
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.

He built a company around predicting what people would watch next, then decided the most interesting next move was to leave the chief executive's chair. Now ByteDance's private founder is back near the frontier he never really abandoned: artificial intelligence.

He began with shopping guides for Chinese travelers. A decade later, the quiet founder of Xiaohongshu presides over a place where hundreds of millions decide what is worth eating, wearing, visiting and remembering.