Zhang Yiming

Zhang Yiming

Zhang Yiming, male, born in 1983 in Yongding District, Longyan City, Fujian Province, is a Hakka. He graduated from Nankai University. He is the founder and CEO of Beijing byte beat Technology Co., Ltd. and the founder and former CEO of today's headlines.

Zhang Yiming graduated from the software engineering major of Nankai University in 2005. He has participated in the creation of many Internet companies such as kuxun and jiujiufang. He has successively served as chairman of kuxun Technical Committee, founder and CEO of Jiufang. In 2012, Zhang Yiming founded the company. In 2013, he was selected as "China's 30 entrepreneurs under the age of 30" by Forbes and "China's 40 business elites under the age of 40" by fortune. He is one of the most concerned young leaders in China's Internet industry.

On April 6, 2020, Zhang Yiming ranked 89th in Hurun global top 100 entrepreneurs with a fortune of 95 billion yuan. On May 12, 2020, Zhang Yiming ranked 19th in the "2020 New Fortune 500 rich list" with a wealth of 78.53 billion yuan.

In 2021, Zhang Yiming ranked the 26th in the 2021 Hurun global rich list with a wealth value of 350 billion yuan.

Character experience

Study and grow up

In 1983, he was born in an institution family in Longyan, Fujian Province. His father was a staff member of the Municipal Science and Technology Commission before he went to Dongguan to set up an electronic products processing factory, and his mother was a nurse. Unlike other parents in the public institution compound who strictly control their children, Zhang Yiming's parents who love to try new things gave him a relaxed environment early on, allowing him to decide his own life direction when he was very young.

In Zhang Yiming's childhood, most of the topics that his parents talked about with each other were that their friends had developed a certain technology and made a certain product abroad. Now it is difficult to judge whether the innovation trend germinated in this small family in the 1980s has affected Zhang Yiming's future life path. However, one thing is certain that his parents' leniency and the family's early touch with business have brought him into contact with the relationship between the business world and innovation at a very young age.

In everyone's eyes, geek's childhood should be an early ambition to become a scientist, but Zhang Yiming once again subverted everyone's imagination of geek. He said: "when I was in college, I wanted to make something valuable, such as making a chip, which is a very specific thing, or being able to make a breakthrough in medicine. The idea that scientists dream of being in primary school has long gone

In middle school, he had been very good in chemistry. He didn't make much effort in chemistry experiment class. In experiment class, the tedious procedures of setting up alcohol pot and pouring test tube made him feel trivial and dangerous.

Now no one can tell clearly when Zhang Yiming, who hated manipulating alcohol lamps and chemical crucibles, began to plan his life for the first time. However, he began to feel vaguely that what he liked was something that had a sense of experience and participation and could produce quick results. "Your behavior, your output, all need to see the change quickly," he said. And computers are the fastest. " When he was in college, he applied for microelectronics, and then transferred to software engineering.

This kind of character is not willing to do routine and repetitive things, which is also shown again and again in his future entrepreneurship. After graduating from University, he once entered Microsoft for a short time. Later, because he felt that the big company did not have a clear and strong goal, he was doing some basic development far away from users every day, so he quickly chose to leave.

After graduating from University, Zhang Yiming once analyzed each part and angle of network information dissemination in detail, and found that there is the largest space for the organization and distribution of information.

When working in kuxun, one thing made Zhang Yiming feel very strong. When Cool News programmed vertical search, Zhang Yiming had to book a train ticket to go home. At that time, it was very difficult to buy a ticket to the railway station, and he didn't know when a second-hand ticket would appear on the Internet. He just spent an hour at lunch writing a little program. The existing search of cool news is the same as our common search, which requires users to actively enter information to search and see whether there is the latest information of second-hand tickets in real time. Zhang Yiming's job is to solidify and store his own needs in a program, let the website machine automatically search for him regularly, and inform him by SMS as soon as there are search results. After writing this program, he went out. As a result, within half an hour of going out, he received a text message prompt, and then he went directly to collect the ticket. He doesn't have to buy a scalper ticket or stay in front of the computer all the time. This little program provides him with great value. At that time, Zhang Yiming had an idea. When there is information that meets his needs, he should tell him. Later, he has been thinking about how to find information more effectively.

