TikTok

“Whether it be Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest or Vine or Tumblr back in the day or TikTok, you know, it's always been young women who've been that first set of early adopters”

“We had two other investments, Triller and DubSmash, that were kind of the same thing, right? And there's no real reason that they didn't succeed. They just didn't.”

“So good example of this is that I think that like NFT powered commerce in Web three, NFT powered digital media and various kind of social media platforms. That I knew or believed were gonna happen in 10 years or so, I think are now possible in the next two to …”

“I invested heavily in Snapchat stories when they were big for business. We gained a 100,000 plus fans there, but with the reducing popularity of the platform for business, The audience declined, and it was no longer worth the investment for me over other platf…”

“I think Meta has just as good a chance as them or anyone else to displace them Over the next couple of years. So I think this battle sort of will be won over the next, let's call it, 24 months.”

“And so I think the key for a new social network to break out is it has to do something different That is hard for another platform to travel to, and arguably no platform did this better than TikTok, right? They built a new tool set which ended up creating a ne…”

“I think the biggest innovation clearly in the last six, seven years has been TikTok who found like a new format of using music for something completely different.”

“What you're seeing now is the broad social networks are becoming all about communities and all about interests, and they just have different take on it. Like that's where tick tock is. That's what Instagram is becoming pretty quickly. That's what Reddit obviou…”

“I love the companies that have a, they segregate an experimental budget from their core, core acquisition budget, just to, because if you bundle them together, it, It's a barrier against experimentation. If you're constantly optimizing Google and Facebook, but…”

“I saw an unbelievable stat, which is like, 45% of millennials use TikTok instead of Google as their primary search engine.”

“I don't feel different about TikTok than I feel about Twitter or Facebook for that matter. These systems need to become programmable. If they're not programmable, we're being programmed by them.”

“That's not a categorical rule, because TikTok buys users at monstrous scale. But, you know, Google really didn't buy many users, Facebook didn't buy many users, you know, tick, tick, tick, tick.”

“I saw an unbelievable stat, which is like, 45% of millennials use TikTok instead of Google as their primary search engine.”

“Faster than Snap, who also cloned and copied TikTok despite everything they've said about that.”

“You look at TikTok and what they're doing right now. They're focusing very heavily on messaging. They're focusing very heavily on friend graph.”

“Right now they're like, not very transparent. They use it like every growth hack. It's like a very slimy app in that way.”

“Banning them outright, I don't see that happening unless there's like a full Republican government and like, you know, will of, you know, political will.”

“Oh, I mean, I don't know. I don't think so. I think that there's too much of a single generation that uses that app that would go crazy if it disappeared.”

“There's a very clear reason why the order of founding went from Twitter first, to Instagram, to Snapchat, to TikTok. And it is because mobile as infrastructure and bandwidth in its earliest stages, supported the lowest packet size, text. And then next compress…”

“Ad platforms are always getting more expensive. They're always more constrained. And if you particularly look at some of the trends that are happening with moving to richer formats like TikTok, it's just more expensive to create basic content. And so I think t…”

“They're, I think they still are the most well-executing competitor I think we've ever faced. There's a couple others that are up there, but they're, I think, at the top of that.”

“If you're kind of getting these lottery-type checks, I think it gets much more harder to plan. I think that's a common complaint I've heard about how TikTok's payments compare to YouTube's payments, for instance, which are much more predictable.”

“Probably a disregard for privacy and conventional rules.”

“We were a startup that had just kind of raised seven million dollars. We had the, that was the cash in the bank. They were spending that in like a week”

“I think they did it at a scale leveraging all of the revenues that they had gotten in China already via Dao Win and To Tiao and actually leverage that to really buy out the U.S. Market.”

“The ad targeting at this point in 2019 had gotten so granular You could actually get to, like, a city level, a user demographic level, and TikTok leveraged all of that. And Facebook and Snap all benefited because they saw tons of money coming in in the form of…”

“I think the targeting capabilities after what Apple has done has gotten reduced dramatically, so I think it would be much tougher, but If you spend that much money, maybe it's possible.”

“You know, it's the long form content where the money is as an investor. You know, you're not going to make much unless you're a very highly influential influencer on TikTok. You're not making much at the moment. YouTube, the big YouTube creators, they make mon…”

“There's a TikTok star who does kind of news in the UK, and he has ten million followers now. And the BBC attacked him recently.”

