Tianji

» see tianji.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Tianji launched in 2005, six years before anyone outside China had a reason to watch Chinese white-collar software. Derek Ling built it for a specific person: a graduate under forty working in a city, with a degree, a job title worth putting on a page, and an interest in the next job title. You filled in a profile, you attached a work history, you collected contacts. It was a professional network in the ordinary sense of the phrase, and in China it got there first.

The growth was real for several years. Through 2010 and 2011 the site was adding more than 380,000 accounts a month, with tens of thousands of company executives among them. By September 2013 the registered total was past seventeen million, and by the end its French owner was quoting twenty-five million. Registered is not the same as active, and the gap between those two words is most of what happened next.

Professional networking is the one social category I did keep up with, on LinkedIn, in English, from a desk in Ankara. Tianji was that same product for a market I have no claim on, and the part of its story worth reading is not really the product at all. It is what happened to the company in Paris that bought it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the french half ~

Viadeo merged with Tianji on 23 February 2008. Viadeo's whole pitch was that it was the professional network that was not American: strong in France, present in a handful of emerging markets, and above all sitting on China before LinkedIn had a license to operate there. Tianji was the largest thing Viadeo owned outside its home country and the single line in the investor story that made the company look like more than a French business.

~ the listing ~

Viadeo went public in Paris in 2014 with a stated plan to spend about a third of the proceeds on developing Tianji. The listing raised less than it needed and the private money that was supposed to follow did not appear. Viadeo closed its data center in California, cut back to the French market, and decided that China would have to be somebody else's problem. LinkedIn had meanwhile entered China properly in 2014, with a licensed local site and a joint venture built to survive the regulations, which was exactly the kind of commitment Viadeo could no longer fund.

~ the last week of december ~

Tianji stopped operating on 27 December 2015, four days before the year ended, which reads like a decision made against a financial calendar rather than a product one. Ten years of accumulated resumes and contact graphs went with it, belonging to a population that in 2005 had not had a place to put any of that and by 2015 had several.

tianji.com does not resolve today. Viadeo did not outlast its Chinese half by much: receivership came on 29 November 2016, eleven months after Tianji went off, and what Le Figaro's classifieds arm bought out of it cost one and a half million euros.

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