TikTok Time

Time behaves differently in speed-obsessed environments.

It warps what it feels like to 'be'. And it reconfigures in a brute-force way your assumptions about what's possible.

In a smoky bar in East Berlin, a Product leader at Zalando confided that 1 year at Zalando was the equivalent of 5 years in a typical company. I was full of beer and I was skeptical. Later, finishing a 2 year stint at Zalando, I concluded it was the best 10 years of my career.

Time, spent in the right environment, can manufacture experience at rates that are unthinkable in most companies. The simplest explanation is that operating a faster clock speed means you compress more examples into a fixed period.

There is truth to that. But there is also something to be said for the sheer pace, changing the experience itself. It's like playing tennis with opponents who are multiple levels above you; who hit big, at speeds you struggle to handle. You are forced to play out-of-your-skin; on instinct. And if you can adapt to that pace, you can close the skill gap very quickly indeed.

TikTok is the most extreme version of this analogy I can imagine.

A sort of multi-threaded Zalando, where business plans are birthed in hours and all's changed utterly in a week.

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This post is part of the TikTok Sequence, a series of short thoughts inspired by my time working with TikTok. The posts focus mostly on the experience of work culture at TikTok and companies like it.