Unlike going to Substack to catch up on some newsletters (which as you know by reading mine, takes time) — TikTok unlocks rapid dopamine hits. Making it “an ideal app” to open up when you have even a minute of idle time. If you don’t have any FB friends or follow any pages, your feed is going to dry. That’s where that iconic FB insight of “7 friends in 10 days” came from — they needed users to build a basic graph so they stick around.
- Many products follow the “remote control” model by not taking an opinionated view of what users experience.
- Rubo Liang, a co-founder of ByteDance, has taken over Zhang Yiming as the firm’s CEO.
- Kohlberg Kravis Roberts has been operating since 1976 and has 20 offices around the world, with its headquarters in New York City.
- The company says it racked up more downloads in the US than Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube in both September and October, and TikTok now has over half a billion people worldwide using it monthly.
- ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in November 2017 and subsequently merged it with TikTok.
- It has a diverse portfolio across tech, real estate, energy, and more.
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There’s no better evidence of why a government might fear the app’s insidious nature than the fact that TikTok is banned in China itself. Instead, the Chinese government lets ByteDance use a limited domestic version of the app that’s explicitly subject to state censorship. While Toutiao had become unencumbered by formats and was also pulling in video content, it wasn’t really becoming a platform where a new category of emerging media—short-form video (SFV)—was finding a place.
Apple again snubs AI in its ‘iPhone App of the Year’ finalists
The Information reported that CEO Bill Ford may play an increasing role in helping ByteDance navigate U.S. politics. General Atlantic invested in ByteDance in August 2017 How to buy ethereum and March and Oct. 2018, according to a spokesperson. Ether Capital, sometimes translated as APlus Investment Consulting, is a Beijing-based venture capital firm founded in 2014 that primarily invests in early-stage ventures. Its founder, Zijing Zhou, and its director, Charlie Cao, were both original seed investors in ByteDance in 2012. Sina Corp., owner of popular Chinese microblogging site Weibo, has invested in multiple private companies. It invested in two of ByteDance’s funding rounds but sold its stake in late 2017, according to Pitchbook.
Alpha Square Group is a single-family office founded in 2015 with a focus on late-stage funding. It is currently invested in just 20 companies, according to its website, including the China-based MissFresh, Xiaomi and Meituan. See the investors behind ByteDance’s success, and explore their other ties to the company. Also, don’t miss this week’s cover story, which goes into detail about how the company became such a global phenomenon. Because the company is privately-held, there is no public list of all the current shareholders. But using various data sets, and a report from Pitchbook, we have compiled a list of who invested, from the Seed round up to the 2020.
How ByteDance Became the World’s Most Valuable Startup
Driven by the success of TikTok and their other apps, ByteDance’s yearly revenue ballooned to $80 billion in 2022. The company has more than 150,000 employees and operates offices worldwide. In August, Nongfu posted the slowest half-year profit growth since its listing in 2020, dragged down by the performance of its drinking-water products. He also criticised the company’s algorithm for amplifying the negative publicity around him. Tiger Global is an investment firm founded by Tiger Management alumnus Chase Coleman. The nearly 20-year-old fund is headquartered in New York with offices across Asia and Australia, and over 40% of its investments are in Asia.
For starters, the handful of other apps that were in this SFV space had content that was locked in their apps, making scraping hard. Second, there was a positioning problem, as SFV was more snackable entertainment value than news. Unlike other platforms, Toutiao didn’t need any explicit user inputs, social graphs, or product purchase history to rely on. 11 years ago, while we were waiting to see if the Mayans were right, Zhang was deeply curious about the opportunities in the then-nascent mobile Internet market in China — specifically, in search. First, Chinese smartphone users were struggling to find relevant information in the apps available (Google Search was banned).
ByteDance has an international version of the app called TikTok. In July 2018, ByteDance Bull by the Horns said Douyin and TikTok had 500 million monthly average users (MAUs). That number could now be higher because the company said in January that Douyin alone had 500 million MAUs in China. ByteDance products have faced government-led investigations and large-scale bans in other countries, including Australia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Turkey.
No reliance on a social graph
So, wherever your feelings about TikTok lie, I hope you’ll stick with me as we unpack not just the mobile slot machine that is TikTok, but also ByteDance — the most valuable private tech company on the planet. With opinions ranging from the suppression of the people’s voice and loss of livelihoods to Chinese spying and influence. I’ll give this important topic more coverage at the end for more on what this means for the broader Internet, and why we should all care. In short, I think banning TikTok is a really bad idea, both geopolitically, and in terms of what it would mean for free speech and Internet privacy as we know it. At the time of his appointment as the new finance boss, speculation was rife that Chew was brought in to work on ByteDance’s initial public offering. While both companies insist they are independent of the Chinese government, the US intends to ban TikTok in January 2025 unless ByteDance sells it.
These concerns have been echoed by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies – including by the FBI director this week – as well as regulators elsewhere. ByteDance has rocketed in recent years to become one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth around US$225 billion, according to market intelligence firm CP Insights. These concerns have been echoed by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies — including by the FBI director this week — as well as regulators elsewhere. ByteDance’s founders have a 20 percent stake, and the remainder is held by employees, according to TikTok. A privately held firm, ByteDance does not release revenue and profit figures, but media estimates of its earnings put it on par with some of the biggest firms in atfx trading platform the world. ByteDance has rocketed in recent years to become one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth around $225 billion, according to market intelligence firm CP Insights.
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