Story of Tik Tok
The owner of TikTok is the Chinese company Bytedance, recognized in October 2018 by Bloomberg as the most expensive startup in the world. The organization was valued at 75 billion dollars, in second place – the global taxi service Uber.
Bytedance in founded Zhang Yiming in 2012. At that time he was twenty-nine. Now he is included in the ranking of the most influential people in the business world under 40 years old.
The startup’s first product was the Toutiao news aggregator, whose unique “chip” was support for artificial intelligence: the algorithm learned from the user’s habits and chose the right materials for them. You won’t surprise anyone like that now, but at that time the idea was more or less innovative.
Most startups in China usually go under the wing of major Chinese holdings, and ByteDance has taken a different path. In 2016, they released TikTok, but then it was still called Douyin and its target audience was in China. Even then, its first local stars, memes and its own atmosphere appeared in it.