After Zhang Yiming graduated from Nankai University, a senior brother read his background information on BBS and asked him to start a business together. At that time, the elder martial brother simply told Zhang Yiming on the phone that he was about to develop a product in great demand, and the products on the market were not good, but as long as he followed his ideas, he could make very good and useful products.

"This kind of dialogue is easier to attract me," Zhang said. There is no need to talk about listing and making money. Call first, then eat face to face. " Two weeks after that conversation, Zhang Yiming decided to join. This kind of conversation still affects the way he recruits his engineers. Zhang Yiming said that most of the time he works, in addition to Taming the algorithm, he interviews and recruits employees. His dialogue with employees is simple and pure. More often, they will talk about product concepts and ideas in coffee shops.

Zhang Yiming joined four companies before designing the algorithm of today's headlines, and most of his career experience is related to technology.

Continuous Entrepreneurship

In 2014, 30-year-old Zhang Yiming, the founder of byte dance, is a typical technical otaku from the oil stains on his jeans. Since his high school years, he has loved computers. In 2001, he entered Nankai University and studied microelectronics and software engineering. PCBs, the PCB automation software he wrote in his senior year, won the second prize of "Challenge Cup". He has been directly involved in the start-up of five companies, two of which are self founded, and one is a partner.

As soon as he graduated from university in 2005, he formed a three person team to develop an enterprise oriented Iam collaborative office system. However, the wrong market positioning of products led to the failure of entrepreneurship. At that time, collaborative office had not developed in China at all.

In February 2006, Zhang Yiming entered kuxun, a travel search website. As the first engineer of kuxun, he was fully responsible for the search and development of kuxun. A year later, he became a senior manager of technology, managed more than 40 people under him, and finally served as the chairman of the technical committee. After becoming a manager, Zhang Yiming, who came from a technical background, wanted to learn the management methods of big companies, so he left Cool News and went to Microsoft in 2008.

In October 2009, Zhang Yiming started his first independent business and founded the vertical real estate search engine "jiujiufang". In jiujiufang, Zhang Yiming began to set foot in mobile development. Within six months, he launched five kinds of mobile applications, such as palmtop renting and palmtop buying. Under the mobile Internet environment at that time, he achieved 1.5 million users, ranking first in real estate applications.

At the end of 2011, Zhang Yiming resigned from the CEO position of Jiujiu housing and began to prepare "today's headlines" in early 2012.

At the end of December 2012, Zhang Yiming also noticed the development trend of mobile Internet, "on this premise, to help users find interesting and valuable information, opportunities and significance have become very big". To this end, he resigned from the position of CEO of 999 housing and started his fifth venture. The company he founded has an interesting name - byte beat. As the name implies, the company's products are related to data. Bytedance has developed a mobile app known as "today's headlines" and has become the fastest growing news client in China. In addition to "today's headlines", byte beat also has 12 applications such as "content paragraph", "funny and embarrassing way", "content comic", "good pictures", "must see video tonight". The overall performance is not bad, in which the "connotation of the paragraph" in the entertainment class ranking once more than sing it.

In Zhang Yiming's view, the information explosion brought by the mobile Internet makes people face more and more choices. In the face of information overload, people are often at a loss. In this case, the way of information acquisition will no longer be the artificial mode adopted by traditional media, but more intelligent and personalized automatic recommendation, and the recommendation engine will begin to show its technical advantages and play its power. "The more on the mobile Internet, the more personalized personal information portal is needed. We are born for the mobile Internet. " Zhang Yiming said

Today's Toutiao, founded by Zhang Yiming, has no team, does not carry out manual intervention on the content, but relies on algorithm learning to carry out personalized machine recommendation; it does not carry out the production and processing of the content, but only does the content distribution channel. The core competitiveness and advantage of today's headlines lies in machine distribution. Personalized recommendation based on big data and algorithms is not only a news client, but also an information distribution platform. It is a technology company with media attributes. The company now has a team of more than 300 people, 50% of whom are responsible for technology and back office operations. 90% of them have worked in Internet companies such as Baidu and Tencent, and half of them are former colleagues of Zhang Yiming.

In July 2012, today's headlines obtained millions of US dollars in series a investment from sig Haina Asia, etc.; in September 2013, they obtained DST, etc

Chinese PinYin : Zhang Yi Ming