Image source @ Visual China
Wen | Box Lunch Finance, author | Wu Zhaohan, editor | Zhao Jinjie
ByteDance also acquired a company founder under his command.
On March 21, the low-code vendor "Black Paw Cloud" announced that it would stop service and maintenance. According to 36Kr, the Black Payun team has been acquired by ByteDance, and founder Chen Jinzhou and some team members have joined Feishu to be responsible for the aPaaS product "Kunlun". Some insiders said that Chen Jinzhou has a high level and directly reported to Xie Xin, vice president of ByteDance.
Through the acquisition of the company, the team is absorbed together, which has developed into the practice of ByteDance, and at present, Byte is some of the most well-known executives, such as Zhang Nan, Chen Lin, etc., which ByteDance introduced through the acquisition of the company. A Byte employee once revealed that part of ByteDance's investment and acquisition purpose is to go to the team, for example, Byte's previous acquisition of the niche APP Daytime Calendar is to see the team's strong research and development capabilities in the smart calendar, "as long as the team is bullish enough, in the process of investing in the company, you can buy it." ”
Compared with Tencent and Ali, which are also big manufacturers, most of ByteDance's executives are introduced from outside. Ali has the famous "Eighteen Arhats" and Tencent also has "Five Tiger Generals", but the executives trained by ByteDance from scratch are not many compared with these companies.
At present, among the heads of the six major sector businesses reported to CEO Liang Rubo, Zhang Nan and Chen Lin all joined byte through the acquisition of companies, while Xie Xin, Yang Zhenyuan, Yan Zhi, and Zhou Shouzi joined bytes from other companies with high salaries.
Digging up the elite talents that have been cultivated by various companies is ByteDance's consistent talent training policy. According to the words of ByteDance's former HR Li Nan, Byte has been winning with To C products since its inception, "so Byte prefers to use it in various companies that have been verified, and people who do special cattle can use it for us when they come." ”
Especially in the early days of ByteDance's development, founder Zhang Yiming almost like an early entrepreneur to recruit people, many founders were under his income, these people in the process of ByteDance to expand the territory of the process played a pivotal role.
Although Byte now has a stable management team, the way of replacing recruitment with acquisition has not been abandoned, and the acquired founders are becoming the vanguard of ByteDance to develop new business and find new markets.
01
Before the abolition of ByteDance's war investment department, it was called the "recruitment integration department" by the outside world, because many executives were joined by ByteDance through investment and mergers.
Today's headlines (renamed ByteDance in 2018) was established less than two months ago, it acquired a small team that does drift bottles and weather applications, Chen Lin is one of the founding members of this team, after the merger, Chen Lin joined ByteDance, work number 12, good at product design, he took today's headlines from 0 to 100, and he also completed the transformation from iOS research and development to product manager. After Zhang Yiming stepped down as CEO of Today's Headlines, Chen Lin took over, and now he is the head of ByteDance's education and innovation business.
Zhang Nan, CEO of ByteDance China, is also included in Zhang Yiming through mergers and acquisitions. Zhang Nan was the founder of the picture sharing and exchange community Map Bar, in 2013 Zhang Yiming acquired Tu Bar, Zhang Nan entered today's headlines responsible for the connotation of the paragraph, and then led the team to integrate the birth of Douyin and led its rapid growth.
Zhang Nan Image source @ Douyin official Weibo
In addition, entrepreneurs such as Zhu Jun and Yang Luyu, founders of Musical.ly, Guo Lie, founder of Faceu Face Meng, and Liu Yong, founder of Qingbei Online School (who has left), have all entered ByteDance through the way of the acquired company.
This is a very typical Facebook "acquisition of recruits" approach, in the first step of investment, will ask the team, is not interested in joining the headlines.
Zhang Yiming tends to be a person who has had entrepreneurial experience, which is clearly reflected in the early development of ByteDance. In the early days of byteDance's development, Zhang Yiming was the first HR, and the Internet circle has been circulating that Zhang Yiming has been observing the object of the vote: walking on the road, he will observe the actions and expressions of the pedestrians around him, speculate on their advantages, and go to the hotel lobby to look around to see which people are suitable for attracting headlines, and do not miss any opportunity to tap talents.
Through investment and mergers and acquisitions, high-paying poaching, toutiao in the stage of weak external cognition, found a group of executives whose capabilities far exceeded the company's development stage at that time. In addition to the above-mentioned Chen Lin, Zhang Nan and others, there are Zhang Lidong, the person in charge of byte commercialization, and Yang Zhenyuan, the person in charge of technology. The addition of these people has laid a solid foundation for ByteDance's future rapid development of talent reserves, and has also made great contributions to Byte's expansion of territory.
02
Among the executives who are independent of Byte, Zhang Nan and Chen Lin have the most similar growth path, in addition to being acquired into the company in the initial stage, they have followed the company to open up a territory and led their respective products from 0 to 100. Zhang Nan also reported to Chen Lin for a while.
When she first joined Byte, Zhang Nan was in charge of the connotation of duanzi, which is a veteran but marginal product, and because of her deep understanding of UGC community products, she is well aware of the key role that operation plays in the community. Therefore, when the short video strategy landed, Zhang Yiming chose Zhang Nan's mutual entertainment, and in the cold start of Douyin, the operation activities of students of art schools led by Zhang Nan played a key role. According to Late Post, Chen Lin was also actively involved in the process.
In March 2019, Zhang Nan gradually faded out of Douyin and became the head of the interactive entertainment business department, focusing more on organizational management, leading interactive entertainment to establish multiple middle offices including live broadcasting, video, and marketing. Half a year later, Douyin and Kuaishou entered a tough battle, and Zhang Nan returned to the front line.
