On May 20, 2021, Zhang Yiming, the 38 year old founder of byte beat, unexpectedly sent a letter to all staff, announcing his resignation as CEO of the company. At an age when most people still need to struggle, Zhang Yiming chose to "retire" early. Now, a whole year has passed. Byte, a "unicorn" valued at hundreds of billions of dollars, was waved by Zhang Yiming and handed over to his college roommate Liang Rubo.
This year, Internet companies faced a tightened external regulatory environment, the Internet demographic dividend disappeared, the story of rapid growth could not continue, and zhonggai shares suffered revaluation in the overseas secondary market.
A series of organizational structure and business changes have also been carried out inside byte. The main line is to lose weight and lose weight. The personnel are optimized and adjusted. The internal and external situation is complex and unclear. Therefore, every time byte has something to do, someone is calling for the return of founder Zhang Yiming.
As Zhang Yiming wrote in his letter to the whole staff, he was not interested in simply expanding the business scale. The busy CEO's work hollowed out his knowledge reserve, making him feel that he was "eating his old capital" and preferred to be in a daze. Therefore, he seemed to deliberately ignore these voices and eliminate them completely.
In his resignation letter a year ago, Zhang Yiming made a ten-year agreement with the company, hoping to explore a more far-reaching development goal. A year has passed. What fields has Zhang Yiming explored? "Post Yiming era", has byte found a new beating rhythm?
Zhang Yiming's year of "complete disappearance"
No internal letter, no speech, no face-to-face communication of "classmate Association", and Zhang Yiming, who has been retired for one year, disappeared completely.
The annual Arbor Day is also the anniversary of byte. This year coincides with the 10th anniversary of byte. The staff's Siqing gift bag has been upgraded. There are T-shirts, backpacks, water cups, stationery bags, notepad and canvas bags with the theme of the 10th anniversary, which are much richer than in previous years. Some employees also expect that Zhang Yiming, the long lost founder of the company, can take advantage of the 10th anniversary to speak on the stage as in previous years to cheer up the "students".
But on Si Qing's day, the celebration was hosted by tiktok CEO Zhou Shouzi online, and CEO Liang Rubo made an opening speech. Zhang Yiming, the founder of the company, did not show up, nor did he send an internal letter or record videos in advance. It seems that he intends to keep a distance from the company.
Lin Fang, who joined the company in 2019, has experienced three anniversary celebrations, which is the first time that Zhang Yiming does not exist. In previous years, Zhang Yiming will appear on the scene, either make a keynote speech or act as a host. Many "golden sentences" of enterprise values come from such occasions.
Lin Fang recalled that in the past two years, whenever there were major events in the company, Zhang Yiming would make a voice and sometimes send internal letters to discuss corporate values; Sometimes I will participate in regular "classmate meetings" and have a dialogue with front-line employees on site to answer their workplace and life puzzles.
Since Zhang Yiming "retired", Lin Fang felt that the weak connection between herself and the top managers of the enterprise had been completely broken. Although Liang Rubo, a roommate in the University, took over Zhang Yiming's class, in the view of many employees, some of Zhang Yiming's public voice in the past will have an obvious personal style. Sharing will also start from what he sees and feels, which is more grounded and has no sense of distance; Liang Rubo's internal sharing focuses more on business, rarely makes personal play, and is more official.
For some time, Zhang Yiming disclosed his OKR to align the work goals of the company. Later, he admitted that he had not updated his OKR since 2021. The front-line employees of byte were also closed and unable to view Zhang Yiming's OKR.
Zhang Yiming, who is not good at social networking and prefers to surf the Internet, read books, listen to songs and be in a daze, thinks he is not a mature manager in the traditional sense. In contrast, he prefers to be a lonely explorer. The cover of Zhang Yiming's flying book is a person sitting on a paddle and sliding towards the center of the lake alone. In the distance, there are towering snow mountains and jungles. The future is unknown, leaving others on the shore to see his back.
The year when Zhang Yiming retired is also a year when byte is facing great internal and external challenges.
The Internet has entered the era of stock competition and strict supervision. In the past, the rapid development of bytes has also slowed down. The company began to reduce costs and increase efficiency, reorganize its structure and business lines, from borderless expansion in the past to cutting down some business lines and optimizing employees. The company has entered a growth bottleneck period, and the labor relations between employees and the company have also entered a multi friction stage. The cancellation of weeks and weeks has triggered a big discussion on the decline of wage income. Recently, an employee's performance has been marked "FII" (F is the worst performance in bytes), which has raised questions about unfair assessment, and the management has encountered a crisis of employee trust again.
