ByteDance

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The platform's own early signals for this company — hard-to-fake, and where one preceded a real raise, the measured lead.

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• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  Their AI, you know, their chat GPT equivalent is number one in China, right? And they've been using AI to drive TikTok globally for a very long period of time.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  But most people have kind of quietly ignored probably the company that's the leader in AI in China, and that's ByteDance.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  keeping companies like ByteDance and Tencent, et cetera, in the CUDA ecosystem, rather than allowing all of that data, all of those profits to flow right into the Huawei ecosystem

• bullish assessment Bill Gurley

  ByteDance, it seems to be the company to watch on anything consumer. And they already have an app. If someone said whose app is closest to open AIs in China, it's already an app from ByteDance, um, that's out there.

• bearish criticism Jacob Helberg

  On the software side, you have Russia, China, and to a lesser extent, Iran, distorting and manipulating what you see on the front end of your screen. These are the issues we've seen in headlines related to disinformation, information operations, issues related to Russia's face app, or even China's TikTok.

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  there are, as I see it, three reasons why the us taking action against tick tock makes sense for the United States. The first is that, as I mentioned earlier, China has taken action against almost every single American content platform.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  well, hey, dummy, you, there's a thing called downloading, you download the data anytime you want and back it up.

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  it has a microphone, camera, GPS, and your photo albums, and can be rooted, and your Mac address can be hacked, as apparently TikTok has been doing.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  there is zero chance that the CCP does not have complete access or, you know, whatever level of access they want to that data, because all the companies in China are required to give that level of access already. So why wouldn't one operating the United States also have that level of access?

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  insane that people would put TikTok on their phones and not believe that the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, would not have access to that.

• mixed assessment Jason Calacanis

  Now ByteDance, trading over $330 billion in secondary markets is an amazing company. It's a conglomerate of Chinese media companies, sort of like Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp, except they own Totiao, which is a news aggregation type app. And then they have China's Tiktok, which is like a counterpart to it, which is Duyin. Tiktok doesn't operate in China as the name Tiktok. They do have this counterpart, Duyin. I've never used it. So I can't tell you exactly how similar it is to Tiktok. B

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  investors and bankers who had previously been expecting ByteDance to go public as early as this year, now say there is no clear timetable.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  ByteDance has been weighing this initial public offering of all or some of his businesses in the US and Hong Kong.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Their most recent valuation at ByteDance was 180 billion in December of 2020. And ByteDance's shares have traded steadily at 330 billion in secondary markets over the past month, according to the Wall Street Journal.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Tik Tok's parent company ByteDance, put its US Hong Kong IPO on hold after Chinese officials told them to focus on addressing these data security risks.

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  And China obviously knows that TikTok's parent company ByteDance, they had recently hired 10,000 employees according to the information to work on education projects, because it's such a huge opportunity. And now they are in danger of basically having to let those employees go or reassign them. According to the article, here's the quote, some ByteDance employees who work on the company's tutoring apps are already asking around for other job opportunities outside of education because of concerns

• bearish prediction Brendan Carr

  going out, whether it's next year or the following year, I just don't see a future in which the CCP and ByteDance can continue to have the same degree of control over TikTok that they once, that they once enjoyed.

• bearish criticism Brendan Carr

  I think the answer is this, we need to require the genuine divestment of all ties back to CCP. So getting rid of ByteDance, getting rid of all CCP controls, the platform itself, I don't have a problem with people doing short form videos. The problem is it being, you know, connected back to the CCP.

• bearish assessment Jason Calacanis

  Back then, he made a lot of waves when he called for Tim Cook and Sundar from Google to remove TikTok from the apps for something that has turned out to be pretty prescient. And people are now starting to take that much more seriously.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Douyin and a rival Chinese social media platform began testing, quote, anti addiction measures. This include testing child locks and experimenting with limiting the amount of time children spent on these platforms, both of which now exist in the Douyin app.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  So they're basically banning Tiktok for people in their country. But they're more than willing for us to use it.

