Mayan, who works in the Corporate Development Department, was born in New York but partly grew up in Israel where she served in the Israeli army. She had lived in many countries before she moved to Beijing at the age of 21 because of her strong interests in Chinese culture. Since then, it has been 9 years. As the old saying goes, “the longer you stay, the harder it is to say goodbye.” For Mayan, leaving China is not in the cards. She studied, works and has a family in Beijing.
Mayan is able to use her international experience at ByteDance as the company has launched different products in different countries. According Cheetah Lab’s list of the most popular short video apps in the U.S., three of the top five apps are from the same company: “ByteDance.”However, ByteDance is still a rather unknown brand overseas, which makes it complicated for Mayan to explain her work to her friends. When her friends would guess some product names, Mayan would only shake her head with a smile and answer: "Well, in fact, that is just one of our many products."
Like many foreigners in China, Mayan started to study Chinese because she realized the potential of China, given the extremely fast growth and development of the country following the Beijing Olympics. Following her studies, she chose to work in the Internet / tech industry as she believed that Mobile Internet will be the next big thing not only in China, but worldwide.
Mayan has a deep understanding of the industry and focuses on its pioneers. ByteDance is a unique company to her. “We are not like other big Chinese household names or any Western Multinational corporation.“We are younger and dynamic, which allows to move faster in a more innovative environment”she said.
“For both technology, marketing and go-to market aspects, we come up with advanced methods and move quickly to capture the market, instead of copying products from Western markets to merely localize them in China. Our products cross borders, cultures and languages. This is real globalization, which lies in our overseas users, monetization capabilities, internal multi-language communication and the flat organizational structure of ByteDance, which is designed for expanding globally."
Mayan believes China skipped many stages and jumped to mobile Internet while skipping the traditional PC. It is flexibility that helped the companies here grow faster. In the U.S., manymature companies are still very structured and lack that flexibility which may delay moving things forward.
“Everyone here is very young and humble. You never know who you are walking, that person might just be the CEO Yiming Zhang, who eats with all of us at the canteen” Mayan, who has experienced a variety of regions, cultures and languages, highly appreciates equal and flat organizations as those allow a free environment to bounce off great ideas. Go Bigger Be Better, WE UP!
