance’s AI research, including work on “world models” that simulate environments.

ByteDance is not listed on a stock exchange, but its private valuation rose steeply. In September 2026 Bloomberg ranked Zhang, who is reported to own about a fifth of the company, the richest person in Asia for the first time, overtaking Gautam Adani.

He is known for his discipline and privacy. Early in ByteDance’s history he wrote that he wanted to build a company that was as simple and neutral as a machine. His critics argue that algorithms are never neutral: they shape what billions of people think about, and may keep them scrolling. That question is his legacy, as much as the company.

How He Runs Things

Zhang is known for studying management as seriously as software. He admired the American streaming company Netflix’s principle of “context, not control”: giving employees the information to make good decisions themselves, rather than telling them what to do. ByteDance built its own tools, including the workplace app Lark, to share goals and documents widely across the company, and used quarterly objectives that anyone could read.

He has also been unusually willing to experiment. ByteDance built dozens of apps, kept the ones that grew and shut the rest, and applied the same recommendation technology to news, video, education and games, buying the Shanghai game developer Moonton in 2021.

Living With the State

ByteDance’s growth in China has depended on staying on good terms with the government. In 2021 a state-linked investment fund took a small stake, and a board seat, in one of ByteDance’s main Chinese subsidiaries, a type of arrangement often called a “golden share”. The same year Zhang gave 500 million yuan to an education fund in his home town of Longyan. Like other Chinese technology founders, he has since kept a very low public profile.

Scrutiny Abroad

TikTok’s success made it a target of regulators well beyond the United States. India banned TikTok and dozens of other Chinese apps in 2020, after a border clash between the two countries. In Europe, Ireland’s data protection regulator fined TikTok €530 million in 2025 over transfers of European users’ data to China, which TikTok said it would appeal. Governments in several countries have also banned the app on officials’ phones.

Through all of it, Zhang has almost never spoken publicly. ByteDance’s arguments have been made by its executives and lawyers.

Inside the company he is still widely regarded as its intellectual leader, and his early internal essays about management and product design are still read by ByteDance staff.

The measure of him is one design choice. Most social networks showed people what their friends posted. Zhang decided that a machine should choose instead — and in doing so, he changed how much of the world spends its time.

Common Questions

How This Was Written

Corrections are welcome and are made without argument: commissions@99founder.com.