TikTok

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2019

⏱️ 100 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We take Acquired to the Old Town Road to cover the amazing story behind the biggest global sensation of 2019 — and the highest valued private startup in the world — TikTok. How did a mid-30 year old UX architect at enterprise software giant SAP wind up creating Gen Z’s favorite social app that’s now rivaling Instagram in global MAU? Why is a 2017 merger of two Chinese companies being branded a US national security threat and retroactively placed under review by CFIUS? And perhaps most importantly, why is TikTok such an important product & technology innovation that all of us should be learning from? Tune in for all the answers!

Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta

Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury

Carve Outs:

Ben: Track 34 on Ghosts IV by Nine Inch Nails: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XF_ceFugJjQ
David: Nintendo Switch Lite https://www.nintendo.com/switch/lite/ and Knives Out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGqiHJTsRkQ

Sources:

Transcript

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0:00.0	Cool. Yeah, we're jamming a lot in here.
0:02.4	I know.
0:04.0	Heh. H. Welcome to Season 5, episode 8 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert and I'm the co-founder of
0:24.1	Pioneer Square Labs a startup studio and early stage venture fund in Seattle.
0:28.4	And I'm David Rosenthal and I'm a general partner at Wave Capital, an early stage venture fund focused on
0:33.7	marketplaces based in San Francisco. And we are your hosts. Today we'll tell the
0:39.2	story of the most valuable tech startup in the world, bite dance. You may not have heard of it, but you
0:46.3	have almost certainly heard of their most popular product, Doine. Or wait, if you're in our Western audience, I mean Tik-Tock. Valued at close to 80 billion dollars, this
0:57.7	privately held venture-backed Chinese company has completely changed how a generation of teens and 20-somethings globally use their phones.
1:07.0	Or another fun way to introduce Tik-Toc,
1:09.0	what is this machine learning based social media app that skyrocketed the then unknown Lil Nause X to
1:15.9	number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for 17 weeks the longest of any song in history with his breakout track Old Town Road.
1:25.2	Do it after doing this research I finally know what the E-Haw challenge was.
1:29.3	Well David, I mean how on earth can this app create such a universal sensation for so many people at once to skyrocket it to number one like this?
1:41.3	I mean this is something that no other social media
1:43.8	app has been able to accomplish. Well not in quite a long time. The other fun
1:50.7	thing that we're not going to talk as much about on the episode but to say
1:53.6	up front to also just build the acquired you know theme and suspense here you of
2:00.6	course know who assigned the I think it's 70 it's either 78 or 79 billion dollar valuation to to buy dance right
2:07.8	Is it Sequoia China? No
2:10.8	They were an earlier investor
2:12.3	Oh was an earlier investor.
	...

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