Zhang Yiming's most trusted female CEO stepped down

Zhang Nan waved his sleeves.

Yesterday (February 7), Douyin Group CEO Zhang Nan announced that he had resigned as the group's CEO, and would focus on the development of Jianying in the future, which is a video editing software owned by Bytes. In the future, Zhang Nan will continue to report to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo.

So far, Douyin has undergone another high-level adjustment.

Retrospectively, Zhang Nan has been joining ByteDance for 10 years. In 2013, Zhang Nan's entrepreneurial team was acquired by Toutiao, which entered Bytes, and in 2016, it launched products such as Douyin and Volcano from 0 to 1. In 2020, Zhang Nan became the CEO of ByteDance (China) and completed an unattainable life transformation in just a few years.

Now, she's decided to take her weight off and start again. This is reminiscent of ByteDance's annual all-staff meeting a week ago, when Liang Rubo mentioned that one of ByteDance's key words in 2024 is "always entrepreneurship".

She resigned as CEO and embraced AI

Who will be at the helm of TikTok?

Zhang Nan sent a "farewell" letter.

She mentioned that "CEO of Douyin Group" is a heavy responsibility on her, and now she is ready to step down from this, start from the "heart", and toss some of the things she loves in the next ten years with the state of always starting a business. Zhang Nan clearly stated the future direction of Jianying, "Grow up with this era of AI and jointly draw the fantasy world in your mind." ”

The letter was full of emotion. 2024 is Zhang Nan's 10th year to join ByteDance, where she has experienced "incomparable wonderful moments in life, among which all kinds of hardships and joys can only be truly understood by those who have struggled together, and there are many gains and some regrets." ”

Ten years have passed, Zhang Nan is ready to restart in situ: "This is my gift to myself for the next ten years, in a limited life, an infinite game, as the old saying goes, life must be able to afford to let go, I think only by really letting go, can I go all out." ”

Literally, Zhang Nan, who left Douyin, was for a new venture. But why the silhouette?

Looking back at the development of Jianying, it was officially launched by ByteDance in May 2019, and public information shows that in the past three years, Jianying-related products have developed rapidly, and as of 2021, Jianying's monthly active users have exceeded 100 million, making it the largest mobile video editing product in China.

The overseas version of CapCut, which was launched in April 2020, has also set off a small whirlwind, with downloads once surpassing TikTok, and in September last year, the total user spend on CapCut exceeded $100 million. In addition, Capcut has surpassed 200 million monthly active users and has been downloaded more than 500 million times since its launch.

A person close to Jianying revealed that in the past year, Zhang Nan has tilted most of his energy to Jianying-related business, and personally led the team to seek a breakthrough in AI-assisted creation, and will soon launch an AI product for pictures and videos.

The popularity of AI-generated videos is obvious to all. In December last year, Pika, an automatically generated video software, swept the AI circle in Silicon Valley, and quickly received $55 million in financing, with a valuation of more than $200 million, becoming a representative of the AI startup wave that cannot be ignored. It was previously reported that while the business adjustment was being made at the end of 2023, Byte was also concentrating its resources on AI. All of this makes people look forward to the new future of the silhouette under Zhang Nan's rule.

It's just, who will be at the helm of Douyin's tomorrow?

According to people close to Douyin Group, as various businesses are approaching maturity, after Zhang Nan's resignation, the company has no plans to set up a new CEO, and the group's business will be handled by Han Shangyou, the head of Douyin, Zhang Chao, the head of Tomato Novel and Toutiao, Wei Wenwen, the head of Douyin e-commerce, Pu Yanzi, the head of Douyin Life Service, and Zhao Xiuying, the head of Douyin's advertising business.

According to an internal email from Liang Rubo on February 7, Han Shangyou and Zhang Chao reported to Zhang Lidong. Among them, Han Shangyou will continue to be responsible for the coordination of all Douyin-related main businesses (Douyin e-commerce, Douyin life services, Douyin advertising business).

10 years of growth history

Zhang Nan's moments in bytes

Zhang Nan has always been low-key.

Few people have completed her career leap in a few years: first, she started her own business, the company was acquired by ByteDance, and she also entered Byte and was promoted all the way to the CEO of the company, in just 6 or 7 years, Zhang Nan has achieved a transformation beyond ordinary people. This also represents Byte's employment style, in fact, many of Byte's senior management team are entrepreneurs who are "bought" through acquisitions, and Zhang Nan is the most prominent one.

It was 2013, Zhang Nan started an APP, a picture sharing and exchange community, and later this company was acquired by Toutiao, she immediately led the team to join Toutiao, responsible for Toutiao's relatively marginal products. With his in-depth understanding of UGC community products, Zhang Nan slowly "raised" this product to achieve good results, and later began to be responsible for the entire UGC business of ByteDance.

Of course, Zhang Nan's most outstanding achievement is Douyin. In fact, in the two years before Douyin was launched, "whether to make short videos" was repeatedly discussed within Toutiao. In 2014, the entire subway on Zhichun Road in Beijing was covered with advertisements for Microvision, and Weibo launched Miaopai, which was discussed several times within Toutiao but did not do it, and at the end of the year, Meipai had hundreds of thousands of DAUs, and Toutiao felt that it had missed the opportunity.

The discussion about short videos in 2015 impressed Zhang Nan very deeply. "Yiming took the whole team of our company to Okinawa for an annual meeting, and after the annual meeting, more than a dozen of us came to the izakaya and chatted about a short video. We were more than a dozen people, and we ordered two plates of sushi, and we sat around the table to discuss whether short videos, especially UGC short videos, should still be made?" However, for various reasons, Toutiao still did not make a move.

