Now it has become one of China’s short video giants, and it has been battling with Douyin under ByteDance for a long time.
Zhang Yiming and source capital Cao Yi: “In the beginning, you voted for me, and now I also support you”
All along, Zhang Yiming’s well-known identity is not only the founder of the world’s largest unicorn, he is also the LP of source capital. He and the source capital Cao Yi are sympathetic and become a model for mutual support between investors and entrepreneurs. .
In 2013, with millions of daily lives, Toutiao started to look for Series B financing, but Zhang Yiming hit the wall everywhere. A detail circulated in the circle: It was said that Zhang Yiming visited more than 30 VC organizations one after another, saying that his voice was dumb and no one would like to vote for him. It was in this round that Cao Yi, who was still at Sequoia Capital, pushed today’s headlines at an internal meeting, but was not passed. This was also a pity for Shen Nanpeng when he remembered it—it was too late to vote for Zhang Yiming.
In 2014, Cao Yi, who left Sequoia China, founded the source code capital. The first fund successfully raised US$100 million. The first investment of the source code capital was given to today’s headline, with an investment of 5 million US dollars. Later, whenever there is an opportunity, he will add it.
It is worth mentioning that the LPs behind the first source capital fund include Zhang Yiming and Wang Xing. According to the data, Zhang Yiming was the largest single shareholder of source code capital, holding 8.14%; Wang Xing, Wu Shichun and others were the second largest single shareholder, holding 7.75%; Zhou Hang, Li Xiang, Xu Yirong and others held 3.88%.
At the end of 2019, one of the operating entities of the source code capital, “Tibet Source Code Equity Investment Partnership (Limited Partnership)”, had a shareholder change and many individual shareholders withdrew, including Zhang Yiming and Wang Xing.
At the beginning of this year, Zhang Yiming and Wang Xing also withdrew from the shareholders of another source of investment in the source code capital “Tibet Yuanshang Equity Investment Partnership (Limited Partnership)”, and also withdrew from the car home founder Li Xiang , Moderator Li Jing, founder of Blue Cursor Zhao Wenquan and many other shareholders.
However, information from Tianyanzhan shows that Zhang Yiming is still a shareholder in multiple investment entities of source code capital.
Actually, Zhang Yiming and Cao Yi have a very good personal relationship. Three years ago, at today’s 5th Anniversary Annual Meeting of Toutiao, Cao Yi participated as the only external guest. At that time, he unreservedly expressed his optimism about Zhang Yiming: Yiming is Zuckerberg in China. The headline should be Companies with hundreds of billions of dollars.
Today, ByteDance valuation has exceeded 100 billion US dollars, becoming the world’s fastest growing super unicorn.
From the existing public information, we can know that Zhang Yiming personally only made the LP of the source code capital, but the bytebeat he led has quietly become the LP of many institutions.