Zhang Yiming, is a 36-year-old chinese internet entrepreneur. He founded the famous TikTok app’s parent company when he was young. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Indez, Zhang Yiming is the 13th richest billionaire in China.
Zhang Yiming founded ByteDance, the company that created TikTok app in 2012
TikTok, the #1 non-gaming iOS app in the U.S is now worth $75 billion. Thus, making it the most valuable privately held company in the world. The company, ByteDance owns several networking apps that operate within China. They also released a WeChat rival called FLipChat.
The most successful app, TikTok was created in September 2016. It is one of the most popular social networks not only in Asia but also among American teens and has been downloaded more than 1 billion times!
Did you know, Zhang makes his own TikToks and requires his employees to do as well?
The creater, Zhang Yiming said he made it compulsory for all management team members to make their own TikTok videos. They even create a ‘competition’ where they must win a certain number of ‘likes’ or otherwise, they have to do push-ups. He changes the perception that TikTok videos is a product mainly for young people.
The 36-year-old internet entrepreneur hopes the app will continue to grow abroad and ByteDance will be as borderless as Google.
He made over $12 billion in 2018, mostly from TikTok
Zhang’s fortune is growing rapidly and the majority of his fortune comes from his 24% stake in ByteDance. Forbes declared Zhang a billionaire in March 2018 – estimating that Zhang was worth $4 billion. Now, his net worth is estimated at $16.2 billion.
However, Zhang was born in an ordinary family in China
He was born in 1983 in China’s Fujian province. His parents worked as civil servants. He graduated from Nankai University in 2005 where he studied microelectronics and eventually switching his major to software engineering.
His first job was at a digital travel booking startup, Kuxun
He was an ordinary engineer at the beginning. But in the second year, Zhang was in charge of about 40-50 people responsible for back-end technology and other tasks related to products. He later applied the sales skills that the previous job taught him to grow ByteDance. According to a source, Zhang also worked at Microsoft before founding ByteDance, the company that created the global internet sensation TikTok.
Source here
Discussion about this post