At the beginning of 2020, Zhang Yiming stepped down from his position in China, and Zhang Nan was promoted to CEO of ByteDance, in charge of the interactive entertainment business department and the general information platform two major content product departments. At the end of 2021, these two product departments officially merged to form Douyin BU, which was managed by Zhang Nan. Among the executives currently reporting to Liang Rubo, Zhang Nan is the only woman and the person who manages the most business, in addition to Douyin, today's headlines, watermelon videos, tomato novels and other products are responsible for her.
Compared with Zhang Nan, Chen Lin is responsible for more business changes within Byte. In 2017, Chen Lin took over as CEO of Today's Toutiao, and a year later, Zhu Wenjia succeeded Chen Lin at the helm of Toutiao, and Chen Lin turned to byte's internal innovation business. At that time, a large number of new businesses of ByteDance were responsible for Chen Lin, social networking (multi-flash, fei chat), content community (understand the car emperor), enterprise services (Lark), education (gogokid, aiKID, etc.) and so on. After the education business became independent, Chen Lin became CEO. After the double reduction policy in 2021, Byte Education has encountered major setbacks and is still in the pain of transformation.
Compared with the two senior executives, the business that Zhu Jun (Alex), Yang Luyu and others are responsible for has undergone many changes.
Zhu Jun is best known as the founder of Musical.ly, and in 2017, Zhang Yiming snapped up the three-year-old Musical.ly for $1 billion, and Zhu Jun joined byte at the same time as co-founder Yang Luyu. After entering byte, Zhu Jun's identity has undergone many changes, according to the "Late Post" report, in March 2019, Zhu Jun took over Zhang Nan and became the domestic head of Douyin. In October of the same year, the identities of the two were reversed, with Zhang Nan in charge of Douyin domestic and Zhu Jun in charge of TikTok, the international product of Douyin, and directly reported to Zhang Yiming.
After TikTok ushered in its OWN CEO, Zhu Jun became vice president of products and strategy of ByteDance, gradually responsible for the company's strategy and product design, as well as strategic investment, with Zhou Receiving capital to join ByteDance as CFO and TikTok CEO, Zhu Jun stepped down as the head of strategic investment.
In the middle of last year, Byte upgraded music to P1 priority business, and Zhu Jun took over the music business at that time and led the launch of Byte's overseas music product Resso. According to 36Kr, Zhu Jun's goal is to make Resso a great product of TikTok.
Yang Luyu, who entered Byte at the same time as Zhu Jun, put more energy into Byte's education brand. After joining Byte, Yang Luyu set up an education hardware team and released ByteDance's first education hardware "Vigorous Intelligent Work Light" in October 2020, which is also one of the few achievements of Byte Education. In September last year, Yang Luyu was transferred to the position of being responsible for the vigorous intelligent business and was responsible for the vigorous education product strategy.
Compared with the acquired predecessors, most of the entrepreneurs who later joined byte are not complicated in their business adjustments, such as the game company Mu Hitomi, which was acquired last year, which still maintains independent operations, and Pico's founder Zhou Hongwei is still in charge of the original VR business.
03
Looking at the process of ByteDance's acquisition of companies and executives, a major logic behind it is to make up for the shortcomings of the business and find a new growth curve.
Zhang Yiming initially recruited people like an early entrepreneur, because the business led by these founders can make up for the new modules needed for the development of ByteDance. Combining external resources with its own business system to achieve the most efficient value in the shortest time is the main tactic of ByteDance's mergers and acquisitions, and it is also a big help for one of its products to surpass competitors in the short term, and TikTok is the master of this idea.
At that time Musical.ly was a hot target, and ByteDance, Facebook, Tencent, Snapchat and Kuaishou all expressed their willingness to acquire many times and negotiated with the founders many times. However, because Fu Sheng, CEO of Cheetah Mobile, used his veto power in Musical.ly to engage in bundled sales, he tied up two of Cheetah's other failed products, News Republic and Live.me, and dissuaded many people.
In addition to Musical.ly, Zhang Yiming also spent $86 million to acquire News Republic, Cheetah Mobile's news aggregation app, and invested $50 million in Cheetah Mobile's live broadcasting platform Live.me.
Musical.ly's overseas traffic base combined with ByteDance's powerful algorithmic capabilities brought rocket-like growth to Tik Tok and became byteDance's most successful overseas product.
In addition to making up for the shortcomings of the business, opening up a new growth curve has become another major reason for ByteDance to buy people and buy companies in the later stage. For example, ByteDance increased the stage of the education industry to acquire Qingbei Online School, follow-up into the game field has successively acquired Ink Pelican, Mu Hitomi, Youai Interactive Entertainment, last year's meta-universe fire, Byte heavy money to acquire VR manufacturer Pico.
Now, byteDance, which is eyeing the cloud service, has bought a black pa cloud. Considering the gap between china's TOP3 cloud manufacturers such as Alibaba, Huawei, and Tencent, the money-for-time acquisition strategy may continue to be staged in Byte.
Resources:
"ByteDance, what kind of company do you like to invest in?" " chopped pepper entertainment
Zhang Yiming's Investment Empire, Chinese Entrepreneur Magazine
Who's Managing TikTok, Late Post
"Zhang Yiming's View of Employment", Late Post
"After the Zhang Yiming Era, Liang Rubo waited for the first winter", Yifan YIFAN
"ByteDance upgrades music to P1 priority business, former Tiktok head Zhu Jun personally led the team", 36Kr