From Facebook intern to TikTok boss: A story of career success.
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During the summertime in 2009, Shou Zi Chew was employed as a student trainee at Facebook. More than ten years later, he had climbed the ranks and become the leader of its largest adversary.
On Thursday, a 40-year-old citizen of Singapore will be joining his former colleague, Mark Zuckerberg, to appear before the Congress for answering queries about the concerns related to the widely used application of the world.
The House energy and commerce committee members want to question Chew regarding accusations involving TikTok's connections with the Chinese government. Some US lawmakers have expressed concerns that the app, typically used for creating and sharing videos, is also being used for spying and disseminating propaganda. They have even called for a complete ban on the app. Recently, Britain joined the list of countries that have banned TikTok from government-owned devices.
Congress might use this chance to familiarize themselves with the mysterious technology influencer. This happens to be one of the rare instances where he has appeared openly in the United States, despite TikTok having a vast user base of over 150 million Americans.
Very little information is available about this person that his Wikipedia page, as of Wednesday (22 March), only consists of six sentences. In comparison, Mr. Zuckerberg's page is over 6,000 words long.
Hence, what information do we have about Shou Zi Chew?
He was raised in Singapore, but eventually ventured to London, where he completed a degree in economics at University College London in 2006. Afterwards, he was employed as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs before relocating to Boston to earn his MBA at Harvard Business School. In contrast to Mr. Zuckerberg, this individual actually completed his studies at Harvard.
He wrote on his Harvard alumni page, which can only be found in archived versions now, that during his internship days, he worked at Facebook. He mentioned that he was engaged with a startup named Facebook during that particular summer.
He also encountered his spouse, Vivian Kao, through electronic mail when they were there.
The picture of Shou Zi Chew and his wife Vivian Kao can be found on a previous version of his alumni page at Harvard Business School.
He and his partner have a total of two kids. According to him, neither of his children utilize TikTok at the moment. "They're not old enough for it," he mentioned while appearing publicly at The New York Times's 2022 DealBook Summit.
Following their studies at Harvard, they relocated to China where Chew was employed as a venture capital banker in the city of Beijing. During this tenure, he made an investment in the machine-learning start-up ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, which was relatively small at the time.
His fascination with the technology industry led him to his significant position as the CFO of Xiaomi, a Chinese smartphone manufacturer. While working there, he played a crucial role in the company's huge IPO, which made it one of China's biggest tech offerings ever.
In March of 2021, he became a member of TikTok and functioned as CFO. A few months later in May, he moved up to the position of CEO.
During his leadership, TikTok became the largest triumph of Chinese technology worldwide. However, due to its origin and the inescapable associations with the Chinese government – as all companies in China have to comply with data sharing requests from the Communist Party – the survival of the app is now in jeopardy.
This implies that the CEO's skill in maintaining a low public presence in contrast to other tech leaders is expected to be short-lived. The examination surrounding TikTok and its leader is anticipated to persist until a verdict is made or the application is prohibited.
