Technology History | Shangdi East Road — The Short-Video Company That Got There Five Years Early

The building in the photograph carries the 快手 logo across its top floor, which makes it unusual among Kuaishou's properties in this district. Walk about 270 metres west to the buildings the company actually uses as its headquarters and you will find no sign at all. The photographer who documented the complex in May 2022 noted this himself, remarking on how odd it was to reach the head office and find nothing on the wall. Kuaishou began as something else entirely. Cheng Yixiao (程一笑) released GIF快手 in March 2011, a small utility for turning clips into animated GIFs that people could post on Weibo, and it spread because Weibo at that moment ran on image-based humour. In late 2012 the tool became a short-video community, and in 2013 Su Hua (宿華) joined as co-founder, a Tsinghua graduate who had written infrastructure at Baidu and brought the recommendation engineering with him. That sequence is the fact most accounts of TikTok skip. Kuaishou was running an algorithmic short-video feed in China roughly five years before Douyin shipped from ByteDance's compound across Haidian, and it built its audience in smaller cities and rural counties rather than in Beijing and Shanghai. Douyin was not the invention of a format. It was a well-funded entry into a market somebody else had already proved. The rivalry produced a race to the public markets, and Kuaishou won it. Shares began trading in Hong Kong on 5 February 2021, priced at HK$115, opening at HK$338 and closing the first day at HK$300. The offering raised about 41.3 billion Hong Kong dollars, roughly 5.3 billion US, which made it the largest internet listing since Uber in 2019, and it put Kuaishou on an exchange ahead of ByteDance, which has still not listed. Su Hua marked the day at an event here in Beijing rather than in Hong Kong. Tencent held around 21.5 per cent going in. Outside China the app trades as Kwai, and as Snack Video in several South Asian markets, where it was caught by the same 2020 Indian ban that removed TikTok. Shangdi is a working technology district in north-west Haidian, a short distance from Xierqi, and it looks the part: wide roads, security barriers, glass podiums and very little to tell a visitor who occupies what. The offices are closed to the public, but the street is not, and the logo on this building is the only one in the complex you can read from the pavement. Photo: N509FZ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons