TikTok Sets Up Shop in Silicon Valley, Poaches Facebook Employees

TikTok has seen a pretty rapid rise to fame over the course of its still brief lifespan. All of this success has allowed the social media platform to expand its operations quite a bit, so much so that they are now getting office space in Silicon Valley. The specific office space that they are getting was previously used by WhatsApp, and it is right in Facebook’s backyard.

Not only is TikTok aggressively moving into their competitors own turf, they have started to poach employees from Facebook as well. The company is doing this by offering salaries that are competitive with those that Facebook is offering, and what’s more is that in some cases the salaries that they are offering are even higher than what Facebook is currently giving its employees. Certain poached employees have gotten a 20% pay bump, a hefty sum that would make anyone want to switch sides.

The total number of employees that it has poached from Facebook comes to around two dozen, and it shows that TikTok, and by extension its parent company ByteDance, are taking their competition with Facebook very seriously indeed. The main competition is over the younger demographic of users, an area where Snapchat was once a contender before being summarily defeated by the behemoth that is Facebook.


TikTok seems like more of a match for Facebook however, with the reason for this being that ByteDance, its Chinese parent company, has about 700 million users across the various apps that it currently offers. Facebook, by comparison, has 2.1 billion users across its platforms. This means that ByteDance does have quite a long way to go, but it’s really not as far as you might have thought it was given the amount of time that Facebook has been active.


Photo: Thomas Trutschel / Photothek / Getty Images

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