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  getting people off of tick tock and then getting them to post again to youtube that's hard but getting the people already on youtube and saying hey here's your new feature is great

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  that is so smart i mean that's how you take out tick tock

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  back to youtube and you know how much money this is making and how big this is um this to me seems like a no-brainer for youtube to win this race

• bearish criticism Brendan Carr

  Katie bar the doors, it goes right to the CCP.

• bearish criticism Brendan Carr

  The only reason why ByteDance exists in China is because they are, you know, helping the CCP to stay in power, if they weren't, they wouldn't be there.

• bearish criticism Brendan Carr

  they're right now amassing probably the world's most sophisticated data collection and AI operation

• bearish assessment Brendan Carr

  It continues to proliferate. In fact, I'll be testifying later this week, at a house hearing where we talk about tick tock in the context of the military, in the sense that it's still very, very popular, even though it's banned from official devices.

• bearish criticism Brendan Carr

  We got to go faster, we can't just sort of have the status quo of data going back to China.

• bearish endorsement Brendan Carr

  That's what I think should happen. I mean, look, India, the world's largest democracy has taken that action.

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  if we ban TikTok, one, we'll be doing it at the behest of Mark Zuckerberg

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  Tiktok is on 100 million phones and it's tracking each individual everywhere they go has access to all of their private information, photos, location, etc.

• bearish assessment Jason Calacanis

  And now that we have competitors that are equally viable, Instagram is now tick tock, and YouTube,

• bearish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  they literally told the employees, please downplay our China Association.

• bullish endorsement Jules

  i partner with descript so overdub is their feature and it's great

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  sources say it has been downloaded 53 million times it boasts as many as 20 million daily active users so it's had two and a half times growth since july of 2022

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  be real has yet to generate any revenue that we know of

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  now it's raised a 60 million dollar series b at a 600 million dollar valuation sources familiar with the deal have stated that yuri milner's dst global will lead the round this is a forex jump in valuation since its last 30 million dollar series a which was led by a16z and excel that was back in june of 2021

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  the company also noted that it was focusing on expanding its revenue growth and has been investing heavily in ar with tools like custom landmarks for house of the dragon snapchat times vogue world in new york and adding lenses

• bullish prediction Jason Calacanis

  snap is in the middle of a bit of a turnaround so they said they would cut 20 of staff last month as part of a major restructuring so we're hoping for their sake that it could be a little more profitable toward the middle of next year with just about you know 20 less overhead

• mixed fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  q3 cash and short-term securities total about 4.4 billion dollars so the cash situation is not a disaster q3 net loss was about 360 million dollars though that's a five times larger loss year over year snaps stock-based compensation in q3 was 343 million dollars that actually represents a majority of that net loss so just to be clear that was mostly a compensation issue but q3 free cash flow was only about 18 million dollars that's actually about breakeven on a free cash flow basis which is not

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  in a prior earnings report snap noted that apple's app tracking transparency features were a huge problem for its business this is of course the thing that also wiped about 25 billion dollars off the combined market caps of google and facebook and you could imagine that snap didn't have as big a cushion as those two companies these new privacy features make it harder for platforms to target users as accurately as they were before that means digital ads are less effective which means advertisers

• bearish assessment Jason Calacanis

  snaps market cap unlike some other companies is completely correlated has traded basically in lockstep with its quarterly year over year revenue growth over the past five years or so so we made another chart where you can see snaps market cap in yellow and its quarterly year over year revenue growth in black and again these are almost identical trend lines there this is one of the very few cases where uh investors are saying we have no faith right there's no sort of divergence in price to earnin

• bearish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  snaps stock is down 30 percent today after another disappointing earnings report snap of course has had a string of disappointing earnings reports but just as a level set here snap is down about 90 percent over the past 52 weeks 90 90 and again it was down about 30 this morning so let's dig into the reason for today's drop this chart by the way i am just looking at another one of our why charts on snaps quarterly year over year growth and it is absolutely brutal here's what they reported that ca

