Right Time To Begin Is The Key: Matthew Brennan
TikTok has becomes the world's fastest-growing tech behemoth worth in excess of $100 billion. Several things have been written about TikTok and ByteDance, however, no one has told the complete story. Hence, Matthew Brennan come up with his book named- Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance. It is a blend of storytelling and analysis, interwoven with captivating anecdotes of TikTok, and ByteDance.
The Attention Factory
Talking about why he chose this catchy name for the cover page, Brennan said, "Actually, up until very late, the actual name of the book was 'App Factory', because it is the nickname of ByteDance in China. In China, they have 50-60 apps in the market and are constantly changing. We changed it, on the basis of the recommendation of a friend of mine, a university professor (Business School). He said, you know why don't you go with 'Attention Factory' as this company is about attention, that's the core thing here, what makes TikTok so compelling is how it grabs your attention and keeps you coming back watching the short video."
The Mysterious Founder
Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance is a very impressive entrepreneur, by some means, he is perhaps one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. Terming Yiming as a serial entrepreneur, Brennan said, "ByteDance is not his first company, he is a serial entrepreneur who has been in Beijing since the beginning of the internet era. Working with startups and leading them to create various internet products. He is famous for being logical and philosophical, thinking about where he wants to spend his time and how he wants to build ByteDance as a company. Today, he has already left the CEO position to focus on other areas, but is very much in charge of the company."
He still takes care of how the information flows through ByteDance, optimizing it and making it more efficient as possible, Brennan mentioned.
The Perfect Timing
Brennan said, the timing of Bytedance, we can look back now and 10 years later can say, that was the right time to start this company, at the beginning of the mobile internet revolution in China and also the beginning of the revolution recently, around deep learning and AI. "Why is this company able to grow so fast? Because it is the right time to begin and focus on neural networks and machine learning together with video and news feed content on mobile internet," Brennan added.
During his interaction, Brennan talked about what brought ByteDance to his attention and how he realised this something could be very big. "The main advantage I had for being so early to see this trend is actually being in China. Being on the ground and using Douyin the Chinese version. I was a heavy user of it in early 2017. I believed in the product, in the platform and I can see the value. I also had friends working in ByteDance, so having insiders, who were working early on TikTok and speaking to them regularly."
In earlier times, there was skepticism around whether ByteDance with TikTok could be successful outside China as Douyin was inside the country. However, "I was more positive, because one of the big factors I saw, in China, a lot of foreigners like myself, who lived there loved using the Chinese version. There were many creators on the platform, who were foreigners and were doing very well. So this gave me a lot of confidence. Those were the key factors," Brennan.
(With inputs from Abhishek Sharma)
