Recently, according to the Forbes Global Real-time Rich List, ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming surpassed Tencent Ma Huateng with 59.4 billion US dollars, equivalent to 379.6 billion yuan, becoming the richest person in China's Internet. Moreover, this is still in Zhang Yiming's company ByteDance, the unlisted "conservative estimate", if ByteDance is listed, Zhang Yiming almost has the strength and financial resources to compete with the world's richest man.
379.6 billion, what is the concept? Let's look at a set of data. In 2020, among the officially disclosed GDP rankings of 314 cities, the Shennongjia Forest District, which ranked last, had an annual GDP of 3 billion yuan, less than a fraction of Zhang Yiming's value. Among the 314 cities, only 73 have an annual GDP of more than 300 billion yuan. In other words, Zhang Yiming's personal wealth directly surpasses the annual GDP of 254 cities in China.
Fujian Longyan
Take Zhang Yiming's hometown of Longyan City, Fujian Province, 287.1 billion yuan, the city's annual economic income to compare, Zhang Yiming's net worth is 1.3 times the annual GDP of longyan City, his hometown. To exaggerate, even if Zhang Yiming is now "lying flat", if he does not work, he will spend money. Spend 100 million a day, you can also use 3796 days, 10 years, 4 months and 24 days.
"Lying flat" net map
As China's youngest and the world's second youngest billionaire, looking back at his grassroots entrepreneurship counterattack history, Zhang Yiming's success is nothing more than these keywords: direction, achievements, and boldness. At the turning point in his life, the choice of colleges and universities, he only spent 5 minutes to fill in the application, and the mathematicians were all kinds of entangled volunteers.
This is not Zhang Yiming playing a handsome man and being irresponsible for his own future. Being able to screen a large number of majors at such a speed is that he has a clear direction in advance. Combined with his specific needs, he set four criteria for school selection: comprehensive university, close to the sea, not close to home, and snow in winter. In the end, Zhang Yiming chose Nankai University, and he made the following humorous answer:
Nankai University
Comprehensive universities solve the problem of imbalance between men and women in order to find a girlfriend smoothly; relying on the sea is to relieve hunger and facilitate eating seafood; far from home, in order not to let test results and school performance easily pass to parents; snow in winter, purely in the hometown has not seen snow.
In Zhang Yiming, who came from a science department, it is difficult for you to see the stereotype of "straight men" and dull men in science and engineering. He thinks leaps and thinks, has his own ideas and opinions. The rationality of the science student, the sensibility of the liberal arts student, he has it. This is inseparable from the education Zhang Yiming received since childhood.
Born in the compound of the public institution, his parents gave him a free and relaxed environment for growing up. While other playmates of the same age were grounded by their parents to do exercises at home and practice hard for various certificates, Zhang Yiming was playing happily. In his childhood, he grew up listening to his parents talk about foreign friends, engaging in technology research and development, and making Internet products. This also laid the foundation for the direction of his life.
"The World of Microelectronics"
After going to college, Zhang Yiming studied microelectronics, and after a year, he did not see the learning results. On the other hand, software engineering students can not only write programs that can immediately "run up", but also easily work part-time outside the school and earn extra money. Zhang Yiming was moved, and without saying a word, he turned to the software engineering major.
Everything has a positive and negative side, and Zhang Yiming found that writing code is not as wonderful as he imagined. It's been a long time and it's boring. So, in addition to typing code, he also found two interesting things for himself: fixing computers and reading books. By pouring a computer for people, Zhang Yiming made many friends, and also found a girlfriend, and now he is a wife who has been working together for a lifetime.
Great men of history
And a large number of biographies nourished his spiritual world, Zhang Yiming found that before becoming a great man, the great man also lived a step-by-step life every day, and every day he did some trivial things. But it is from this that success is connected. Inspired by this, Zhang Yiming finalized three small things for his college life: writing code, reading books, and repairing computers.
In 2005, after graduating from school, Zhang Yiming first worked in a technology company in Tianjin for three months, and then became a north drifter and began to explore the road of entrepreneurship. At this time, Internet companies, Tencent and Baidu, had been listed, and Alibaba launched Taobao and Alipay. The Internet industry is thriving.
Zhang Yiming found two alumni of Nankai University to form a three-person group to prepare to develop a collaborative system for enterprise work, similar to the current DingTalk and Tencent conferences. Unfortunately, collaborative office had not yet developed in China at that time. After the failure of the first venture, Zhang Yiming realized that it was not enough to have a wild idea. Ideas must be based on accurate market positioning.
Microsoft Corporation
After the technical tempering in Kuxun, Microsoft's management capabilities have been upgraded. In October 2009, Zhang Yiming began to fight alone and start a business again. In the context of real estate, it took 6 months for Zhang Yiming to develop a vertical real estate search engine "Nine Nine Houses". This time, he was a great success, achieving 1.5 million user registration in the mobile Internet environment at that time, becoming the first place in the real estate application.
"Nine Nine Rooms"
That is, this successful experience, Zhang Yiming clearly found that the mobile phone users' demand for personalized information is a piece of "fat meat". But he also keenly captured that the real estate industry is only a carnival for a small number of people. In other words, there are still very few houses that Can be bought in China. "Just doing a property search is good, but the fish pond is too small." Without the slightest hesitation, Zhang Yiming gave up his hard-earned Jiangshan, resigned from the POSITION of CEO of "Nine-Nine Rooms", and began to prepare for "Today's Headlines".
Although Zhang Yiming at this time was already an Internet "veteran" and had considerable entrepreneurial experience, the appearance of today's headlines also faced unprecedented problems. During the period when headlines are still brewing, the market for content information has become saturated, and news clients such as Tencent, NetEase, and Sohu have long divided up users.
In the eyes of many investors at that time, whether there is market space for today's headlines is a problem, not to mention whether it can be commercialized and make money. Therefore, although Zhang Yiming has met many investors, there has been no substantial progress in the financing of today's headlines. But good things grind a lot, a chance. Zhang Yiming met the famous Russian investment institution DST, founder Yuri Milner, and got his investment.
Yuri Milner
With the injection of funds, the headlines broke through, and in just 90 days, it had 10 million users. Like the creation of the "Nine-Nine Network", after the headlines were on the right track, Zhang Yiming resigned as CEO and turned to short videos to incubate Douyin. Someone once commented on Zhang Yiming, "crazy self-discipline maniac" and "programmer fighter". He always climbed one mountain and then continued on to another.
After the great success of Douyin, Zhang Yiming "washed his hands in the golden basin", resigned as CEO of ByteDance, and threw himself into public welfare activities to give back to the society. Donated 100 million yuan to his alma mater, Nankai, and set up the "Nankai University Innovation Fund"; during the epidemic, donated 100 million yuan to support frontline medical personnel during the epidemic. In the development of education in his hometown, Zhang Yiming was even more generous, first investing 10 million yuan for his alma mater, Yongding No. 1 Middle School, to build a science and technology art museum and a teaching building. On June 22, 2021, it directly donated 500 million yuan to establish the "Fangmei Education Development Fund" to help education in the hometown.
Compared with the greedy businessmen who are crazy to suck blood and squeeze society, Zhang Yiming is returning his wealth to the right way with the spirit of an entrepreneur.