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Comment by mgraczyk | Hacker News Reader

I've heard this myth that musical.ly was founded in China before, but it's hard to believe if you look at some basic facts.

One cofounder worked full time at SAP in SF bay area for several years before and after musical.ly was founded. The other says on his LinkedIn that he was working in Santa Monica for several years on either side of the founding. They lived, worked, and founded the company in CA.

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According to Pitchbook https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/149415-13

>Primary Office 16/F, No. 127 Guodao Road, Yangpu District, Shanghai China

musical.ly appears to have always had its head office in Shanghai until the acquisition. The fact that it also had significant operations in California doesn't make it a US company. Only those operations are subject to US law and would have to be divested due to disapproval by CFIUS.

> musical.ly appears to have always had its head office in Shanghai until the acquisition.

That's not true. I have not found a specific date, but the Shanghai office did not exist at the time musical.ly was founded. I have not found any references to the Shanghai office from before late 2015.

I searched for the Chinese name of the company (found on Wikipedia-zh) and immediately found all the information about how the company was founded and funded.[1] It was founded in Shanghai on 2013-08-01.

Not being able to find any reference on the English-speaking part of the web doesn’t mean it couldn’t have existed.

[1] https://www.jfz.com/pe/d-C6e3ie12gj.html

Though I think the onus is on you to demonstrate that it's a myth when you're directly contradicting the first line of the first main paragraph of their wikipage (which is referenced)

"Musical.ly Inc. was founded by longtime friends Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang in Shanghai, China."

Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang don't sound very Californian to me.

Really? As both a SoCal and Bay Area resident name alone would tell me absolutely nothing about whether someone was a native to either area.

Their public LinkedIn profiles say that they went to university in China. They're Chinese.

Probably true. Of course, them being Chinese has nothing to do with where the startup was founded.

That's true, of course. However, every source I can find says that the company was founded in Shanghai, but ended up being more successful in the American than the Chinese market, and opened up offices in California. Most of the engineers are supposedly in Shanghai, though. One more detail is that the founders appear to have worked in Silicon Valley before founding the company.

Whether any of this makes any difference, as far as US law goes, I don't know.

1. https://www.businessinsider.de/what-is-musically-2016-5

2. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bytedance-musically/china...

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTyg2E44pBA

Neither do German (What you Americans call Jewish) or Russian/Ukrainian names sound English yet they are by far the biggest majority of your country way ahead of the Anglos. More likely than not a European American has its roots somewhere in Central or Eastern Europe.

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