2016 决战国内第一（今日头条 2015 年会演讲）

2016: Fight for No. 1 in China (Toutiao 2015 Annual Meeting Speech)

> By Zhang Yiming · internal speech at the Toutiao 2015 annual meeting · full text as published by Huxiu · 2016-03-12 · [Original link](https://www.huxiu.com/article/141687.html)

Four years ago a colleague of ours whose name was something like Cuihua went to the business registration office and brought back our business license, so we set the company's birthday as March 12. In fact, even earlier than that, we had already started putting work into developing and running products.

> [Note: 「名字似翠花」 ("a name like Cuihua") is the same in the Huxiu and Jiemian versions; probably a transcription error at the event (perhaps meant 「名字叫翠花」, "named Cuihua"); the original is kept.]

Speaking of annual meetings, ByteDance has never really held a formal annual meeting before. I remember at the end of the first year we had Haidilao deliver to our apartment in Jinxiu Jiayuan. The apartment's circuit breaker soon tripped, and of the eight hotpots we'd ordered we could only run four; that was our first annual meeting. In the second year, an HR employee said it was outrageous not to have an annual meeting, and I said there were only five days left, so whatever we could prepare, that's what it would be. In the third year we took everyone on a trip to Okinawa, with no formal annual meeting. At the end of 2015, the company felt like a proper company, and it was time to hold an annual meeting.

> [Note: 「锦绣家园」 (Jinxiu Jiayuan) is the same in the Huxiu and Jiemian versions; ByteDance's early office was at 「锦秋家园」 (Jinqiu Jiayuan) on Zhichun Road, Beijing (he says 「锦秋家园」 several times in the 7th anniversary speech, see 04), so this is probably a transcription error; the original is kept.]

I told my administration and HR colleagues that if we really had to hold an annual meeting, first, don't invite Sola Aoi, because that style of annual meeting doesn't fit the company's character, it costs a lot, and it might make some female colleagues feel disrespected. Second, no making fun of me. Third, I hoped we could invite our clients, our creators or our users, so that we could have exchange with the outside. At (大) many companies the annual meeting is just for amusing themselves; we wanted the outside to see the results of our work, whether how much code we'd committed or how many clients we'd served.

> [Note: 「大很多公司」 is the same in the Huxiu and Jiemian versions; probably a transcription error (perhaps meant 「很多大公司」, "many big companies"); the original is kept.]

Then they told me I absolutely had to give a speech, and I wondered what to say. I thought about it for quite a while. Our investor Wang Qiong says I don't hype things. Actually, it's not that I don't hype, but that I'm afraid of overpromising. When I talk to investors or candidates, I usually knock off a discount, and that way it isn't hype. Or I don't mention the really impressive things. Why not? Because I'm afraid they'll say I'm a fraud. Later I thought it over, and this year it was necessary to say them. Because reaching long-term goals is first of all not my business alone, it takes everyone's joint effort, and since it takes everyone's joint effort, the things to be achieved should be said out loud. That actually reduces my pressure too.

I thought of many themes and wanted to say many things, and there is one focus: in 2016 we must fight for No. 1 in China.

I. Where we came from

In early 2012, this is how I described ByteDance: we wanted to cover many forms: images, video, articles, music; many topics: funny stuff, beautiful women, knowledge, news and more. We wanted to cover many platforms: phones and PCs. Our product's information architecture would cover distribution and creation; we'd invite many creators, such as 郑在秀小题影, and we wanted a lot of interaction, with "god-tier comments" and Toutiao's popular interactions. [Translator's note: 郑在秀小题影 is kept in the original characters.]

> [Note: 「郑在秀小题影」: the Jiemian version has 「郑在秀小题影视」; probably a transcription error for the name of a Toutiao Hao creator; the original is kept.]

This idea was written up with complete logic and a correct worldview, and it moved investors a lot. But what was the real situation?

Gaoxiao Jiongtu (搞笑囧图) was the big brother of Neihan Duanzi; the joke-type product that came out before Neihan Duanzi was Gaoxiao Jiongtu. In fact these products all covered the earlier idea, only they were born in a more down-to-earth form. Because mobile internet was developing very fast at the time, we wanted to launch products quickly to gain users and test the idea. This idea actually already covered every point of the original intention.

