I get a call and I answered Hello, and there's this guy on the other end. Yeah, you emailed my daughter. He goes, she's twelve. And I was like, okay, you know, sorry about that, and he goes, yeah, listen, everything's all right, but you gotta answer me this one question. Why does she come home from school and say that she needs a manager? And I'm like, well, I don't know. Maybe it's because she has nine thousand fans on TikTok. There was a time when most adults didn't know what TikTok was.
If you haven't heard of TikTok, TikTok is the most addicting app in the entire world. If you get it, I'm warning you, you will be on it for four hours just scrolling through your four you page. Most people still don't know the real story. One day, I was on coul trip from Mountain View to San Francisco and that Tin so a loss of high school students and I was observing the behavior. How too mysterious tech founders from China that captured the attention of an entire generation.
You know, I think there was some natural skepticism of like, hey, can we trust these guys we've had issues in China with intellectual property infiltrated American pop culture. You identify a couple of whales, you pay them for a certain number of posting them. Sort of a flywheel from there, because you know, the internet is like it is like high school cafeteria is the second the popular kids do it.
Everyone wants to get in. Went to battle with Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants, And when I brought up the Chinese internet companies, I think that that's a real, a real strategic and competitive threat. Took on the most powerful man in the world. We're looking at TikTok. We may be banning TikTok. This season. On Foundering, we'll take you behind the scenes of TikTok with exclusive interviews of creators, investors, and employees, including the CEO of TikTok's controversial Chinese parent
company byt Dance. You'll see what it was really like inside the company after TikTok landed on Donald Trump's hitlist and nearly lost it all. Check us out Foundering, a podcast from Bloomberg Technology. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.