What I Learned from College and Work — From ByteDance Founder Zhang Yiming
Editor’s Note: This article is from WeChat public account “Datawhale” (ID: Datawhale).The original article is in Chinese and I translated it as following. It’s said to be a letter by Zhang Yiming to college students but it can’t be verified. However, I found that it may be based on an interview of Zhang Yiming at Tsinghua University in 2018.
Foreword
In life and work, we often notice: for young people who start their own ventures, why is that for some of them, their businesses grow bigger and bigger, while for the others, their businesses get smaller? Why do young people who enter the workplace at the same time may reach a very different height in just two or three years? What is the difference between the young men who will become somebody and nobody? This in-depth summary of reflection on his college education and early work experience by ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming should give you some ideas.
Three Gains from College
I got into Nankai University in 2001. At first, college life was a bit disappointing. But slowly, in the peaceful campus and the surrounding atmosphere of hard work, I was able to find my rhythm.
During college, I mostly did three things: 1. writing code, since I was a technical major. 2. reading books, lots of them. 3. fixing computers. From these, I have made three gains: patience, knowledge, and partners.
The firstly is patience.
The ability to be patient, to tolerate loneliness, to base your judgments on long-term thinking rather than short-term distractions, and to wait patiently for what you imagined and working hard for to materialize, is critical for entrepreneurship.
You may often find yourself having imagined something beautiful, designed thoughtfully, and working hard for it, but realize what you imagined may not happen for a long time. For me, I acquired that kind of patience at Nankai University.
How did I manage the mundane life in college? Well, I read a lot of biographies of famous people to lift my spirit; they were pretty good chicken soup for the soul. If I learned anything from these books, it is that I discovered that even for these great people, they lived a pretty mundane life before they became who they were. They were doing seemingly trivial and insignificant things every day, but these little things ended up connecting the dots and formed a line that made them successful.
After graduation, I successively was involved in the founding of Kuxun, Fanfou, 99Fang, and now Toutiao. Every single one of these entrepreneurial journey has been pretty lonely. In retrospect, patience was crucial. It is not just the patience of waiting, but also the patience to think deeply, and the patience to find more and better partners.
The second gain is reading.
The lonely college life was the best quiet reading time in my life. I spent the time that others spend on gaming and playing cards on reading all kinds of books. My reading was pretty messy — I read books specialized for various professions, biographies, and also newspapers and magazines from at home and abroad.
Of course, at that time, I also had my doubts. All these books were interesting intellectually, but they were pretty useless practically and did not help my life in any way.
It was not until later that I got into the Internet industry and started building businesses that the past knowledge of all kinds became useful. They helped me understand industries, management, and master unfamiliar areas quicker, including how to organize and distribute information more efficiently, thereby changing the efficiency of all walks of life.
In 2011, I observed that the number of people reading and selling newspapers on the subway was decreasing. There were still some at the beginning of the year, but almost none at the end of the year.
At the same time, 2011 had the record for smartphone shipments, which was higher than the sum of the past three years combined.
I thought that this could be the revolution in the media of information dissemination — mobile phones were going to replace print media as the mainstream carrier of information. Combined with the closed relationships people have with their mobile phones due to their portability and personal nature, the demand for personalized recommendations will surely increase. So I founded Toutiao.
The third gain is that I made a lot of friends.
During college, I met many excellent colleagues. As a geek who does not participate much in group activities, how did I stay social? Well, mainly through fixing computers and building websites. Years later, during the class reunion, the way that I say hello to my classmates was basically, “Hi, your computer was installed by me!”
There must be dozens of computers I have installed. Of course, most of them belong to female classmates — not only do you need to help set up the computers, but you also have to maintain them frequently ;).
That’s right, as you might have guessed, fixing computers has also brought me the biggest gain in my life — my then-girlfriend and now wife.
On-campus, I took on many outsourcing projects, including building the website for my wife’s faculty (for free, of course). This skill plus some part-time gigs, when I was a senior, I could earn make more than RMB2K — 3K/month. I was considered a nouveau riche! At that time, I would labor in the lab with my classmates, staying up until 1 or 2 am in the middle of the night, and treat everyone to eat barbecue skewers. We would eat 2–3 times a week!