At this time, many employees began to call for Zhang Yiming's return. On the byte intranet, some employees posted a post saying: "call, danger, return quickly". In the recent "FII incident", some employees believe that the more and more frequent deletion and restriction of posts in the byte circle is gradually far from the "byte model" corporate culture dominated by Zhang Yiming in the past with "honesty and clarity" as the core.
But no matter inside or outside, there was not much information about Zhang Yiming in this year. In recent years, many founders of Internet companies have chosen to retreat in a hurry, but "retreat without rest" is still the norm. Huang Zheng, founder of pinduoduo, who resigned as chairman last year, was found to have donated 250 million yuan to his alma mater Zhejiang University at the end of 2021, although there is little news.
The news about Zhang Yiming is more about gradually cutting with byte, and recently it is intensively stepping down as the legal representative of many companies under byte.
"Post Yiming era" continues to shrink
Zhang Yiming is no longer interested in making big money. He doesn't want to "eat the old capital". He wants to focus on learning, systematic thinking and researching new things for a period of ten years, so as to create more possibilities for the company.
On the 7th anniversary of byte in 2019, Zhang Yiming shared the concept of "pragmatic romanticism". On the occasion of Zhang Yiming's retirement, some employees lamented on the social platform: if the CEO becomes Liang Rubo, will pragmatic romanticism become pragmatism? From the actual situation of this year, compared with the borderless expansion of the "Zhang Yiming era", when byte entered the "liangrubo era", it became a new choice to shrink the boundary and rely on Tiktok to make a big harvest.
In Zhang Yiming's era, byte launched attacks on popular tracks such as short video, live broadcast, information, games, social networking, Q & A, education and finance, but it also made it difficult to focus on business objectives. In the end, many tracks ended in failure. Fortunately, the company developed fast enough to cover up many contradictions. In Zhang Yiming's words, it is not easy for the company to have office politics and collision at this time. But once the company develops slowly, it is easy to squeeze together, just like a box with many balloons.
What Liang Rubo is doing is more like puncturing a balloon that doesn't make money and giving space to the balloon of "cash cow". During the two handed over the stick, the change of the external environment accelerated the progress of "poking the balloon", and the contradiction was also intensified.
In 2021, the Internet industry ushered in an eventful year: platform antitrust, double reduction in the education and training industry, algorithm recommendation and rectification, strong supervision of the financial industry, all of which are on the lifeline of many business lines. So at the stage of Liang Rubo, a series of operations, such as "breaking the muscles and bones" adjustment of the education sector, large-scale layoffs of commercial teams, and the sale of financial businesses, began to shrink sharply.
Incomplete statistics of leopard substation based on public data
On November 2, 2021, bytek made a major adjustment to its organizational structure, and set up six BU for the first time: Tiktok, vigorously education, Feishu, volcanic engine, Chaoxi Lightyear and tiktok. The establishment of the six business divisions actually symbolizes that byte, which previously liked to run fast and try and make mistakes quickly, is about to enter a period of business stability. Zhang Yiming also completed the final power transfer of the company without appearance.
With more than 600million live days, Tiktok is undoubtedly the basic disk of byte traffic, which plays the role of byte ecological traffic infrastructure and is the foundation of commercial realization. At one time, Tiktok's revenue mainly depended on advertising, but then e-commerce was highly expected by bytek. In June, 2020, bytek established a "e-commerce" level-1 department to coordinate the e-commerce business of platforms such as Tiktok, today's headlines, watermelon video, etc.
Different from Zhang Yiming's era, byte likes to "taste fresh", perhaps it is facing increasing listing pressure. Now byte wants to rely on mature businesses such as e-commerce to quickly make large revenue. This is a very realistic demand for a company preparing for IPO. According to media reports, the Gmv of Tiktok e-commerce may reach nearly trillion yuan in 2021, while the Gmv target in 2022 is 2trillion yuan, maintaining an annual growth rate of doubling. However, the recurrence of the epidemic and the unsmooth production, sales, circulation and other links have put a lot of pressure on the continued expansion of Tiktok e-commerce.
Recently, Tiktok has also increased the promotion of e-commerce businesses such as "Tiktok mall", and has frequently attracted users to place orders with the selling points of low-cost good goods, limited time spike and tens of billions of subsidies. It is obvious that it wants to rapidly expand Gmv by relying on subsidies and low prices.
