In Search of Kindred Spirits

Kytu Lin, founder and CEO of Dcard, was included in Forbes’ “30 Under 30” Asia 2020 list at the age of 28. The team he heads up has created a homegrown Taiwanese social media platform with a wealth of discussion from a user base mostly made up of college students. Today, Dcard has become an invaluable window into the minds of Taiwanese in the treasured 18-35 demographic.

Kytu Lin, CEO of Dcard

A friendly community that values privacy

After registering for Dcard, users of the mobile app are invited to select five topics of interest and are then presented with AI-driven personalized recommendations of posts to check out. If you want to reach outside your normal areas of interest, you can also switch to a new page to sort posts by popularity and see the overall trends in discussion among Dcard users. Even someone who started using Dcard at university a ­decade ago can still find something that strikes a chord from among the 500-plus topic boards, despite having moved on and started a family.

In the past ten years, not only has the number of boards increased, the user base has also grown from solely college students to include graduates and other members of the community. In recent years, the company has even launched an e-commerce service called Good Choice, which sells food, makeup, lifestyle goods, clothes, electronics, and more. To boost interaction between users, Dcard also hosts online events like “Adult-ish Friend Finder,” inviting public figures in their early 30s who are influential to the younger generation—such as singer-songwriter WeiBird and Teach for Taiwan founder Liu Anting—to share their memories and the life-shaping decisions they made in their 20s, as well as the Dcard boards they like to browse.

“We want the atmosphere of the community to be positive and warm,” says Kytu Lin. The value of Dcard as a product, he says, is in its protection of its users’ privacy and in creating an environment in which ­everyone is encouraged to speak up. The company has drawn on this basic idea to create many activities and services, like their eponymous YouTube channel, which discusses topics of everyday concern to younger people in a relaxed and joyful atmosphere.

Working together to build Taiwan’s brand

This April, the first international iteration of Dcard was launched in Japan under the name Dtto. This name is taken from the Italian detto and its English cognate ditto, representing the idea of finding people and things that resonate with one another. The key to the company’s expansion from a workforce of less than ten people at the beginning to over 200 employees in Taiwan and abroad, including a local team in Japan, has to do with a habit of Kytu Lin’s.

Whether in business or in life, he says, “What I want is not to achieve a goal, but to create a system. A ‘goal’ could be losing two kilos in a month, but a ‘system’ would cultivate the habit of exercising every day. When you approach things from a systemic perspective, they can be sustained over time and won’t be easily ­interrupted.”

Since its earliest days, Dcard has emphasized user privacy and the authenticity of its posts. In order to maintain these principles, any unauthorized com­mercial posts are handled by a dedicated team of moder­ators. The sharing of real-life experience by users has further enhanced the credibility of Dcard’s posts, so that people will often add “Dcard” to their searches online. As a result, even those who don’t use the site itself are likely to come across and consult Dcard posts in their searches for particular things. In Lin’s analysis, “this means that people believe these posts have value, which is why they’ll input this kind of search query. Over time, Google is trained to just suggest ‘Dcard’ auto­matically after you type such and such a term and a space into the search.”

Lin is an eager learner and often shares his reading experience on Facebook. From these posts, you can get an insight into the thinking behind Dcard’s success. In a Medium post of his on “pie-chart thinking” versus “line-chart thinking,” Lin mentions that the latter tends to limit company development because it relies on past experience and achievements to deduce future performance, whereas pie-chart thinking emphasizes “using the future to deduce the present,” which is to say thinking about future market opportunities rather than limiting oneself, and using that visionary insight to bolster areas of weakness in the present. As such, learning is key to growth. Dcard’s company culture is based on learning. Whenever employees propose a book they want to read or a seminar they want to attend in their group chat, Lin will get things sorted out within 48 hours because he believes that this is the most responsible way to treat his colleagues.

Like their eager-to-share CEO, Dcard’s employees are also committed to transparency, disclosing problems and solutions on the online publishing platform Medium as Dcard Lab. For example, one post discusses how the company used quantitative research to determine the reasons for the high rate of people leaving the registration page, and then improve the registration process, ultimately achieving a 500% increase in registration completion. Other posts offer experience from various teams and tips from interns. For Lin, his main concern is not commercial competition, but his users, so Dcard shares information openly in a demonstration of the philosophy of the brand.

During his college days, Lin was a youth ambassador for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and while on a visit to Canada he saw an advertisement that said, “If we can’t export the scenery, we’ll import the tourists.” This quote has stuck with him for the past decade. During this time he has started his own business and visited various countries to explore markets and meet other entrepreneurs, and throughout, a voice in his head has said, “Taiwan is a brand that needs to be opened up. When more world-class companies emerge from here, the world will get to know Taiwan better, and so what Dcard can do is look to the world and keep expanding its influence.”  

On Dcard’s e-commerce platform, Good Choice, users can comment on or discuss products.

Dcard’s video team engages well-known Taiwanese YouTubers in discussions about hot topics from the site.

Dcard's video team visits college campuses around Taiwan to gauge students’ opinions on a variety of issues.

The atmosphere at Dcard is relaxed and open, with staff hard at work in their preferred locations around the office.

Dcard as a company is focused on the growth of its team members. Not only do the staff have access to educational resources, they are regularly engaged in discussions by CEO Kytu Lin, who gives them a chance to have their ideas heard.