Zhang Yiming founded the short-video platform TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. He started ByteDance in 2012 with Liang Rubo and other early collaborators, building the company around personalized content recommendations.
Zhang’s first major product was Toutiao, a news-aggregation app that used algorithms to recommend articles to individual users. That recommendation-focused approach later shaped Douyin, ByteDance’s Chinese short-video service, and TikTok, its international counterpart. TikTok is therefore not an independent parent company; it is a ByteDance product.
A common mix-up is identifying Zhang as TikTok’s current chief executive or confusing ByteDance with Tencent, founded by Ma Huateng. Zhang led ByteDance as chairman and CEO during its formative growth, but he stepped down as CEO in 2021. Liang Rubo, a co-founder, succeeded him as chief executive.