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Rui Ma 马睿 Profile picture
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20 May, 7 tweets, 2 min read
Woah Zhang Yiming steps down as ByteDance CEO giving it to cofounder and HR head Liang Rubo also his classmate from college saying that he’s not that social and not suited to managing people.

uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/exclusive…
What he said in letter is pretty consistent with what he’s always said & acted like. Also as reminder this is for ByteDance Global since ByteDance China CEO (where most of the revenue is) has been Kelly Zhang for a while.
But do go nuts on the conspiracy theories since Jack Ma was most definitely CEO of Ant.
(Correct answer would be: no he wasn’t)
Full letter:

mp.weixin.qq.com/s/NMDo4H40gCvi…
English translation of his letter:

Also now seems like a good time to surface the annotated translation we did of one of his best interviews, Tsinghua University 2018. Great insight into how he thinks.
Note: There are 4 parts!

techbuzzchina.com/bytedance/byte…
Official English letter here:
bytedance.com/en/news/60a526…

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More from @ruima

Rui Ma 马睿 Profile picture
20 May
1/ So Zhang Yiming no longer wants to be CEO of ByteDance Global. What do we know about him? Sure, he's super low key. But he's actually really open when it comes to talking about learning. So here are the books he says that have changed his life, they may surprise you:
2/ The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, MD. "A psychiatrist suggests ways in which confronting and resolving problems, a painful process most people try to avoid, can lead to greater self-understanding and spiritual growth." Image
3/ A Sense of Urgency, John Kotter.
The book is about change management, but the concept that Zhang Yiming took away from it that he talks about all the time is delayed gratification. Not just at the individual but also at the corporate level. Image
Read 7 tweets
Rui Ma 马睿 Profile picture
20 May
1/ Here are the contents of Zhang Yiming's "resignation letter" from ByteDance Global CEO.
Someone said "he's my spirit animal." Yeah I think if you're a nerd you might find that to be the case.
2/
3/ He wants to focus on new upcoming tech paradigm shifts.
FYI, he wanted to study biology in college, and he's said many times his favorite book is "Basic Biology" (a textbook)
Read 9 tweets
Rui Ma 马睿 Profile picture
19 May
1/ Just read FP article titled "China’s Overseas Tech Talent Is Torn Over Going Home." It's got some good points, but also is ultimately biased / incomplete.
- He notes that Chinese Big Tech actively "copying" SV culture. Yes I've tweeted on OKR usage by ByteDance, etc. But ...
2/ he pretty much neglects to mention that best cos are actually integrating from best practices WORLDWIDE. Alibaba shared services platform inspired by Supercell, ByteDance heavily leans on McKinsey methods. It's not copy & paste, it's a lot of interdisciplinary recombination.
3/ “A lot of my [Chinese] friends do not have proper technical aesthetics. They only try to finish the job, but they do not care about if it is beautifully done." I've heard of the same complaint re: brittle codebases, etc. But is it really just a Chinese co problem? U tell me.
Read 10 tweets
Rui Ma 马睿 Profile picture
19 May
When I caught up w my friend Ron Cao at Sky9 Capital in Q1 2020 he had said Yidui (livestreaming matchmaking) was one of his most interesting portcos. He was also an investor in Pinduoduo. We did an interview w him a few weeks ago on @techbuzzchina.
@TechBuzzChina He was also the person I quoted in my @thewirechina article The Next China is China. Pretty popular take but I like how he put it! Rural China is still growing at ~10% & has ~1Bn ppl. Infrastructure already there. Where u gonna find another mkt like this?
thewirechina.com/2021/02/28/the…
@TechBuzzChina @thewirechina Yidui, btw, is a rural China phenomenon, and bc of demographic reasons, it makes a lot of sense. If you wanna listen to Ron more, we talked abt rural China yes but also semis, SPACs, crypto more recently:
Read 5 tweets
Rui Ma 马睿 Profile picture
18 May
I know the anniversary of the big 5/12/08 Wenchuan earthquake was last week, but I came upon this story from Tencent's Pony Ma and wanted to share. Apparently a big motivation for Tencent to do charity is that after the earthquake, they could see via IP there was a steep drop ...
in users from the affected disaster areas. They knew real time lots of users will never be online again. That was a really powerful moment for him, very direct and impactful.

I remember the earthquake well too. Despite having grown up in California I'd never experienced big...
earthquakes. I remember I was in Shanghai working on the 29th floor. It was after lunch & I was feeling really nauseous & dizzy. Then ppl started yelling it was an earthquake and we dashed to the staircase. It was madness. I had just visited earthquake area for vacation 3 wks ...
Read 4 tweets
Rui Ma 马睿 Profile picture
18 May
1/ Apparently @kaifulee said “If [a Chinese tech giant] succeeds in building a product that people want, they don’t get to declare victory. They have to declare war.” That's bc no winning feature is safe from being copied. Case in point: Pinduoduo copying WeChat & Douyin.
@kaifulee 2/ (Which is kind of also what Kuaishou did, so maybe you can call it copying Kuaishou.) But the "bargain, gamified group-buying" platform has had a Moments & friend making feature since early 2020.
@kaifulee 3/ It put in a livestreaming function around the same time, but that has now been replaced by short video, which looks exactly like Douyin, of course. The diff is instead of a livestreaming tab, it tells you every few videos that there are beautiful girls waiting to chat you.
Read 5 tweets

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