It’s not often that we get to peek inside a company worth more than US$200 billion. It’s even rarer to get a look inside and learn from a Chinese firm with as much notoriety as ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok.

The most recent episode of The Tech Strategy Podcast by professor and consultant Jeffrey Towson provided that rare opportunity.

See also: Can TikTok Shop catch up with Shopee, Tokopedia in Indonesia?

Towson recently visited ByteDance’s headquarters in China and discussed what he learned from the trip on his podcast. He noted that all the insights came from his observations and not from what he was told by the company’s representatives.

Here are three highlights we picked out from the episode:

19:46 – Why visiting ByteDance brought the complexity of modern ecommerce into focus and why the company’s model is difficult to replicate elsewhere.

26:31 – How adaptive ByteDance’s strategy is, even on a large scale.

31:10 – How good ByteDance is at externalizing its internal capabilities and turning them into a product or service.