Zhang Yiming Tik Tok (Zhang Yiming, founder of Tik Tok)

Zhang Yiming, founder and CEO of ByteDance Technology Co., Ltd., founder of today's headlines and founder of Tik Tok. In 20 13, it was selected as "30 entrepreneurs under the age of 30 in China" by Forbes and "40 business elites under the age of 40 in China" by Fortune.

The following is his sharing:

Why do people with similar levels widen the gap after graduation for many years? Hello everyone! You are all young. I was under a lot of pressure when I came here today. Because I graduated almost 1 1 years ago, when I saw you, I really felt that "the waves behind the Yangtze River pushed the waves before."

I participated in the school recruitment in Wuhan last year, and I feel that the quality of the new generation of young people is really good. I was thinking about what I should share with you today yesterday. After thinking about it, I first drafted the title and changed Jobs's "Stay Hungry and Stay Stupid" to "Stay Hungry and Stay Young".

I want to share my work experience and experience after graduation with you. In addition, as an interviewer, I may have interviewed 2000 young people in the past 10 years. Some were in the same company as me, and some went to other companies. Their development is actually very different. From the algorithmic level, we call it "positive example" and "counterexample".

I want to share: Why is there such a big difference between "positive cases" and "negative cases"?

What is "stay hungry and stay young"? "Stay hungry", as we all know, means curiosity, thirst for knowledge and self-motivation. But why say "stay young"?

I think young people have many advantages: no rules and regulations, not too much self-protection, frequent violations, hard work, uncompromising and unsophisticated.

10 years later, some young people still maintain these good qualities. I think this is "staying young".

People who "stay young" have hardly reached the ceiling and have been growing. On the contrary, many people improve their skills after graduation, but they stop growing after reaching a ceiling.

How to become the supervisor of a 50-person team in the second year of graduation? In 2005, I graduated from Nankai University and joined a company called Kuxun. I was one of the first employees to join. At first, I was just an ordinary engineer, but in the second year, I managed a team of forty or fifty people in the company, responsible for all back-end technologies and many products-related work.

Someone asked me: Why did my first job grow so fast? Are you particularly outstanding in that company?

Actually, it is not. At that time, the company's recruitment standards were also very high. When I joined the company at the same time, I remember that there were two PhDs in the Department of Computer Science in Tsinghua.

Am I the best? Is it the most experienced? I didn't find anything. Then I thought about what I had.

At work, I don't know what I should and shouldn't do.

After I finish my work, I will do most of my colleagues' problems as long as I can help solve them. By that time, I had seen most of the code in Code Base. As soon as I have time, I will explain it to a new person when he joins the job. Through explanation, I can grow myself.

Another feature is that two years before work, I basically went home at 12 every day, and programming was very late after I got home. It's really because of interest, not because the company has requirements. So I quickly went from being in charge of a module for extracting reptiles to being in charge of the whole back-end system, starting with a team, then a small department and then a big department.

I never set boundaries.

At that time, I was in charge of technology, but when there was a problem with the product, I would actively participate in the discussion and think about the product plan. Many people say that this is not what I should do. But I want to say: your sense of responsibility and your motivation to do things well will drive you to do more things and give you great exercise.

I was an engineer at that time, but the experience of participating in the product was very helpful for me to transform into a product later. My involvement in business is also very helpful to my present job. I remember at the end of 2007, I went to see customers with the sales director of the company. This experience taught me: what kind of sales is good sales. When I set up headlines to recruit people, these reference cases will make me know nothing about this field.

These are the characteristics when I just graduated.

10 years of observation, all the outstanding talents I met have these five characteristics. Later, I joined various entrepreneurial teams. In this process, I live with many graduates and still keep in touch with many of them. Share some good and bad things I have seen with you. To sum up, what are the characteristics of these outstanding young people?

First, I am curious and can actively learn new things, new knowledge and new skills.

I'm not too modest today. I take myself as a positive example, and then I will tell you a negative example. I have a former colleague who has a good theoretical foundation, but he always leaves work after finishing his work. He has been in this company for more than a year, but he knows nothing about the new technologies and tools on the Internet.

So he is very dependent on others. When he wants to realize a function, he needs someone to help him with the second half, because he can only do the first half by himself-if he is a curious person, he can master the front end, back end and algorithm, or at least understand it, then he can do a lot of debugging and analysis by himself.

