Byte Beat is China’s most Facebook-like company.
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “ Chaos ” (ID: luanbooks), author Pan Luan.
The 10th Anniversary Innovation Conference of Geek Park has reviewed the seven star companies that have emerged in the past ten years. The byte-beating replication and innovation unit consists of two parts. Li Xiang first discussed from the product, technology, and cultural perspectives, “Why Byte Beat can continue to launch successful products?” This article is the second part of the conversation between Li Xiang and me. “
Talk: Li Xiang, Pan Luan
I. Misunderstanding
Misunderstanding 1
Li Xiang: There are a lot of misunderstandings. One of the misunderstood keywords is the App Factory. What do you think of this?
Pan Luan: The APP factory means that byte beating can produce apps in batches, and it can operate like a factory assembly line in the industrial era.
Zhang Yiming himself is very disgusted with this formulation. He believes that the byte beating is very transparent and innovative, it encourages free thinking, is a pragmatic romance, and the factory that pays attention to standardization of actions is not a species at all.
In my opinion, the terms batch and pipeline are also inappropriate, because byte bounce has always been very focused, and each stage has a special focus of two or three directions. For example, 15 years ago was the headline, 16-17 was the watermelon volcano, 17-18 was the Douyin, and later it was the international Tik Tok. And BYTE’s APP is not more than other big manufacturers.
If the business is not very focused, China and Taiwan cannot actually serve too many businesses at the same time, because the cost of horizontal communication across vertical lines is very high. If you are the head of the growth group, your 50-person team must grow 10 apps at the same time, and it will definitely collapse. The normal logic is to fully support the growth of one or two products at one stage. The headlines can run so fast, but the business is focused enough.
If you have to compare factories, it shouldn’t be an APP factory. Zhang Yiming might even more accept the concept of a factory that builds airplanes. He himself said: build airplanes, don’t build bicycles. Aircraft business is complex and requires a large architecture, Good talents, close collaboration, once made, there are high barriers and moats.
Misunderstanding 2
Li Xiang : There is also a saying that byte beating is Baidu in the mobile era. Can you talk about this misunderstanding?
Pan Luan : I think it is an illusion to think that headlines are like Baidu. The difference between the recommendation engine and the search engine is still very large, the specific difference can be seen in this picture:
The frequency of use, service method, expression of interest, threshold of expression, accuracy of expression and frequency are all very different. For example, Baidu search results are more deterministic and rigid, and headlines are more user-friendly entertainment. Search engines need to make users run out of time to save time, and recommendation engines allow users to immerse and consume more time. The content ecological level search engine is positioned as a traffic distributor, crawling the entire network but not controlling the content, and the recommendation engine is to complete the cycle of content creation, distribution, interaction and commercialization in a closed product.
The biggest difference between recommendation engines and search engines is the use of a large number of user characteristics. Because the search terms strongly characterize the user’s intentions, search ads can be targeted very precisely. The goal is that the results are not the user. The core optimization is to crawl the most complete content for optimal ranking. The value of user portraits in this scene Relatively weak. Personalized recommendation and calculation of advertisements need to use each person’s behavior for customized push. It is necessary to sample as much data as user portraits. If you want the product to have more advertising space, the core indicators that need to be optimized are time and Keep it.
I think the headlines were more like Facebook in the early days. For example, the concept of user growth was learned from the headlines from Facebook.
This picture is the Facebook F8 developer conference in 2014. Zuckerberg defined the company ’s core capabilities to define user growth, application construction (including retention), and commercial troika. Does the business logic and business model follow the words? Is the knot beat like?
Looking at the organizational structure, Facebook internally also builds an organization based on front-end products, technology in the platform, user growth and commercialization.Toutiao is very similar to Facebook’s organizational structure, business logic, and style of work, and the core business models of both companies are information flow advertising.
I believe that students who return from Silicon Valley to join ByteDance will feel that the integration is extremely smooth, whether it is corporate culture or collaborative office tools.
Of course, as the company’s business becomes more complex, it can no longer just stare at Facebook and Google. Now the byte beat may refer to Amazon more.
