Zhang Yiming

Zhang Yiming studied at Nankai University in Tianjin, starting in microelectronics before switching to software engineering and graduating in 2005. He was an early engineer at the travel search startup Kuxun, worked briefly at Microsoft and then at Fanfou, an early Chinese microblogging service. In 2009 he co-founded the property search site 99fang with Liang Rubo, working on the search and ranking problems that later shaped ByteDance's recommendation-first approach.

Zhang Yiming co-founded ByteDance in Beijing in March 2012 and served as its chief executive until November 2021. Before ByteDance he worked at Kuxun, Microsoft and Fanfou and co-founded the property search engine 99fang with Liang Rubo in 2009. His central idea was that smartphones would make recommendation more important than search, so ByteDance built a machine-learning ranking system first and products on top of it: Toutiao in August 2012, Douyin in September 2016 and TikTok about a year later. He pushed early for global expansion, including the November 2017 purchase of Musical.ly, which was merged into TikTok in 2018. In May 2021 he said he would step back from day-to-day management to focus on long-term strategy, and in November 2021 he left the board, while keeping majority voting control, according to Reuters. TikTok's growth made him one of the richest people in China, and 2024 rich-list rankings placed him first in the country.

Zhang Yiming was born in 1983 in Longyan.