In 2016, Toutiao tested the waters of live broadcasting, but entered the game too late and lacked advantages, and then tested the combination of short video and live broadcast, with better retention rate, activity and user dissemination cost, proving that short video + live broadcast may be an effective model. Zhang Nan and Zhang Yiming discussed the short video again, and felt that they still couldn't give up.

The pressure is overwhelming. There is a detail circulating in the market: the company locked a team in a small black room for closed research and development for more than a month. It wasn't until September 2016 that Douyin came out. 17 months after its launch, Douyin DAU exceeded 100 million, becoming the fastest-growing product of China's mobile Internet after WeChat.

In 2018, Zhang Nan was appointed as the CEO of Douyin and the head of the company's marketing brand, fully responsible for Douyin, Volcano, market brand and other businesses. In the impression of the outside world, Zhang Nan is described as a female leader who is good at mobilizing the resources of the market head, and is resolute and persistent in decision-making. She also briefly left Douyin to go to the United States to support the budding TikTok.

Among the few public speeches, Zhang Nan made a deep impression. In 2018, the fast-growing Douyin also ushered in big and small problems, and some peers pointed out: life itself is actually not beautiful, and most products are just using various filters to trick users and deceive users. Zhang Nan replied positively in his public speech: "Some people still ask, which one do you choose, the flawed true and the false beauty? I don't agree with this statement, I think this is a routine, it is a deliberate opposition between beauty and truth." And, the pursuit of authenticity is certainly valuable, but it shouldn't be an excuse for platforms to evade content management. ”

In March 2020, Zhang Nan ushered in the pinnacle of career promotion and was appointed as the CEO of ByteDance (China), comprehensively coordinating the product, operation, marketing and content cooperation of the company's China business, including Toutiao, Douyin, Xigua Video, Search and other businesses and products. Behind this promotion, Douyin is naturally indispensable, but few people know that Zhang Nan also led the company's camera business and led the team to develop products such as light face and Jianying.

Zhang Nan, who has always maintained his enthusiasm for entrepreneurship, once said: Sometimes, the evolution of a product is not what you think it is, but to respect the objective reality, respect the product's ability to evolve itself, its boundaries, and let it evolve naturally in that direction, which is the best state.

After becoming the CEO of Douyin Group, Zhang Nan began to appear more and more in front of the public. She once said that ByteDance is the best platform, with both dreams and pragmatic romance. Liang Rubo commented on her: "Thank you Zhang Nan for leading the team to make a breakthrough, from 0 to 1 to launch products that are popular with users, such as Douyin and Jianying. We look forward to her continuing efforts in her new role. "Is the next TikTok coming?

The sense of crisis behind a Big Mac

警惕平庸

"All the diseases of the big companies that should be there are gone. ”

On January 30, ByteDance held the 2024 annual all-staff meeting, and CEO Liang Rubo expressed the above feelings, and said that the key word of ByteDance in 2024 is "always start a business and escape the gravity of mediocrity". The biggest sense of crisis, he said, is the fear that bytes, as an organization, are becoming mediocre and unable to make new breakthroughs.

Liang Rubo believes that to deal with a series of problems such as organizational inefficiency, it is necessary to break complacency, raise standards, and build a lean organization. Therefore, Byte has three goals in the new year, the first is to strengthen the sense of crisis at the level of organizational management culture, always start a business, and escape the gravity of mediocrity, the second is to continue to increase social trust, and the last is to continue to focus on a small number of important things in business.

This is another time that Liang Rubo has emphasized "always starting a business". Previously, in June 2022, Liang Rubo, who took over as ByteDance's CEO not long ago, adjusted ByteDance's internal culture and promoted "always entrepreneurship" from fifth to first.

Once upon a time, ByteDance successfully created products such as Toutiao, Douyin, and TikTok with its keen insight into users and the market, but today's bytes are becoming sluggish. As Liang Rubo admits frankly, Byte's sluggishness is manifested in the fact that it is not as sensitive to opportunities as startups, and he mentioned that the semi-annual technology review at the company level did not start discussing GPT until 2023, and the large-scale model startups that did well in the industry were founded from 2018 to 2021.

Now, Zhang Nan "abandoned" Douyin and "Jianying", and further rushed to the AI field where Internet giants gathered, and fired the "first shot" of entrepreneurship in 2024 from the level of the company's executives. As Zhang Nan faded out, almost all the main business leaders of Douyin Group reported to Zhang Lidong, chairman of Beijing ByteDance, who further moved to the foreground Due to various internal and external reasons, ByteDance, which has not yet and is not in a hurry to go public, "commercialization" occupies an increasingly important position.

At present, ByteDance's revenue still mainly comes from domestic advertising and e-commerce, and TikTok still brings high growth, and TikTok's revenue contribution to the entire byte in the second quarter of 2023 has been close to 20%. There is no doubt that TikTok, which is fighting overseas, is one of the important grasps of byte commercialization.

According to previous media reports, ByteDance's revenue in 2023 may reach 110 billion US dollars (about 790 billion yuan), a year-on-year increase of about 30%, and it is reported that this volume exceeds Tencent and approaches Meta. This super unicorn, valued at hundreds of billions of dollars, is still attracting the attention of the world's Internet circle.

For a long time, Byte has also begun a drastic reform in terms of business focus, and has given up bets on education, VR and games. Liang Rubo mentioned: "AI technology will greatly subvert content creation, and even produce new creation platforms." ”

In any case, the wheels of history roll forward. ByteDance, which has become a behemoth, is trying to catch the next wave.