Good afternoon and thank you for your patience. It's a long, long day and it's just almost the beginning of the day. I'm extremely happy and I decided to be selfish today. This is why I asked my team that this conversation I want to moderate because Shou is one of my heroes, even if my family is making a lot of fun of me for years and years because I was one of the first users of TikTok. Thank you. And despite many people challenging me about why before going to bed I spent almost—I'm sharing some secrets with you guys—half an hour every day on TikTok. I find that it's an amazing platform what you have created despite all the critics and the challenges you are going through. But it's not the purpose today. I want to share with you that in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, almost everyone is looking at TikTok, I can tell you. If they say no, they are lying because I know that many people are forwarding me a lot of TikTok stuff. So yes or no guys, be honest. You see. So Shou is the Chief Executive Officer of TikTok and of course he is leading the overall business and bringing the company's vision to life. So just for you to understand who Shou is, he has been part of the TikTok family since inception. He was born and raised in Singapore and he attended university in London, so he holds an undergraduate degree from University College London, UCL, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. So he's a smart guy, and this is why one day he probably had this great idea of having this original spark that ignited the idea for TikTok. So what was exactly this original spark, Shou?
Yeah, Richard, I think we have to start from the mission of the business. It's important because ultimately we have thousands of employees and every day they're building towards something. The mission that we have is to inspire creativity and bring joy. So that's sort of—and I'll come back to this in a second because if you use TikTok, it sounds like you do every night for 30 minutes, you could spend more time if you want. What you will find is a very creative experience, a very joyful experience. In terms of the original spark, the idea was to present content to users not based on who you followed, because back in 2012, 2013, the social network was all the rage and it's all about building your social graph, meaning getting people to follow you, building out that graph, and the content that you will see is going to be based on people that you follow. I think that's the model that many of our peers in the market still follow today. But we have brought something very new to the table. We recommend content to you not based on how many people follow you, but based on interest signals. Meaning if you have a good message, if you have a funny video, if you are a small hippo in Thailand which has gone completely viral called Moo Deng—if you haven't seen it, just search it—if you have a good message, you don't need any followers to begin with to become viral, to make sure that your message is heard by as many people around the world as possible. I think that's the difference, the key difference that we bring to the table.
But what was the main decision you made to turn almost what was a small app to what is becoming now almost a cultural phenomenon?
There are a couple of things in the last 10 years. First of all, machine learning and AI enabled the recommendation algorithm to be as useful and as interesting as it is today. It's very accurate if you think about it. There's no human curation really that goes into the recommendation process. It is really about using machine learning and then matching your signal interest with potential signal interest that you could have. That's really the magic of the algorithm. Now beyond that, in the last 10 years, everybody has a smartphone now, and smartphones have cameras. So we decided that the app was not only going to be based on text, not only going to be based on pictures, but we opened up video and we made video the main format for the app itself. That's another innovation that we brought to the table. And the third is, of course, this idea that everybody should have the chance to publish. So it shouldn't just be in the hands of a small group of people. We allow essentially anyone with a camera, anyone with creativity, to be able to create something very quickly using all the tools that we give them and be able to share their message with the world. So that's really the difference that we brought.
I know you are under huge pressure and some critics. So let's make a pitch to our friends and to the millions of people who are watching us. How TikTok could be a force for good.
Yeah, I think a lot of people still have this understanding, especially people who don't use the app that much, they think that the app is for young people, is dancing, is singing. Well, that's all true. There's still a lot of dancing and singing, but it's more than that now because we have more than a billion users around the world today.
How many as of today do you know?
We don't disclose specifics, but it's definitely significantly larger than a billion active users around the world. If you think about the content that we have, even in this country, I was looking at the feed whenever I travel. It's my third time in the Kingdom in just this year. There is somebody called Abdullah Al Alawi, for example. He's a local creator. He shares a lot of content about local culture. For example, I learned about the—I'm going to say this wrong—the shabab? He talked about the history of the shabab, the fishing net, and the years of the wheat, and how that original practical use is married into the culture today in the local context. It's amazing. I did not know about this. I think there is a female footballer called Farah. She plays for Al-Ahli, I believe. She's on the platform and she's encouraging young women to learn about the sport, to pick up the sport. So it's no longer just about entertainment, the light dancing and singing, which is still important. It is about community, it is about education, it's about heritage, it's about culture, it's about the arts. I think that's a significant positive change to the world.
So let's continue the pitch. How TikTok could make us more creative and not just be distracted and become addicted to an app, which is—forgive me to be a bit provocative—useless? So how can it help us to be more creative? Because I will be very honest, I find great ideas as a creator of also platforms. I took two or three ideas from what I found on TikTok. So if I'm asking the question, it's because I am convinced of the answer, but I would like you to continue this speech on how can we be more creative, or how can you help us to be more creative?
We provide tools. First of all, to inspire creativity is the mission itself. We talked about the mission at the start: inspire creativity, bring joy. So creativity and joy—joy is important.
We'll talk about joy. This is your DNA. The DNA is creativity and joy.
Exactly. It's built into the mission statement of the company. So what we provide is, if you open the app, you click the plus sign at the bottom, you go to effects, you're going to see thousands and thousands of effects that we bring to the table to help spark people's creativity. It's a tool that enables them to express themselves better. In terms of the content pool itself, what we are seeing is that things like BookTok—BookTok is a very organic movement on the platform where people talk about books that they like. It has tens of billions of views around the world today. There is something very interesting that we launched in the US about a year ago called the STEM feed. This is a feed where it is only science and math content. We are going to launch this in the Kingdom as well, in conjunction with the Science and Technology University here. So we believe that this should be a platform that's not only about creativity and fun, but you could learn something as well. We're going to take all the STEM and math content that we can find and put it in a dedicated and specialized feed for users in this country.
