The New Interconnected; Zhang Yiming's Resignation

This Interconnected post may be the most “disconnected” yet, but I will do my best to connect everything anyway.

First of all, I want to share that I started a new role as the senior director for International Expansion strategy at GitHub earlier this week.

For long time readers of Interconnected, you would know my point of view and feeling towards developers. I believe developers are the most important demographic to understand and support, during this next phase of technology-driven globalization. They are also “global by nature”, given the borderless nature of learning, building, and deploying technology itself. So when this opportunity came across, it felt like a no-brainer. I’m grateful for this opportunity to practice what I’ve been preaching.

But what does this change mean for this beloved bilingual newsletter that you’ve so generously decided to spend time reading and (hopefully) subscribing?

Here are the three major changes to the “new Interconnected”, and why they are happening:

• From twice a week to once a week; new post publishes every Sunday.

Why? While this newsletter started out as a twice-a-week endeavor, I don’t think I can keep that commitment given my new obligations. I also don’t think frequency means better quality or higher value. Going forward, we will adopt a weekly publishing cadence, which is both more practical and would help me better ensure the quality of this newsletter. The content will still be a mixture of deep dive analysis and news commentaries.

• More audio and visual content.

Why? Reading is just one of the many ways to learn. I’m actually an audio learner and absorb a lot of information from audiobooks and podcasts. But so far, I’ve not spend as much energy building Interconnected’s audio and video side. I plan to do more discussion sessions, like our company building webinars, and narrations of articles with slides of key takeaways on our YouTube channel. I already did a narration of the post “China's ‘Semiconductor Theranos’: HSMC”. Please give it a listen or watch and let me know what you think!

• Outside contribution by current operators.

Why? We will expand the knowledge and expertise of Interconnected by publishing analysis and opinions by other contributors. These are all operators currently working in startups that are building developer-focused products or open source technology. I hope their views will make Interconnected more diverse, practical, and useful for you.

I clearly have a bias in favor of the opinions of founders and operators. After all, those are based on “lived experiences”, not “armchair expertise” that unfortunately still gets too much undeserved attention.

Speaking of armchair experts commenting on the action of founders/operators, I want to share some thoughts on the resignation of one of the best founders in the business last week.

(What do you think of this transition to tie everything together? *wink*)

Zhang Yiming’s Resignation

After reading Zhang Yiming’s resignation letter, in both its Chinese original and official translated version on ByteDance’s English website, I felt a sense that he felt profoundly misunderstood by the world.

That sense is not hard to validate after reading just a few media articles that reported on his resignation. Reputable media institutions would quote phrases from so-called experts who say things like, “Founders of China’s tech unicorns have built enormous personal charisma. Beijing is worried that they may grow political ambition, or at the very least influence the political agenda-setting with their popularity.”

If we are talking about Jack Ma, maybe. But Zhang Yiming? Personal charisma? Have you seen this guy? Well, here’s a video (h/t Rui Ma of Tech Buzz China) of him and Liang Rubo (the next CEO of ByteDance and Yiming’s BFF) visiting the apartment where they started ByteDance:

I can hardly imagine Yiming doing an earnings call, let alone harbor political ambitions. Sadly, almost no journalist covering tech in the US or China has been a founder or operator of any company of any meaningful size. It’s worse than sad, because these journalists end up quoting from analysts almost none of whom has done that either; they only look at companies through spreadsheets and research reports, not as a collection of human beings to recruit, hire, manage, coordinate, motivate, and oftentimes fire when things don’t go well. None of these things are easy to do in isolation, let alone when done synchronously, but that is, in essence, a company. And when you multiply them all by (literally) the tens of thousands, you get the day-to-day work of the CEO of one of the most valuable tech companies, period.

Thus, the only sentiment that’s worth any salt is from a CEO of equal calibers, like this tweet from Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe:

40,000 new employees in one year? And not just any year, but 2020? The sheer number of onboarding sessions, training, 1-on-1s with direct reports, OKR planning, etc. will wear any mid-level manager down, let alone an introverted CEO, who was also confronted with the toughest geopolitical quagmire imaginable. I’ve only built teams a fraction of that size, and it was a drain (I’m definitely an introvert too).