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  a person with direct knowledge of open ai's finances implied the company was on track to generate revenue in the low tens of millions of dollars this year so there is some revenue for open ai happening

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  there's going to be a new round apparently for open ai as well

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  i think gpt3 and dolly i think are going to be commodified there's now other open source projects that are doing the same thing

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  microsoft had invested in open ai in 2019 at a billion dollar valuation they raised that somewhere around a 20 billion dollar valuation two years later so they literally went up 20x in 24 months

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  they flipped over to a for-profit which i think was a brilliant idea because money and uh it seemed like they could make a lot of money by making this a for-profit

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  most people on reddit create discords most people on youtube who get popular create a discord so why not have the discord inside of reddit and have the discord inside of you know for the modality of of persistent chat

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  i really like this because i want to invest more in the twitter i'm sorry the youtube community and steer it towards that would be great

• bullish prediction Molly

  it does make me wonder if this is not an opening toward more of a discord like product or a slack or a persistent chat that could exist outside of just comments which would actually be awesome

• bullish prediction Jason Calacanis

  i would think that there'll be you know a youtube.com slash at twist or something and you'll see our page and um but then your feed might include people's videos does that make sense molly like um it would become your youtube feed could become feel more like a a hybrid of twitter slash tick tock slash youtube i think that's what they have planned

• bullish prediction Jason Calacanis

  are they going to create a community are they going to go straight up uh and compete against twitter i think so

• mixed assessment David Sacks

  I still have very mixed feelings about the idea of just the TikTok ban. Because, look, you're talking about an app that 100 million Americans use for something like 90 minutes a day. So, people obviously get a lot of value out of this. I've yet to see the hard proof that this app is under the control of the CCP. I mean, I know that allegation was made. I can understand why people make it.

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  So that would be like ByteDance. Okay. ByteDance is a Chinese company.

• bearish prediction Chamath Palihapitiya

  I like thomas's math I believe it I do think it's about a hundred billion dollar asset but at the end of the day the president was very clear that it is completely and utterly worthless without his permit and he wants to own 50 of this asset now if you're a buyer of something you're not going to pay a hundred billion dollars if you control whether it can exist or not you're basically going to pay today's equivalent of one frank which would be one dollar now I'm not saying that it is going to be

• bullish endorsement David Sacks

  you guys made a fantastic investment in byte dance which is the parent company of tick tock

• mixed prediction Unattributed

  what did we learn a couple days ago yeah we learned that it might just get shut down and be worth zero right so in one sense anything that's greater than zero by definition is kind of better right i think ultimately it will kind of come down to does the government want to be the only bidder for the asset or would the government be comfortable with either elon owning it and merging it to x or microsoft owning it

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  we never attributed much value to the you know the tick tock u.s asset in the sense of our our analysis was always based on the value of the chinese business specifically because it's just hard to know what the you know the tick tock asset x china would be worth right is it worth zero because it's so compromised regulatorily is it worth a lot more it's just very very difficult to know so we always took a very kind of conservative view of really looking at kind of the chinese and you know some of

• bullish assessment Thomas

  if we look at tick tock in the u.s we can just kind of very back of the envelope look at the math right so if we look at da use mother blue or meta as we love to know the facebook hat roughly has about 200 million da use in the u.s daily active users for folks who don't know the terminology yes correct right so if you look at facebook blitz instagram you'll see it's about 200 million da use and you can look at the time spent what's interesting about tick tock's time spent is the da use are about

1. 2028-02-16 going out, whether it's next year or the following year, I just don't see a future in which the CCP and ByteDance can continue to have the same degree of control over TikTok that they once, that they once enjoyed. · Prediction · pending

VentureSignalScore 0/100 for bytedance, composed from 1 of 4 components (emerging formula), discounted ×0.76 for 20% signal coverage