Misunderstanding 3
Li Xiang : What do you think about the misreading of byte beating?
Pan Luan: Bytes beat for a few years to achieve the current volume, everyone needs to explain, but also needs a quick explanation. Because you are successful, everyone will look for various correlations and time series connections for causal interpretation. The most typical misunderstanding is the typical misunderstanding of byte beating. Collaboration is a better way to achieve success, but not the cause.
How can a new product become a company-level project from a pilot, project attempt, and running through closed loop to 10 million DAU? These requirements for CEO decision quality are actually very high. Have a certain general direction first, choose the track, such as the layout of multiple short video products at the same time. Then set up a team, set the number one, and let Chen Lin and Zhang Nan lead the commando forward. In the process, they provide support for the algorithm team and operation review, and finally decide on resources based on business conditions.
You can see this ppt painted by Zhang Yiming in 12 years, which refers to the application of recommendation engines in different fields, which means that the byte bounce has always been done around his own product philosophy and product line product. In fact, until the acquisition of musica.ly in 2017, the byte beat was equivalent to practicing this blueprint.
I think that people often talk about technology and Taiwan and the coordination mechanism. Everyone thinks that the headlines are bottom-up, and the innovation mechanism is strong and very strong. I just can’t accept that the byte bounce is successful because there is a very blueprint CEO.
But everyone is unwilling to believe this, because it is equivalent to face the CEO, because it is relatively easy to collaborate within the company to promote cultural innovation, and it is difficult to change to a visionary CEO.
It is also worth noting that ByteDance has founded more than 50,000 employees in the company for more than 7 years. So far, no major mistakes have been made, and the organization and culture have not encountered real big challenges. No cleaning product line, no collective resignation of partners,Did not shout to advocate the elimination of petty bourgeoisie.
Organization
Organization 1
Li Xiang: Do you think Zhang Yiming intentionally established an organization or did he accidentally do it right?
Pan Luan : Zhang Yiming has always emphasized that he has been making two products at the same time since he started his business. One is a product that provides services to users; the other is a company, and the CEO is a product of the company. manager.
Zhang Yiming has experienced two failed startups, Kuxun.com and Fanfu. He has been interested in learning the advanced experience of Silicon Valley since the 99 room period. He has worked very hard at the beginning of the byte beat and worked harder than any entrepreneur. .
With regard to talent, Xie Xin, the first head of human resources in the headline, was previously the CTO of Kuxun, and may be the only CTO-born HR leader in China. The current person in charge, Hua Wei, used to be a VC, because Zhang Yiming believes that “HR and VC both need to examine human nature, and look at the ability of candidates to match.”
In addition, I like to use acquisitions to recruit. Today’s headlines of Chen Lin, Tu Worm’s Shen Zhenyu, and Douyin’s Zhang Nan, were all joined by the company after being beaten by bytes.
There is also a relatively strong tool culture inside the headlines. There is an efficiency engineering department within the company that optimizes the information flow within the company. You are like Fei Shu, originally they were larks to solve the internal collaboration of their company. It must be said here that flying books are really easy to use.
The previous Slogan on the flying book startup page was Zhang Yiming who said that the company would be built like a product.
These measures clearly show that Zhang Yiming is constructing the organization intentionally, not by accident. For example, the headline resigned employees are very unsuited to other companies’ management systems and office tools, and will feel very inefficient. For example, about the boss time or booking a conference room, other companies take a long time to communicate, headline look at lark at a glance.
Organization 2
Li Xiang: How did the organization and culture of byte-beating come into being?
Pan Luan: Here are six posters of the headline corporate culture.
These 6 posters are posted in ByteDance offices around the world. In fact, these corporate culture posters are equivalent to explaining how their corporate culture is formed. It is mainly a combination of Silicon Valley practices and a large number of indigenous pragmatic practices.
