Zhang Yiming: How a reluctant CEO built a $66B empire

While China’s richest man sells bottled water, the second wealthiest sells something far more addictive: a perfectly curated, algorithmically generated stream of human desire. Zhang Yiming, the 42-year-old founder of ByteDance, sits atop a $65.9 billion fortune, making him the second richest person in China according to the 2025 Hurun Rich List. He is the architect behind a global cultural revolution, the man who built the machine that powers TikTok and Douyin. His story is one of a pragmatic engineer turned reluctant manager, a patient strategist who understood the future of the internet better than anyone else. Unlike the “Lone Wolf” Zhong Shanshan, who built his empire on the tangible promise of natural purity, Zhang’s kingdom is entirely invisible, built on code, data, and a profound understanding of what makes us scroll. His journey offers a radically different, yet equally powerful, set of lessons for entrepreneurs and brands on how to build a global phenomenon in the digital age. Three gains of a patient geek Zhang’s story began with a quiet period of preparation. After entering Nankai University in 2001, he shifted from microelectronics to software engineering and spent long hours reading far beyond his coursework. This habit of wide learning shaped his respect for knowledge and long-term thinking, laying the foundation for a patient, systems-oriented approach to problem solving. Through biographies and self-study, Zhang realized that meaningful success is built through ordinary, repetitive effort rather than dramatic breakthroughs. This insight cultivated his patience and tolerance for delayed rewards, allowing him to focus on fundamentals while others chased quick wins. His technical skills also drew people to him naturally, helping him form early relationships based on trust. That focus on partners took shape after graduation. In 2005, Zhang founded his first startup, IAM, with two classmates. Working from a small apartment, they built an enterprise collaboration product that ultimately failed to find market fit. Reflecting later, Zhang concluded that the issue was not technology but understanding real needs. The experience reinforced his third gain: learning alongside the right partners and letting patience, knowledge, and collaboration compound over time. The vision: An algorithm to read minds The origin of ByteDance was not a sudden flash of inspiration but the result of long-term observation and accumulated conviction. By the early 2010s, Zhang had become acutely aware that the way people consumed information was fundamentally changing. Mobile phones were replacing newspapers and desktop search as the primary interface for information, yet most media products still relied on uniform editorial judgment or user-initiated searches. Zhang believed this model was structurally inefficient: different people wanted different information, and forcing everyone to read the same headlines no longer made sense in a mobile, data-rich world. From this insight emerged the core idea behind Toutiao (今日头条): information should proactively find people, not wait for people to search for it. Rather than relying on social connections or explicit queries, Toutiao used algorithms to learn what users read, skipped, lingered on, or ignored, and continuously refined its recommendations. This data-driven, AI-first approach marked a clear break from traditional media and portals. It also reflected Zhang’s long-standing belief, reinforced since his university days, that systems built on feedback loops and iteration outperform human intuition at scale. Toutiao’s rapid adoption validated this philosophy and became the proving ground for ByteDance’s recommendation engine. More importantly, it established the company’s identity: ByteDance was not building individual apps but an underlying “brain” capable of understanding and predicting human attention. This algorithmic foundation would later power Douyin and TikTok, extend across multiple products, and define ByteDance as an AI-driven organization from the outset. For Zhang, Toutiao was never the destination; it was the first successful training run for a much larger ambition to reshape how information flows in the digital age. Global ambition from day one ByteDance was founded in a small Beijing apartment in 2012 with a deliberate global-first mindset. Zhang Yiming and his team chose a name that worked in both Chinese and English, signaling their intent to build a product beyond domestic borders. Unlike many Chinese startups that prioritized the local market first, ByteDance aimed to create platforms capable of transcending cultural and linguistic barriers from the start. This vision became reality with the launch of TikTok in 2017 and the strategic acquisition of Musical.ly later that year, which merged in 2018. By combining Musical.ly’s established U.S. user base with ByteDance’s sophisticated AI recommendation algorithm, TikTok rapidly became a global phenomenon. Zhang’s approach demonstrated that a Chinese consumer app could compete with, and even surpass, Western social media giants through a combination of global thinking and algorithmic personalization. By Q1 2025, ByteDance had become the world’s largest social media company by revenue, surpassing Meta. The company was projected to generate around $50 billion in profit for 2025 and was valued between $350 billion and $370 billion as of January 2026. Its ecosystem, including Doubao, Douyin, Xigua Video, CapCut, and Feishu, showcases the company’s AI-driven content, tools, and services. This global-first strategy, embedded into ByteDance’s DNA from day one, highlights Zhang’s long-term vision of building platforms with worldwide impact. The reluctant manager’s playbook Perhaps the most unconventional aspect of Zhang’s story is his leadership style. He is, by his own admission, not a natural manager. In his 2021 letter announcing he was stepping down as CEO, he wrote, “The truth is, I lack some of the skills that make an ideal manager. I’m more interested in analyzing organizational and market principles… rather than actually managing people.” This self-awareness is his superpower. Instead of clinging to power, he engineered a system that could thrive without his constant intervention. His leadership philosophy offers a unique playbook for the modern CEO: Be a reluctant manager: Focus on long-term strategy instead of day-to-day operations, leveraging your strengths where they matter most. Flatten the hierarchy: Encourage equality and open communication to foster innovation and idea sharing. Empower local teams: Trust teams who understand their markets to make decisions, a key factor in TikTok’s global success. Build systems, not just products: Create scalable algorithms, processes, and culture that can operate independently. Encourage transparency and debate: Cultivate a culture where feedback is direct and ideas flow freely without ego. Employees describe him not as a domineering boss, but as an ordinary engineer who is rational, pragmatic, and sincere. His schedule is accessible to staff, and he fosters a culture of debate and directness. This approach — part engineer, part philosopher — is a world away from the top-down, command-and-control style of many traditional Chinese founders. It is a style born of humility and a deep-seated belief in the power of the collective. Zhang understood that to build a truly innovative company, he needed to create an environment where ideas could flow freely, unencumbered by hierarchy or ego. The bottom line Zhang Yiming’s journey is a testament to a new kind of entrepreneurship. It proves that the most powerful force in the modern world isn’t capital or charisma but a nicely crafted algorithm. His success offers a compelling counter-narrative to the myth of the swashbuckling, larger-than-life founder. He teaches us that true vision isn’t about having a single brilliant idea but about patiently connecting the dots that no one else sees. He shows that self-awareness can be a more valuable leadership trait than unshakeable confidence. Above all, he demonstrates that in the 21st century, the most influential empires are not built on steel or concrete, but on the invisible architecture of code that shapes how we perceive the world. For brands and leaders, the lesson is clear: in an age of distraction, the ultimate competitive advantage lies not just in capturing attention but in understanding the mechanics of it. Zhang Yiming built a machine that generates culture, a global assembly line for memes, trends, and viral moments. In doing so, he became the conductor of the digital age, whose influence is felt through the silent, irresistible pull of the next video in the feed. Ashley Dudarenok is a Chinese entrepreneur, author, and media personality, recognized by Thinkers50 as a “guru on fast‑evolving trends in China.” She is the founder of ChoZan, a China‑focused research and digital transformation consultancy. Ashley and her team help multinationals learn from China through tailored China innovation tours, research, and boardroom briefings. She is a keynote speaker, author of three bestselling books, runs a popular newsletter, and shares her insights with a B2B community of over 500,000 China watchers across LinkedIn and YouTube. Her latest endeavor is The Hidden Switch, a show spotlighting billion‑dollar founders from emerging countries who are reshaping the world.

Sectors

Insights

Company

Zhang Yiming: How a reluctant CEO built a $66B empire