Many of the people that I suppered with shared my interest in programming and are like-minded school mates and friends. Many majored in microelectronics and software engineering. Many later joined the companies that I co-founded and became the technical backbone and entrepreneurial partners in these companies.
What I Learned from Working
In 2005, I graduated from Nankai University and joined a startup called Kuxun, a travel search engine company, as one of the earliest employees. I started as just a junior software engineer. However, in my second year of work, I found myself in charge of a 40–50 people team in the company, responsible for all backend technology as well as a lot of product-related work.
I was asked: How did you grow so fast in your first job? Is your performance particularly outstanding in that company?
Actually, not really. At that time, our company’s recruitment standards were very high — two PhDs from the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University joined me at the same time.
Was I the best in technical? Or was I the most experienced? Neither.
I thought about it in retrospect about what qualities I had at the time.
First of all, when I work, I never distinguish between what is my assigned responsibility and what is not. After I finished my work, I would help with most of the problems that my colleagues face as long as I can. At that time, I read most of the codes in the codebase. When a new engineer joined the team, as long as I have time, I would explain it all to him. Through the explanation, I was growing as well.
For the first two years of work, I went home at 12 or 1 am almost every day. After I got home, I would still program until late. Indeed it is because of interest, not because the company asked me to. So very quickly, I went from being in charge of a module for web crawlers to be responsible for the entire backend system. I started leading a team, then a small department, and then a big department.
I was in charge of tech at the time, but whenever there was a problem with the product, I would proactively participate in the discussions and think about product solutions.
Many people would say that it is not my job. But I would say this: Your sense of responsibility and the need to do things right will push you to do a lot more than required, and you will get the extra experience in the process.
I was an engineer, but the experience of being actively involved in product helped me tremendously later when I switched to product. My involvement in the business side also proved to be very helpful to my current work.
I remember that at the end of 2007, I went to meet potential customers with the sales director of the company. That experience taught me what kind of sales is superb. When I set up Toutiao and was recruiting people, these past experiences provided good reference points, so I wasn’t clueless in this field.
Why I Started Up
I have huge respect for Elon Musk. He not only founded TESLA but also founded a company called Space X, which aims to innovate space technology. The ultimate goal is to allow human beings to become a multi-planetary spacefaring species.
Space X is now the first private company in the world to have successfully launched rockets into space and recycled them. The process of achieving breakthroughs in frontier technology is incredibly difficult, and maybe no one else shares your belief for a long time. Elon Musk has always believed — as long as it’s sound and possible theoretically, then we should strive our best to accomplish it.
I particularly appreciate the courage to pursue excellence and lead. For young entrepreneurs, the aim should be to create new technologies, do things that are established theoretically but have not yet realized, and bring fundamental progress to the world. When starting a business, some people want to make money, while others want to make something. I think I am the latter.
If you accidentally discovered that penicillin could treat infections, should you first consider using it to save people or make money? I think most of us would first be thinking about saving people. In our time, it’s possible to provide personalized recommendations of information, and I want to make it happen.
If I were to sell ByteDance now, I could get a lot of money. But what I am working hard for is not to make money and enjoy spending it. What motivates me is self-realization. I hope to have more creative experiences, fuller life experiences, and to meet more outstanding people.
The entrepreneurial environment now is excellent compared to last time. How large the outcome your entrepreneurial journey can be, depends most importantly on how far you are willing to go. Young people should have big ambitions and enjoy the struggle. Don’t be complacent and don’t slack off. You should set your goals as far as possible.
Five Qualities of Outstanding Young People
I joined various startup teams along the way. During this journey, I have worked with many young graduates, and I still keep in touch with many of them. I would share with you some good and bad things that I have seen. In summary, what are the qualities of outstanding young people?
- Curiosity, being proactive to learn new things, new knowledge, and new skills.
I used to have a colleague who has a solid technical foundation, but every time he finishes his work, he packs up and leaves the office. He had been working at the company for over a year, but he never spends the effort to understand new technologies or new tools. He was very dependent on others. Whenever he wants to implement a feature, he needs someone else to help him do the latter part, because he can only do the first half. If you had been curious enough and have some level of mastery at frontend, backend, and algorithms, or at least some understanding at each, then you can do a lot of the testing and analysis all by yourself.