Second, be optimistic about uncertainty.

For example, the headline tells you at the beginning: We have to do 1 100 million daily startup times. Many people will think, what does your small company do? Only big companies can do it well. So he dare not work hard. Only optimistic people will believe and be willing to try.

Actually, it was the same when I joined Cool News. That company wants to be the next generation search engine. I don't know what others think, but I feel very excited. I really wasn't sure and didn't know how to do it, but I went to study and saw all these related things. I think it may be impossible or incomplete in the end, but this process will also be very helpful-as long as you are optimistic about the uncertainty of things, you will be more willing to try.

Third, we are not satisfied with mediocrity.

After entering the society, we should set higher standards. I have met many college students and colleagues who work together, and there are many excellent talents whose skills and grades are better than mine. But after 10 years, many people failed to meet my expectations: I thought he should be able to do well, but he didn't.

Many people have low goals after graduation. I looked IT up and found that some colleagues joined the IT department of the bank: some joined after graduation, and some joined after working for a period of time. Why do I associate this with "unwilling to be mediocre"? Because many of them joined in order to quickly solve the Beijing hukou, or at that time, some institutions had housing allocation subsidies and could buy affordable housing.

Later, I was thinking about a problem. If I don't want to be mediocre and hope to do well, I won't worry about these things: do I have a Beijing hukou? Can I buy a set of affordable housing?

If a person sets his goal here as soon as he graduates: to buy a two-bedroom apartment and a three-bedroom apartment in Beijing's Fifth Ring Road and spend all his energy on it, then his work will be greatly affected. His behavior will change and he won't take risks.

For example, I met my former friend who did some part-time jobs in his spare time to earn some income. In fact, those part-time jobs have no technical content, which has an impact on their own work, not only on his career development, but also on his mental state. I asked him why, and he said, hey, pay a down payment quickly. I think he looks like he made a profit, but he actually lost.

It is important not to be mediocre. When I say not mediocre, I don't mean that the salary is high or the technology is good, but that you must set high standards for yourself. Maybe you changed slowly in the first two years, but after 10 years, it will be very different.

Fourth, don't be arrogant, but be able to delay satisfaction.

Here is a counterexample: the two young people who impressed me deeply have good quality and skills, and they are also quite distinctive. I was their supervisor at that time, and I found that deliver was always in a bad situation at work. They think that other colleagues are doing worse than them, but they are not: they can really be counted as the top 20% of colleagues recruited at that time, but they mistakenly think that they are the top 1%. So he doesn't want to do a lot of basic work, such as being a debugging tool or not cooperating well with his colleagues.

Originally, they were all very qualified talents, very smart and have strong hands-on ability, but they never controlled their pride. I think this is not contradictory to "unwilling to be mediocre". "Not satisfied with mediocrity" means that you should set high goals, and "not arrogant" means that you should be practical in the status quo.

In these 2000 samples, I saw a lot of things that I thought were good, but they didn't develop as well as I thought. What I thought was not good, but it actually exceeded my expectations. Here I also give an example:

At that time, we had a colleague who made products and was also recruited by fresh graduates. At that time, everyone thought he was not particularly smart, so we asked him to do some auxiliary work, statistics, user rebound and so on. But now, he is the vice president of a billion-dollar company.

Later, I thought about it. His characteristics are hard work, responsibility and never shirking. As long as he has the opportunity to undertake one thing, he always tries his best to do it well. It's not particularly good every time, but we always give him feedback. After he went to that company, he took charge of a marginal channel with less than 654.38 million users and made this channel better and better. Because this is a marginal channel and not equipped with a complete team, he took on a lot of responsibilities and got a lot of exercise.

Fifth, have judgment on important things.

You should have your own judgment on what major, company, occupation and development path to choose, and don't be influenced by short-term choices. Some of the above examples also cover this point. For example, at that time, many people were willing to go to foreign companies instead of emerging companies. In 2007, many schoolmates asked me about my career choice, and I advised them to go to Baidu instead of IBM or Microsoft. But in fact, many people do it for short-term reasons: foreign companies may be famous and have higher wages.

Although this truth has been heard many times. When I first graduated, the salary difference was three or five thousand, which was really insignificant. Short-term salary differences are not important. But in fact, there are not many people with judgment who can get rid of this.