![]() The startup was promptly acquired by ByteDance, with Zhang absorbed into the new parent company in 2014. In the first six months, her platform amassed almost 500,000 users, as people could view a seemingly endless pool of photos and share them with friends, assured that there was a constant stream of new and buzzworthy visuals that were refreshed 24 hours a day. In February 2013, she founded her own photo-sharing app, Tuba. That naturally sets the direction, and then we build and iterate the product along the way.” ![]() Instead, I like to discover what the users’ true demands and needs are. Reflecting on her attitude towards product development in a recent interview with Chinese media outlet GeekPark, Zhang said, “I don’t approach it with a strategy from the top down. Her immersion in China’s fledgling internet market would provide a strong foundation for her knowledge of user behavior using data analytics, and imbue her with an empirical approach to making apps. That was around the same time when Apple’s Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone, laying the first brick of the foundation for the mobile internet area. In 2006, she left Digital Red to work at Qianchi Unlimited, a social media app developer. In the three years she spent at this company, Zhang became familiar with China’s nascent digital marketing scene. ![]() As one of the few product heads who was building knowledge in Chinese tech firms early on, Zhang has a unique set of skills that prepared her to succeed with ByteDance.Īfter graduating with a fine arts degree in 2003, she began working for Beijing-based Digital Red, one of China’s earliest mobile game studios, working on product planning and design. She has firsthand experience weathering the challenges of China’s early mobile internet era. Still in her 30s, Kelly Zhang is already a veteran of the Chinese internet industry. A background in internet entrepreneurship So who is Kelly Zhang, ByteDance’s #2 and leader in its home market? Kelly Zhang has been instrumental in shaping ByteDance’s products in China. ![]() His trusted executive, Kelly Zhang, took on the mantle of China CEO. In nine years, ByteDance has grown into nothing short of an internet giant, with ambitions to match as it reaches horizontally across fintech, healthcare, and education, to name a few industries in which the company has active services.įrom March 2020, the company’s founder, Zhang Yiming, announced an internal restructuring where he assumed the position of global CEO focusing on overseas markets. While TikTok’s success garnered the company worldwide attention, the foundation of ByteDance’s rise since it was established in 2012 was built on the company’s ability to compete and win its domestic market with products like personalized news aggregator Jinri Toutiao and TikTok’s older twin in China, Douyin, which surpassed 600 million daily active users in August 2020. Its short-video app TikTok transcended languages, cultures, and national borders, amassing more than 1 billion users globally, with more than 2.6 billion lifetime downloads. Beijing-based ByteDance broke the mold of what it means to be a successful Chinese technology company.
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