Of course there was a problem: when I used these products to persuade investors it was fine, but to persuade those high-ranking vice-president candidates it definitely didn't work. They'd think, how could I possibly join something this low? Even some engineers wouldn't come.

In May 2012 we had Neihan Duanzi, and only later Toutiao. Toutiao basically embodied our idea in a fairly formed and complete way. We really are not a news client; from the earliest days we hoped to cover the creation, distribution and discussion of all kinds of content, to be the information platform that knows you best. You can see from our starting point that over the past four years this starting point never changed; it was worked out in early 2012.

II. Are we OK?

If you ask me whether I'm satisfied with the past year, looking only at historical data isn't enough; whether we're OK has to be compared with the outside. Compared with what? We compare ourselves with the best internet companies in history; if we're going to compare, compare with the most extreme and the best. Look at the following internet companies and how they were in their fourth year.

GOOGLE, Baidu and Facebook are all top-tier technology internet companies, founded in 1998, 1999 and 2004 respectively. We compared their revenue four years after founding, and in this chart you can see that we are now seven million US dollars ahead of where GOOGLE was four years after its founding. So in that sense we're still "so far, so OK".

A couple of days ago I spent ages on the phone with a candidate, and today he finally came. A question candidates often ask is: "You're already this big, so future upside is limited, two or three times at most." We're a four-year-old company; let's compare what has changed for excellent tech companies from their fourth year until now.

In GOOGLE's fourth year there was no YouTube, no Android, no Gmail. In Tencent's fourth year there were no games, no OMG, no WeChat, and at its IPO it was worth only one billion US dollars; the fourth year was only a very early beginning. Alibaba is the most typical: in 2002 there was no Alipay, no Tmall, no Ant Financial. This wasn't a comeback story; in their fourth year they were already the best companies in the industry. GOOGLE goes without saying; Tencent was also one of the best companies in the industry; Alibaba's 1688 was then the largest B2B site and one of the most successful internet companies.

It's not that these companies were unremarkable for their first four years and only took off later; they were all doing very well in their fourth year. But after four years, their futures gave birth to many more valuable things. Not every company is like this; many companies had already reached their peak by year four, stopped growing and declined.

We hope ByteDance will be a company that is enterprising and strives for the extreme, and can still create many more wonderful things after four years.

Colleagues in content operations often say I'm uncultured because I don't quote famous people in my speeches. So this time I specially looked up a quotation online to go with the PPT.

"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." That's Churchill's famous line. [Translator's note: the source gives the line in Chinese, literally "this is at most only the end of a beginning"; Churchill's English wording is used here.] Four years is exactly the time it takes to finish an undergraduate degree. I think it's the same for ByteDance: after four years we're just about to graduate, and I hope this is at most the end of the beginning.

III. 2016 and the future

I'd like to look ahead with everyone at what will happen to ByteDance in the future: 2016 and beyond.

At the start of 2016 our DAU reached 40 million, and we hope that by the end of this year the Toutiao app's DAU alone will exceed 60 million, reaching No. 1 in China.

We hope that over a longer future our DAU can reach 150 million. By then, we estimate the whole market's mobile internet DAU will be about 700 million, with news penetration around 35%, roughly 250 million. Currently, news apps across the whole market have about 200 million DAU; we plus Tencent currently have 100 million DAU; add the whole Chinese browser industry that we've bent our way, since China's three big browsers have switched to the Toutiao model, all moving over to the Toutiao model, and the three together have about sixty or seventy million DAU; then add the other small companies. If in future we can take half, that's at least 100 to 150 million.

Our revenue is mainly advertising, and media time determines our ad revenue.

What is media time? Excluding chatting, watching movies, reading novels and playing games, if everything else, news, search, shopping, short video, pictures, Q&A, counts as media time, that time in China is about seventy billion minutes. Each phone user's screen-on time is a bit over three hours, of which about half is media time. Removing chat, film and TV, novels and games, it's about seventy billion minutes. If we can reach 150 million DAU, and current daily usage per user is 57 minutes, which should soon exceed 60 minutes, assume it reaches 70 minutes: that time is 10.5 billion minutes, roughly 1/7 of all users' mobile media time.

