jakiro
Author: Zheng Keshu
The most fascinating entrepreneurial stories are often like this: a person, a team, seize an opportunity that sounds a bit crazy, persevere, and achieve unsuccessful success.
TikTok is such a story.In 2017, Chinese Internet giants went overseas to pay and socialize with Chinese tourists and overseas Chinese.At that time, TikTok was just starting out and was far from a giant ByteDance jumped into the US market and used TikTok to tear a gap at Google and Meta’s home courts.
Even since 2020, three U.S. presidents have forced ByteDance to sell TikTok with executive orders and multiple rounds of congressional legislation, this team is still devoted to what they are best at – growth.The bargaining chips on the negotiating table are speechless, but as long as they get bigger, it makes sense.
Now, TikTok’s five years of self-rescue in the United States have come to an end.
On the afternoon of September 25, US time, Trump signed an executive order endorsing the new TikTok U.S. deal, saying that the plan is in line with previous Congress legislation that can keep TikTok running while protecting national security.
The executive order states that all parties will set up a new joint venture in the United States to control TikTok’s US applications, including code operation and content review.ByteDance will not hold more than 20% of its shares in the joint venture.Local media quoted the White House as saying that Oracle and other companies will invest 45% of the shares, and the original ByteDance overseas shareholders will hold the remaining shares.
Some relevant parties also told us that TikTok’s US operations will be divided into two companies in the future:
·A US company wholly-owned by ByteDance will continue to be responsible for e-commerce, brand advertising operations, interconnection with international businesses, etc.
· The new joint venture in the White House will introduce external investors, with Byte holding 19.9%.The joint venture will be responsible for TikTok’s US data security, content guarantee, software guarantee and related local businesses.Vice President JD Vance says the company is valued at $14 billion.
ByteDance will retain ownership of TikTok’s recommendation algorithm and authorize it to joint ventures.
A week ago, the heads of state of China and the United States held a call.A spokesperson for the Ministry of Commerce of China then expressed respect for the wishes of enterprises and was happy to see that enterprises should conduct business negotiations on the basis of complying with market rules and reach solutions that comply with Chinese laws and regulations and balance of interests; we hope that the US side will provide an open, fair and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese companies to invest in the United States.
ByteDance issued an announcement on September 20, saying that it will promote relevant work in accordance with Chinese legal requirements and allow TikTok’s American company to continue to serve the majority of American users.
Trump’s new executive order provides legal guarantees for the continued transaction.However, the details of the transaction framework, including the details of the algorithm authorization, have not been released, and require final confirmation by all parties and approval from the Chinese government.If the transaction is successfully completed, the power relationship between the two companies in operation will also determine the long-term development of TikTok.
Currently, more than 100 million Americans, including 60% of young people, use TikTok.Its users brush on average 52 minutes a day, 1.5 times that of Instagram.Globally, TIkTok is already a giant platform with 1.6 billion monthly active users.
According to eMarketer forecast, TikTok is expected to receive $14.3 billion in advertising revenue in the United States in 2025.The United States is the world’s largest consumer market and largest advertising market. The value generated by an American browsing digital advertising is equivalent to 32 Indians.This is why Bytes initially began to internationalize since the United States – only by taking over the US market can there be ample advertising fees and global competition between English creators and Silicon Valley giants.
TikTok is a microcosm of the end of the era of globalization, and its fate will inevitably determine more companies’ expectations and investment in the global business environment.The first people affected were its creators and employees who have been striving to pursue growth in the past few years.
A peaceful morning
Over the past week, TikTok’s transaction details have been constantly news, but there has been no trouble in the TikTok office.After the executive order was signed, a Chinese employee of TikTok in the United States said that no one in the office discussed this matter and everyone was working as usual.
On the morning of last Friday (September 19), US time, after the Chinese and US dollar heads talked, Trump posted that the TikTok deal had been approved.Li Ming (pseudonym), a TikTok employee who is on business in the United States, saw the news on WeChat.A few minutes later, ByteDance’s WeChat official account issued a brief announcement.
ByteDance announced in the early morning of September 20.
Li Ming is based in China and does global business, and is a little numb to the news – in the past six months, Trump has issued executive orders five times to postpone the implementation of the ban.
On the same day, he came to TikTok’s local office.At lunch time, there were no people in the cafeteria – many people worked from home on Fridays.It seemed as if nothing had happened.The sun on the West Coast is shining on the empty dining table.
