Shou Zi Chew has said that the most grueling experience of his life was a five-day survival course in the jungles of Borneo while serving as a recruit in the Singapore armed forces.
The TikTok CEO, whose transglobal business and academic career has quickly propelled him to the top job at one of the world’s largest tech companies, will need to show some of that mettle as he fights to ensure the corporate survival of the controversial but controversial app. immensely popular social video.
The 40-year-old Singaporean, who faces questioning from US lawmakers on Thursday amid talks of a possible US ban, came from a relatively modest background: his father worked in construction and his mother in accounting. His fate was transformed at the age of 12 when high scores on a national exam landed him at an elite high school, where he added fluency in Mandarin to his native English.
After his military service, Chew is a reservist officer in the Singapore Army until the age of 50, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from University College London.
He stayed in the UK capital and became a banker at Goldman Sachs for two years, an investment experience that would eventually lead him to meet a young Zhang Yiming, the founder of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, when he was developing the company. company in a crowded department. in the university district of Beijing.
In 2010, Chew earned his MBA from Harvard Business School, where he got his first life experience in the tech sector with an internship at Facebook while the social media company was still in startup mode before going public in 2012. .
It was also where he met his future Taiwanese-American wife Vivian Kao, with whom he has two children. chew – whose Tik Tok profile was created in February of last year and has only 23 posts, including videos of him attending Super Bowl and NBA games, as well as meeting celebrities like Bill Murray, he does not allow his children to use the app, having said on Last November they are “very young”.
After business school, Chew joined venture capital firm DST, founded by Israeli-Russian IT billionaire Yuri Milner, where his Mandarin qualified him to be its China-focused partner.
This would see him make his pivotal visit to Zhang’s ByteDance in 2012 before the team created TikTok, resulting in Chew and his partners investing in the startup the following year.
He also led investment in Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker with global ambitions to compete with Apple, joining as chief financial officer in 2015 at the age of 32.
Chew helped secure the financing that led to the company’s public listing three years later. At the time, this was one of China’s largest technology initial public offerings, though its stock performance has been mixed ever since. He was named head of its international business in 2019.
In 2021, Zhang persuaded Chew to join ByteDance as its first CFO. Two months later, he was promoted to chief executive officer following the abrupt departure of former Disney executive Kevin Mayer after just three months, when the Trump administration tried to force a sale of TikTok’s US assets.
Chew’s rise to the top of the tech industry landed him on the Fortune 40 under 40 list in 2021.
The low-profile executive is now embarking on a media offensive as part of TikTok’s broader efforts to galvanize support to avoid a ban in the US and other countries.
“This could take TikTok away from all 150 million of you,” he said in a post targeting US TikTok users.
