00:00Let's first take a look at what ByteDance actually is.
00:03So, ByteDance is a Chinese technology company that specializes in artificial intelligence
00:08and it was founded on March 2012 by Zhang Yiming, who is also the current CEO.
00:13It is behind some of the most popular apps in the world, including TikTok Douyin, which
00:18is the Chinese version of TikTok Todiao, which is a news aggregator app, and many others.
00:24The company has grown exponentially since its founding.
00:27In fact, they went from raising their first round of funding in 2013 to becoming a unicorn,
00:33a term used to describe companies that are worth $1 billion or more in just three years.
00:39So how did they do it?
00:40How did ByteDance grow so fast and become what it is today?
00:44Well, the answer lies in the story of how TikTok was born.
00:48So it all started back in 2014 when Zhang Yiming was thinking about how people get their news.
00:53He noticed that most people were getting their news through social media rather than traditional
00:59media outlets like newspapers or TV.
01:02This led him to believe that there was an opportunity to create a better news app that could deliver
01:07high-quality articles directly to people as smartphones.
01:11In order to do this, he assembled a team of engineers and data scientists who helped him
01:15develop an algorithm that could analyze people as reading habits and then recommend articles
01:21that they would be interested in.
01:23The algorithm was trained on a massive data set of articles and then tested with a small
01:28group of users.
01:29After making some tweaks based on the feedback, Zhang decided to launch the app, which he called
01:34Todiao, which means today's news in Chinese.
01:37Todiao quickly became popular among Chinese readers who love the app's ability to curate news and
01:43articles that matched their interests, but Zhang didn't stop there.