On September 19, the atmosphere was equally calm at the TikTok San Jose office, 600 kilometers away.The employees carried out their work as usual, only talking a few words during the meal.Some people joked that buying Oracle’s stock at this time might make a big profit – there were rumors that Oracle would participate in the acquisition.The company did not give any explanation as usual about the transaction.As usual, ordinary employees learn about the news through online news.
From threatening to shut down in 2020, TikTok CEO Zhou Shuzi went to Washington to face fierce inquiries in 2023, to last year’s US Congress legislation requiring TikTok to “ban if you don’t sell”, TikTok was shut down for one day at the beginning of this year, the ban was delayed three times, and now the transaction was settled, TikTok’s crisis in the United States has lasted for five years.In the past five years, Google, Meta, and domestic e-commerce competitors have targeted people, and a group of TikTok employees who have found better job opportunities have left.
After repeated and procrastination, the people who remained were already numb. They focused on their work, caring about performance and promotion, and adapting to the rounds of structural and business adjustments.
Previously, more than a dozen countries have followed the United States and banned the installation of TikTok in the name of national security.TikTok deals have taken another step forward.(Swipe up and down to view)
“We carry heavy work every day, and we don’t care about things that we can’t control,” said a Chinese employee in TikTok’s US office.Several TikTok employees told us that their working hours are close to or more than 12 hours and they need to meet with partners across time zones and work overtime until one or two in the morning.
TikTok Many of the employees and management of the US office are Chinese.They are more concerned about another piece of visa news—and on September 19, Trump signed an executive order to raise the H-1B visa application fee to $100,000.The policy quickly caused panic, with TikTok employees talking in the elevator and in the cafeteria.H-1B is assisted by the employer, and the number of places in the United States is limited every year, and the applicant needs to draw lots.This is the most common springboard for applying for a professional immigration green card, and relevant policies directly affect whether they can continue to stay in the United States.
For these Chinese working in the United States, the impact of visa policies is more direct and urgent than the company being split and acquired.Although White House officials quickly clarified that the policy does not apply to H-1B visa holders and only new applicants need to pay the fee, some Chinese who return to their hometowns for family vacation or travel abroad still book air tickets temporarily and return to the United States before the policy takes effect on Sunday (September 21), causing blockage of entry customs.They joked that they were “H-1B slave” (H-1B slave).
Growth, growth, the only effort you can do
Among the TikTok employees we contacted, Zhang Yue (pseudonym) is one of the few people who showed strong emotions about the closure incident on January 19.He mentioned “shock” first, then “nonsense”.
Zhang Yue remembers that at the TikTok general meeting at the end of last year, Zhou Shouzi said at the opening ceremony, “Users are with us. Facts are with us. Law is with us.” (Users are with us, facts are with us, and law is with us).Zhang Yue believed it at that time.
On January 19 this year, TikTok was suspended in the US.A panicked local colleague in the United States asked him what to do. Zhang Yue comforted the other party with the promise of “not laying off employees” at the staff meeting, and was glad that he was responsible for global business, and there were other markets besides the United States.
A few hours later, the US district service resumed, but the closure made Zhang Yue realize that he was “naive”.He once thought there was no evidence that TikTok was harming U.S. national security and that more than 100 million Americans used it, such an app could not be shut down.After January 19, he felt that the company founded in China would be regarded as an original sin, and the effect of recruiting more local executives, providing more local jobs, and spending a lot of money to make the US government change its mind, with minimal effect.
Like many colleagues, he began to believe that only high-growth businesses can save TikTok.
For performance, promotion, and for the survival of their own business, TikTok employees work diligently to maintain this super product.A few days before it was shut down, Zhang Yue saw that his colleagues were still selling advertising spaces for the day of January 19.He said, “Brother, you are so awesome.” The other party replied, “It’s a day to do it.”
Growth is indeed the only life of TikTok – only by binding more interests and having greater influence can we gain greater space for gaming.Since 2023, TikTok has launched a series of social functions such as group chat in the application, and has launched TikTok Lite for low-configured mobile phone users, attracting more than 100 million American users and supporting the annual advertising revenue of 10 billion US dollars.7,000 employees work in TikTok’s US office, and more than 200,000 merchants and 100,000 creators sell goods on TikTok.
Since the end of 2022, TikTok’s e-commerce business has been launched, and a number of post-90s executives who have fought hard battles in key domestic business lines have transferred TikTok, including Zhou Sheng, head of domestic commercial products, Kevin Chen, president of Toutiao, and Zhi Ying, vice president of TikTok.
