bytedance
(7)
Bing Wu and the seven-second problem
Before Retell AI answered business calls, Bing Wu’s team built a dubbing tool that kept listeners waiting seven seconds. His voice-AI company took shape around a deceptively difficult question: when should a machine speak?
Louis Lee Has Spent a Decade Finding the People Behind the Machines
Before Pika, Louis Lee recruited across Meta, Google and TikTok. His career makes a quiet case that the people who build the future are often found by someone who remembers what opportunity can change.
Liang Rubo and the Discipline of Day One
He spent years building ByteDance from behind the screen. Now the engineer who shared a dorm room, a desktop and a startup with Zhang Yiming is asking a global company to move as if it were still day one.
ByteDance
ByteDance is a Beijing-headquartered technology company behind TikTok, Douyin, CapCut, Lark, Toutiao and the Doubao family of AI models. Founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming and Liang Rubo, it built one of the world's most powerful content recommendation engines and grew into the largest social-media company by revenue, surpassing Meta in early 2026.
Lark
Lark is ByteDance's productivity superapp that stitches chat, video meetings, docs, spreadsheets, calendar, and project workflows into one platform, designed for multilingual teams that want to shrink their tool stack without losing power.
David Sze
David Sze is an Advisory Partner at Greylock Partners who built the firm's consumer investing franchise from scratch, backing Facebook at a $500M valuation in 2006, LinkedIn when it had 1 million users in 2004, Discord in 2016, and Roblox before it became a household name. A former operator at Excite, Electronic Arts, and HBO, he ranked #4 on the Forbes Midas List in 2012 and remains one of Silicon Valley's most decorated consumer internet investors. He is a Yale trustee, Rockefeller University board member, and advisor to McLaren Racing.
Matt Huang
Matt Huang is co-founder and Managing Partner of Paradigm, the research-driven crypto investment firm he launched with Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam in 2018. With $12.7 billion in AUM and foundational investments in Uniswap, Optimism, Flashbots, and dozens of other protocols, Huang transformed venture capital by treating his firm as a hybrid research lab, engineering organization, and fund. The son of a Goldman Sachs derivatives head and a pioneering computer science professor, he turned a $500K bet on a language-barrier pitch from Zhang Yiming into an estimated $500M windfall. In 2025, he added founding CEO of Tempo - the Stripe-Paradigm blockchain for global payments - to his portfolio, while raising a new $1.5B fund to expand into AI and robotics.