How does Bytedance CEO think?

If you want to learn more about trending and innovative Chinese startups, please subscribe the newsletter!

An interesting phenomenon is happening on the Internet in China

If you are an entrepreneur, what do you most hope to get from Tencent? There is no doubt that it is traffic. The lowest cost and the maximum traffic from QQ or WeChat are almost all entrepreneurs’ dreams.

Compared with the passive opening of QQ, WeChat users are free to flow from the beginning. WeChat groups, official accounts, Moments of Friends, and small programs are indeed the source of original traffic for many companies, and they are free.

When facing Ali, their demands and ideas became different. Although Alipay and Taobao can get a certain amount of users to jump, but entrepreneurs want to cash out from the Ali system. Ali's own mission is also to do no difficult business in the world. From this point of view, Ali's internal and external perceptions are unified.

Tencent’s declaration is: I understand the Customer side, and then I can help you better serve the Customers. Use WeChat’s free tools as you like. Ali's attitude is clear: I am in the business side, and people who want to make money come to me.

But when ByteDance rises, entrepreneurs' mentality and demands have undergone a great change.

Their initial attitude towards “Jinri Toutiao” which means today’s headlines was that they didn’t like it. After the product’s DAU exceeded 100 million, they couldn’t understand it.  

Because Byte, Didi, and Meituan are different from the previous generation of Internet companies. They grew up in the shadow of giants, and each found a set of growth methods, survival philosophy and successfully created new territories.

Especially when countless people asserted that the traffic dividend disappeared, Douyin succeeded in a counterattack and became the new traffic overlord. Everyone is curious; what is the path of realization?

As a result, entrepreneurs emerged with a worship mentality of learning from the West. Everything about bytes is placed under a magnifying glass, pixel-level learning; even if one or two true transmissions are obtained, perhaps the miracle of bytes can be copied.

Dingding and corporate WeChat are popular. In 2019, the independent Feishu can quickly harvest a wave of corporate users. The fundamental reason is their curiosity about the collaborative thinking of byte organizations.

Xie Xin, vice president of BYTE, said that as long as you talk to the target company, BYTE is a company that has worked hard and has been running forward. It is always committed to developing the company better and making its business move forward in great strides. This is what moves companies the most. The more you have similar qualities, or you want to become such a company, the more you like Feishu.

In the past nine years, Byte has moved from the edge of the Internet to the center. Technical capabilities, growth concepts, and operating tools are very critical. Now, a series of growth tools such as A/B testing has moved from insourcing to outsourcing. 

A detail also reflects that BYTE understands the needs of enterprises. Their toB service products like to use the word "engine." The externally commercialized product is called Huge Engine.

Of course, the entrepreneur who is most interested in Byte is Zhang Yiming himself.

Zhang Yiming stated that he had applied to the Department of Biology at the university, and "General Biology" had a great influence on him. "Biology is rich in species from cells to ecology, but the laws behind it are very simple and elegant. There are many analogies for you to design a system or look at the economic system of a business."

As a result, the Internet has set off a wave of biological thinking. This is a statement that reflects the essence of entrepreneurship better than infinite games and is in line with the evolution of everything. Fu Sheng and Li Shanyou both advocated. Zhang Yiming's thoughts a few years ago were packaged into golden sentences and regarded as the new holy book of entrepreneurship.

From this perspective, the essence of Byte to B is the realization of Zhang Yiming's methodology. To what extent can this kind of grafting work?

Before answering this question, we need to confirm what the core of byte growth is. The extent to which tools can carry growth momentum.

Byte growth has become a phenomenon, not because it has achieved the success of a single product, but because the organization has the ability to continuously breed successful products. What APP Factory is talking about is that a new type of organization in the mobile era finds a different survival rule from the past.

Most of Zhang Yiming's speeches for entrepreneurs also talked about his thinking on the nature and operation of the organization. For example, he said:

-Understanding the business means clearly knowing how the product and the company operate and being able to continuously improve them.

-The utility of the organization lies in the multi-use of people's strengths and complementing their shortcomings.

A byte of HR once said, "Byte, a company that may not emphasize process or control, but reorganize and manage, and we have a lot of refinement and precipitation on management."

For example, Byte attaches importance to the transparency and flow of internal information. This is the underlying value of the Byte skipping operation for an organization.

An investor in charge of Internet strategy believes that BYTE has harvested two waves of dividends: a traffic dividend and a talent dividend.

"Develop a company as a product" is a management philosophy widely cited by Zhang Yiming. There are three types of inputs for a company as a product: capital, opportunity, and talent. Zhang Yiming believes that the most important thing is talent input.

High salary, authorization, and degree of freedom keep Byte's talent density at a relatively high level. Especially the joining of some company founders has virtually pushed up Byte's potential. You know, it is difficult for most entrepreneurs to adapt to the culture of a large company.

Zhang Yiming himself is Byte's most important HR. Before opening a bimonthly OKR, he explained to HR that “recruitment is our most important management task, and recruitment determines the success of our strategy.”

Byte employs the idea of ​​growth in recruitment, acquisition, selection, retention, and internal push to ensure good performance.

In the early stage of the business, the core of HR was recruitment and team building, but after the end of 2018, Byte of HR began to spend a lot of energy on talent development and organizational culture. They have to participate in organization management.

Byte's HR is also capable of fighting. When the business encounters challenges, major decisions need to be made, and the formation of key personnel, the business will consult with HR as soon as possible.

In ByteDance, HR is the company's operator. For international business, HR may even be a pioneer. With the right people, growth can be achieved. The head of TikTok's Korean business before was an entrepreneur who joined the company.

Even if Byte attaches much importance to growth, no matter how great the tool, Byte's organizational construction, and talent input are the first.

Around 2017, one of the things that Zhang Yiming did the most was to treat himself as a client and jump out to see himself. Because he found that sometimes external forces know the company better, and when they are in it, they can't see the full picture of the company.

Those entrepreneurs who are trying to copy the miracle of bytes should also jump out first to see what they really need.