The person in charge of e-commerce and advertising in the US market was originally a local professional manager, but they were both replaced this year.The person in charge of TikTok’s American live broadcast business is a Chinese American. His direct reporting subordinates were mostly Americans earlier, but almost all of them became Chinese who could speak Chinese over the past year.
The transfer of these people has led a group of subordinates who are looking forward to achieving achievements and getting promoted faster, especially Douyin e-commerce employees, to work together on TikTok.
An insider said that Chinese employees communicate smoothly and efficiently, and share a discourse system, “This is what Douyin does, so do it.”The American employees from Twitch and Youtube in the office do not understand Douyin and want to promote American-style operation experience, such as purchasing copyrights for concerts and music festivals, and doing live broadcasts at the event site.However, Chinese employees believe that this move is too slow to cultivate users’ minds and is superficial. The essence of the problem lies in how the platform guides creators to grow and operate.TikTok, which may be shut down at any time, cannot spend more than ten years to stock up on a huge ecosystem like YouTube.
“It’s not OK to do it slowly,” he said.
Byte’s lobbying against the US government has not stopped either.This year’s lobbying team has a total of 41 members, who continue to lobby for the White House and the Senate on content platform regulation issues.According to OpenSecrets, the U.S. political donation database, the Byte and TikTok lobbying fees hit record highs in the first half of this year, reaching $2.83 million; the second quarter fees fell back to $2.02 million, down from the same period in the past three years.
The continuous joining of Chinese employees has brought efficiency and new problems.The most prominent point is that many people use Chinese to communicate business.Business Insider quoted a U.S. employee of the TikTok engineering team in April this year as saying that in the past six months, Chinese managers have been talking directly with them for less than 30 minutes.Documents and group chats on the internal messaging platform Lark were initially written in Chinese, and meetings were also conducted in Chinese, which made local employees difficult to understand.
A TikTok American employee said that management changes often bring about changes in the following two levels of personnel, and grassroots employees constantly adapt to the new boss’s work requirements, which is an additional work burden.She compared that a few years ago, the atmosphere of TikTok’s American team was more “foreign companies”. After more domestic employees transferred to work, the American team became more and more “short”.
Since this year, TikTok has implemented an English proficiency assessment internally, and the content of the test questions is highly related to actual work, such as discussing a specific topic at a meeting or answering questions from partners.Employees can do simulation questions on the system, taking them once a quarter, and the passing criteria are approximately equal to IELTS 6.5.Employees whose grades fail to meet the standards will be restricted from promotion, traveling business, and accessing local business.
Unfortunately, hard work has not brought good results.The US business transaction is settled. In the future, Chinese employees who stay in the new TikTok American company must re-adapt to the different operating strategies of US shareholders.Most Internet companies in the United States like to let their products grow naturally and will not form large operational teams.Instagram supported a content community of tens of millions of users with more than ten people back then.When Facebook was doing international business in its early years, it stipulated that it would not recruit Ivy elites. In its view, the core work of localization is to solve the language translation problems encountered by users in different countries and regions when using products.This may lead to adjustments to the company’s business and personnel.TikTok employees should also consider finding new ways out.
Find other opportunities, but not necessarily
After the bill was passed, a former middle-level manager of TikTok observed that his Chinese students who used to communicate in Chinese began to actively hold meetings in English.They hope to improve their English proficiency and find a new job in the United States.
Guo Xin (pseudonym) is one of them.She graduated from an American university after the epidemic, caught up with many North American technology companies laying off employees, submitting hundreds of resumes, and finally only got TikTok, the only offer.She is lucky that a classmate around her received an offer from Disney, Amazon, and Google, and was temporarily broken and had to find another opportunity.
In the past few years, TikTok has been the only option for many Chinese students to stay in the United States.A person working for a U.S. technology company said that in the past two years, the employment environment in North America has worsened, and technology companies either laid off employees – Meta and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) both laid off more than 10,000 employees at the end of 2022 and early 2023, and have since laid off employees one after another – either suspending or reducing the processing of PERM for foreign employees (labor certificates, the first step for US employers to apply for green cards for foreign employees). Only TikTok is still recruiting people on a large scale to help employees apply for green cards.
Another former employee also mentioned that in the United States, except TikTok, no other company can issue visas to so many non-technical Chinese.American Internet giants occupy the largest consumer market and radiate almost global markets outside China. Money comes easily and rarely do heavy operations.A few companies that value operations are more willing to recruit locals.
