On March 23, 2023, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew appeared before a panel of federal lawmakers to address their worries about the platform’s security in light of its ties to China.
Chew spent the majority of his professional life in investment banking and venture capital before becoming the leader of TikTok around two years ago. Let’s learn more about the CEO, Shou Chew through this post.
Who Is Tiktok Ceo Shou Chew?
Singaporean businessman and entrepreneur Shou Zi Chew born on 1 January 1983. He held the position of CEO of TikTok since 2021. On January 1, 1983, Chew was born in Singapore. His father was a builder, while his mother was an accountant.
After receiving his diploma from Hwa Chong Institution, Chew enlisted in the Singapore Army to complete his National Service (NS). Chew served in the military before returning to school to earn a Bachelor of Economics from University College London in 2006.
In 2010, he earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and interned at Facebook throughout the summer. Chew joined DST Global as a venture capitalist in 2008, after spending two years as a banker at Goldman Sachs in London following his 2006 graduation from University College London.
After serving in that capacity for some time, he decided to leave and pursue further education at Harvard Management School in the United States in 2008. In 2009, while still a student at Harvard, Chew interned at Facebook, then a small but promising online social networking service.
Chew has worked in the consumer electronics industry in Beijing and for a Hong Kong-based venture capital firm since he graduated from Harvard in 2010. He became the CEO of TikTok and the CFO of ByteDance, the business that owns TikTok, in 2021.
Chew is a family man; he and his wife, Vivian Kao, have two kids. In 2013, Chew oversaw a group of early investors in ByteDance while at DST Global. Chew became the chief financial officer of Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi in 2015.
In 2019, he was promoted to the role of president of Xiaomi’s worldwide business. Chew started working at ByteDance as its CFO in March of 2021. After only three months on the job, he was promoted to CEO of TikTok taking over for Kevin A. Mayer who had already left the ByteDance offshoot.
As part of the legislative attempt to outlaw TikTok in the United States, Chew spoke before the United States Congress in March 2023.
Chew wed Vivian Kao, a Taiwanese American. In 2008, while both were students at Harvard Business School, they crossed paths. In his leisure time, Chew enjoys playing golf and reading about theoretical physics.
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What exactly is Chew famous for?
According to Cornell University professor Brooke Erin Duffy, who researches social media platforms, the average American knows “very little” about Chew compared to other Silicon Valley social media heavyweights like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
She said:
“Chew has been in the background on public discourse until now, so he doesn’t have the same reputation we would associate with the Silicon Valley set, especially Zuckerberg”.
She explained that “he doesn’t have the same reputation as someone we know and we don’t have a sense of who he is” because most Americans only learned of Chew this week when he produced a video directed at TikTok’s U.S. fans.
Nonetheless, Chew has earned a solid reputation in both the American and Chinese tech industries. According to Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities, he was a strong fit for TikTok because of his experience in investment banking and his time at Facebook and DST Global.
“He garnered a lot of respect just by assuming that high-risk, in-the-hot seat role at TikTok,” Ives said, adding that the firm probably decided he was the best person to soothe tensions with U.S. politicians.
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