2. Being optimistic about uncertainty.
When Toutiao first started, if I were to tell people: we have to achieve 100 million DAUs, many people would think, how can our small company do it? If you are skeptical about something, you dare not try hard. Only the optimists will choose to believe and will be willing to try.
It was the same when I first joined Kuxun. The company wanted to be a next-generation search engine (we didn’t make it in the end, only managed to do a search engine for the travel vertical). I didn’t know what others thought at that time, but I was very excited. I was indeed uncertain and had no idea how to do it, but I went to learn everything about search and studied all the relevant materials.
I think, even if it doesn’t work out in the end, or is not achieved completely, but the process of figuring out will still be helpful as long as you remain optimistic about uncertainties — you will be more willing to try.
3. Unwilling to be mediocre.
After entering society, young people should set higher standards. Among my classmates and colleagues that I studied or worked with during college, there are many excellent talents. For sure, some of them had better skills or grades than me. But after ten years, many didn’t meet my original expectations for them.
After graduation, many people don’t set high goals for themselves. Looking back, some of my peers joined the IT departments at banks: some joined right after graduation, while others joined after working for some time.
Why do I associate them with “unwilling to be mediocre”? Because many of them joined the banks to expedite the process of getting registered permanent residence (“Hukou”) in Beijing or for the opportunity to buy affordable housing.
If after graduation, all you can think about is to buy a small two- or three-bedrooms within Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road [1] and spend all your energy on it, then how you work and how you behave will change. You will be unwilling to take risks.
If you’re unwilling to be mediocre and strive to do very well, you need not worry about any of this stuff. When I say not mediocre, it does not mean a high salary or great skills, but that you must have high standards for yourself. Maybe you won’t appreciate any difference in the first two years, but looking back 10 years later, I’m sure it will be drastically different.
4. Having a small ego and can delay gratification.
Let me start with a counter-example: two young men who left an impression on me — both are of high caliber and have great skills, and each has distinctive qualities. I was their supervisor at the time and noticed that their work delivery was never smooth.
They thought that the other colleagues were not as good as them. That’s not really the truth - they can certainly count as the top 20% among the recruits at the time, but in their minds, they are the top 1%. So for basic tasks, such as building a debugging tool, they would not be willing to do. For work that needs to be coordinated with colleagues, they cannot cooperate well either.
Originally great talents with the smarts and good execution, because they couldn’t control their ego, never end up what they could have become.
I think this does not contradict “unwilling to be mediocre”. “Unwilling to be mediocre” means that you have to set your goal very high, and “small ego” means that you are realistic about where you stand.
Another example — we had a product colleague who was also recruited as a fresh graduate. At that time, everyone thought he was not particularly smart, so we asked him to do some supporting work — consolidate the metrics, conduct user feedback, etc. Now he is the vice president at a billion-dollar company.
Later, when I think about it, what stands out about him is that he is willing to follow through, is responsible, and never shirks. As long as he is in the position to take responsibility, he always does his best. His work usually was not really excellent, but we always provided him feedback. When he went to the billion-dollar company (not at the time), he first took charge of a low priority channel with <100K users and managed to grow it significantly. Because it was a low priority channel, it didn’t have a complete team. So he took many responsibilities upon himself and, in the process, acquired lots of experience.
5. Having good judgment about important decisions.
In choosing a profession, company, career, and development path, you must have good judgment and not be swayed by short-term considerations. For example, not so long ago, most graduates wanted to work in foreign MNCs rather than startups.
In 2006 and 2007, many of my juniors asked my advice on career choices. I suggested that they go to Baidu instead of IBM or Microsoft. Far too many people choose jobs based on short-term considerations: foreign companies may be well-known and pay higher. It may sound cliche, but I would like to reiterate: the 3–5K salary difference for your first job is negligible in the long-term. But honestly, not too many people can break away from short term benefits and make decisions based on long-term considerations.
Note
[1] The inner the ring, the more expensive the real estate. Generally, within the fifth ring is considered middle-class.