A few months ago, Guo Xin also started looking for a job, but it was not going well, and there were not so many vacancies in the market.On the phone, she was always calm.Rather than complaining, think of a solution.“There is no way out.”At the end of the phone, she sighed and said, “A grain of sand in the times falls on one’s head and is a mountain.”
Guo Xin wants to change jobs because she is too tired.Her colleagues are scattered in offices in Los Angeles, Seattle, San Jose and New York, and a considerable number are in China.She started working at noon and sometimes held meetings with the Chinese team at one or two in the morning.
A former TikTok employee was very excited when he first transferred from China to San Jose, hoping to get to the forefront of information in Silicon Valley.But he often holds meetings with his Chinese team at night and gets up at noon the next day. This routine makes him miss social time perfectly.Some employees also transferred the dogs they picked up to others because they didn’t have time to walk.
Therefore, on the American workplace rating website glassdoor, employees gave TikTok a low score of 3.2, leaving anonymous comments such as “Byebye personal life” (joining is to say goodbye to your personal life).Amazon, known as the “sweatshop” because of its excessive overtime and strict management, has a rating of 3.6.
But TikTok “gives a lot of money.”According to glassdoor, in Los Angeles, TikTok offers software engineers an annual salary of $200,000 to $310,000, 1.5 times the local average.
The crisis has been delayed for 5 years, and those with better choices have long left.Some of the people who stay in TikTok to work in the US are Chinese employees who come to the United States with L or H visas. They are usually responsible for global business and can continue to work in other regions after the US business is divested.There is another part of them, who are local employees with status, most of whom are only responsible for US business.The most stressed are those who don’t have American status but want to stay.In order to reduce the joint risks of layoffs, some people choose not to take their families and work alone in the United States, while watching new opportunities in the country.
Before joining TikTok, Cheng Bai (pseudonym) had made overseas business in a domestic mobile phone manufacturer and witnessed Xiaomi being frozen by the Indian government in 2022 by 4.8 billion yuan.At that time, she didn’t understand the huge impact of such incidents.Later she entered TikTok and encountered the Indonesian government banning TikTok from conducting e-commerce business. The panicked merchants came to her and asked what to do about the business. She realized how much impact geopolitics can have.
With these experiences, she is no longer nervous when talking about “If you don’t sell, just ban it”.After TikTok suspended services in the United States on January 19, she and her colleagues bet whether to shut down permanently or restart within 30 days.She won a meal.
She gradually accepted that uncertainty was the fate of doing this industry, and believed that Chinese companies going overseas could not be stopped.But she also asked me, where can I work after I got out of a platform company?
The power of geopolitics was foreshadowed more than ten years ago.At the end of 2012, the U.S. Congress held a hearing to study whether Huawei’s communications equipment business in the United States endangered national security.Huawei responded actively.Ren Zhengfei personally led executives to receive former US President Carter and a group of US lawmakers in Shenzhen and Hong Kong respectively.Huawei’s U.S. company spent millions of dollars to hire lawyers to lobby, and a senior vice president went to Congress to testify.Although there is no clear evidence, the House Intelligence Committee still ruled that Huawei poses a security threat to US cyber facilities.
At that hearing, a member of lawmakers talked about the fundamentals of the conflict: as long as there is a possibility of threats, Congress must react, “We cannot wait until the threat comes true, just like on 9/11.” The experiences of Huawei and TikTok are based on this assumption.
In 2020, we ended our article on TikTok’s US lobbying.TikTok is an experimental sample—what level of business cooperation can be maintained in two societies with many differences.Now the results have arrived.
A few months ago, Zhang Yue left TikTok.TikTok asked employees to travel to the United States more frequently, and his child was just born.He remembered that he studied in the United States nine years ago.At that time, some Americans heard that he was from China and would give him a thumbs up and say, “China is very powerful.”That year, Trump ran for the first time for president. He came to Zhang Yue’s school to give a speech, standing in front of a row of American flags, shouting, “We want to build a wall, who will pay for it?” Zhang Yue, who was watching the fun, mingled in the crowd holding the slogan “Make America Great Again” and waved his fists together, “Mexican! Mexican!” (Mexican! Mexican!).
Nine years later, Trump took office as president for the second time.This time he not only built a wall, but also completely shakes the international operation mode that was largely led by the United States in the past few decades.The global trade war, TikTok transactions, are just the beginning.
