Introduction: As the hottest industry in the past 10 years, the Internet industry has always been known for its fast speed of wealth creation. Among them, Ma Yun and Ma Huateng, as the earliest batch of Internet entrepreneurs in China, have only taken more than a decade to harvest hundreds of billions of yuan of wealth and have successively become the richest people in China. Since then, there has been Huang Zheng, the founder of Pinduoduo, who only took more than 3 years to successfully make Pinduoduo a listed company and earn hundreds of billions of yuan. However, the Internet industry is also like other industries, a generation of back waves to push forward waves. From the earliest PC-side Internet, to the mobile Internet opened in the 3G and 4G era, and then to today's 5G era, with the advancement of communication technology, the pattern of the Internet industry is constantly changing. In China's Internet industry, there is also officially a new industry richest man surpassing Ma Yun and Ma Huateng, and he has also done what Ma Yun and Ma Huateng wanted to do but did not do, that is, to enter the European and American markets and win a large number of users.
A few days ago, the Hurun Research Institute released the latest issue of the "2021 Hurun Rich List". Judging from the list data, Ma Huateng and Ma Yun ranked fourth and fifth with a wealth of 317 billion yuan and 255 billion yuan respectively, which is also a very rare time for Ma Huateng and Ma Yun to fall out of the top three at the same time. On the other hand, in the top ten of the list, all the other real estate rich people except Li Ka-shing have fallen out of the top ten. Among them, Zhong Hashian has become China's richest man with a value of 390 billion yuan with two listed companies, "Nongfu Spring" and "Wantai Biological". Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, ranked second with a valuation of 340 billion yuan with a valuation of 400 billion US dollars (about 2.55 trillion yuan) of ByteDance, and also became the new richest man in China's Internet industry. For specific ranking data, please see the following figure.
Worth 340 billion yuan, Zhang Yiming became the richest man in China's Internet industry, the most important thing is that he is still only 38 years old, and he is also the youngest of the top ten richest people. So, what kind of entrepreneurial story does Zhang Yiming have?
According to public information, Zhang Yiming was born in Longyan, Fujian Province in 1983 and was admitted to Nankai University in 2001. After graduating from Nankai University in 2005, he started a business and developed an IAM collaborative office system for enterprises. Due to market positioning and other issues, Zhang Yiming's first venture ended in failure.
In 2006, Zhang Yiming entered Kuxun, a travel search website, and became the company's first engineer. After working in Kuxun for 2 years, Zhang Yiming became the chairman of the company's technical committee all the way. In 2008, Zhang Yiming left Kuxun and entered the large company Microsoft, and after working at Microsoft for a year, he chose to leave his job, started a business again, and founded a vertical real estate search engine "Nine Nine Rooms". The venture was relatively successful, with 1.5 million users, ranking first in real estate applications.
In 2011, Zhang Yiming resigned as the CEO of Jiujiufang, and began a new round of entrepreneurship, founded the "Today's Headlines" (later renamed ByteDance), with the characteristics of data mining recommendation, today's headlines began from the launch, only 90 days to win 10 million users, becoming the dark horse of the domestic news client at that time.
Of course, byteDance's real sense of becoming a social media giant lies in the douyin released in 2016 and Tik Tok released in overseas markets. 2016 is the year when 4G networks are fully popularized, the 5G era begins to germinate, and with the popularity of 4G networks, the mobile Internet has also begun to shift from text and pictures to video in social attributes, and Douyin has seized this opportunity. As for Tik Tok, it is ByteDance that has done what Ali and Tencent want to do but have not done, that is, in today's globalization, it has entered the European and American markets and won a large number of users.
Today, ByteDance has a number of well-known APPS such as Toutiao, Douyin, Watermelon Video, Tik Tok, etc., with a total of 1.9 billion users, covering 150 countries and regions around the world, and supporting more than 35 languages. It can be said that in the era of short videos, ByteDance has completed the overtaking of Tencent in the social field. In 2020, ByteDance achieved revenue of 236.6 billion yuan, an increase of 111% year-on-year. The valuation of ByteDance has reached 400 billion US dollars (about 2.55 trillion yuan), and Zhang Yiming's personal value has also reached 340 billion yuan. It is worth mentioning that today's ByteDance has not yet been listed, if it is listed, Zhang Yiming is very likely to change from the richest man in the Internet industry to the richest man in China.