douyin
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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.
Zhang Yiming and the Useful Art of Disappearing
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.
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.