The lack of first-hand understanding and empathy for what entrepreneurship and company building entail means that most media narratives, especially ones about China tech, default to familiar tropes and the lumping of completely different personalities -- Jack Ma, Colin Huang of Pinduoduo, and Zhang Yiming -- into one bucket. And the people who read (and believe) these media narratives, often due to lack of alternatives, will be misinformed. People would be incapable of interpreting events like Zhang Yiming’s resignation as simply the action of a self-aware person who thought deeply about what he’s good at, what he is bad at, and have decided to use his energy where it can be used best -- ironically, the one thing every good CEO or people manager should recognize. It’s the kind of self-awareness that’s all too rare in tech. It’s more worth celebrating than over-speculating.

There’s been a lot of rough comparisons between Zhang Yiming and other successful tech CEOs. Some have compared him to Zuckerberg, because both built an ad-driven social media company -- a somewhat lazy comparison that I’ve fallen into before. More people have compared him to Colin Huang recently, given Colin’s own recent resignation with similar motivations.

But the more I think about it, the more I see Zhang Yiming as following the “Larry Page model”, which Colin emulated, perhaps having been an Xoogler. Larry, Yiming, and Colin are all engineers by training. All three appear to be introverted nerds, but also with worldly ambitions to build products and are not content to stay within academia. All three scaled their respective companies faster than their predecessors, partly due to their talent but also because of the natural scaling effect of technology products, especially when deployed in a growing market like China’s.

Let’s do a rough comparison of each ex-CEO's resignation timing.

When Larry Page resigned for good in 2015, Google:

• Valuation: ~$380 billion
• Company age (at the time): 17
• Total headcount : ~60,000

When Zhang Yiming resigned last week, ByteDance:

• Private market valuation: ~$180 billion (but shares have been trading close to ~$400 billion as recently as April)
• Company age: 9
• Total headcount: ~100,000

When Colin Huang resigned earlier this year, Pinduoduo:

• Valuation: ~$150 billion
• Company age: 5
• Total headcount: ~8,000

Given what Zhang Yiming has accomplished, with or without all the geopolitical tensions or antitrust regulations, his resignation and self-directed transition seems more than appropriate.

Some tech CEOs choose to embrace the challenge of becoming a manager -- Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, Reed Hastings, Pony Ma, Wang Xing, Patrick Collinson. Others choose to step away -- Bill Gates, Larry, Colin, and Yiming. They all began as engineers and nerds in one flavor or another, yet they are anything but the same. It’s almost impossible to group and interpret them by conventional boundaries, like nationalities, markets, types of product or business model, let alone geopolitical landscapes and regulations. That’s what makes them entrepreneurs and outlier successes.

Does my narrative explain why Zhang Yiming resigned better than what you may have read elsewhere? Perhaps not, but it’s certainly not worse. Given what I know about the tech business, China, entrepreneurship, and company building, I feel obligated to at least present an alternative narrative and a different perspective for you to consider.

When I recorded a podcast on ChinaTalk a few weeks ago, the host Jordan Schneider asked me who in the Chinese tech scene deserves the Steve Jobs Hollywood biopic treatment.

My answer was Zhang Yiming, obviously not knowing he was going to resign soon. I’ve always seen him as one of the more thoughtful tech CEO’s. That monk-like thoughtfulness is abundantly evident if you read his company all-hands speech in March -- his last one. The speech read more like a meditation retreat session than the typical rah-rah you’d hear in a tech company. His resignation is just the latest action that reflects his meditative, daydreaming, and hyper self-aware nature.

Whether he’ll be in a Hollywood biopic or not is out of my hands. But if that ever happens, Ashton Kutcher should definitely *not* play him.

To read all previous posts, please check out the Archive section. New content will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday. Follow and interact with me on: Twitter, LinkedIn, Clubhouse (@kevinsxu).