The first version of ByteDance’s corporate culture is very similar to Netflix. For example, at the beginning, it was discussed whether employees should take the company as the head of the company. The conclusion is that it should not be because the home is a place to comfort you. Place, but Byte Beat is a Chinese company, and many human factors will be added to the system design. For example, in order to reduce the time and energy wasted on the road, renting a house can provide rental subsidies within three kilometers of the company. Provide a unified cafeteria for employees at the beginning of business.
The first version of the corporate culture comes from Netflix. The organizational reference for user growth comes from Facebook. The CEO ’s bimonthly face-to-face tradition and OKR come from Google. The company ’s initial user growth and engineer culture are very similar to Facebook, data-driven. As a result, the culture of Google and Facebook has both, but when the business became more complicated, ByteDance began to learn Amazon, saying that it must be Day1 forever and subvert itself.
Bocai’s strengths, byte bounce is a purposeful pragmatism, in fact, he doesn’t care who he is and who he doesn’t want. The company’s goal is to maximize efficiency, efficiency is for growth, and organization is the way and tool to maximize it. Business products are just the result of growing basic tools, and they are the realization of basic tools. Whether the company’s basic tool itself is better or not is a more important issue.
Doctrine is not restricted by rules and regulations. Logically, other companies have made some choices about the byte bounce that Amazon and Google accept. For example, you will also learn about Nike and Dario. These non-advanced Internet companies will not hesitate to learn, as long as it makes sense to help organizational evolution.
It’s like Transformers. It’s five combined robots. They all look alike, but he is himself.
Organization 3
Li Xiang: What is the organization and culture of byte beating, what are the same and different from the previous generation of companies known for organizational culture, such as Ali?
Pan Luan: In the morning, I also asked Miao Renfeng of Alipay. They said that Ali’s organizational ability is strong, and the performance is that he can be easily deployed. He said that all this requires culture.
The similarities between Toutiao and Ali are that they have strong organizational capabilities, have cadre rotations, and are technically competent. They all advocate a sense of position, not a sense of territory. In order to solve the problem at the top of the mountain, Ali relies on the rotation of the organization department and cadres, and the headlines rely on data-driven and technical mid-stage. Of course,Recently, the byte bounce has also begun to be the organization department.
Look at this picture. For the organizational structure, Ali is more like 2 and byte beating is more like 3. Ali’s rank and Title still belong to the industry’s hard currency. A while ago, Ali’s P8 marriage letter was hotly searched, and the byte beating organization structure was flatter.
Ali pays more attention to people ’s spiritual strength, has relatively strong metaphysical and long-term goals, advocates a common vision and concentrates on doing big things, and truly achieves mission drive.
Byte beating is still in the stage of pursuing worldly success goals. It believes in strength and growth, and is guided by results and data. Go big go better. Not enough attention and discussion about those metaphysics.
However, the organization serves its goals. For a new round of growth and changing its culture again, these two companies have more ability to make new curves than most companies.
Because it was designed for the purpose at the beginning, the organization itself often tossed. The next time you change organizations, you have the same mentality. In the future, the larger organizations will evolve and they are ready. Because the mentality is always ready, unlike other companies, what has been said before will not change.
Organization 4
Li Xiang: Is the organizational culture of byte beating strong related to Zhang Yiming himself?
Pan Luan: The founder wants to set a strong example for everyone. Start-up companies extend from dozens, hundreds, thousands, and organizational cultures to the founders. What does the entrepreneur do every day, what kind of character he is, and whether he is willing to do it by himself. Many companies learn about OKR aliasing, because the CEO is not like this character. If your OKR is not public, you will not disclose the goals and future strategies of the next two months, and the organization cannot learn.
The formation of organization and culture still shows that Yiming is very good at learning. To do finance and education, he will make himself an expert in this field in a short period of time, because international executives will take English classes every week.
Zhang Yiming also has two qualities, one is curiosity and the other is ego. They are all elite intellectuals who push themselves endlessly and pursue self-iteration. In particular, ego is small. In fact, many successful entrepreneurs in China are “strong men”, which also means that their willingness to learn from the outside will be lower.
The most typical way of doing things is delaying gratification and vigorous miracles, but I think his lower level is still a very determined practical master.