At ByteDance’s 2024 annual all-staff meeting, CEO Liang Rubo delivered a speech and mentioned the “sense of crisis” many times, and included “strengthening the sense of crisis” as an annual goal.He admitted frankly that the biggest sense of crisis is the worry that Byte as an organization is becoming mediocre and unable to make new breakthroughs.
From 2019 to 2021, ByteDance expanded rapidly, with the number of employees increasing from more than 10,000 to more than 100,000.
Liang Rubo said that many people have reported that Byte now has “all the ills of a big company.”
Liang Rubo talked about a number of organizational mediocrity trends he observed, including inefficiency, slowness, and low standards.
He mentioned that the semi-annual technology review at the company level did not start discussing GPT until 2023, and the large model startups that did better in the industry were all founded from 2018 to 2021.
Liang Rubo also specifically pointed out that after the company grew bigger, he sometimes felt that if the company's efficiency was 30% lower than that of other outstanding teams, he would not be surprised, and even if it was 50% lower, he would not be shocked.
But looking back, this lack of shock itself made him "break out in a cold sweat" because it meant "my own standards were declining."
He believes that it is necessary to break complacency mentally, raise standards, maintain a sense of crisis and always have an entrepreneurial mentality, and at the same time increase differentiation in incentives to attract the best talents.