“There was a very interesting recent large scale survey in the UK, which it said that I think young people in the UK are watching over an hour's TikTok a day now, on average, which seems astonishing for one platform.”

“It wasn't really the algorithm of TikTok. It was the UI that maximized what was, you know, pretty traditional export export algorithm, like since the day so hot or not.”

“The best way to start Is to steal like an artist. And I say that because a lot of TikTok is like copying each other. Like that is the truth of it. When we first started, these trends were us just copying what we see and obviously giving credit where it's due, …”

“Candidly, most I would say about 95% of our impressions are completely organic and they're for the cost of like maybe duo's costume and like the sushi I had for dinner while like filming and like staying late a little bit.”

“A lot of things that break the internet and trend on TikTok don't do well on shorts.”

“So if we have a viral video, we'll actually see an uptick in users. Based off the timing of it and people saying, yeah, we heard about you from TikTok.”

“I would say at this rate of where we are, I would say about 75% is rip and replace. And what the other 25% is us trying to actually think through, like, what would work better on Reels versus TikTok.”

“The comment section is your social brief. Like, People will say stuff, like, lean into that. Like, if they're telling you they want to see X, Y, Z, give them X, Y, Z, and it can be that simple”

“If you're not a creative writer and you don't know how to make something punchy in five seconds, even if you have a trending audio, it's not going to do well.”

“He does DM me and there's these open conversations and he's open to hearing pushback as well. There's been times where he's told us to take down a video and I was like, okay, cool. But what if I like change the audio, fix up the text a little bit, can I repost…”

“We haven't seen direct correlation, if I'm being honest. I would say more of, like, a one million view thing on TikTok might, would actually have more correlation with, like, app downloads but it kind of stays within its own little realm.”

“I always say our TikTok is like a sitcom. Everything we put out there is an episode. Some are amazing and go super viral. Some are just there to build the storylines, but it's something that can live and function as short form video content, even if it was to …”

“I always say the reason why our TikTok was so successful is because I didn't really know all that much about advertising, if I'm being honest.”

“One million views for us is like a viral video that is successful. That is what is like written down as like green check.”

“No brand was doing it yet. And I think that was kind of our insight. And it was like these small human moments that I think has made our TikTok kind of blow up.”

“And I'm a firm believer, and I know our CEO said this too, that I don't think like Babbel or Rosetta Stone or other language learning places are our actual competitors. Like our real competitors are like TikTok. And other social media platforms that are like t…”

“I mean, I think you're competing for time. You're sort of share of mind for people, whether it's, you know, gaming or TikTok or whatever it is. I mean, at the end of the day, there's just a finite, finite amount of time in the day. And I think, you know, at so…”

“Our most recent wave was Completely driven off of short forms, whether it's YouTube shorts, Instagram, you know stuff or reels or, you know, TikTok. It is totally driven.”

“Yeah, I would force them to divest of Tik Tok. I think that, I think that's fine for Americans own Tik Tok. I think right now, China controls the Tik Tok algorithms. I don't care if the guy's based in Singapore, some of the data's here. It's very clear China c…”

“It was a genius invention that came about of necessity because the Chinese government didn't want to have any social networks with more than 500 followers.”

“Now, it's a social network, you know, as much as there's people, there's individuals who are creating stuff that's being consumed by other individuals, but it's not a social network in that, you know, I'm connected to my friend Harry, you know, on LinkedIn.”

“I think they were 10 years ahead of the U.S. On AI and psyops using TikTok. I think they were 10 years ahead of the U.S. In sophistication of how to manipulate the minds of young people.”

“Robinhood was the number one app in the app store. And my feeling at the time was, you know, everyone was sort of like, Wow, you should be really happy. You're the number one app in the app store ahead of Instagram and TikTok. Not just financial app, but every…”

“Hundred percent absolutely yesterday, if not years ago.”

“So right now, like the only paid acquisition we've ever touched and it's so lightweight are some just like simple TikTok ads testing different value propositions with 18 to 24 year olds.”

“Probably ByteDance, and I would shut down TikTok immediately.”

