The billionaire Zhang Yiming, the co-founder of Bytedance quit his job to read and dream a lot
Many people resign whenever they get another job, when they don’t want to continue in their current job, or whenever they feel they need a break. Many living people work longer to avoid losing their existing jobs anyway, even when the arrival of the Covid pandemic.
The Chinese boss of TikTok’s parent company has said he is leaving the role because he lacks managerial skills and preferred “reading and daydreaming” to running the tech giant.
Zhang Yiming, the co-founder of Bytedance, the parent company of Tick Tock, a popular short video app banned in India, is resigning. Yiming explains that he is stepping down as part of a ‘long-term plan’ later this year. BiteDance co-founder Liang Rubo will take over the CEO position from Yiming.
Yiming is china’s fifth-richest person with assets of USD 36 billion. “The truth is that I don’t have some skills for a great manager. I’m more interested in analyzing organizational and market principles than actually dealing with employee matters,” Yiming said in the extraordinary open memo.
I’m not a social media-friendly character. My priority is to be online, to play, to listen to music, and to do solitary activities such as daydreaming about possible things 38 years old Yiming added.
For some time now, Zhang has also been under enormous pressure to convince the world that TikTok will not hand data over to China’s ruling Communist party, while also protecting his image at home by not appearing to give in to demands from the west.
ByteDance now has more than 60,000 staff in 30 countries and last year Zhang said they were looking to recruit around 40,000 more.
The company also runs a series of popular products including Douyin – the Chinese version of TikTok – as well as news aggregation app Jinri Toutiao and productivity app Lark, which features cloud storage, chat, and calendar functions.
