From Facebook intern to TikTok chief executive, Shou Zi Chew’s rise to the top of the tech industry has been nothing short of stellar.
The 40-year-old Singaporean faces a tough battle to ensure the corporate survival of the controversial but immensely popular social video app amid talk of a possible ban in the US.
Chew’s trans-global academic and business career began when high marks on a national exam got him into an elite high school where he added fluency in Mandarin to his native English.
He obtained a bachelor’s degree in economics from University College London and worked as a banker at Goldman Sachs for two years, which eventually led him to meet Zhang Yiming, the founder of TikTok’s parent company ByteDance.
He gained his MBA from Harvard Business School where he got his first experience of life in the tech sector with an internship at Facebook before going public in 2012.
After business school, Chew joined the venture capital firm DST, where his Mandarin qualified him to be its China-focused partner.
This led him to make his pivotal visit to Zhang’s ByteDance in 2012 before the team created TikTok.
Chew invested in the startup the following year and also led investment in Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker with global ambitions to take on Apple, where he eventually joined as chief financial officer in 2015 at the age of 32.
His rise to the top of the tech industry landed him a spot on Fortune’s 40 under 40 list in 2021.
That same year, Zhang persuaded Chew to join ByteDance as its first chief financial officer.
Two months later, he was elevated to chief executive following the abrupt departure of the former Disney executive Kevin Mayer after just three months as the Trump administration attempted to force a sale of TikTok’s US assets.
Now, Chew is embarking on a media offensive as part of TikTok’s wider efforts to galvanise support to avert a ban in the US and other countries.
In a post appealing to US TikTok users, Chew said, “This could take TikTok away from all 150 million of you.”
Despite his rapid rise to the top, Chew remains low-profile and prefers to keep his personal life private, even stating that he does not allow his children to use the app due to their age.
As he faces questioning by US lawmakers amid talk of a possible ban, he will need to display the mettle he gained during a five-day survival course in the jungles of Borneo while serving as a conscript in Singapore’s armed forces.
His background in economics, investment, and tech, coupled with his fluency in Mandarin, make him a valuable asset to ByteDance and TikTok as they navigate their way through a challenging time in the tech industry.
