At the beginning of 2024, ByteDance has already felt a strong "sense of crisis". On the afternoon of January 30, ByteDance held its 2024 annual all-staff meeting. Liang Rubo, CEO of the company, mentioned the "sense of crisis" many times in the sharing, and included "strengthening the sense of crisis" in the annual goal. He admits that the biggest sense of crisis is the fear that Byte, as an organization, is becoming mediocre and unable to make new breakthroughs.
From its establishment in 2012 to the beginning of 2024, ByteDance has just ended the last 12-year cycle and stood at a new starting point. "Dark Horse", "Unicorn", "The Most Imaginative and Creative Company"...With a shining "halo" on its head, ByteDance has expanded rapidly and developed into a company with a valuation of $225 billion in just over a decade.
However, as the company continues to grow, some hidden problems are gradually exposed. Liang Rubo said that many people have reported that now Byte "has all the diseases of large companies". At the same time, he talked about several of the trends he has observed in organizations that are becoming mediocre, including inefficiency, sluggishness, and low standards.
Crisis 1: Inefficiency
Innovation culture is one of ByteDance's core competitiveness. In the past, ByteDance was known for its "agility and efficiency", but today it has become less efficient. The simple requirements of an internal system pulled a bunch of people, and at the beginning it was assessed that it would take 1,000 man-days, that is, one person to do 1,000 days, and after in-depth questioning, it was found that in fact, some people misunderstood, and finally found that it only took one person to do 15 days to complete.
I'm talking about inefficient organizations, and don't get me into thinking I'm saying people aren't working hard. Liang Rubo said that it is precisely in a mediocre and inefficient organization that employees are more likely to feel tired, because even if they work hard, the final result is not ideal.
The desire and pursuit of innovation is an important reason why ByteDance can continue to launch new products and occupy the market heights. However, as the company grew in size and the number of team members grew, it became a challenge to keep the team innovative. Liang Rubo's measures to strengthen the sense of crisis and improve organizational efficiency are precisely to stimulate the innovative spirit and enterprising spirit of employees.
Crisis 2: Sluggishness
In the past, ByteDance grasped the opportunities brought by emerging technologies with keen insight, successfully incubated a series of fist products such as Toutiao and Douyin, and gained a firm foothold in the Internet technology track full of giants. And today, ByteDance has begun to lag behind startups in terms of sensitivity to opportunities.
Liang Rubo mentioned that the semi-annual technology review at the company level did not start to discuss GPT until 2023, and the large-scale model startups that did better in the industry were founded from 2018 to 2021.
In the fierce competition between domestic and foreign technology companies for the commanding heights of artificial intelligence technology, ByteDance's pace is undoubtedly lagging behind. A person familiar with the matter said that before ChatGPT was made public, Byte's internal investment in large models was still relatively hesitant, and there were arguments such as "for Byte's product matrix, the current algorithm is enough". After ChatGPT exploded, major manufacturers such as China, Alibaba, and Tencent quickly followed up, but ByteDance lagged behind and lost the opportunity. Now that the wave of generative artificial intelligence has swept the world, the model products and applications launched by ByteDance have not only failed to stir up too many waves in the market, but also spread the negative news that the account was banned by secretly calling the OpenAI API account to generate data to train its own large model. In the long run, this "sluggishness" will adversely affect the future development of ByteDance.
Crisis 3: Low standards
Although the company has always emphasized that documents should be concise, accurate and easy to understand, there are still many documents that are often tens of thousands of words, full of black words, and have infinite abbreviations, which do not directly hit the problem. Liang Rubo said. He specifically mentioned that after the company became bigger, sometimes he himself felt that he was not surprised if the company's efficiency was 30% lower than that of other excellent teams, and he was not shocked that it was even 50% lower. But in retrospect, this "not shocking" itself made him "break out in a cold sweat", because it meant that "my own standards are falling".
In order to deal with this problem, he believes that it is necessary to break the complacency mentally, raise the standard, maintain a sense of crisis and always have an entrepreneurial mentality. At the end of the all-staff meeting, Liang Rubo shared ByteDance's three goals for 2024, the first of which is the organizational management culture level, and the goal is to "strengthen the sense of crisis, always start a business, and escape the gravity of mediocrity". The second is to continue to increase social trust. Finally, the business continues to focus on a small number of important things.
Previously, it was reported that ByteDance's revenue in 2023 will exceed $110 billion, surpassing Tencent. However, from the perspective of business layout, Tencent has formed a huge commercial territory including social **, games, cloud computing, financial technology, etc., and ByteDance, in addition to Douyin, which shoulders the responsibility of the pillar of revenue, the former glory of Toutiao no longer exists, and many attempts in the direction of new businesses such as VR and games have failed, and cloud computing has not stirred up too many waves, and the second growth curve has not appeared for a long time. 2024 is full of crises for ByteDance, and if you don't advance, you will retreat.
Author丨Song JingEditor丨Zhao Chenmei Editor丨Maria Producer丨Lian Xiaodong.