This year, the resources of bytes are gradually tilting towards Tiktok. Since joining byte in the second half of 2019, Liu Li's organizational structure has been commercialized. At the end of 2021, the commercial team laid off staff in a large scale, and Liu Li became the lucky one to stay. However, after that, her organizational structure was adjusted to the Tiktok line, and the performance was mainly assessed by Tiktok related work indicators. Before that, Xu Luran, the person in charge of byte social project "multi flash", also joined the e-commerce business line after multi flash was abandoned by the strategy.
Liangrubo's latest big move is to rename byte "Tiktok group". On May 6, byte beating (Hong Kong) Co., Ltd. was renamed Tiktok group (Hong Kong) Co., Ltd. In addition, a number of companies under byte beat have also changed their names one after another, focusing on "Tiktok". Prior to this, bytek appointed a high standard successor CFO, known as "IPO specialist", who helped many Chinese technology companies to list overseas.
Market participants believe that the move to change the name is aimed at improving the valuation of Tiktok brand, which is strongly related to byte's consideration of listing Tiktok and other domestic businesses as Tiktok group in Hong Kong. Perhaps, the purpose behind Liang Rubo's series of contractions is to expand: to achieve the IPO of Tiktok.
The answer is in the meta universe
Zhang Yiming has quoted the sentence in Alice in Wonderland on many occasions: sometimes before breakfast, I already believe that six seemingly impossible things will happen. But his busy work made him ignore that many things had happened in reality.
Zhang Yiming is worried that cutting-edge technology has taken place and he is out of touch with it. He found that he had not studied systematically for too long and could not keep up with his colleagues in the technical seminar. Therefore, cutting-edge technology accounts for a large proportion in Zhang Yiming's "retirement" learning list.
Virtual reality is the first area that Zhang Yiming needs to focus on in his resignation letter. According to Internet observers who pay attention to byte dynamics, Zhang Yiming pays more attention to Pico.
Pico is a VR product of Beijing bird look Technology Co., Ltd. the company was acquired by bytek in August last year and incorporated into bytek's VR related business, obtaining a large number of Tiktok channel exposure and content introduction subsidies. Industrial and commercial data show that Zhang Yiming owns more than 98% of the beneficial shares of the company.
Internet giants favor virtual reality technology is not without precedent. Facebook established its leading position in the VR market through the acquisition of oculus. In October 2021, Facebook announced that part of its brand would be renamed "meta", adding metauniverse and virtual reality technology. But investors do not seem to agree with this idea. Facebook's share price has fallen from a high of $381 in September last year to about $192, almost halving.
Byte has also been involved in hardware manufacturing before, but the response is general. In 2018, byte acquired the dying hammer mobile phone, but it has not improved. At the beginning of 2021, byte announced to abandon the mobile phone business and merge the hammer team into the education hardware team. Will Zhang Yiming repeat his mistakes in this layout of VR intelligent hardware?
From the perspective of promotion, Pico's marketing on Tiktok is not without effort.
According to leopard transformation, Pico has registered four Tiktok blue V enterprise numbers. Among them, Tiktok, the "official flagship store of Pico", is broadcast live for almost 20 hours every day, and several anchors are broadcast live in shifts. They continue to emphasize the 30 day trial. If you are not satisfied, you can return it without reason.
Pico Tiktok live studio, where the anchor broadcasts live for nearly 18 hours a day
According to the statistics of cicada mother, the live Gmv is not optimistic. The average Gmv of the last 34 live broadcasts is only 107000 yuan. However, CSC securities predicted in a research report that Pico's shipment will be increased from the original 1 million units to 1.8 million units in 2022 due to the better than expected marketing effect of byte on Pico. However, there is still a big gap compared with the sales of nearly 9 million oculus.
At the same time, byte also increased its support for Pico. It is reported later that more than one person in charge of bytek's content line has been transferred to Pico's Department, such as songbinghua, head of Tiktok variety show, wuzuomin, director of Tiktok entertainment, Ren Lifeng, head of watermelon video, etc., hoping to make up for Pico's previous shortcomings in marketing and content.
However, many consumers still have doubts about VR products. Some users said that VR equipment is expensive and not just needed, so they dare not try it easily and are afraid of stepping on the pit. Some people have bought VR products before, but the bad experience makes them feel that they have spent unjustified money. It can be seen that compared with mainstream consumer goods such as mobile phones, UAVs and new energy vehicles, it remains to be seen whether VR, which belongs to a niche market, can meet Zhang Yiming's expectations.
Zhang Yiming once said that his signature file has always been like a daze, implying that he likes to think about some ideas that are very boundless and rarely discussed. Now, his signature of flying book is changed to "serious, patient, relaxed and active". In the year when Zhang Yiming decided to "retire", his complete release gave his successor room to show his strength, but where byte finally went, the outside world can only wait patiently for the time being.