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Zhang Yiming, a Chinese billionaire internet entrepreneur, who founded ByteDance in 2012 and developed the news aggregator Toutiao and the video-sharing platform TikTok, has stepped down as CEO and will reportedly hand over the reins to co-founder and HR head Liang Rubo, who will take over in 6 months following the transition period. Liang Rubo is also Yiming’s childhood friend and the latter has chosen his college roommate as his successor.
Yiming wrote in an internal letter on Wednesday that he is stepping down from the throne and will commence focussing on long-term strategy, corporate culture and social responsibility by the end of the year. He wrote that he’s generally a bad manager, and prefers solitary activities. His open admission to his drawbacks shows his incredible humanity. He wrote “The truth is, I lack some of the skills that make an ideal manager. I am not interested in analyzing organizational and market principles, and leveraging these theories to further reduce management work, rather than actually managing people”
“After several months of thinking about this, I came to the conclusion that transitioning out of the role of CEO, with all of the related day-to-day responsibilities would enable me to have a greater impact on longer-term initiatives,” Yiming said in the letter. “Our success over the last nine years has been predicated upon our ability to innovate at just the right moment in the development of the industry. Notably, this has included applying machine learning to mobile and video products,” he added.
It is reported that Yiming is tired of a monotonic and pressurized lifestyle. Managing 60,000 employees and dealing with heightened scrutiny by global regulators, Yiming is done. He believes that he spent most of his time in meetings and not enough time researching the types of innovative technology that has gotten ByteDance to where it is today.
“Three years ago, I spoke with some entrepreneurs about the challenges of scaling a business. I said that often when companies mature and expand, many fall into the trap of the CEO becoming overly central — listening to presentations, handling approvals, and making decisions reactively. This leads to an over-reliance on existing ideas already in the company, and results in knowledge structures being slow to iterate,” he wrote.
“I worry that I am still relying too much on the ideas I had before starting the company, and haven’t challenged myself by updating those concepts. As an example, before 2017, I spent a lot of time keeping track of developments in machine learning. However, since then, while I do my best to bookmark technical articles online, I haven’t had the time to make much progress digging into the area. During technology meetings, this sometimes means I actually struggle to keep up with the discussion.”TikTok alone has more than one billion active users worldwide, and ByteDance’s global advertising revenue topped $27 billion last year.
Tags TikTok Zhang Yiming