We hope that with 1/7 of media time, through a more powerful ad system and a more powerful commercial system, we can reach 1/5 of market revenue, and we hope to reach 10 billion US dollars in 2020.

Last year we went to many countries, and at the recent Two Sessions Xiaomi's Mr. Lei also said Toutiao is a representative of original Chinese innovation. [Translator's note: 雷总 = Lei Jun, founder of Xiaomi.] Indeed, we've seen followers of Toutiao in every country, and they call themselves that country's Toutiao.

We hope that within the next five years we'll have the chance to replace Twitter and Yahoo and become the world's largest content creation platform. At last year's content creators' conference we said we wanted to be the largest creation platform in the Chinese-speaking world, and at the time I told my Toutiao Hao colleagues I hoped one day we could remove the words "Chinese-speaking". [Translator's note: 头条号, Toutiao Hao, Toutiao's creator account platform.]

Excellent companies like GOOGLE, Facebook and Tencent keep producing innovative products because they've become innovative technology companies, and I hope ByteDance will be the same. Simply put, keep working hard and keep charging up the big moves (憋大招).

IV. Making the company a product

There's another very important thing. Besides the products we provide to users every day, I've always had an idea: to develop the company into a product.

We say a company has inputs: money, people, and all kinds of opportunities in the market; these are the company's inputs. Like a person's inputs: air, food, steamed buns. And the output? That's the vision, the goal you need to reach.

What lies between input and output? You have an idea, you have a friend, a group of colleagues and a sum of money; these are only factors of production. How are the factors of production turned into output products? What lies in between is the company.

We're a mobile internet technology company with a fairly simple structure, like this chart.

The company's business basically divides into three parts. Acquiring users is BD, PR and UG; product, technology and operations colleagues retain users through excellent products and services, raising activity, clicks and user satisfaction, and that's traffic; colleagues in commercial products, commercial sales and commercial operations turn this traffic into revenue. Such a cycle.

How do these parts run efficiently? How does the rotation get faster and faster? If it develops well enough, there will certainly be enough money and enough people putting themselves into this system; the input is actually unlimited. As long as your company develops well enough, the faster you can reach your goal.

How to run faster? Let's think about this abstract question: how do you make a product run faster? When we write programs, we make our coding habits a bit better, save memory as much as possible, raise the servers' CPU frequency as much as possible. I think the core of raising the running speed of the product that is the company is management and values. Management is relatively hard: it's the company's hard rules. And values? Values are the basic philosophy by which the company runs. Under the guidance of the vision, everyone can work around the values of how to better achieve the vision.

In March 2012 we registered the company and released a few products, Neihan Duanzi and Toutiao, and got our first million DAU, laying a very good foundation for the company. In the third year we scaled the products and got ten million DAU. In 2014 we solved the content problem, did creation, did commercialization; in 2014 commercialization entered a positive cycle, and the loop was established.

By 2015 we were already very competitive in China, but 2015 wasn't a landmark node; 2016 is.

I believe that in 2016 we have a great chance, and we must, become China's largest news and information platform. Of course this isn't our end point; it may be someone else's end point, but it's not ours. When I talked with my Toutiao Hao colleagues about the 2016 goals, you came up with a department vision, and after thinking for a long, long time you still didn't dare call it "China's No. 1 content creation platform"; what you came up with was "approaching China's No. 1 content creation platform". I hope that by 2017 we can remove the word "approaching".

By 2018, I hope we go a step further and become the true, absolute No. 1 in the market, taking half. By 2019, full success in globalization, becoming the world's No. 1 creation platform. If we get there, I believe Toutiao has a chance to join the next companies worth a hundred billion US dollars in market value.

A hundred-billion-dollar company: is that hype? I actually didn't say this when raising money; I didn't put it in the fundraising PPT. But I've had this idea in my heart. I've talked it over with a few colleagues and never shared it with everyone. At this annual meeting I'm sharing this goal with you all, hoping we'll reach it together. Finally, let's come back around: in 2016, the first goal is to fight for No. 1 in China!

Thank you all!

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