TikTok grew out of a startup that first failed at something else entirely.
Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang’s education-video startup never caught on. Nearly broke, they pivoted to a goofy lip-sync app, Musical.ly. Teenagers swarmed it, and in 2017 ByteDance bought that pivot to fold into TikTok, paying about $1 billion.
TikTok on Brandseum