“The right way, I think, to think about this from an American or any other perspective is to say China bans Competition in China from Meta, Twitter, etc. And so the right way to say is like, look, if you're banning our companies, we should ban yours. Commercial…”

“I think that they probably reverse the causality. Things break on TikTok, and then they become famous on Spotify, but that is a function of both algorithms and people pushing music, and not necessarily only a function of the quality of the music.”

“I think songs have gotten Shorter, yes, but also much more homogenous in melodies, harmonies song structures, and they, and music innovates very much sonically. Like, they're really interesting sounds, and they all fit into the same song structure, and this is…”

“I think TikTok is actually a really great product, potentially like a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think what TikTok has done, when I look at my TikTok feed today, I would say it's 90% highly informative, educational, really great content.”

“I think there's absolutely a convergence. I think probably the influence is a little bit more being pulled towards us, but the reality is like apps like, you know, TikTok, there's a lot of things going on, things flying around, scrolling, all that stuff. Like …”

“I would say TikTok, I would buy. Meta, I would buy on their big bets that they've made.”

“I think people demonize social in the way that diet can be demonized. If you go on my TikTok, Instagram, you name it, there's protein recipes, there's inspirational talks from Tony Robbins, and Alain de Botton, and great thinkers there's baby videos, I think b…”

“I believe Snap is an interesting place over the next five to 10 years. Whether it can compete with the TikToks, and the Metas, and at this scale, I mean, these players are Huge. And we've seen what they've done in AI. We've seen what they're doing in e-commerc…”

“I mean, like, our base case is that it does get banned, and we still see a path. After making at least five times our money, even with TikTok not being part of that investment case.”

“I think at some point we were bigger on TikTok than Nike.”

“ChatGPT is the fastest, even though Sam Lesson said he's not sure it's important, it's the fastest Gain of users in, in the history of the world. Zero to eight hundred million in 17 months. Okay. That's, it took Netflix 15 times longer. It took TikTok five tim…”

“It was ChatGPT over the last 28 days, 29.5 million downloads. ChatGPT, 29.5 million. Just mobile. That's just its mobile app. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and X, thirty two million. So ChatGPT mobile downloads just about equal to all the social media guys combi…”

“I think it should be loud, but there should be a bigger conversation about social networks and about the openness of algorithms, which don't only apply to TikTok, but, you know, applies to X, applies to Facebook. I think those algorithms should be should be pu…”

“Whatever this crazy deal is, it's going to get signed in the next 60. I think these deals are going to get done this calendar year, and I think it's going to get signed”

“So on TikTok, you need to have three times more creatives. They're not meta.”

“With TikTok, you need to launch around Thousand of creative per week to make it successful.”

“One of the co-founders in the company became essentially a TikTok Instagram persona, right? Who can create these videos kind of on demand for the company as well and drive very, very similar amounts of views and traction and growth for the company.”

“Capital as a weapon in consumer, most of the time it's, it doesn't really work. Like I would say TikTok is maybe the exception, maybe Uber.”

“I think the company's doing 15 or sixteen billion dollars in the US revenue, And they bought it for like one times revenue plus or minus.”

“I think TikTok didn't work for me yet. I think that sports endorsement in some kind of way didn't work for me as I expected it to work.”

“Also LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn potential is enormous. The arbitrage, again, is there. The targeting is not perfect as an other solution yet, but I believe that those two are having tons of opportunity for us.”

“The permanent decline of Hollywood. Employment. It's permanently in decline. It's not there. It's on, it's in decline because fewer movies and TV shows are being made. TikToks and YouTubes are doing it, and it's in permanent decline because every other country…”

“I would say when it comes to engagement, creating the ability for a social network to not need any social interaction and still be able to deliver you fantastic content, the TikTok recommendation algo is quite phenomenal.”

“Now, the best place to be a creator is to be a streamer. Partly because streams get clipped, and then those clips can get watched seven billion times in a week on TikTok and Instagram Reels and all these other places.”

“So we believe that Suno has, you know, I'm using this term loosely, but unlimited upside potential. You know, if you look back at the history of media on the internet, and you think about the generational platforms that truly democratized a medium, right? YouT…”

“To be honest, in any of the three kind of core companies that I've been at so far, It hasn't worked yet, but maybe I'll get a chance to change that at Victor.”