I joined the TikTok team at ByteDance in 2018. It was Beijing, right after the Musical.ly rebrand. The veterans—the ones who saw the company as a tiny team—always said 2018 was already “late.” But compared to every workplace I’ve seen since, it was a high-bandwidth anomaly. What made that period so productive wasn’t corporate “culture.” It was the absence of friction.
We never used buzzwords like ‘values’ or ‘principles.’ We just talked about how to get things done. The key was that titles were irrelevant. There was only a shared obsession with building something that worked.
I recently read Stealing Fire, which describes how Navy SEALs achieve “collective flow.” Tasks are divided seamlessly. Leadership isn’t assigned; it’s claimed by whoever is the expert in that specific moment. To stay that agile, they strip away the hierarchy—no uniforms, no salutes.
This was the exact mechanism I saw in Beijing. In a startup, specific technical skills become obsolete in a year or two anyway. What I actually gained was the confidence to lead. I learned that if you know the best way to do something, you have the right—and the obligation—to take charge. If your logic is sound, people follow.
In the early days, TikTok didn’t care about elite credentials. The only question was: Can you ship? Now, the system has changed. It’s filled with people from fancy universities. Paradoxically, this often makes collaboration harder. When a system is full of “smart” people, they tend to become guarded. They prioritize protecting their image over finding the truth. They are less willing to trust someone else’s judgment and just move.
People often ask why TikTok emerged from China and not the US. It wasn’t about long hours; that’s a lazy stereotype. It was about the organizational design—we had a system that allowed information to turn into action without getting stuck in bureaucracy.
That kind of magic is fragile. Once a company becomes a giant, the friction returns. You can’t find that flow inside a tech incumbent anymore. You have to build it from scratch.