We’ve been hearing a lot lately about what Snap CEO Evan Spiegel didn’t anticipate. Last week, he told employees, according to The Verge, that he hadn’t anticipated the extent to which interest rates would rise (really?). Also last week, speaking at the Code conference, he said ”nobody” in the U.S. had anticipated ByteDance would spend billions on marketing to sign up users for TikTok. Isn’t it the role of highly compensated CEOs to look into the future and anticipate what might happen?

Perhaps Spiegel could be forgiven for missing the threat ByteDance posed. After all, before ByteDance came on the scene, Chinese tech companies had historically been far more successful within their home market than outside it. Even so, there were plenty of clues about what ByteDance was up to: The Information sussed those out in 2018 when we predicted that ByteDance would increasingly challenge Facebook. Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s 2019 criticisms of TikTok suggest he was awake to the threat the app posed.