Zhang’s parents worked as civil servants, conformable to Bloomberg.

Its name is based on a Chinese proverb about “surprising everyone with a first try,” South China Morning Post reported.

Zhang graduated from Nankai University in 2005, where he began studying microelectronics before switching his major to software engineering, according to the South China Morning Post.

Zhang said he started out as an engineer but ended up being in charge of 40 to 50 people by his second year at the company, according to SCMP. He credits that job with teaching him the sales skills he later used to grow ByteDance, including learning “what sales are good sales.”

According to the report, Zhang learned the value of pursuing excellence during his first job at Kuxun, he told ByteDance employees.

“At that time, I was responsible for the technology, but when the product had problems, I actively participated in the discussion of the product (plan),” Zhang said, according to the newspaper. “A lot of people say it’s not what I should be doing. But I mean: your sense of responsibility and your desire to do things well will lead you to do more things and gain experience.”

Zhang also worked at Microsoft before founding ByteDance, the South China Morning Post reported.

The company owns several social networking applications operating in China. It launched a WeChat rival called FlipChat and a video messaging app called Duoshan in 2019.

Zhang wanted to create a news platform whose results were powered by artificial intelligence, separate from China’s search engine Baidu.

“We push information, not through queries, through news recommendations,” Zhang said Bloomberg in 2017.

Despite his focus on news, Zhang said Bloomberg’s Lulu Yilun Chen and Mark Bergen in 2017 that ByteDance has none journalists on his staff like many other social networks.

“The most important thing is that we are not a news business,” Zhang said Bloomberg. “We are more like a search business or a social media platform. We do very innovative work. We are not a copycat of an American company, both in product and in technology.”

TikTok is one of the most popular social networks among American teenagers and has over 170 million users in the US as of September 2024, the company say.

“For a long time, I only watched TikTok videos without making them myself, because it is mainly a product for young people,” Zhang said, according to the publication. South China Morning Post. “But later we made it mandatory for all members of the management team to make their own TikTok videos and they have to earn a certain number of ‘likes’. Otherwise, they must do push-ups. It was a big step for me. “

Zhang’s leadership style is “soft-spoken but charismatic, logical but passionate, young but wise,” according to Kai-Fu Lee of Time Magazine.

Zhang he resigned as CEO in 2021, saying he “lacks some of the skills that make an ideal manager” and would be a greater asset to the company in a non-management role.

Zhang wants the app to continue to grow overseas, saying he hopes his ByteDance will be “as boundless as Google,” according to him. South China Morning Post.

“We have to work harder, we have to be even more perfectionists,” Zhang said, according to SCMP. “Just as there was an international division of labor in the industrial age, there is also an international division of labor in today’s information age. Chinese entrepreneurs also need to improve their own capabilities as they globalize,” he said.

Forbes first declared Zhang a billionaire in March 2018, estimating that Zhang was worth $4 billion.

On an annual basis Rich list of Hurun China for 2024, he was listed as the richest person in the country, with an estimated net worth of $49.3 billion.