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0:35 Josh Elman reached out to Alex Zhu in September of 2015. He was shocked to learn that Alex and Musical.ly were based in Shanghai, China.

1:45 Before working on Musical.ly, Alex spent most of his career in enterprise software (SAP). Alex's passion was always in consumer businesses: using the consumer approach to deal with enterprise design.

2:15 In 2013, Alex was a futurist for education in SAP. Tried to do some research on how the education industry was going to transform with new technology. This prompted Alex to start a company in the education space. Alex and his co-founder came up with a "billion dollar" startup idea to transform education by combining Coursera + Twitter into a new product. The vision was to make educational content mobile-first and bite-sized. This turned out to be a "complete failure."

3:35 What were the lessons from this failure? And how did Alex ultimately decide to make Musical.ly?

6:00 How did you go from zero users to today? How did you start to grow your community?