Ray Cao: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's my pleasure. I am really excited to have you here because it feels like we rarely get a peek into what it's like to work at TikTok, how TikTok builds product and operates, also how to be successful in TikTok as a business, as an advertiser. So I have all these kinds of questions for you, and so I'm really happy to be chatting. I wanted to start with a little bit about your time before TikTok, which was at Google and comparing that to TikTok. So, you're at Google for six years, I believe. Now you're at TikTok. I'm curious on what stood out to you about the cultural differences between how Google operates and TikTok operates. Three major things, I would say. Number one is really how these two company thinking about innovation. So, I think Google has a very strong philosophy of we're engineering lab and that there's a lot of technology-driven, and a lot of pieces. They are not necessarily always trying to, I would say, cope with the market even, right? However, I think at the TikTok, I think besides the technology part, we do have a very keen, I would say, appetite to really understand what the markets really want and also how can we really service our clients in a better way and the clients here is not necessarily only for advertisers including our user and also creator altogether. So that's one of the things I think it's very different in terms of TikTok way of work. It's very customer-centric in a way, and again, the customer here is not necessarily only for the business partner but also for our regular user and creators on the platform. And the second one is really thinking about how we take approach on product development. So a lot of times that we take a very rigid approach in terms of product development and oftentimes you see us that experimenting a lot of different things all the same time. And also we do have a lot of engineering and [inaudible 00:07:04] project in the backend to really understand how can we optimize better for the platform. So a lot of time, these are the things that I think TikTok is doing really, really well. The last piece I have to say is the approach for global prioritization. A lot of times that you see a US-born company go global and oftentimes still they are really rooted with the US market and there's nothing wrong with it to be honest, because this is the biggest market for them as I would say for East-born company. I think a lot of times that we can take approach with truly how do we think about globalization and for example, we launched a lot of product not necessarily first in North America. We launched it in South Asia for example, for our shopping, really very big initiative internally for shopping and we launched our really creator fund here in North America. We launched our gaming approach, really serviced our EUI gaming advertisers. Really, really strong over there. So there are a lot of different approach in terms of how do we prioritize our go-to-market and also product development. So that's the part I feel like we're very unique in the market or unique to some of that was the tech company born in the US. It reminds me there's this piece by this smart guy, Eugene Wei who wrote a few things about TikTok over the years and just why it's been so successful and one of his really big points is that TikTok can work really well in other markets 'cause it's basically... you don't need to know a ton about the market because it's this algorithm that figures out what people in each market want. Is there anything along those lines you've seen that just has been really fundamental to it working so well in many different markets?…

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